It has taken the Trump administration just eighteen months to turn a seasonal stomach bug into a national epidemic.

Cyclospora, the food borne parasite that causes severe diarrhea, has infected an estimated 18,000 Americans so far this summer—more than six times the number of cases the U.S. typically experiences over a full year.

This surge in case counts represents the largest recorded outbreak of Cyclosporiasis in U.S. history. As of writing, it has led to more than 400 hospitalizations across 45 states. Worse still, Michigan recorded its first two Cyclospora-related deaths earlier this week.

With all this in mind, it makes sense that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recently spent nearly three hours grilling a health official over their response to a disease outbreak…

…until you realize that the topic of discussion was COVID-19 rather than Cyclosporiasis.

On July 29, Congressional Republicans called an oversight hearing to do something they’ve done many times before: ask Dr. Anthony Fauci to explain, once again, where COVID-19 came from.

These COVID-origins hearings have now run for years, generated multiple staff reports from both parties, and reliably produce the same result:

• Republicans accuse Fauci of a cover-up,
• Fauci denies,
• Democrats call the exercise theater,
• Everyone goes home having learned nothing they didn’t already believe going in.

This most recent hearing was no different. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) subpoenaed Fauci and the 85-year-old retired scientist, more than three years removed from federal service, declined to answer questions. The only notable part about this go-round was that Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right more than a hundred times to avoid responding.

On Thursday, the committee voted—along strict party lines—to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his recent testimony.

COVID-19 origin hearings have established themselves a predictable, low-yield use of oversight capacity. That makes it worth asking: why are Republicans calling attention to the issue now?

Oversight hearings involve real and finite resources including a Senate committee’s subpoena power, its staff’s investigative time, and a chair’s agenda-setting authority. To have that congressional attention wasted on an issue both sides have already litigated to exhaustion is revealing—especially when juxtaposed with the fact that not a single Republican has subpoenaed anyone over a historic outbreak that continues to spread with no real end in sight.

The Food and Drug Administration’s current acting commissioner Kyle Diamantas could have easily replaced Fauci in the hot seat. Not just for the agency’s failure to adequately communicate with the public about their cyclospora investigations, but also for his professional history as “corporate lawyer that defended Abbott Laboratories in 2022 for its key role in creating an infant formula crisis.” That’s the same Abbott responsible for the contaminated baby formula that spawned a multiyear criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, which has since been dropped despite having yielded, per the DOJ’s own prosecutors, enough evidence to support criminal charges. According to the Wall Street Journal, that call was made by the DOJ’s “top decision makers,” which in all likelihood included the man the GOP plans to confirm as the country’s top lawyer: Todd Blanche.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—and his former Department of Government Efficiency co-lead Elon Musk—could have similarly been forced to answer questions about how their brand of “efficiency” has hollowed out federal, state, and local health departments charged with monitoring viral threats and inspecting food facilities. Do the American people not deserve to know that thanks to these cuts, there’s a thousand fewer people overseeing our food supply to ensure instances of cyclosporiasis don’t become widespread outbreaks? Or that the principal national office with cyclospora expertise was dismantled during Musk and Vought’s campaign?

There are ample administration officials to place in the hot seat, but the list of culpable targets extends even further. Taylor Farms’ surreptitious handling of this ongoing tragedy is obviously deserving of microscopic inquiry. People all over the country will not look too fondly on the summer they were forced to eschew their bright salads out of fear of becoming too well acquainted with their bathrooms. But Rand Paul & co. evidently have no desire to satisfy the public’s itch for accountability since Taylor Farms’ CEO Bruce Taylor continues to sit easy even as Americans die. A grim reminder of the privileges that political donations have secured under Trump.

The precedent for achieving this sort of accountability was already set by House Democrats. Two days prior to the Fauci hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)—the Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform—demanded Bruce Taylor answer questions about his (company’s) role in this outbreak.

Neither the ongoing cyclospora outbreak, nor the next manufactured health emergency under Trump, will be solved by another round of questions for a Biden-era retiree. But Republicans aren’t looking for solutions, they’re looking to shift blame for—and from—a shit-show of their own making.

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am local time, our world changed forever when the US dropped the first atomic bomb used in war over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The immediate death toll was approximately 70,000 with ~140,000 to have died by year's end. Three days later, the US would drop a plutonium bomb over the city of Nagasaki. The immediate death toll there was ~40,000 with ~70,000 to have died by year's end with a combined total of ~210,000. Three weeks earlier, following the atomic bombing of New Mexico with the Trinity test, the nuclear age was thrust upon mankind. The nuclear legacies from victims and survivors of the atomic bombings, Hibakusha, and their history lingers to this day. The legacy extends from the mining for the nuclear materials and its impact on local communities to the processing, testing, use, storage, and waste management, as well as the impacts and risks of nuclear power to this day.

Amnesic of past history and events, the United States initiated a new arms race beginning in 2010 with then-President Barack Obama‘s “grand bargain“ to garner favor with the Republican Congress to ratify the New START Treaty. Following our lead, all of the remaining nine nuclear nations are working to modernize their stockpiles as well.

With the advent of artificial intelligence programs already utilized by President Donald Trump’s Department of War and the race to bring this technology to war, we move ever closer to the brink of nuclear war, either by intent, miscalculation, mistake, or cyber attack using disruptive technologies. This fact was recognized by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, moving their Doomsday Clock forward this past January to 85 seconds to midnight.

In order to survive, we must awaken from the myth of deterrence, realizing it for what it is, the greatest driver of the arms race. The unexamined assumptions that these weapons must exist is blatantly false. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to disassemble them. From a height of roughly 64,000 weapons in 1986 we have reduced global stockpiles to approximately 12,187 currently. We also know that even a “limited nuclear war“ in a remote region of the world, for example, between India and Pakistan, using less than one half of 1% of global stockpiles, will result in a global nuclear famine. This could potentially result in up to 2 billion deaths on the planet due to the catastrophic climate change that would follow.

The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons.

When we awaken from this trance and understand that these weapons do not make us safer, but rather are our greatest existential threat, we will be able to work together to lead an international effort to abolish them in a time-bound and verifiable manner.

What is required in this race to save ourselves is the political courage and will to do so. Thankfully, there is hope both internationally and nationally. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 75 nations and signed by 25 additional nations representing a majority of the global population. Here at home the Back From the Brink grassroots movement currently has endorsing congressional resolutions. There are 70 members of Congress, who have endorsed House Resolution 317 and Senate Resolution 323.

The Hibakusha have a mantra of “never again.” We owe a debt to the Hibakusha, their memory, and future generations to demand the complete abolition of these weapons. We must demand our elected officials endorse this campaign or move out of the way for those who will.

Democratic Connecticut Rep. John Larson has a long record of fighting for working families. He has a 98% voting record with AFL-CIO. He’s endorsed by over three dozen unions and the Working Families Party. And he is Social Security’s No. 1 champion in the US House.

Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act would protect and expand Social Security by making billionaires pay in on all of their income, just like the rest of us. That’s why billionaires are so desperate to defeat him—and they’ve found just the empty suit to do it.

Luke Bronin, the former mayor of Hartford, is challenging Larson in the August 11 Democratic primary. As mayor, Bronin laid off hundreds of workers, slashed worker benefits, and tried to undermine collective bargaining rights. Bronin’s frosty relationship with labor was a major reason that he abandoned a bid for governor. But now, billionaires are trying to use Luke Bronin to take out John Larson.

Bronin is backed by The Bench and Majority Democrats, two billionaire-funded PACs created to prop up corporate-friendly Democrats. Notably, Bronin is the only candidate challenging an incumbent Democrat that The Bench has endorsed. That’s how badly the billionaires want to take out John Larson.

“We're not gonna let the billionaires buy a seat in Congress to stop the progress that John Larson has led for his entire career.”

Labor leaders and Social Security experts have lauded Larson for his consistency and stalwart determination to protect, in his words, “the best economic development plan that this nation has ever had.”

View this post on InstagramA post shared by Social Security Works ❌

“The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country’s elevation to greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.”—A-bomb survivor Setsuko Thurlow, Nobel peace prize ceremony for ICAN, December 2017

This August 6-9 marks the 81st anniversary of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States is the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons, having committed the unspeakable sin and crime in 1945, thus ushering in the nuclear age.

Rather than repenting for the evil of building and using nuclear weapons, making reparations to the victims, and promising to eradicate its nuclear program, the US government has instead made nuclear weapons the cornerstone of its military policy. This policy holds that the United States must be prepared to use any military means necessary, including nuclear weapons, to protect and ensure its “vital” national security and geopolitical interests.

The US nuclear weapons program was conceived under a shroud of secrecy that continues to this day, and without the consent of the US people. Beginning with the Manhattan Project in 1940, the US has spent over $9 trillion on its nuclear weapons program.

The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable.

To date, the US government refuses to adopt a “no first-use” nuclear policy, declaring it reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the case of conflict. Therefore, a US president could unilaterally order a nuclear attack at any time. According to peace advocate and author Joseph Gerson, the US has prepared or threatened to use nuclear weapons against adversaries an estimated 30 times to bolster its aims.

Moreover, the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review includes planning for limited nuclear war by developing low-yield nuclear weapons to counter an adversary’s limited use of nuclear weapons in any conflict. The US government is now continuing a several decades long process to modernize its nuclear arsenal at a cost of nearly $1 trillion. Instead of funding vital human needs programs, this exorbitant expenditure (along with the $1.5 trillion 2027 military budget) constitutes a direct theft from the poor! The US, along with the eight other nuclear nations, refuse to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which now deems nuclear weapons illegal under international law. To date, 75 nations have ratified the TPNW.

On January 27, 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight, the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. This is due to the existential threats of nuclear war and the climate crisis, AI, and worsening world tensions and other perils. The Ukraine war has further aggravated the nuclear threat between Russia and NATO.

The nuclear threat is further exacerbated by recent threats against Iran by President Donald Trump, including to “blast Iran into oblivion” and “back to the Stone Ages,” and his warning: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

As a leading nuclear superpower, the US practices a double standard by calling on other nations to disarm while, at the same time, it refuses to disarm and instead is rapidly expanding its own arsenal.

AI technology also increases the risk of nuclear war. A study by King’s College London published earlier this year revealed that AI models used in 21 simulated nuclear crises escalated the conflict by threatening nuclear war in 95% of 329 turns of play.

As we confront the nuclear peril today, it is imperative that we hear and heed the testimony of those who were directly impacted by nuclear weapons. Since 1945, the Hibakusha has urgently called on all the nuclear nations to abolish nuclear weapons stating that “humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.” Additionally, people of faith and conscience have actively opposed and resisted nuclear war preparations, including those of blessed memory such as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who immediately condemned the 1945 bombing; Bishop Tom Gumbleton (first bishop president of Pax Christi USA); Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ; Philip Berrigan—all Pax Christi USA teachers of peace—Thomas Merton, OCSO; Sr. Anne Montgomery, RSCJ; Fr. Carl Kabat, OMI; Sr. Ardeth Platte, OP—as well as peacemakers today like Pax Christi USA teachers of peace Elizabeth McAlister and James and Shelley Douglass, plus Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, and so many more!

Throughout the Nuclear Age, different church denominations, faith leaders, and organizations and groups, including International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Back from the Brink, and Warheads to Windmills have also called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. And there have been countless non-violent actions for nuclear disarmament and ending war. Since 1980, plowshares peacemakers have enacted the biblical prophecy of beating swords into plowshares by hammering and using others symbols to literally begin the process of disarmament. I have been blessed to be part of two plowshares actions.

Catholic leaders have made significant statements regarding the use of nuclear weapons and present nuclear peril.

• In 1972 St. Pope Paul VI stated, “It is unthinkable that no other work can be found for hundreds of thousands of workers than the production of instruments of death.” In 1976, he described the atomic bombings of Japan as a “butchery of untold magnitude.”
• In 1976, Fr. Richard McSorley, SJ said, “It’s a sin to build a nuclear weapon.”
• In 1981, Seattle’s Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, the 1987 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, stated: “Trident is the Auschwitz of Puget Sound… I say with deep sorrow that our nuclear war preparations are the global crucifixion of Jesus… the final crucifixion of Jesus, in the extermination of the human family with whom he is one.”
• In 1982, Bishop Leroy Matthiesen, the 2009 Pax Christi USA teacher of peace, told Catholics in his diocese who worked at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas, “In the name of the God of peace, quit your jobs.” In making this appeal, he said he would try to offer financial assistance to any defense worker who would quit.
• In 2017, for the first time ever, a pope condemned the very possession of nuclear weapons as immoral. Pope Francis declared: “Nor can we fail to be genuinely concerned by the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental effects of any employment of nuclear devices. If we also take into account the risk of an accidental detonation as a result of error of any kind, the threat of their use, as well as their very possession, is to be firmly condemned. For they exist in the service of a mentality of fear that affects not only the parties in conflict but the entire human race…”
• In 2020 Pope Francis reiterated, “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral, as I already said two years ago.”
• Pope Leo has since continued his predecessor’s stance of calling for nuclear disarmament.
• On January 11, 2022, Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico and recipient of the 2026 Pax Christi USA Teacher of Peace award, released a landmark pastoral letter: “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace-A Conversation Towards Nuclear Disarmament.“
• There has also been the development of a new partnership of US, Japanese, and South Korean bishops. Last year they declared: “On the solemn occasion of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II, Catholic bishops from the United States, Japan, and South Korea have come together in Hiroshima to call for a world free of nuclear weapons. Representing the Partnership for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, the bishops joined with atomic bomb survivor organizations to honor the memory of those who perished, to stand in solidarity with survivors, and to urge the global community to reject the possession, use, and threat of nuclear arms.“

Last year, to mark the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings, more than 500 people and 60 organizations in the US signed an Apology Petition to the Japanese people calling on the US government to apologize to Japan for the atomic bombings and pledge to ratify the TPNW. The mayor’s office of Nagasaki, Nihon Hidankyo (the main Hibakusha organization and 2024 Nobel Peace Prize recipient), and Catholic clergy and religious in Japan acknowledged receiving this petition and expressed their great appreciation.

Most recently, the groundbreaking “Rome Declaration for an Unarmed and Disarming Peace in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Nuclear and Autonomous Weapons, New Digital Protocols, and Emerging Models of Digital Development,” was signed by over 200 Nobel laureates, leading AI innovators, and global academics.

Nuclear weapons are immoral and illegal, and no follower of Jesus should be involved in their production, financing, or use of them! The Catholic Church and all churches have a crucial role to play in helping to bring about a disarmed world. What if the church leadership in all denominations were to call on all Christians in the military nuclear chain of command to refuse orders to kill and use nuclear weapons, and publicly support those who do so? What if the churches could take the lead in calling for the conversion of arms industries to non-military production, while advocating for full and just protection of workers’ rights during the transition process? What if the church would provide material resources for those who quit their jobs for reasons of conscience? And what if the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and all Catholics—clergy, religious, and laity—and Christians in the US demanded that the US government ratify the TPNW? These efforts would go a long way to help create the climate necessary to bring about real disarmament.

Followers of the non-violent Jesus, who commands us to love and never to kill, cannot allow nuclear weapons, death-dealing technologies, and idols of death to ever be normalized, and must reject any ideology or theology that justifies war, genocide, and even omnicide. We need to adopt non-violent practices, as many are doing today, as a primary means to respond to conflict, to resist systemic violence and injustice, and advocating non-violent civilian defense as an alternative to militarized-based national security.

The nuclear challenge before us is great, but not insurmountable, for with God, and people acting on their faith convictions, all things are possible. History bears out this truth. I join with many peacemakers worldwide who believe that nuclear abolition can happen, and who are acting to make it a reality. During this August 6-9 time, numerous events and actions are taking place across the US and worldwide calling for nuclear abolition. I hope you who read this can join in one such action where you reside.

On September 4, 1989, six peacemakers and I participated in the Thames River Plowshares action in New London, Connecticut. We were able to swim and canoe to the docked USS Pennsylvania, the 10th Trident, and hammered and poured blood on the hull. Three of us, including myself, were able to climb on top of the submarine where we prayed for the abolition of nuclear weapons. From aboard this most destructive weapon, I believed then, as I do now, that if people have the faith to believe that disarmament is possible, and act on that faith, it can occur. Now is the time to act!

This article was first published on the Pax Christi USA web site.

Although 81 years have passed since the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945, the rulers of major nations continue their reckless march toward a nuclear holocaust.

The nine nuclear powers (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea), possessing some 12,100 nuclear warheads, are all busily upgrading and expanding their nuclear weapons arsenals at an accelerating pace. Nuclear weapons spending rose to an all-time high of $119 billion in 2025―a 19% increase over the preceding year. The US government alone, which accounted for more than half of this spending, is embarked on a $1.7 trillion, decades-long nuclear weapons buildup.

As the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has observed, “This overwhelming spending on nuclear weapons shows a willingness to research, develop, finance, and build tools to exterminate humanity.”

Moreover, international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements among the nuclear powers have collapsed. Russia and the United States own 86% of the world’s nuclear weapons and, although they signed numerous treaties in the past to limit or reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals, the last of these treaties, New START, expired this February.

Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war.

The accelerating nuclear arms race is accompanied by repeated threats of nuclear war. Russian officials are particularly notorious in this connection. According to the Voice of America, from early 2022 to late 2024 Russian officials publicly issued 135 nuclear threats, with 27 of them coming from President Vladimir Putin. But America’s President Donald Trump has also publicly and repeatedly threatened other countries with nuclear destruction, as has North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Early this year, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, assessing this deteriorating situation, moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous setting in its history.

Of course, there have been a great many warnings that nuclear weapons portend global disaster, including many beginning right after the shocking annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Seldom, if ever,” reported CBS radio commentator Edward R. Murrow, “has war ended leaving the victors... with such a realization that... survival is not assured.” The Chicago Tribune warned that a future atomic war would leave the world “a barren waste, in which the survivors... will hide in caves.” In France, the resistance leader Albert Camus declared that the modern world had “reached the last degree of savagery,” in which nations were faced with the prospect of “collective suicide.”

As nuclear fear swept around the world, large numbers of people sought to avert catastrophe. Some called for dramatically strengthened global governance to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war, while others, with the same goal in mind, championed nuclear disarmament. Speaking on behalf of the newly-formed Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Albert Einstein typified this popular uprising by arguing that “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive.”

Over subsequent decades, the anti-nuclear movement ebbed and flowed, but, at times of mass mobilization, it had an important effect on nuclear weapons policies. Naturally, the leaders of many nations felt the allure of nuclear weapons, especially after thousands of years of human history in which national security often seemed to rest upon military strength. Nevertheless, as indicated by opinion polls and massive demonstrations, anti-nuclear agitation inspired revulsion against nuclear weapons and nuclear war among large portions of the public. Consequently, most governments decided not to build nuclear weapons or even to deploy them on their territory.

Hard-pressed by anti-nuclear campaigners and public opinion, even the small number of governments that built nuclear weapons found themselves unable to resist agreement on nuclear arms control and disarmament measures. Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush were not nuclear “doves” when they entered office, but, in response to popular pressure, they took significant action to curb nuclear dangers. Some government officials, like Mikhail Gorbachev, even became fervent converts to the anti-nuclear cause.

As the 20th century came to an end, however, progress in rolling back the nuclear menace began to unravel. Popular protest declined, and nuclear disarmament organizations dwindled in size. By contrast, conservative and militarist forces grew more assertive, blocking US Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, demanding the building of new nuclear weapons, and derailing Barack Obama’s initiative for creating a nuclear weapons-free world.

Although nuclear disarmament organizations were on the defensive during the early 21st century, they retained enough strength to produce one major victory. Joining together in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, they cooperated closely with officials in small, non-nuclear nations to produce a series of United Nations conferences on nuclear issues. Then, at the 2017 conference, the national delegates voted 122 to 1 to adopt the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which banned nuclear weapons. Entering into force in January 2021, the treaty has been signed, thus far, by 100 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.

Even so, the situation remains dire. Today, most rulers of the nuclear powers are nationalistic, militaristic, and authoritarian, with no interest in nuclear disarmament. Instead, they are busy readying their nations for a disastrous nuclear war. Not surprisingly, none of them is willing to sign or even abide by the TPNW. Although the anti-nuclear movement continues to oppose their priorities, it remains weak and unable to halt the momentum toward nuclear catastrophe.

Thus, unless there is an advent of new, less hawkish rulers, a movement revival, or both, a nuclear war seems likely.

Admittedly, it’s possible that, when a calamitous nuclear war does occur, it will finally convince even the slow learners among government officials that the nuclear age requires new thinking about international relations. Unfortunately, that recognition will arrive too late to matter, for such a war will snuff out most life on Earth.

It has been 81 years since the atomic bombings delivered an unmistakable message. From the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, humanity was faced with a choice that Martin Luther King, Jr. would later describe as one between “non-violent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” The intervening decades have made our answer painfully clear.

As a result, today we live as prisoners consigned to a permanent death row, having organized our world not around a commitment to collective sanity, safety, and security but around the perpetual preparation for collective destruction. The nuclear threat has predictably returned to the center of world politics, from Ukraine and Taiwan to Palestine and Iran.

American and Israeli officials have called for the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza, which during the ongoing genocide has already been subjected to equivalent of 13 Hiroshimas. And in the context of the second disastrous and criminal war in the region this century, waged ostensibly, and counterproductively, to preserve a system of nuclear apartheid, President Donald Trump has never disavowed his genocidal threat against Iran that “a whole civilization will die.”

It is therefore clear today that we can hardly take refuge in the comforting fiction that the collapse of the Soviet Union had consigned the specter of atomic holocaust to history. And it is our inability to confront nuclear weapons for what they truly are which has helped produce the present crisis. From their first use, the atomic bombs were immoral and illegal. Within a matter of years, such weapons would come to be described, in the words of their own architects, as a “weapon of genocide,” one which serves no military end beyond the slaughter of civilians.

The supreme irony is that the nuclear age and the postwar international order entered into force together, as the legal regime intended to prevent atrocities was born under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

As such, states that possess nuclear weapons cannot be understood as guardians of the international order, represented by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, but as its greatest threats, outcasts from law and humanity. They are, in the words of Daniel Ellsberg, adherents to no recognizable ethics other than perhaps “a form of Satanism, a worship of unbridled power that gives national leaders the right to gamble with forces that can undo creation.”

Yet instead of banning the bomb, the postwar international legal order accommodated it, failing to proscribe nuclear weapons, as it has for chemical and biological weapons. The result has been a world in which the capacity to exterminate millions, even billions, of people is treated not as the ultimate international crime but as the ultimate marker of international prestige and a currency of geopolitical power. So long as some states insist upon the legitimacy of their own atomic arsenals then, efforts to abolish them will remain, however well-intentioned, little more than “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Why then, despite the obvious reality that nuclear weapons are prima facie illegal, that they violate the most fundamental tenets of international humanitarian law, making a mockery of its principles of distinction and proportionality, has the law failed even to signal its opposition to the bomb?

The Failures of the 1996 ICJ Advisory Opinion

There have been numerous, often tepid, attempts to resolve the contradiction at the heart of the nuclear exception. The most significant came 30 years ago this summer, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons. Although the Court affirmed that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would “generally be contrary” to international law, it ultimately preserved the nuclear status quo by declining to rule definitively on their legality “in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

Nuclear states could therefore continue to justify their continued possession of these apocalyptic weapons through the familiar language of military necessity. The result was a legal ambiguity that left nuclear powers free to claim a right to initiate nuclear war in response to an asserted existential threat, as countries like the United States and Israel regularly inflate to advance their imperial policies. The law would then be left to determine, only after the fact, assuming any courts remained amid the ruins, whether the slaughter of millions of civilians had, in fact, been permissible.

But why did the World Court equivocate at such a critical historical juncture? The Cold War had recently ended, and with it seemingly the geopolitical and ideological confrontation that had long legitimized the logic of mutually assured destruction. Arms reduction agreements were underway, and several countries were abandoning their nuclear ambitions. A path toward the elimination of nuclear stockpiles appeared, however briefly, to be within reach.

Yet as scholars have argued, this was less a missed opportunity to challenge the nuclear powers than an ideological inability to confront the broader questions posed by nuclear weapons. A legal order ostensibly designed to restrain violence had, from its inception, collided with weapons that defy any standard of morality and legality. Faced with this contradiction, the court retreated into an act of institutional self-preservation. The effort has proved futile, as evidenced by the continuing impunity of powerful states and increasingly brazen attempts to dismantle the broader framework of international law.

Nonetheless, as Martti Koskenniemi has argued, had the ICJ actually declared nuclear weapons categorically illegal, it would have “put the court and the whole system of law it represents in a collision course with the politico-military system of the nuclear age.” In this confrontation, “the law could hardly prevail.” Recognizing this, “an opinion underwriting an absolute prohibition would have condemned the law to irrelevance already in advance.”

More fundamentally, the international legal system could scarcely have resolved the question. The imperatives of great-power politics had long stunted the court's ability to function. By elevating military necessity into a doctrine through which states could justify their actions, the law came to function not as a constraint but as a source of legitimacy for state violence. As Koskenniemi observes, citing philosopher Thomas Nagel, once mass violence can be deemed permissible under certain criteria, other considerations can then “be brought to bear to ease the consciences of those responsible for a certain number of charred babies.”

The Birth of the Bomb and the “International Order”

This failure was not the World Court’s alone. The problem had been embedded in the postwar legal order from the beginning. On August 8, 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France ratified the London Charter establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Hours later, the United States destroyed Nagasaki with a second atomic bomb, just three days after Hiroshima. The supreme irony is that the nuclear age and the postwar international order entered into force together, as the legal regime intended to prevent atrocities was born under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

Many of the earliest voices of conscience presenting the most forceful condemnations came from the political left. Those such as Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, Dwight MacDonald, and Norman Cousins denounced the bombings in the days and weeks that followed. Yet opposition was by no means confined to one side of the political spectrum.

Conservative critics also challenged the decision. David Lawrence, editor of US News, rejected attempts to justify the bombings. Try as we might, he insisted, we can “never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations, though hesitating to use poison gas, did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women, and children.” Journalist Felix Morley similarly denounced this “act of atrocious revenge,” concluding that Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted, in effect, an American Buchenwald.

If the law is to come to mean anything, it must bind the powerful before it punishes the powerless.

Religious leaders also lent their moral voices. A coalition of Christian clergy representing a range of denominations issued “unmitigated condemnation” of the “reckless and irresponsible” decision, warning that we “will receive judgment before God and before the conscience of humanity.” One of these signatories, A. J. Muste, would in subsequent years distill this sentiment into a single, provocative sentence: “If Dachau was a crime, Hiroshima is a crime.”

While public opinion, both domestically and internationally, increasingly moved toward abolition, culminating in the first resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly calling for the elimination of atomic weapons, US leaders had little intention of relinquishing their God-like powers. They brushed aside the warnings of scientists and statesmen who argued that this brief window, before other nations acquired the bomb, offered perhaps the only opportunity to prohibit nuclear weapons before catastrophe became permanent.

Instead of being prohibited, the bomb was rendered outside the law. At Nuremberg and Tokyo, the US established a legal exceptionalism that insulated nuclear weapons, and the strategic bombing that first made them conceivable, from meaningful scrutiny. Prosecutors opted to omit these crimes entirely, rendering them beyond the reach of law. Universal justice, in short, was subordinated to political expediency.

Many in the courtroom recognized the contradiction. At Tokyo, the atomic bombings loomed large over the proceedings. If individuals, rather than states, could be held criminally responsible for atrocities committed in war, as Nuremberg established, then American officials who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should face similar judgment. Otherwise, the tribunal would rest on an irreconcilable double standard. As the defense pointedly put it, “We know the name of every man whose hands loosed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima; we know the chief of staff who planned that act; we know the chief of the responsible state.”

American officials acknowledged that they had certainly been no strangers to criminality during the course of the war. In his opening statement, Chief Justice Robert Jackson remarked that “the Germans have taught us the horrors of modern warfare,” but the Allies were far from “dull pupils.” Telford Taylor, Allied chief prosecutor, similarly noted that prosecutors had deliberately avoided litigating the bombing of civilians because the scale of indiscriminate Allied bombing far exceeded any similar such forms of aerial warfare carried out by the Axis states.

Taylor later conceded that the bombings were war crimes but were rendered “tolerable in retrospect only because their malignancy pales in comparison to Dachau, Auschwitz, and Treblinka.” The physical and psychological distance afforded by aerial warfare, and the public apathy it cultivated, could hardly legitimize such violence, even as it was increasingly accepted by many Americans. To the contrary, Taylor wrote, had “Allied ground forces [entered] German and Japanese towns with guns blazing, and [killed] off the infants who survived the bombing,” few would have dared defend such policies.

The Legacy of Nuclear Exceptionalism

The legal silence surrounding aerial and atomic bombing at Nuremberg and Tokyo has constrained efforts to impose meaningful legal limits on indiscriminate attacks against civilians ever since. In Gaza, Israeli officials have repeatedly invoked the Allied bombing campaigns to argue that if that was not deemed criminal, neither is Israel today. The precedent established in the aftermath of the Second World War has therefore continued to legitimize the laying waste to cities, reinforcing the logic that first made nuclear weapons conceivable.

While there have been additional efforts to challenge this exceptionalism, they too have fallen short in the face of US empire. The most significant was Japan’s 1963 Shimoda decision, in which the Tokyo District Court concluded that the atomic bombings had violated international law. By then, however, Japan had been pacified, first through occupation and then through its incorporation into the US Cold War order, leaving it with neither the political will nor the institutional means to pursue accountability.

This dynamic in postwar Japan reflects a broader reality: The bomb has long functioned as a tool of empire. As W.E.B. Du Bois warned at the dawn of the atomic age, if power could be maintained through atomic bombs, then “colonial peoples may never be free.” The nuclear order that emerged after 1945 has vindicated that position. It has always rested on an unmistakable hypocrisy. States that insist nuclear weapons are indispensable to their own security, many of them the colonial powers of yesterday and the imperial powers of today, simultaneously demand that the rest of the world accept permanent vulnerability at the hands of nuclear-armed states. Its governing principle is simple: Do as we say, not as we do.

But this blatant hypocrisy cannot coexist with a functioning international legal order, which, as has become increasingly clear in recent years, is crumbling before our eyes. At Nuremberg, Chief Justice Jackson warned that the only hope of those responsible for atrocities was “that international law will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law.” Eight decades later, his words have become an equal indictment of the nuclear age. If the law is to come to mean anything, it must bind the powerful before it punishes the powerless. The survival of international law, and perhaps life on Earth itself, depends on whether that principle is finally applied to the world’s most powerful states.

With midterms approaching and the future of US.democracy balanced on a knife's edge, a media-driven moral panic about the Democratic Socialists of America is dividing the Democratic Party. That's unhelpful. Everyone knows Democrats need to unify under a big tent to retake Congress and check President Donald Trump's authoritarianism. This isn't the first unproductive debate of its kind. Before it came another fight—over the proper role of resistance to Trump's immigration crackdown—driven by the same hand-wringing, among the same people, that has slowed progress for years. As with immigration, the lesson is the same: it is grassroots resistance, not elite caution, that is winning this fight, and Democrats' cowardice in scapegoating their own base is what's holding the party back.

CNN reports that Trump is polling lower than Herbert Hoover did in the Great Depression, and a recent Fox News poll shows that voters now favor Democrats over Republicans on immigration. That is a huge turnaround—the GOP led by eight points on immigration as recently as April. That's also a huge collapse for Trump on what was once his signature issue. But it shouldn't be shocking or surprising. Trump's (and by extension all Republicans’) popularity on immigration was bound to go down from the moment he was sworn in. The only question is why it took so long.

Trump's failure on immigration was baked in, predestined, and unavoidable. The tragedy is that too many Democratic leaders and policy influencers have never understood this. Their tepid and craven response to Trump’s barbaric treatment of immigrants has hindered emerging bottom-up national consensus that can overtake Trumpism.

For years, Democratic party elites urged immigrants and advocates to abandon their ferocious defense of immigrants' rights. They said endlessly that the only way to win good immigration policies was to compromise on the bad ones. Their path to comprehensive immigration reform required grassroots activists to fall in line. Pundits, think tank thought leaders, and the philanthropic donor class insisted it was smart politics not to challenge the Republicans' dishonest framing of immigration. That is, as a crime and jobs problem to be solved only with more policing, as a security threat to be solved with militarized borders, and a public-health emergency to be solved by ending asylum. And that's not to mention the cultural panic.

While Democrats continue to read polls and ruminate over slide decks, the vilified street protests are doing their work for them.

Talk tough, they told us. Give Republicans what they want on the border, the prisons, the boots, and guns. Avoid using the word “amnesty” to talk about legalization. Say no to "sanctuary cities,” say yes to the Chamber of Commerce, and shut up about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Then they might let you have some extra green cards. And if we don’t win immigration reform in Congress, we were told, at least we will have an issue that will keep Latinos voting for Democrats in the next election. And we can even tell undecided voters and moderate Republicans that we’re just as tough as the other guys. In short, the Democratic elite felt confident it could play all sides.

But the visas never came. Reform never happened. Trump won the White House, and won again (this time with a higher share of Latino support), and the Republicans took Congress and the Supreme Court along with it. How did prospects for immigration reform and the Democrats political advantage disappear into thin air?

Democrats, consultants, and talking heads needed to pin the blame. Immigrants themselves were the first scapegoats. Newcomers made lunch-pail voters nervous. Asylum-seekers were next. Too many, too fast. America was full. "No vacancy," said the cover of The Atlantic magazine.

But then, curiously, a new culprit emerged: grassroots immigrant-rights organizations like mine—known derisively by collective shorthand as "the groups” among the Acela corridor class. They said "the groups" had pushed President Joe Biden to be too radical on immigration. Too "open borders." Too tolerant of people fleeing poverty and death and seeking refuge here. Too heedless of public opinion. Too sanctimonious.

That view was always wrong. Let's unpack why.

Trump's first presidential campaign began with an explicitly racist anti-immigrant lie about Mexicans. He ran on his promise to build a border wall to keep out criminal rapists and terrorists and to win back jobs for native-born Americans. He made his racist, xenophobic agenda more explicit when he ran for and won a second term, replacing the promise of the big, beautiful wall with a pledge to do mass deportations.

But that fascist tactic—promising quick, brutally simple answers to complex problems—was bound to fail. Lofty promises on immigration are easy for candidates because immigration is a meta issue that encompasses the fiction that a country tells about itself. For the MAGA movement (always a minority of the country, it’s worth remembering), America is a secure homeland for white English speakers. For Trump, it’s more like a vast country club, exclusive and gated like his fabled Mar-a-Lago.

In his first term, Trump’s deranged fantasies about immigration and other things started vaporizing immediately. Support for his false promises precipitously and steadily declined soon after his inauguration and throughout his term. The wall never got built. America didn't become Great Again.

Now, just as in Trump's first time in the White House, a huge chasm has opened up between lies and reality. The gaps are many. Get criminals? They're already covered by the criminal-justice system. Seal the border? It already was. Make America Great Again, again? With masked death squads terrorizing American cities? Yeah, right.

Mismanaging expectations is nothing new for modern presidents. George W. Bush had the right instincts on immigration, but he couldn’t close the bipartisan deal handed to him by Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). President Barack Obama had lofty goals and rhetoric. But he became the deporter-in-chief, a terrible stain on his historic legacy, and one that prefigured Trump’s outright war on immigrants. President Biden’s brightest moment in an otherwise dismal campaign was his promise to defend asylum. Until he ended it.

That cycle of promise and betrayal on immigration had become the rule, not the exception. Everyone knows the immigration system needs modernizing—amnesty paired with sensible enforcement measures—but with Congress dysfunctional beyond all recognition, no president has been able to deliver legislation. So they have all reached for executive power instead, using it not just to govern but to wedge and divide the opposition party. For a while, it worked. Republicans were in full-scale disarray after Obama's 2012 reelection, with voices from Sean Hannity to Charles Krauthammer calling for surrender on immigration reform.

This all changed with Trump. As a candidate, he defied the conventional wisdom of Republican elites with overt racism. In office, he became truly unique: the first president to triple down on an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda rather than tack to the middle. Trump has a lap-dog Republican Congress and more leverage than any other recent president to cut a comprehensive immigration deal. But he likely won't—certainly not when his top ghoul, Stephen Miller, is pursuing a vast ethnic-cleansing campaign instead. By now, the only constant in Trump’s addled mind is probably a belief in his own lies about immigration and in the notion that punching down at immigrants is the only way to save himself.

With Trump's popularity on immigration destined to fail, and with daily images of ICE cruelty that shock the conscience, all Democrats had to do was stay united in opposition. First, to help the people they had been promising citizenship for more than 20 years. Second, to help themselves. Instead, their divisions in the face of Trump's campaign of white supremacy have been uniquely ugly and counterproductive. Democratic elites made the same mistake Republican elites made in their 2012 autopsy, only in reverse. They mistook the repudiation of Biden’s failure as a ratification of Trump’s racist vision of America. The difference is that this time, far more people are suffering for it. And democracy itself is now at risk if Democrats don’t change course.

Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry—the two leading Obama-era voices guiding Democrats on immigration from inside and outside the White House—should have blamed themselves for decades of failure. Instead, they conveniently blamed "the groups." Senate Democrats surrendered on the racist Laken Riley Act. Two supposedly progressive Democrats, Sens. Jon Ossoff (Ga.) and Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), are already calculating how much this capitulation will cost their 2028 presidential ambitions.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) assailed Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) for standing up for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the former day laborer whom the Trump administration defamed, abducted, and disappeared into a torture prison in El Salvador.

And it's not just Obama alums and elected officials. Pundits from Matt Yglesias to the Pod Save America bros have warned of doom if Democrats don't keep the groups in check and moderate on immigration. How many New York Times op-eds have blamed the 1965 immigration act for the rise of right-wing xenophobia? How many have blamed immigrants for upsetting white voters? Not even hashtags were spared—somehow #AbolishICE got blamed for everything.

Meanwhile, the maligned groups in the field have labored on—with far more to do, with far fewer resources, and with none of the luxury enjoyed by the elites who spent their time pointing fingers. There's no time for that when the work itself is the emergency.

They are helpers to those in need. Across the country, in response to what is now a full-scale domestic human rights crisis, leadership has come from the streets, not from those in elected office. People assisting neighbors. Defending their communities. Protecting kids. Showing up at courthouses and ICE check-ins so no one faces fascism alone. And immigrants and citizens standing and marching together, courageously, in the streets to demand: ICE out of our cities.

While Democrats continue to read polls and ruminate over slide decks, the vilified street protests are doing their work for them. The resistance that Beltway Democrats shun has become their lifeline—turning the tide on the one issue Trump was supposed to own.

And those sanctuary policies, once treated as the source of Democrats' problems back in 2016? They have literally stopped hundreds of thousands of deportations—in police stations, in jails, in courthouses across the country.

The Beltway Democrats' skittishness—their craven blaming of immigrants to conceal their own failure—has been a brake on progress. Those people need to join the resistance. Do something. Help someone. And stop bashing the people you claim to defend.

Absent the mother of all pivots from the White House, the downward trajectory for Trump on immigration will continue inexorably. The only questions are about the rate of decline and what comes next.

Rather than continue internecine fights, Democratic elites should join the grassroots in fighting the real adversary—the brutal, violent, white-nationalist deportation campaign now tearing this country apart. They should get out of their conference rooms and Zoom calls and hit the streets with us. A number of members of Congress have already followed Sen. Van Hollen's lead, forcing their way into the warehouses where immigrants are jailed in defense of their constituents. Every Democrat should do the same. Not as a photo op, but because it's right. And because in every election to come, Democrats will be judged not by their campaign promises, but by what they did in years Trump was in office.

The stakes go beyond the midterms. Fighting back now, unequivocally, is what will get Democratic leaders ready for what comes after Trump's inevitable downfall. They need to think about the vast possibilities ahead—restoring truth to immigration discourse, and pursuing policies that make a real difference in the lives of real people. They should be as ambitious in proposing new ways to help immigrants and rebuild this country as Trump has been in trying to destroy it.

At 2 a.m. Michigan time early Wednesday morning, NBC projected that AIPAC's preferred candidate was on her way to look for a new job. US Rep. Haley Stevens' defeat in Michigan's Democratic Senate primary is the last nail in AIPAC's coffin. The once-feared Israel lobby is sinking, along with Israel, like a stone in American public opinion. Despite sixty-to-one spending against Abdul El-Sayed, Stevens couldn't keep her head above water. AIPAC and its Israel-first billionaire funders turned Michigan into the most expensive Democratic Senate primary in American history and lost anyway.

Just think about it for a second: a PAC that backs a conservative candidate who champions tax cuts for billionaires in one congressional district while simultaneously bankrolling a liberal, like Stevens, who wants to tax the wealthy in another is not advancing a coherent American political interest. If the only principle uniting those otherwise incongruent endorsements is unwavering support for Israel, then the PAC is driven not by a domestic ideology or constituency, but by a foreign policy agenda.

Now, after spending millions to elect a Democrat, Stevens, AIPAC is all but certain to pour millions more into backing Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate, in November—not for the sake of Michiganders or Americans, but for Israel. That is the essence of AIPAC: partisan differences are irrelevant so long as the candidate serves Tel Aviv's interests.

The Democratic establishment squandered its remaining credibility kowtowing to AIPAC, the most powerful foreign lobby, widening the chasm between the Democratic base and its leadership. AIPAC funding and endorsements from Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer and Gretchen Whitmer carried little weight in Democratic primaries.

Ask Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York. Ask Dan Goldman, also of New York. Ask Diana DeGette, a 15-term Colorado congresswoman who represented Denver since Bill Clinton's first term. All three lost their seats in the same six weeks, and all three— and despite AIPAC backing—lost for the same reason: they stood with Israel, or wouldn't say the word "genocide," while their own voters had moved on without them. In Michigan, the Democratic establishment's endorsements, and its push to have State Senator Mallory McMorrow drop from the race to consolidate the anti-El-Sayed "Democratic" vote, failed on its face. This is further evidence that the party's base and its leadership are living in two different universes when it comes to Israel.

For seven decades, unconditional support for Israel was table stakes in Democratic politics; the safe position that kept Israel-first billionaires and AIPAC's money flowing and primary challengers away. That math has broken. Staying quiet while Gaza starves and burns is now one of the fastest ways for a Democrat to lose an election.

Espaillat had AIPAC's backing when Darializa Avila Chevalier, a former organizer of Columbia University's Gaza encampment, beat him in New York's 13th District. Goldman, who refused throughout his campaign to call Israel's conduct in Gaza a genocide, lost to fellow New Yorker Brad Lander, a Jewish candidate and the city's well known comprtoller who ran explicitly against Goldman's Israel record. Then came DeGette, a Congressional Progressive Caucus stalwart, unseated by 29-year-old Democratic socialist Melat Kiros despite a late injection of AIPAC-linked outside spending trying to save her. Kiros' closing message to voters was blunt: reject “corporate PACs like AIPAC” and stop waiting to end what she called the genocide in Palestine. Voters agreed by nearly ten points.

Haley Stevens who once bragged that Israel comes to her in her dreams—turned nightmare in the primary—attempted to sharpen her language criticizing Benjamin Netanyahu, trying to close a gap against El-Sayed. Even Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Israeli army, a man who built his career as one of Israel's most reliable Democratic defenders and is openly eyeing a 2028 presidential run, stood in Tel Aviv last month and said Netanyahu's government had driven the country into a dead end, questioning America’s unconditional support for Israel.

The state of Maine offers maybe the starkest proof. After the anti-genocide Senate candidate Graham Platner campaign imploded, half a dozen Democrats jumped in to replace him—and every one of them has had to scramble to prove they'll carry his opposition to the Gaza war forward, not walk it back. Troy Jackson, the current nominee, attempted to placate the establishment avoiding Israel and Gaza out of his launch speech entirely; by the next day, under visible pressure, he was calling the war "unconscionable" and pledging he'd never vote for taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel. The hopeful Nirav Shah has had to publicly deny taking AIPAC money and commit to opposing all aid to Israel, offensive or defensive, just to hold onto the coalition Platner built. Even Shenna Bellows, was pressed by reporters and rivals alike to say where she stands on Gaza. None of them could afford to look like the old consensus anymore.

The behind-the-curve Republicans are watching and licking their chops, framing these wins as too far left to win in November. The party is even further behind the Democratic establishment in understanding the shift among American voters. Republicans have always been late to catch up with the reality of change in America—from voting rights to women's rights to LGBTQ+ rights, the GOP has always been a Johnny-come-lately. And the next midterm elections are poised to prove that.

What we are observing today is not just a minor shift in national American politics. It is a tectonic realignment in party politics. It used to be that not groveling to Israel—not making the obligatory photo op wearing yarmulke and tucking a note into the crevices of a wall built under the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, was the political risk. Now it's staying silent, hedging, or clinging to the old line that gets you ousted, and it's grassroots movements doing the ousting, defeating outside PACs or pressure groups.

This happened because two years of televised famine, bombed hospitals, murdered children, and a UN commission calling Israel's conduct genocide changed how American voters see Israel and what they now expect from the leaders who represent them. The politicians who read that shift early, Mamdani, Lander, Avila Chevalier, Kiros, won. The ones who didn't are now—or soon to be— former members of congress.

The lesson for every Democrat still weighing how much daylight to put between themselves, AIPAC, and Israeli apartheid: the voters have already decided. The only question left is whether the Democratic establishment will catch up with the anti-genocide American voters in time to win the majority in both houses this November.

Thin-skinned and heavy-handed, the Trump administration apparently feels like it is being singled out by those who dissent from its policies. As a result, Trump appointees are taking drastic "McCarthy" tactics to stop dissent.

In less than one month, alleging that dissent and protests are part of attempts of other governments “to overthrow the government of the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has sponsored two major initiatives to frighten those who oppose the Trump administration's policies. The first salvo was orchestrating a conference with 60 countries participating over “Threats From Left-Wing Terrorists.” The second was the report on Cuba that alleged virtually every group that has ever visited Cuba is paid by the Cuban government.

No One is Paid to Protest—If One Is NOT Outraged Then You Aren’t Watching

These allegations of paid protest and travelling on the dime of another country are unfounded, untrue, and fly in the face of the history of protests in the US and travel by US citizens to see the effects of US polices on other countries.

President Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy, including the disastrous attacks on Iran as a favor to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli war machine; attacks domestically cutting health and education; horrific treatment of migrants; daily outlandish statements on just about every subject; and disregard for facts in virtually every issue all provide good reasons for protests by outraged US citizens.

I have not been paid by any country to protest US policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid.

No one needs to be paid to be outraged!!!

Dissent is Not Illegal and Is Not Paid by Other Countries

In particular, Secretary of State and National Security adviser Marco Rubio, who has authored the latest "McCarthy" report to quell opposition to illegal, immoral policies of his department and the Trump administration in general, seems to have lost his grasp on the history of dissent in the US.

From his 15 years in the US Senate, he should remember that many of each administration's domestic and international policies have been lawfully and non-violently protested by US citizens in the US Congress.

Having been a part of many protests since I resigned from the State Department in March 2003 in opposition to a war policy, President George W. Bush's war on Iraq, I know that these protests are NOT a part of attempts of other governments to “overthrow the government of the United States,” but are legitimate shows of concern about specific policies. Rubio’s allegations of other countries’ influence in these protests are unfounded and untrue.

I was not paid by a foreign government to resign. I resigned because I felt the war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, and a dangerous action jeopardizing the national security of the United States.

I have not been paid by any country to protest US policies, nor do I know anyone who has been paid. Protest is a legitimate, time-consuming act of outrage about a policy that people use to bring attention to the policy, and hopefully effect change in the policy.

Marco “McCarthy” Rubio’s Tactics: Blame the Left When the Right Has Violently Attacked the US Government

The first attack against legitimate protest came in the US Department of State sponsored conference on “Far-Left Terrorism” held in Washington, DC in July 2026, where Rubio and White House pit bull Stephen Miller harangued the representatives of 66 nations about terrorists from the left wanting to overthrow the US government.

In his opening statement Rubio railed: “This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called left-wing extremism a growing threat aimed at “the overthrow of our system and form of government” that officials previously failed to sufficiently address. Miller railed: “We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilize our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.”

A White House press release stated, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Oops, Trump and Rubio Forget to Mention the Violent Attempt at Overthrow of the US Electoral Process by the Trump-Inspired, Right-Wing January 6 Mob

Of course, neither Rubio nor Miller mentioned President Trump’s pardon of the over 1,500 persons who did try to violently overthrow the United States electoral process on January 6, 2021 as they attacked the Capitol police and broke into and destroyed many offices in the US Capitol.

The attempted overthrow of the 2020 election by seeking to nullify the election results through lawsuits in 62 federal and state courts was attempted by Trump’s loyal personal lawyers including the current acting US Attorney General and head of the US Department of Justice Todd Blanche and disgraced and disbarred lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Their cases of election fraud were stopped by rulings in all 62 federal and state lawsuits that no election fraud had occurred.

Rubio and the State Department’s Untruthful, Dishonest Report About Cuba and Paid Protesters

The most recent and most ludicrous allegations of left-wing violence and protests being funded by other countries is in Secretary of Rubio's 10- page report on “Cuba: the Capitol of 21st Century Communism.” Rubio accuses the National Network on Cuba, National Lawyers Guild, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, the People's Forum, IFCO/Pastors For Peace, and the Democratic Socialists of America of being paid by the Cuban government whose goal, the report states, has been for 60 years the overthrow of the US government.

Talk about turning the facts on their heads! As is well-documented, 13 successive US presidential administrations since 1959—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama (first term when CIA policies were still in effect, but changing in Obama’s second term with diplomatic recognition), Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2—have attempted to overthrow the Cuban government in the 60-plus years of its existence.

The current attempt of overthrow of the Cuban government by the United States is centered on the brutal total blockade of fuel going to Cuba, which has left Cuban citizens without electricity for operations in hospitals, for food preparation, for the ability to conduct normal life activities. Making life so miserable for the Cuban citizenry that they overthrow their government would fulfill the longstanding hopes of Cuban-American Rubio.

Rubio Is Not Honest About His Background as a Cuban American

Marco Rubio has been less than forthright about his heritage as a Cuban American in his quest for the overthrow of the Cuban government.

Marco Rubio, “Mr. Righteous against birthright citizenship,” is a "birthright citizen" born in the US of noncitizen parents who had immigrated in 1956 from Cuba under the Batista dictatorship, not under the 1959 revolutionary government.

Marco Rubio, “Mr. Tough on illegal immigrants,” ignores that his own grandfather entered the US illegally and was ordered to be deported but was saved from deportation by an amnesty during the Cuban missile crisis.

Despite these brutal, heavy-handed attempts to silence us, dissent is spreading to regular citizens.

Marco Rubio, “Mr. Kill the Boat Drug Runners of the Caribbean,” disregards that his own brother-in-law was convicted of drug running and his sister implicated but never charged.

Marco Rubio, “Mr. I Know All About Cuba Because I Am Cuban American,” has been to Cuba only once—where in Cuba did he go? A few hours at the US prison on the U. Naval base at Guantánamo.

No doubt, more will come in the next two years as Rubio, Miller, and others in the administration seem to think they can get away with outrageous bullying of individuals and organizations that do not agree with them and that challenge them in non-violent ways, in contrast to the January 6 gang.

In particular, there are always protests against the horrific effects of brutal sanctions that the US government uses to make life so difficult for citizens of other countries that they will overthrow their own governments, whether it be Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, or Nicaragua.

Israel’s Paid Influence on US Citizen Perceptions Seems to Be OK With Rubio

However, Rubio no doubt is thinking that since his buddies in the Netanyahu government have paid Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, millions of dollars in a specific program to influence US public opinion to stop the massive decline in Israel’s “likability,” that other countries have paid off US persons to work clandestinely on the same scale.

Parscale's firm was hired by Israel for $6 million in September 2025 and then signed a $15 million contract with Israeli firm Havas to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel according to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Parscale and his team sent conservative influencers suggested positive language about Israel for posts on social media sites such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. The influencers are then compensated based on how many “likes” each post gets from readers.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has dramatically increased spending on influence operations. Earlier this year, Israel increased by four times its “public diplomacy” influence budget from $150 million in 2025 to $730 million in 2026.

But even The Times of Israel says it’s too late for a “face lift” as a Pew Research Center poll reported that 60% of Americans now view Israel unfavorably, up seven points in a single year, with only 37% viewing it favorably after Israel has committed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza; pillaged and plundered homes, farms, animals in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian West Bank; destroyed southern Lebanon; and got the Trump administration up to its neck in the war on Iran.

Keep Challenging Illegal, Immoral, and Criminal Policies

The two recent major attempts of the Trump administration to quell dissent show how serious challenging illegal, immoral, and criminal policies has become and how important it is that we push back hard against these attempts intimidating citizens to silence their dissent.

However, despite these brutal, heavy-handed attempts to silence us, dissent is spreading to regular citizens. In a recent letter to the editor of my hometown newspaper Honolulu Star Advertiser, which serves a large US military population, a resident of Hawaii summarized the challenge very well: “The true domestic enemy includes those who monopolize political and economic power. The real enemy includes individuals who misinform, threaten, and disenfranchise the less powerful. The true enemy are those who are antidemocratic, have little or no concern regarding the welfare of others, and enrich themselves, family, and a few friends at the expense of the general population.”

Yes, I’m on the fly when it comes to—or do I mean I’m a fly on the wall of?—our most recent history. I’m not sure which, but whatever the case, I do know that I’m watching a world growing eerily stranger by the day (if not the hour, minute, or even second). And you know just who’s at the very heart of that strangeness. His initials, of course, are DJT and, explain it as you will, he just happens to be the president of the United States for a second time (on his third try).

He certainly gives “imperial” new meaning. He is the Great Donald, the No. 1 everything on planet Earth (at least if you ask him) and, if you don’t agree (and you’re anywhere in his vicinity), believe me you’ll regret it.

As it happens, I looked at The New York Times online as I was writing this and here are two of the headlines that promptly jumped out at me: “Iran Digs in After Latest Trump Threats Against Civilian Targets“ (and yes, striking civilian targets is the definition of a war crime, not that Donald Trump gives a damn) and “What to Know About Trump’s Tariffs on Canada, and What’s Next.”

As for Iran, Trump is truly accomplishing something historic, don’t you think? After all, as I was writing this, amazingly enough, he kept the surge in oil prices from his war on Iran to a mere $100-plus a barrel and the price at the pump in this country to a modest $4-plus a gallon (with the distinct possibility that they will rise yet more as he fights on). And honestly, who could ask for better?Meanwhile, just imagine for a moment the nerve of the Canadians, putting 25% tariffs on American cars and trucks (after Trump did exactly that to them), as well as starting all those forest fires and sending all that smoke down not just on the United States but on Washington, DC, and so on Donald J. Trump himself, creating some of the worst air quality on Earth at that moment! Or as the president put it, “We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!”

The question is: What’s next (not to speak of next after that, and that, and that)?

And for such dreadful behavior, they deserved nothing less than Trump’s 50% tariffs from hell (right?), including on such major exports as “wigs (partial), false beards, eyebrows and the like, of synthetic textile materials.” All of that from the president who is essentially doing everything in his power (a sadly appropriate word) to heat up and so burn down this planet of ours.

Of course, there’s no reason for Canada to return the favor, because unlike their fires, the 22 (yes, 22!) grim US fires that were burning in the states of Washington and Oregon as I was writing this and pouring smoke into Western Canada weren’t purposely set (or much reported on in this country). On the other hand, Donald Trump’s (anti-)climate-change policies are intended to do nothing less than set this planet ablaze, but that’s a relatively long-term phenomenon, so, once again, no reason to put the blame on The Donald, right?

And all of that makes so much sense on what’s increasingly Donald Trump’s (wounded) planet. As for war, as that song so famously put it, what is it good for—absolutely nothin’—except when he decides to attack a more or less random country, in the most recent case Iran. Okay, admittedly he’s anything but alone, presidentially speaking, since this country hasn’t won a war in his lifetime and he was born almost a year after World War II, the last truly victorious American war, ended—but who the hell cares now that he’s in the White House? Admittedly, even he once seemed to care, promising on the campaign trail not to get this country involved in yet another set of wars, something that he now vividly denies.

Donald Trump Leaves the Rest of Us in the Dust of History

The question is: What’s next (not to speak of next after that, and that, and that)? Of course, since we’re talking about President Donald Trump, who could ever truly know until it literally happens? I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if some of the algae still growing in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool isn’t also growing inside his brain.

The mainstream media world is simply too polite in its coverage to call the American president a madman, though James Mattis, secretary of defense from his first term in office, described him as “a madman in a circular room screaming.” So, no surprise that he’s appointed a number of mad people to key posts under him. Take Secretary of—yes, “War,” not “Defense” Pete Hegseth. His focus these days, as the US military fights yet another endless (and endlessly destructive, as well as unsuccessful) war, all too Trumpianly labelled Operation Epic Fury, that he’s already claimed as “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield,” is on—what else?—testosterone levels in the US military. Under the circumstances, what could be more important than that?

While I might have focused on certain key figures on this planet and been a kind of fly on the wall to history in the making, I didn’t write time after time about just one of them.

I mean, honestly, what could go wrong when “our” president is putting so much energy into building a new White House ballroom (despite the fact that 97% of the public comments on it have been negative) and a towering 250-foot triumphal arch to himself in Washington (larger, it goes without saying, than the Parisian Arc de Triomphe)? And yet, strangely enough, he hasn’t (so far) committed himself to building the largest White House bathroom ever.

I could go on (and on and on), but let me just ask: Can you even believe it? Any of it? Here we all are and yet can you even believe this Trumpian world of ours? Yes, somewhere in the shadows, another imperial power, China, with another leader, is quietly rising and out there in our grim world, Vladimir Putin is still fighting his war with Ukraine. Nonetheless, give Donald Trump full credit. In his own strange fashion, he leaves them all in dust—and sooner or later, if he indeed does his damnedest (as he undoubtedly will), he’s likely to make remarkable progress (if you’ll excuse my use of that word) in leaving the rest of us in the literal dust of history.

I mean, if Donald Trump doesn’t give imperial decline new meaning, I don’t know who or what could. And yet—and let me speak personally here—I’ve been writing about this country and the world first at TomDispatch and most recently at my own Substack for almost a quarter of a century now and, once upon a time, while I might have focused on certain key figures on this planet and been a kind of fly on the wall to history in the making, I didn’t write time after time about just one of them.

No longer. In some truly eerie way that I only wish I could shake, Donald Trump is now, it seems, my world. And god save me for (and from) that.

In late March, President Donald Trump addressed hundreds of farmers, ranchers, and agribusiness executives on the White House South Lawn at what he hyperbolically called “the single largest gathering of American farmers that the White House has ever seen.” In a rambling 35-minute speech that was ostensibly about the Farm Bill, he lambasted the Biden administration and “environmental terrorists,” lauded US military might, boasted that his ballroom will be the finest in the world, and gushed over a gold-wrapped tractor parked nearby. But he dedicated most of his speech to impress upon the crowd that “American farmers, ranchers, growers, and producers once again have a true friend and champion in the Oval Office.”

“You’re very, very special people,” Trump concluded. “I’ll never forget we won like such a number like nobody’s ever won before. You voted for me. I will never forget that. I’ll never forget the friendship—the great friendship that we’ve had.”

Indeed, the overwhelming majority of the nation’s 3.4 million farmers, 95% of whom are white, went for Trump in the 2024 election. He received nearly 78% of the votes in the 444 counties most dependent on agriculture.

But now, an increasing number of farmers are experiencing buyer’s remorse. Buffeted by tariffs and an unprovoked war against Iran that sent the price of fertilizer through the roof, they easily stand out as the voting bloc most betrayed by Trump. The resulting inflation has pushed many small farms to the brink of financial ruin. It has gotten so bad that even conservative think tanks generally aligned with Trump are griping.

It is virtually impossible to predict how farm country voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump administration policies will play out in the November midterm elections.

Earlier this year, researchers at the libertarian Cato Institute, founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, bemoaned the impact Trump’s tariffs are having on farmers. “The Trump administration continues to tell America’s farm community that this is a golden age and that the administration’s tariffs are working,” they wrote. “The data tell a different story.”

More recently, Marc Short, a former Koch network official who now chairs Advancing American Freedom, a right-wing advocacy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, was even more explicit. In a June opinion piece in The Washington Post, he charged that “President Trump’s policies have punched farmers in the mouth.”

Downer on the Farm

In April, the American Farm Bureau Federation published a survey of 5,700 farmers detailing the pain they are experiencing due to Trump administration policies. Nearly 60% said their financial situation has worsened since last year. Only 6% said they were doing better. Nationwide, 70% said they could not afford the fertilizer they needed, while in the Farm Bureau’s southern region, where Trump won 12 of 13 states, nearly 80% said they could not afford it. Smaller farms, which “are less likely to secure fertilizer ahead of the season” than larger operations, the Farm Bureau noted, were hardest hit.

Based on US Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecasts, Farm Bureau economist Faith Parum predicted that farmers may not receive any “meaningful” relief next year. Even if fuel and fertilizer prices drop, they will still face “higher prices for seed, chemicals, repairs, labor, machinery, and cash rents expenses,” she pointed out, concluding that at “a time when commodity prices remain under pressure and margins are already thin, higher operating expenses will place additional strain on farm viability.”

Many farmers have already lost their struggle for viability. Last year there were 315 Chapter 12 family farm bankruptcies across the country, a 46% increase from 2024. This year, according to the Trump administration’s own data, farm insolvency is expected to grow to as many as 330 bankruptcies and a record debt of $625 billion. In April alone, there were 62 farm-related bankruptcies, the highest one-month total since 2020 during the first Trump administration.

“Each year that we don’t start on the upswing is just more and more stress on farmers, and I think the higher diesel prices, the higher fertilizer prices, it’s just made 2026 the breaking point,” Robert E. Moore, an attorney at Ohio State University’s Agricultural & Resource Law Program, told Ag Daily in May. “I think farm bankruptcies are more likely to increase than decrease over the next few years.”

Through Thick and Mainly Thin

On March 27, Donald Trump thanked the farmers, ranchers, and agribusiness executives gathered at the White House profusely for their votes. (Photo by Abe McNatt/White House)

Farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 only to see him launch a tariff war against China and other US trading partners that cost them $13.2 billion in annualized export losses from 2018 through the end of 2019, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service. That debacle prompted the first Trump administration to give farmers $28 billion in direct payments to compensate them for their losses.

By contrast, farmers largely benefited from Biden administration policies. During their first three years in office, according to a January 2024 Politico analysis, the Biden and first Trump administration each authorized roughly $57 billion in direct USDA payments to farmers. But there was a crucial difference: Much of Trump’s aid was emergency compensation for losses caused by his own trade war with China, while the Biden administration focused more on supporting agriculture through conservation, rural development, and other long-term investments.

“Biden has been better for farmers than Trump,” Politico concluded. “Net farm income has actually gone up since the Democrat entered the White House. On average, net farm income has totaled $165 billion between 2021 and 2023, compared to $94 billion between 2017 and 2019. Farm income reached a record high of nearly $189 billion in 2022.”

Nevertheless, nearly 4 out of 5 voters in agriculture-dependent communities backed Trump in 2024, and this time around, farm losses could be much worse than during Trump’s first term. To be sure, Trump’s policies don’t bear all blame for their woes—farmers have been struggling with high production costs and low crop prices for years—but he is certainly piling on.

In 2025, even before Trump’s war against Iran, the Agricultural Risk Policy Center at North Dakota State University estimated losses of $35 billion to $44 billion for major commodity crops. The center also calculated that Trump’s most recent tariff war with China resulted in nearly $15 billion in annualized losses between March 2025 and February 2026, alone, 40% more than the loss of $10.6 billion due to Trump’s 2018-2019 trade war with China during his first term.

Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress are now trying to mollify farmers with bailouts and price protections that could amount to a record $55 billion this year, The Wall Street Journal reported late last month. But it is not clear how quickly or efficiently that aid could get to farmers given Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cut 24,000 USDA staff members, many of whom assisted farmers with paperwork at the local level.

During a June trip to Wisconsin farm country, Trump urged farmers to be patient. “Your fertilizer prices are going to go way down, just like they were four months ago,” he promised. “Your fertilizer’s down, your energy’s down, your oil, your gas is all coming way down.”

So far, that hasn’t happened, but luckily for Trump, he has been able to depend on farmers’ patience, perhaps because they are aligned with him on so many other issues. Surveys show that white rural voters are more likely to believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen; more likely to support political violence; and less likely to support democracy, racial diversity, and the idea that immigrants strengthen the nation—even though countless farming operations would fail without cheap immigrant labor.

Trump’s hold on farm country also is largely due to the real and imagined grievances rural whites have against “liberal urban elites” that Republicans have been stoking for decades, according to Nicholas Jacobs, an assistant professor at Colby College and co-author of the 2023 book The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. “It’s easy for an outsider to ask, ‘Why the hell are you still with this guy?’” Jacobs told the BBC. “But you have to understand that across rural America, the move toward Republicans long predates Donald Trump.”

Will Trump’s Luck Run Out?

On June 19, a Washington Post article quoted a Nebraska cattle rancher who questioned how much the agricultural sector can endure as more farmers go belly up. Farmers, he said, “have been rationalizing all of this chaos and saying it’s all going to be better later, but now they’re seeing that they may not be in the business any longer later.”

Four days before the Post story ran, Reuters/Ipsos posted a survey showing that Trump’s approval rating in rural America had hit a new low. Fifty percent of respondents approved of Trump, a 10% decline from February 2025. Trump’s disapproval rating among rural Americans, meanwhile, jumped from 34% to 48% over the same period.

A subsequent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released last week, however, suggests that Trump’s falling support among rural voters may have stabilized. Trump had a 44% disapproval and a 52% approval rating, compared to an overall national approval rating of only 42%. For now, Trump’s appeal in rural America appears to be relatively strong.

It is virtually impossible to predict how farm country voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump administration policies will play out in the November midterm elections. Trump may not be on the ballot, but many of his Republican enablers in Congress and state governments will be. Will disillusioned farmers and their neighbors simply stay home, or has their “great friendship” with Trump soured enough that they pull the lever for Democrats? We will soon find out.

This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.

It was really hot in Colorado this weekend. Doing political work outdoors seemed nearly impossible, yet we gathered in Brighton, deep into Colorado’s 8th Congressional District to canvas for Manny Rutinel.

Manny won the Democratic primary and is set to unseat Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) in November. After spending just a little time more directly with Manny, his staff, and volunteers, I recognized something in him that could be called an intangible—respect for every person he spoke to, yet most especially for we elders gathered in the heat.

Respect for others cannot be faked nor can disdain. Many politicians and candidates are pushing away from people at gatherings to find more “important” faces in the crowd or bigger donors to court. Manny did not do that to me or any of the other people around him—he made direct eye contact and leaned in to hear me as I offered my ever-ready counsel on healthcare policy and messaging. That alone was remarkable in this vibrant, intensely caring, courageous young candidate—yet I was mystified in thinking about Manny Rutinel, a young man who lives his values and upbringing, helping restore programs and benefits he knows his often-unseen constituents have lost under Trumpublican Rep. Gabe Evans’ tenure in Congress.

It’s like a huge political wind is blowing here in Colorado, and that wind is clearing away the wreckage of inaction, Trumpublican loyalty, and stagnation that has allowed the House of Representatives to fail in its constitutional role. Manny Rutinel rides on the winds of change with intention. Rutinel’s intention seems clear enough—Manny will represent the people of his district. He isn’t torn by corporate loyalties or hidden agendas.

This weekend, I watched Manny show deference to elders, willingness to make space for other candidates to shine, and a sense of humor that will help us all connect as we struggle to protect this grand experiment of democracy.

One of the people I look to for close knowledge of candidates mentioned early on that he thought Manny rested too much of his success in his looks—and yes, Manny is a nice looking young man. Yet, I have not seen one example in which he expected his looks to carry the day. Women have lived with that sort of judgement for a long time—our stereotypical view is you must be good looking, but if you are, you must not be intelligent. Well, Manny even laughed when I shared that observation with him. He is Yale educated, and I think that takes some real dedication and smarts, and the ability to stand up to wealthy and intellectual snobs in ways we cannot imagine. Yet that isn’t what I felt or even the words I’ll remember from when we spoke. For me to come away with the feeling that I was in the presence of unfolding political greatness was something I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. Manny Rutinel, on a hot Saturday morning in August 2026, stands ready to not only lead, but to do so with respect, decency, and courage.

I can hear it now. How could you know anything of the kind about a candidate from a few brief hellos and one longer conversation? It’s not without comparisons to people I have been lucky enough to know along the way—those who truly helped and those who took their elected offices seriously. In Manny Rutinel, I see the same kinds of qualities I have seen as other candidates advanced in political work. Tom Daschle, Tim Wirth, Elizabeth Warren, and many others (yes, because I knew them when they were younger and less well known) became leaders and never stopped being decent, kind, courageous, and respectful—even to little-known me. Each of those people lifted me and so many others as they moved through and sometimes out of our political system that is at times more like a circus. Watching how a young candidate for office moves through a crowd or interacts with volunteers is instructive, but how that person moves to better the lives of those they represent must flow from a deeper drive, a deeper trust that we all deserve to be heard and we all deserve intelligent, courageous representation. Manny Rutinel will provide that and more. It is as plain as day when he mingles that he understands the task at hand—win the seat back from Trumpublican Gabe Evans and truly represent the people in CD8—all of them.

Policies? Is Manny ready to support all the “stuff” I support? Nope. Manny isn’t nearly as progressive as the young Dem primary winner, Melot Kiros, from Colorado's 1st Congressional District. She defeated long-time incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) with a breathtaking ground game. Manny Rutinel will need that and more to win. But he’ll have it from what I have seen so far, and he will have that campaign strength because he leads with respect, kindness, and an unwavering love for the people of Colorado's 8th District. Imagine, political power growing from that source.

This weekend, I watched Manny show deference to elders, willingness to make space for other candidates to shine, and a sense of humor that will help us all connect as we struggle to protect this grand experiment of democracy. It’s those intangible qualities in his character that will surely make him a fine congressman. We ought all look forward to our Congress, especially the (People’s) House of Representatives, better reflecting our values instead of greed and ultra loyalty to Trumpublican shenanigans.

Of the people, by the people, for the people, let’s “Give Gabe the Boot!”

Unusually hot, dry conditions across many parts of the world—including in Algeria, Canada, France, Greece, Morocco, Spain, Tunisia, and the Western United States—have set the stage for the catastrophic wildfire season underway now. Just over this weekend, rapidly spreading wildfires have exploded around Spokane, Washington, forcing nearly 65,000 people to evacuate thus far. Unrelenting hot dry weather, supercharged by climate change, is contributing to the dangerous conditions causing these fires.

The images of these fires are stunning, their scale terrifying, the human toll enormous already and mounting. And while the proximate causes of the fires, the types of vegetation burning, and nearby settlements differ greatly, the abnormal climatic conditions looming in the background everywhere are unmistakably clear.

Many lives have been lost, and precious communities razed to the ground. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to evacuate from fire zones and millions more have experienced dangerous levels of exposure to wildfire smoke. And, unfortunately, more heat is on the way—a deadly hazard on its own, and one that will also continue to fan the flames of this extraordinarily destructive wildfire season.

If these infernos don’t bring policymakers to their senses and force necessary changes to grapple with the fossil fueled climate crisis, what will?

Wildfire Conditions in the United States

The 2026 wildfire season got off to an early above-normal start in the US. Thus far this year, nearly 5.3 million acres of land have burned across the country, well above the 10-year average of 3.7 million acres for this time of year. On July 18, the National Preparedness Level was raised to 5, the highest level, a sign of the extreme fire dangers and high level of resources committed to fight fires.

Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah are among the states that have experienced an incredibly challenging wildfire season this year. The Aspen Acres fire, covering nearly 102,000 acres in Colorado, has been burning for over a month now. And recent rains have led to heavy flash flooding in the burned areas, carrying ash and debris across roads and into waterways.

Even as wildfires are raging, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits, aided by craven politicians all too eager to give them free rein to burn down the planet.

As of last week, Oregon had 31 large fires burning, across 1.6 million acres. They include the Rowe Creek Complex fire currently covering over 320,000 acres, the Big Grass fire with over 337,000 acres, and the Coleman Creek fire covering over 251,000 acres. Despite the state being in such a dire situation, the Trump administration has denied FEMA Fire Management Assistance Grants (FMAGs) for two wildfires: the East Evans Creek Fire and Rowe Creek Fire Complex. State Sens.Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden have strongly criticized the action and demanded answers from the agency.

Washington had 13 large fires burning over nearly 204,000 acres as of last week, including the Kaiser Canyon fire, which has burned over 128,000 acres.

The latest fuels and fire advisory for the Pacific Northwest notes that low snowpack and drought conditions in the region have led to fuels (i.e. vegetation) drying out much earlier than usual—all of which is ‘producing extreme fire behavior.’ This means intense fires that spread rapidly and are hard to control, putting people and infrastructure in danger.

And the most recent wildfire outlook for August shows continued elevated fire risks in the Northwest, the upper Midwest, as well as Texas, and southern Florida.

The World in Flames

Numerous large wildfires (nearly 900) are also burning across Canada. Over 9 million acres (3.76 million hectares) have burned thus far this year as the nation experiences one of its worst seasons (with the province of Ontario experiencing its worst-ever season).

France and Spain are also in the throes of their worst wildfire seasons on record, with little letup in sight as yet another intense heatwave rolls through Europe, the fastest-warming continent globally. Approximately 300,000 people have been displaced by the fires thus far, which are now approaching major cities. Firefighters have lost their lives. Homes and livelihoods are going up in smoke. New research from World Weather Attribution shows that climate change is increasing the likelihood of the kind of hot, dry conditions preceding the extreme fire weather that led to the wildfires in France and Spain.

Northern Africa, which has received far less attention, is also seeing major wildfires which have caused deaths, prompted evacuations, and are putting a big strain on local firefighting resources in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco.

And earlier this year, Southern Hemisphere countries, including Australia, Chile, and Argentina, experienced intense wildfires during their summer season.

While year-to-date carbon emissions from biomass burning in wildfires were at record lows in the first half of the year, that could change rapidly depending on how the next couple of months of peak fire season in the Northern Hemisphere go (especially boreal fires).

Dangerous Wildfire Smoke

Repeatedly this year, smoke from wildfire\s in Canada and the Western US has blanketed areas up to hundreds of miles to the east and south, reaching as far south as Florida last week. At times, over 100 million people were under alerts for pollution from wildfire smoke. Numerous cities—including Chicago, Detroit, Toronto and Milwaukee—experienced hazardous levels of particulate matter pollution, which can cause heart and lung ailments, worsen or trigger asthma, cause cancer, and even lead to death.

It’s almost unbearable to think that we knew the scientific facts decades ago and policymakers could have taken action to limit the harms so evident around us today.

Research shows that the contribution of wildfires to PM2.5 pollution has been steadily growing in the US. One recent research article on the health impacts of wildfire smoke, driven by climate change, estimates that cumulative excess deaths caused by PM2.5 pollution could be as high as 1.9 million between 2026 and 2055.

Firefighters who spend extended periods of time exposed to hazardous smoke, often with little to no protection, face some of the most acute health risks. A 2025 investigative series by Hannah Dreier of The New York Times showed the harrowing toll this is taking on young firefighters who are getting sick and dying from the toxic substances they’re exposed to. The Forest Service and the Department of Interior have finally been forced to respond and start providing N95 respirator masks to frontline firefighters in 2026.

Fossil Fuel Companies and the Trump Administration: Making Things Much Worse

Even as wildfires are raging, fossil fuel companies are raking in record profits, aided by craven politicians all too eager to give them free rein to burn down the planet. Fossil fuel companies and their political allies are now pushing for legislation to grant them immunity from legal and financial accountability for the climate damages they have caused. Join us in fighting back: Tell Congress: No Immunity for Big Oil!

And the Trump administration’s cuts to the US Forest Service staffing and budget, closure of research stations, and chaotic reorganization plans for federal firefighting efforts are also hampering efforts to address wildfire threats. News stories indicate that DOGE’s destructive actions also delayed grants for forest thinning and fuels management efforts in Minnesota, in an area that has now experienced major fires.

The Climate Future We Feared Is Here

Whether it’s catastrophic wildfires or unrelenting heatwaves, this year has brought home the realities of climate change in ways that are hard to comprehend. Tens of thousands of people have died from extreme heat this year alone, with the highest toll in Europe and Asia. We’ve seen searing images of people fleeing for their lives, and firefighters bravely risking theirs, in the face of towering wildfires. Otherworldly, murky yellow skies and smoke-refracted sunsets signaling dangerous air quality have become all too common.

It’s almost unbearable to think that we knew the scientific facts decades ago and policymakers could have taken action to limit the harms so evident around us today. We can’t let greedy fossil fuel companies and spineless politicians decide our future. We owe it to people reeling from climate-fueled disasters today, and to the generations to come that will live in the shadow of our choices, to do what it takes to chart a different, safer path ahead.

Last week, at least 72 people died while attempting to reach the Spanish exclave of Ceuta from Morocco. Around 60,000 people made it into Ceuta, many of them by sea, others by climbing over border fences. Within just a few days, however, most of them had already returned to Morocco.

Both Morocco and Ceuta are located in Africa. But politically, Ceuta, like Melilla, belongs to Spain and therefore to the European Union. Europe’s response to the unprecedented influx into the exclave has been almost unanimous. What happened has been described as a “threat to Europe’s security.” Some have even called it an “attack” or an “invasion.” Europe’s external borders, we are told, must be better protected.

Twenty-two of the European Union’s 27 member states have now signed an open letter initiated by Italy’s far-right government under Giorgia Meloni, criticizing Spain’s migration policy and calling for stricter security measures at Europe’s borders. Italy has further suspended its Schengen agreement with Spain. That this is little more than political posturing is evident from the fact that Ceuta is not part of the Schengen Area in the first place.

While Europe appears quick to agree on yet more repression, the 72 lives irreversibly lost have become an afterthought. Most of those who died had most of their lives still ahead of them and hoped for a better future. Instead, they found death on what they believed was the path toward that future. As right-leaning governments across Europe compete with one another in increasingly alarmist security rhetoric, the fundamental question is largely ignored: Why does a young person take such enormous risks in order to reach Europe?

People flee war, violence, persecution, poverty, and the hopelessness that arises when there is little prospect of a safe and dignified life. Border fences cannot deter those who see no viable future where they are, but merely make their journeys more dangerous and more deadly. One can debate at length the respective roles played by colonialism and other historical injustices on the one hand, and current political failures on the other, in creating global inequality. But this does not change the fact that a young person in Morocco, facing high youth unemployment and low wages, has every reason to perceive their situation as profoundly unjust when compared with life in much of Europe.

This inequality is not an abstract concept. In a world where everyone is connected to everyone else, and our planet, in many ways, has become a global village, it is experienced directly. People see how others live on their phone screens every day.

Nineteen-year-old Nok in Thailand can watch in real time as Moritz, her age and from Munich, spontaneously buys a flight ticket to Bangkok and spends six months travelling through Southeast Asia to “find himself.” A comparable journey to Europe is out of reach for Nok, given her limited financial means and the enormous difficulty of obtaining a Schengen visa, and it will remain an impossibility in the foreseeable future.

“Come through legal channels,” Europe tells migrants. Kwame in Ghana wants nothing more than to do exactly that. He successfully applies for a master’s program in Germany, spends months of his time and a considerable amount of money on language tests, certifications, translations, and other documents he needs for his visa application, and saves the required funds for his living expenses in Germany. Yet when he requests an appointment at the German Embassy in Accra, he learns that the waiting time is six to twelve months. He will miss the start of his program. Whether his admission will still be valid the following year remains uncertain.

Amina is eight years old and lives in Sudan. For months, there has been little to no schooling in her region. The healthcare system has largely collapsed. While her parents struggle every day to find enough food and clean water, many children in Europe take education, healthcare, and security for granted.

José is 24 years old and works twelve hours a day in a textile factory in Honduras for a wage that barely allows him to survive. The clothes he sews are later sold in Europe, often for more money than he earns in an entire week.

Nok, Kwame, Amina, and José had no control over where they were born. Neither did Moritz. Yet the consequences of this accident of birth could hardly be more different. It may be easier to demand higher fences, but as long as such extreme inequalities in security, prosperity, and future opportunities exist between different regions of the world, people will continue trying to overcome those fences.

The challenges of migration cannot be solved by sealing oneself off. They require an honest debate about how the global order can be made fairer. This is not simply a matter of extending humanitarian compassion as a voluntary gesture; it is a question of how much inequality can be morally justified when it is based largely on the accident of where someone happens to be born.

If Europe wants to prevent images like those from Ceuta in the future, it must address the root causes of migration more decisively — among other things through fairer trade relations, greater commitment to development cooperation, and the expansion of legal migration pathways. Paradoxically, the opposite trend can often be observed today. Many European countries, for example, have significantly reduced their development aid budgets in recent years — a sign of the growing influence of populism, which prioritizes short-term political gains over long-term solutions. Ultimately, such policies harm not only people in countries of origin, but Europe itself as well.

In a rare quiet moment inside the resuscitation room at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, I stood beside a young Palestinian man helping us treat waves of wounded children. He worked with calm precision. Focused. Unflinching.

Then he told me about his brother. Beaten nearly to death by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Not once. Repeatedly. Ribs broken. Face shattered. The attacks ended only when his family fled the land they had farmed for generations.

“They wanted us gone,” he said. Some of the men who carry out this violence hold United States passports.

They live under American law. They vote in American elections. Then they travel abroad and take part in acts that, in any other context, would be recognized without hesitation: assault, arson, organized racial violence. Homes burned. Crops destroyed. Families driven off land.

An American who beats a man because of his ethnicity, drives him from his home, and destroys the means by which his family survives is not transformed into something else by crossing a border.

And then they return. They pass through US customs. They resume their lives. No charges. No investigation. No meaningful consequence.

This is not an abstraction. Human rights organizations, Israeli and international alike, have documented repeated incidents of settler violence in the West Bank: physical attacks on civilians, destruction of agricultural land, the burning of homes and olive groves, often carried out with little immediate accountability.

Some of those involved are Americans. Under US law, citizenship is extraordinarily difficult to revoke. The Supreme Court has made that clear. But citizenship is not the only instrument of accountability, and treating it as such allows something far worse to persist: impunity.

If an American participates in organized violence against civilians abroad, that person should be investigated. If evidence supports it, they should be prosecuted under applicable US law. If their actions meet the threshold of coordinated or systematic violence, then sanctions, asset restrictions, and limits on international travel should follow.

A passport should not function as a safe harbor.

In 2024, the United States took limited steps to sanction individuals and entities linked to settler violence. It was an acknowledgment, however modest, that this problem exists. In early 2025, that framework was dismantled.

The message was clear. Even minimal accountability was negotiable.

Meanwhile, the violence continues. This is where the question becomes unavoidable.

What does it mean for Israel, a country that defines itself as a democracy under law, to tolerate or fail to prevent organized violence by settlers against civilians in the West Bank?

And what does it mean for the United States to allow its own citizens to participate in that violence and return home untouched?

These are not separate questions. They are reflections of the same failure.

An American who beats a man because of his ethnicity, drives him from his home, and destroys the means by which his family survives is not transformed into something else by crossing a border. Geography does not dilute the crime. It only obscures it.

If that same act occurred in the United States, there would be no ambiguity in how it is described or prosecuted.

When it occurs in the West Bank as part of a broader pattern of displacement, it demands the same clarity.

The tools for accountability already exist. Federal statutes governing violent crime, conspiracy, and, in certain cases, war crimes. Sanctions authorities. Civil liability. Immigration and travel restrictions.

What is missing is not law. It is willingness.

Impunity is not an accident here. It is a decision, made repeatedly, on both sides of the ocean.

The man I met in Gaza was not asking for revenge. He was asking for the violence to stop. He was asking for a form of justice that does not end at a checkpoint or a border crossing.

A United States passport should carry weight. It should represent a commitment to law, not an escape from it.

Right now, in too many cases, it does the opposite. And everyone involved knows it.

The Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 that Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, could not be sued because the label of its product, the weed killer Roundup, didn’t mention that the herbicide could cause cancer. The ruling blocked thousands of lawsuits by cancer patients—protecting Bayer-Monsanto from liability for health consequences of exposure to agricultural chemicals—and led to headlines like “MAHA Rattled” and “MAHA Be Damned.”

After the Supreme Court decision and the Trump administration’s approval of two more “forever chemical” pesticides last month, it seems like the Make America Healthy Again agenda is being dropped. Despite what some on the left may think, this is not cause for celebration.

In a time with few points of consensus on the left and right, most Americans—a whopping 84% of adults—are worried about their exposure to harmful chemicals. Nearly as many want the government to do more to identify and regulate harmful chemicals. Regulating Roundup and other pesticides can bring together a new coalition of people across political lines. The left needs to be open to forming new alliances with people we don’t agree with on everything, including MAHA.

Reforming laws so that chemical manufacturers have to accept liability when their products cause harm is one space for bipartisan work. Most Americans don’t want companies like Monsanto-Bayer to be protected from lawsuits when they manufacture hazardous products that result in illnesses. Yet the Supreme Court’s decision does just that: It protects pesticide makers from bearing any consequences when people use their products, unaware of possible dangers of doing so, and later develop illnesses connected to pesticide use, like cancer.

Partnering on one topic while disagreeing on others is part of what politics is about.

Tobacco companies can be sued for the harms of lung cancer and addiction, an achievement after decades when companies were shielded from lawsuits. Pesticide companies should similarly be liable for the harms they knowingly create.

Corporate accountability should be something everyone can agree on. There are already moves toward collaboration in response to the Supreme Court decision. This spring, Democrats joined House Republicans Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.) and Thomas Massie (Ky.) in their push against pesticide liability shields. Then in June, two members of Congress from different political parties—Massie and Democrat Rep. Chellie Pingree (Maine)—proposed the People Over Poison Act, which restores the ability of consumers to hold pesticide makers accountable when they don’t warn us about the harms associated with their products, effectively undoing the Supreme Court decision.

Another possibility for collaboration is how chemicals like Roundup are assessed by the Environmental Protection Agency. When the EPA regulates pesticides, the approach requires scientific proof of harm in order to restrict a particular chemical. But we should shift the burden of proof onto chemical companies, as they do in Europe, by asking, “Has this chemical been proven safe?” instead of “has this chemical been proven harmful?”

In the EU, chemicals are regulated according to this approach, also known as the precautionary principle. Perhaps that explains why the US currently allows the use of 72 pesticides and herbicides banned in Europe (more than a quarter of all US pesticide use). A recent Newsweek poll found 89% of Americans (including 87% of Republicans) in favor of a ban on pesticides already banned in Europe. If Bayer-Monsanto wants to keep selling Roundup, they should have to meet this stronger burden of proof.

Those who want to limit Roundup face an uphill battle. Even in the EU, Glyphosate is licensed for use until 2033, and recent reporting shows how powerful lobbyists are putting pressure on the European Commission to delay EU targets to cut pesticide use. Just as in the US, a revolving door between industry and regulators, the influence of lobbyists, and ghostwritten and industry-funded science impact what chemicals get approved. Now, these same lobbyists—who also work for Bayer-Monsanto—want to dismantle Europe’s chemical license renewal process altogether, so new scientific evidence about health risks wouldn’t apply to these decisions. That similar dynamics keep glyphosate on the market in Europe is less a counterargument than another loophole that should be tightened.

Some are already seeing the usefulness of finding allies in unexpected places. For example, Indian eco-feminist Vandana Shiva does not align with MAHA moms in several respects, but she has been a longtime advocate of food sovereignty and a critic of chemical and seed companies that impact farmers in South Asia. Before the Supreme Court decision, Vandana Shiva protested alongside Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and MAHA activist “Glyphosate Girl.” She also co-founded a group called Mothers Across the World with Zen Honeycutt, a MAHA mom and fan of Turning Point USA. They might disagree about many things, but Shiva and Honeycutt have a shared cause in regulating chemicals like glyphosate.

Partnering on one topic while disagreeing on others is part of what politics is about. We would do well to embrace even strange bedfellows.

Currently we live in a world bristling with nuclear and conventional weapons—with a potential destructiveness unprecedented in history. A nuclear war, for example, would largely be over in one hour, with each second equivalent in destruction to World War II.

Meanwhile, our security is increasingly threatened by skyrocketing global military expenditure at the same time as the United Nation’s capacity to maintain peace is being undermined by member states starving the organization of funds.

The United Nations and its Prescription for a Better World

In the aftermath of two world wars, there was considerable hope that humanity would learn its lesson and that each would be “the war to end all wars.” Indeed, the United Nations was created for just this purpose, as stated in the Preamble to its Charter: “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind…” But hope was not enough.

The Charter’s prescription for preventing violent conflict was a solid one. The states that joined the organization agreed, as an obligation of membership, to resolve their disputes peacefully and to refrain from the threat or use of force against one another.

The UN of today is staggering under the unparalleled expectation that it should be able to deal effectively with a multiplicity of extremely complex problems and that it should somehow be able to do so with resources that are woefully inadequate.

The prescription went beyond the peaceful settlement of disputes to address the root causes of conflict and create conditions for sustainable peace, pledging “to reaffirm our faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…”

But before this hopeful blueprint could get off the drawing board, a new danger to global peace and security arose:

As the Charter was being negotiated and signed in San Francisco, the atomic bomb was being developed in Los Alamos, New Mexico, a thousand miles away… The first atomic bomb was exploded over Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, just forty-one days after the Charter was signed. By the time the United Nations was established on 24 October 1945, the world that it was to serve had changed in fundamental ways.

Indeed, for the next 45 years, the nuclear threat and the Cold War hung like a pall over the UN, greatly distorting the hopes invested in it by the world’s peoples.

When the Cold War suddenly ended, its legacy of abuse and neglect was not easily swept away. One superpower had bankrupted itself in the headlong race toward military superiority, and the other had spent vast resources developing expensive nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, large segments of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty and were malnourished, unhealthy, and undereducated. The neglect of demographic and environmental problems led to a whole host of security threats, as underdevelopment, economic stagnation, and rising expectations generated conditions for protest, violence, and intrastate war. There were also new threats, as global warming; deforestation; desertification; degradation of air, soil and water; and loss of biodiversity endangered the health of the planet itself.

In the power vacuum following the Cold War, the UN was no longer sidelined but, instead, required to take center stage. In a short space of time, the expectations, demands, and responsibilities placed on the organization increased dramatically. An organization whose peacekeeping budget was no greater than the budgets of the New York City police and fire departments was asked to become the world’s police and fire department. At the same time, some who clamored for it to play this enhanced role continued to be late in payment of their dues or to withhold them altogether.

The UN of today is staggering under the unparalleled expectation that it should be able to deal effectively with a multiplicity of extremely complex problems and that it should somehow be able to do so with resources that are woefully inadequate.

Even so, over its 81 years, the UN has had many successes, exemplified by the 12 Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to various parts of the organization. Although detailing its work is well beyond the scope of this article, mentioning just a few achievements can provide some context.

At the time of the UN’s creation, almost one-third of the world’s population (750 million people) were under the yoke of colonial rule. Due to UN decolonization efforts, they are now citizens of 80 independent states and UN membership has grown from 51 to 193.

The UN operates at two levels. At the inter-governmental level, it offers venues (through the General Assembly and its committees, the Economic and Social Council and the Security Council) for member states to discuss international problems and take action, when possible. In a world dominated by Westphalian states, whose interests are not always aligned, multilateral decision-making is necessarily slow and cumbersome. But there are many instances where agreements have had far-reaching consequences. An example is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its covenants, as well as the many subsequent human rights instruments, including the establishment of mechanisms to monitor and assist their implementation.

Another example is the 2015 Sustainable Development goals and targets, including, “no poverty;” “zero hunger;” “good health and well-being;” “quality education;” “gender equality;” “clean water and sanitation;” “climate action;” “peace, justice, and strong institutions;” and nine others.

UN thematic conferences offer another opportunity for inter-governmental dialogue, with potentially constructive outcomes on issues such as climate change, HIV/AIDs, population and development, women and gender equality, racism, and others.

In a parallel process, the secretary-general, the Secretariat and its departments, as well as UN funds, programmes, and specialized agencies (i.e., the World Food Programme, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the World Health Organization, and many others) fulfill their mandates and implement resolutions of the General Assembly or Security Council around the world.

Throughout the UN’s existence, efforts in preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, post-conflict peacebuilding, and peace enforcement have prevented and resolved many crises and conflicts. Local UN disarmament initiatives have ensured that conflicts don’t reoccur and international efforts have contributed to nuclear non-proliferation, and to outlawing and monitoring of biological and chemical weapons. Humanitarian efforts have prevented or contained famines, refugee flows, and pandemics. Smallpox has been eradicated, and the end of polio is near. The number of people living in extreme poverty has been halved, access to schooling has massively increased, and maternal mortality slashed. The UN has also played a major role in advancing gender equality.

The International Court of Justice (also part of the UN) has helped create and strengthen international law by providing legally-binding judgments in a host of cases. Treaties, negotiated via the UN, have established new international law, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which provides a legal framework for marine and maritime activities.

The UN is also involved in many less recognized efforts, including improving agricultural productivity; codifying principles and techniques of international air navigation; labor issues; standardizing and regulating international telecommunications; protecting intellectual property; offering assistance on migration; promoting peaceful nuclear energy and inhibiting its military use; verifying adherence to the Chemical Weapons Convention; and many others.

But the UN’s most important achievement, as Secretary-General António Guterres has argued, is: “Eight decades later, one can draw a direct line between the creation of the United Nations and the prevention of a third world war.”

Meanwhile, World Military Expenditure Increases, as Do Conflicts

Even after the Cold War, states continue to pursue the flawed policy of deterrence and to equate military might with security, in spite of research that arms races increase the likelihood of war and evidence that military spending does not decrease conflict—as the most recent data from the world’s leading source of information on organized violence show.

In 2025, violent conflicts increased to 65, the highest since data collection began in 1946. While most were intrastate conflict, there is also a sharp increase in interstate conflict: “The first decade of the 2000s saw 8 interstate conflicts, while the 2010s saw 12. The 2020s have thus far seen 22.”

Fatalities also increased sharply in 2025 to the second highest since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The war between Russia and Ukraine was the deadliest in the world for the third consecutive year.

The world’s global military expenditure also increased in 2025 for the 11th consecutive year—to an astonishing 2.9 trillion dollars. If similar increases continue, and NATO countries enlarge their expenditure to 5% as pledged, global military spending could reach 6.6 trillion by 2035—five times the level at the end of the Cold War.

Do we really want or need more weapons and more wars? Shouldn’t we, instead, choose cooperative security, collective security, and human security, as represented by the United Nations?

The current US military budget is a jaw-dropping $1 trillion, but the Trump administration is requesting a whopping increase to $1.5 trillion for 2027. Thus, if global military expenditure increases as predicted, the US $1.5 trillion (if approved) would account for nearly half of the entire world’s military expenditure.

Although the US government frames security threats from China and Russia as the main reason for its sky-high military budget, Russia’s military expenditure for 2025 was $190 billion, less than one-fifth of that of the US. China, the world’s second largest military spender, was $336 billion—about one-third of the US military budget.

As the secretary-general concludes, “Despite rising expenditures… global security has continued to deteriorate, calling into question the effectiveness of more military spending to enhance security.”

Do we really want or need more weapons and more wars? Shouldn’t we, instead, choose cooperative security, collective security, and human security, as represented by the United Nations?

Regrettably, we haven’t. Because of unpaid bills from 2025, in January 2026, Guterres sent a letter to member states warning of “imminent financial collapse” if dues were not paid on time. By February 8, the due date for membership contributions to the regular budget, only 55 countries had paid and, even now, neither the US nor China, the UN’s biggest contributors, have paid all of their dues. In July, the UN controller reported: “We don’t have enough cash beyond August. Unless its big donors step up, the UN will have to delay other payments to afford its High-Level Week of the General Assembly” (September 22-28 this year). To address last year’s shortfall, the UN’s regular budget was reduced by 15% in 2026 to 3.45 billion—making the world’s military expenditure 840 times that of the UN regular budget.

In a recent review of where the international order is headed, Brookings scholars conclude, “Whether the Trump administration moves aggressively enough to shatter what’s left of the multilateral order remains to be seen; there’s no evidence of what would replace it beyond unfettered American power.”

However, as A New Agenda for Peace notes: “War is always a choice… if war is a choice, peace can be too. It is time for a recommitment to peace.” It is also time to commit to revitalizing and reforming the United Nations to meet the needs of the future. As the UN secretary-general has stated, “Rebalancing global priorities... is an imperative for humanity to survive.”

Of course, this also depends on the informed participation of citizens and civil society (that means us), who must ensure that the public resources we give our governments to spend on our behalf are used in ways that bring us genuine security. We can’t let the world’s misguided leaders throw the United Nations off the cliff—and, while we’re at it, we must also ensure that we don’t sleepwalk into Armageddon.

On the right corner of my desk, next to my laptop and always in eyeshot, sits a metal model of an atom bomb I assembled from a kit, a model of “Little Boy,” the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima. The model is made from aluminum alloy parts and is a one-twelfth scale of the original atom bomb, about nine inches long. The ad for the bomb contained a video with dramatic music showing the model spinning through the air as it falls toward its imagined target.

“Perfect for collectors,” the ad boasted. “A must-have for history enthusiasts. Very enjoyable assembly process.”

Toward the bottom of the ad, perhaps as an afterthought, perhaps recognizing the implications of marketing such a murderous model, was the following: “By assembling this model, you can understand the history and moral issues of nuclear weapons and trigger thoughts about the future of the world.”

The kit came with a tiny screwdriver, two dozen tiny screws, a sanding rod, glue, and decals. The aluminum alloy parts were in molded plates. The model even had a metal cart to assemble that the bomb sits on so it can be pulled around your desk, pretending you’re getting ready to load it onto the Enola Gay and extinguish a city in a flash.

The bomb wages war against the future.

On the morning of August 6, 1945, the real “Little Boy” exploded with a flash 2,000 feet above the city of Hiroshima, which sits on the Ota River delta on Hiroshima Bay. The Ota River has six channels splitting Hiroshima into islets. Bomb victims staggered toward these channels to throw themselves into the water hoping to extinguish their burning bodies. The channels became so clogged with bodies that others couldn’t squeeze in. Some people, closer to the hypocenter, were vaporized, reduced to shadows seared into stone. Temperatures on the ground reached 4,000°C.

As we once again approach that fateful day of August 6, it is important to recognize that not just the US and Japan are intertwined in a nuclear nightmare that has lasted over 80 years, but also 70,000 Koreans who were exposed to the two atomic bombs incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people forcibly removed from their homeland by the Japanese and sent to work in these cities. Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and for decades used Koreans as they saw fit, from Comfort Women to slave labor. The Koreans then became atomic bomb victims, despite their country not being at war with the United States. They are among the unintended victims, the forgotten victims.

This November in Seoul, South Korea, the surviving Korean bomb victims will testify at a People’s Tribunal holding the US accountable for war crimes. Lawyers from around the world have been preparing legal briefs and will argue the case. The US government is invited to appear as the defendant at the tribunal. The Republic of South Korea has also been asked to appear as a witness.

Once let loose, an atomic bomb keeps on killing, generation after generation, the cancers passed down to those not even born when the bombs first exploded. The Korean atomic bomb victims, as well as the Japanese, have horrific stories testifying to this. Children of the bomb. Atomic maladies. The bomb wages war against the future.

The second atomic bomb that was dropped on August 9, incinerating another Japanese city, had a different nickname. That bomb had an even bigger belly and used plutonium rather than uranium. They called it “Fat Man.” The same ad for the model of the “Little Boy” atom bomb had a second ad inducing you to buy “Fat Man.” It is another one-twelfth scale model of the original, this one weighing 6.2 pounds when completed. I declined the offer to buy and build it. One was repellent enough.

The US currently has 5,277 nuclear warheads. Russia has 5,449. China, approximately 600. France and the UK have about 250 each and Israel has about 90. India, Pakistan, and North Korea bring up the rear with a few nukes each. In total there are over 12,300 nuclear warheads spanning the globe. The Korean atomic bomb victims stand as ready reminders of what happens when these things are unleashed.

The climate fight moves in stages. A decade ago, we got to the pledge stage. First, governments signed the Paris accords, and then, under pressure from Greta Thunberg’s movement, banks and corporations did the same. Leaders don’t mind making pledges; the hard part is always a few years away, and the pledge itself takes off some of the pressure.

Then other stuff intervened: Covid-19, the invasion of Ukraine, AI, the high prices that those things caused, the fascists that were elected on the back of those high prices. So politicians and corporations began to abandon their climate pledges, in favor of other priorities.

But what do you know, now something else is happening: a global outbreak of extremely high temperatures, and with them all the disasters we’ve come to expect. The question is, will that provide pressure enough to get climate action back on course? We’re going to find out over the next year, and I think we’re going to find out first on the other side of the Atlantic

This spring and summer have been horrific in Europe and the UK. A wavering jet stream—the product of a melting Arctic—has brought heat dome after heat dome to the continent, producing bouts of extraordinarily high temperature. Records have been smashed left and right, and now that heat is producing vast fires, centered in Spain and France, but spreading far afield to the UK, Belgium, and elsewhere.

Why would you recommend a Mediterranean climate at the precise moment that the countries that ring the Med are on fire?

I want to start the account by saying: These are not the worst heatwaves underway in the world. It’s hit 127°F in Iran, even as the bombs are falling; India has seen another brutal spring and summer, and as Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Aakash Hassan write from Andhra Pradesh, the toll on very poor people is unbearable. They describe Mahalaxmi, paid by a government scheme to join with other women in digging a new reservoir by hand:

By 11:00 am, the first shift of their day was over. The women headed home, exchanging few words due to their exhaustion. Mahalaxmi did not speak when she got home, but went straight to the bedroom where she collapsed in apparent sleep.

Unable to rouse her hours later, her husband, Palli Shyam Sundha Rao, rushed to find a doctor. Examining her lifeless body, the doctor concluded Mahalaxmi had died from heatstroke.

“It was such a shock to all of us,” said Purilla. “She always seemed so strong. If the heat can take her like this, then it could take any of us.”

So let that serve as a baseline. Scary as what’s happening in Europe and the US is, we retain some wealth to buffer our lives and our communities. That’s not true elsewhere. Still, it’s been wildly hard in Europe. As Mark Landler and Chico Harlan reported on Thursday:

Ravenous fires. Searing heatwaves. Freakish storms. The summer of 2026 has already shattered meteorological records in several European countries. On a continent that has weathered centuries of upheaval—ruinous wars, deadly pandemics—it is the weather itself that now has Europe feeling close to a breaking point.

It has displaced more than 300,000 people in France and Spain, where the largest fires in those countries’ modern history have led to their largest peacetime evacuations, with villages destroyed and hundreds of thousands of acres incinerated. It has left millions more desperate for relief from temperatures that routinely soar above 40°C, or 104°F.

And there is absolutely no doubt how connected all this is to global warming—that is, to our longstanding habit of burning coal and gas and oil. Raymond Zhong, writing in the Times, says new research makes that clear:

For central Spain, the scientists found that the intense heat and dryness in July had roughly a 17% probability of occurring in a given year in the present-day climate. In the preindustrial world, however, the likelihood of such conditions would have been one-twentieth as high, the researchers estimated.

In fact, we can say with increasing specificity what happened, and it’s very similar to things we’ve seen elsewhere, and that I described a few weeks ago in an interview with University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain. What we’re seeing is what he calls “weather whiplash,” when the extreme rains that climate change produces cause a massive growth of vegetation in the spring, only to see these new high temperatures produce “flash droughts” that turn those green grasses and shrubs into tinder, waiting for lightning to strike. The folks at Yale Environment 360 quoted:

Francesca Di Giuseppe, fire forecast coordinator at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, who said the “rebound” from a wet winter to a dry summer was a key factor. After an exceptionally rainy winter spurred the growth of vegetation, an unusual summer drought turned that new growth to tinder.

The results have been brutal. I won’t bother cataloguing deaths and dollars—if we’re “lucky,” the former will be measured in the many tens of thousands, and the latter in the hundreds of billions—but I do want to give some small sense of what life is like. Madeline Schwartz, editor of the international journal the Dial, writes from Paris that:

This summer has unleashed a special kind of hell on France: not just several heatwaves with temperatures reaching as high as 112°F, but drought and forest fires, some right next to Paris. On my street, the leaves have already turned brown; a once lush lawn now looks like burned straw. Across the country, farmers are reporting that crops have withered in the blistering conditions.

The British paper The Express reports that signs in grocery stores warn produce buyers about high prices and unavailable items:

“Produce such as carrots, onions, and potatoes will likely be hit the hardest due to dry soil shrinking crop sizes, while leeks, cabbage and cauliflower could also become harder to find.”

Salad crops such as lettuce may also face a price hike, as they could be replaced by pricier imports due to the heavy irrigation required.

Cupboard essentials such as bread, pasta, and cereal could be affected too, as wheat and barley crops come under heat stress.

Pippa Neill describes the stress on farmers:

“The vines are dying. The grass is yellow and now we can smell the smoke,” Uyen Do, an organic farmer in the Dordogne region of France says, almost in tears. “It’s already very difficult to survive economically and now with climate change it’s becoming a struggle that I’m not sure we’re capable of going through.”

But British farmer Brian King says drought is just one part of the problem. During the recent heatwaves, which saw several days where temperatures exceeded 30°C, “the environment was so hostile that the plants are so stressed they want to die because they just can’t take it”.

Drought has pushed the Rhine River to its lowest recorded levels, stranding the barges that normally carry coal and gas. As Eamon Farhat reports:

The cost to ship diesel from Rotterdam to Karlsruhe—further inland from the closely watched Kaub chokepoint—has climbed to the highest since Bloomberg began compiling the data in 2009.

“With every centimeter it’s getting more difficult,” said Florian Krekel at Germany’s WSV, which manages the country’s waterways. “There’s no rain in sight.”

As river levels fall, Hungary and France are having to shut some nuclear power plants because they can no longer safely cool them; oh, and a sunken Nazi warship has reappeared along the dwindling Danube in Serbia, so that’s nice. The Royal Horticultural Society, meanwhile, may have to move its hydrangea garden to the north of England

But it’s the fires that have really left their mark on this European summer. As Margherita Stancati, Noemie Bisserbe, and Ed Ballard wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week, the continent has never seen anything on this scale before:

In Spain, the fires have destroyed more than 370,000 acres so far this year. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the leader of Madrid’s local government, earlier this week described the Madrid wildfires as perhaps “the worst natural catastrophe in Spain’s history.”

The intensity of the fires has created large, fire-fueled thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, for the first time in France’s recent history. The clouds, which have been observed during wildfires in Canada and Australia, are created by intense heat that lifts hot smoky air and causes the water vapor to condense into ash. The clouds can generate lightning, further spreading the fires.

The US is so vast that sometimes we barely notice things happening in the other corner: There are big wildfires burning in Oregon right now, for instance, (and the chance for many more over the course of a windy weekend). But we forget how compact European countries are. France is among the largest of its nations, but the Tour de France had to be shortened on its final day in order to free up policemen to go help with firefighting in other regions of the country. So there’s no escaping the smoke, or its political meaning. And that’s what we need to talk about.

All this comes after a period of what American politicians have called “climate-hushing,” when even non-MAGA leaders have been backing away from the steps needed to speed up the energy transition. That’s been true in other places too. Bill McGuire, a climate researcher at University College London, wrote that:

Such is the astonishing scale of the wildfires burning at the gates of Bordeaux and Madrid, that if they had happened 20—even 10—years back, they may well have shocked the world into taking action on the climate crisis. But like the proverbial frog in a pot of slowly heating water, we have become inured; not only to the ever more devastating impacts of climate breakdown, but increasingly to the actions needed to bring global heating to heel.

Even as more than 35,000 wildfires rage across the surface of our world, and as we continue to rewind our planet’s climate so it resembles hotter episodes from its distant past, governments and trading blocs are very deliberately turning away from climate action.

The latest evidence that we are not only doing too little but actually doing less as time goes by is provided by the climate action media platform, We Don’t Have Time. It reported last week that the 12 months to July this year saw the reversal across the world of 45 climate policies. The retreat on climate action is global, but Europe—previously seen as a leader in emissions reductions—is in the vanguard, weakening measures across the board, including in the areas of carbon pricing, methane emissions, and the phasing out of petrol and diesel vehicles.

There are even some who are seizing on the new disasters to urge… less action. In a truly remarkable essay for Britain’s conservative Telegraph, pundit Allister Heath used the fires to say that the “war against global warming has been lost” and hence it was time to

accept this sobering reality, cut our losses, cease tilting at (and building) windmills, ditch the despicable con that is net zero, and learn to cope with, and even enjoy, a warmer, drier, more volatile Mediterranean climate.

This is monumentally stupid on several different levels, and Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian now proprietor the the British magazine the Prospect outlines a number of them in a (highly enjoyable) takedown. But mainly: Why would you recommend a Mediterranean climate at the precise moment that the countries that ring the Med are on fire? And of course it’s not as if you get to choose even the current, fiery Mediterranean climate. If you abandon “net zero,” or the other attempts to rapidly build out solar panels and windmills, you’ll get an ever hotter version.

That hasn’t stopped Britain’s Conservatives from purging party members who want to continue the energy transition, and there are at least some signs that England’s new prime minister, Labour’s Andy Burnham, is tilting in somewhat the same direction. The Murdoch tabloids have been mounting a crusade to open up new oil wells in the North Sea, and Burnham said this week that the country needed to be “pragmatic” in the face of rising energy costs, never mind that the global price of energy won’t budge one pence with whatever new supply can be found in the dwindling deposits off the UK coast.

But my guess is that Burnham may well decide to stand up to Murdoch et al. and turn his back on more drilling, simply because the heat and the smoke have made the case for climate action so wildly clear. As Fiona Harvey and a team at The Guardian reported yesterday, a rebellion is brewing because many Labour parliamentarians

are increasingly worried about how support for expanded drilling will play with an electorate alarmed by the worst drought since 1976, soaring temperatures, wildfires, and climate-related food inflation and potential supply shortages.

They worry about losing more voters to the Greens: Zack Polanski’s party has stressed its opposition to further new licences for the North Sea, including the Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea and the Rosebank oilfield, west of Shetland. A decision to go ahead with the projects could trigger a new surge in defectors from Labour.

Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, urged ministers to “keep carbon in the ground”, and watch the recent national emergency climate briefing. She added: “We’re seeing ice caps melting, seas warming up, hotter and hotter summers. This summer has been a warning that we have to go towards a sustainable future fast.”

Clive Lewis, the Labour MP for Norwich South, said there was “no legitimate reason” to press ahead with Jackdaw because it would make only a negligible difference to energy prices while sending the wrong signal internationally as Europe experienced record heat.

Lewis said approving the field would show Burnham was “not looking at the evidence” and that Labour risked adding “the stain of the climate crisis” to the party’s record, alongside Gaza.

Indeed, Britain’s brand new Foreign Minister Ed Miliband, who had been its energy and climate minister until last week, has already issued a joint communique with his Spanish counterpart calling for deeper climate action:

At a time when Europe is facing record heatwaves and terrible wildfires as a consequence of the climate crisis, the two Ministers agreed that this summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.

Both parties agreed that tackling the climate crisis was an urgent policy priority for all countries—to tackle the cost of living, protect health and well-being, and to ensure European economic and energy security. The two Ministers noted that climate action was essential to protect not just current generations, but our children and grandchildren too.

The two Ministers underscored the priority they attach to combating climate change within their foreign policy and agreed on the need to co-lead the green transition, convinced that decarbonisation, energy security, environmental protection, and resilience are inseparable from our security and the prosperity and competitiveness of our economies.

I think that this is a good sign—and I think it’s a dry run for what the whole world is going to go through over the next 12 months. The signs keep mounting that the El Niño building in the Pacific is going to be massive in scale. As United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said last Friday:

This is only a warm-up act. El Niño is strengthening, adding fuel to a planet already on fire.

As the consequences build, the pressure on decent politicians to act will grow. Obviously the Trump administration, and its fascist friends elsewhere, will continue to coddle the fossil fuel industry—but it will be harder and harder for others to turn aside renewed climate fears. I’d be willing to bet that climate will be a key issue in the Democratic primaries (and campaigning for those will be well underway by this time next year).

In fact, there’s already an effort underway—the veteran campaigner Margie Alt is helping lead a Climate Action Campaign this summer to get the issue back on the political… front burner.

Actions began on Thursday and will take a variety of forms. In Michigan, participants will demonstrate against the Republican representative Bill Huizenga who voted for Trump’s so-called big beautiful bill, which boosted planet-heating fossil fuels.

In Arizona, young activists will meet with the Democratic representative Adelita Shirley Grijalva, a climate champion, and encourage her to continue talking about global warming. In other districts, organizers have circulated petitions calling on the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, to prioritize climate issues or plan to call on their representatives to connect the climate crisis to recent heatwaves.

I have no doubt it will annoy some Democrats—and no one is saying the issue should dominate the midterms, which must be fought on the value of democracy and the cost of living. But every politician worth her salt should at every opportunity at least mention the anti-renewables jihad that the Trump administration has launched—the number of Americans who support shutting down 90% finished wind farms is tiny, and the rest of us are truly annoyed.

And in many ways this generation of politicians is the luckiest yet, because they have a tool to call on that make those pledges relatively easy to fulfill. With ever-cheaper power from the sun, wind, and batteries, this ultimate cycle of the climate fight will look different than the ones before. We’re going to get a last chance to get this crisis at least a little right. We dare not lose it.

Does criticizing actions of the Israeli government or the behavior of its prime minister fuel antisemitism? Despite the stretch of logic required to make this argument and the danger its bizarre conflation presents to American Jews, some US pro-Israel organizations are working overtime to establish the case that criticizing Israel puts American Jews at risk. Their view on this matter has now been echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who, before leaving Israel for his meeting with US President Donald Trump, used an interview with an American TV network to level this very charge against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

While tensions between Mamdani and pro-Israel groups have been brewing since his 2025 election campaign, it was recently reignited in the lead up to Netanyahu’s announced visit to the US. Mayor Mamdani was asked by a reporter whether he would fulfill a campaign pledge to arrest the Israeli prime minister as a war criminal, as per the indictment issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

In response, the mayor convened a group of legal experts who concluded that the city, on its own, did not have the authority to make an arrest—only the federal government could do that. In an effort to put the matter to rest, Mamdani released a short video in which he acknowledged that he lacked the power to order an arrest but nevertheless called out Netanyahu as a war criminal responsible for the deaths of “more than 73,000 people” and stated that he would not welcome him in New York City. In his video, Mamdani did not mention Israel, nor did he mention the Jewish people or the citizens of Israel. This was, he observed, simply about Netanyahu’s crimes cited in the ICC arrest warrant.

Some pro-Israel groups immediately denounced Mamdani’s video and charges against the Israeli prime minister. They accused him of “repeatedly singling out the world’s only Jewish state…leaving many Jewish New Yorkers feeling targeted and unwelcome.” One group characterized the video as “blood libel and outrageous lies.” While still another charged Mamdani with “fomenting antisemitism.”

A few days later, a Hispanic man, whom police said had mental health issues, allegedly stabbed two people, one was Asian and another Jewish. In both instances, observers said they heard the attacker shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

The same pro-Israel groups that have been conflating Israel with American Jews and relentlessly condemning Mamdani leapt into the fray, blaming the mayor for making New York unsafe for Jews by “using his platform to viciously attack Israel.” One prominent Jewish leader called on the mayor to resign, charging him with “dereliction of duty.”

Mamdani immediately responded to these charges condemning the stabbings as “hateful and despicable attacks that have no place in our city” and noted that his administration had already dramatically increased investment in hate crime prevention “so that we can start to address the root causes of this bigotry and hatred, as we look to root out the scourge of antisemitism.”

The mayor added: “When it comes to my comments about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they are critiques based not on my personal analysis, but rather on objective facts. They are critiques of a political leader, not of people of a specific faith or religion or background. And my responsibility as mayor of the city is to keep every New Yorker safe, no matter where they come from, what they believe in or frankly, even if they agree with my politics. My job is to keep them safe.”

The mayor was not without defenders in the Jewish community. Brad Lander, who describes himself as a liberal Zionist and who recently defeated a pro-Israel congressman, described the attacks as “almost certainly an antisemitic hate crime and quite likely an anti-Asian hate crime, but they are not the fault of the mayor for calling Netanyahu a war criminal.” Lander added, “The effort to connect the mayor to that… is a political effort to shut down criticism of Israel,” and called it “weaponizing antisemitism.”

Peter Beinart, one of America’s most thoughtful progressive Jewish thinkers, directly took on the pro-Israel Jewish establishment by noting that it was they, not the mayor, who are conflating Israel with the Jewish community. Beinart wrote: “Zohran Mamdani keeps saying again and again that his critique of Israel… has nothing to do with his feelings toward Jews in New York, because he separates Israel, as a state, from Jewish New Yorkers. The people who are making this conflation… are the very establishment Jewish leaders who are now attacking Mamdani.”

The problem here is two-fold. Antisemitism is real, and conflating American Jews with Israel is wrong and dangerous whether it is done by pro-Israel advocates who want to identify all Jews with Israel for political purposes, or by haters of Jews who want to hold Jewish people, in general, responsible for the crimes committed by that state. In the first instance the effort is designed, as Lander notes, to silence criticism of Israel claiming that charges leveled against that state put all Jews at risk. In the second instance, the conflation serves to fuel the preexisting bigotry of some by holding all Jews responsible for the crimes committed by others.

The bottom line is Mamdani, Lander, and Beinart are right, and the pro-Israel establishment is wrong.