Two years ago, Serbian students started their protests, endorsed by many citizens, in an honest, almost naive way. They declared that they wanted the end of corruption, press freedom, prosecution of the culprits behind the collapse of the Novi Sad rail station canopy, and, ultimately, another Serbia altogether. Students persistently claimed that entering politics was not their aim. But given all the issues they called in question, politics remained the name of the game. Nevertheless, they managed to stick with their grassroots methods of organization, and their influence spread.

For the last two years, students continued to act without leaders, and all decisions have been made in plenary meetings, a horizontal, non-hierarchical form of decision-making. This has been direct democracy at its best. It also represents an authentic form of political expression that transcends the impotence of the outdated options available within the existing system.

The ”Student List“ that appeared on the ballot in the recent Serbian elections emerged from the massive protests known as “Students in Blockade,” founded on September 9 with the slogan Students Are Winning. It became No. 3 on the ballot for the parliamentary election. Its program, the 11-point “Student Plan,” centers on the fight against corruption and organized crime and endorses new social measures in education, housing, and healthcare. It has been written in cooperation with experts from various fields, including farmers, doctors, teachers, social and cultural workers. According to its statute:

it is a voluntary, non-governmental, non-partisan, and non-profit association established for a fixed period to raise civic awareness of the importance of democracy and free and fair elections. Its goals include greater youth participation in democratic processes, monitoring elections and referendums, promoting the rule of law and freedom of speech, and holding those who break the law accountable.

The Student List consists not of students but of 250 academics, professionals, and public figures selected by student plenums, and is headed by cardiologist Ilija Srdanović. However, he is not, in the words of the students, the leader. In his own words, he is the first name on the Student List—though not its lead candidate. As he put it:

I don’t think that the invitation to the Student List was an invitation to be a candidate for deputy in front of a political option, but literally an invitation to get involved in the endeavour of Serbia’s victory over the mafia. The mafia stole our country, drove tens and hundreds of thousands of young people abroad, and ravaged the budget, eventually causing a tragedy in which 16 of my fellow citizens died.

In the last month, however, some actions and proclamations of the students gave pause to sympathetic observers from Serbia and neighboring countries. Such commentators are asking about students’ positions toward Russia, the EU, Kosovo, and war criminal Ratko Mladić. In an excellent article published in the Serbian independent media, Dejan Ilić describes how the younger generations are infected by their upbringing in Serbia, which has been prone to selective memory and to a victim mentality. But he continues:

There is little that can be done about that overnight. All we can do is marvel at how courageously those children stood up and confronted an arrogant, heartless regime with an excessive propensity for violence. Now that they have risen, all we can do is stand beside them and try to protect them from excessive repression… We have elections ahead of us. And in those elections, there is one, and only one, important, shared objective: to be freed from the regime headed by Vučić… These are elections for liberation… we should fight for the chance to create a normal and decent Serbia… There is a well-known rallying cry of militant democracy: no democracy for the enemies of democracy. Something similar should apply to Vučić during this campaign: no polite conversation with an enemy of all conversation and all decency.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić was by no means sitting around idle during the grassroots mobilization. Over the years, he seriously damaged independent media. He placed supporters with murky, often criminal background in tents known as Ćaciland, in Pionirski park in front of the Parliament in Belgrade as an intimidation tactic, and he used all known propaganda mechanisms to label students dangerous foreign agents ready to destroy Serbia. He recently stepped down as president of Serbia with the intention of becoming prime minister.

He continued a danse macabre that has ruined all the values of a democratic, civilized country, achieving everything which he has accused students of wanting to accomplish. He sucked up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, flattered US President Donald Trump, cozied up to China as a partner, and lied to the EU.

For good measure, he manipulated his own supporters mercilessly. Vučić told them that WWIII was inevitable. He warned that Croatians were intervening in the Serbian elections, together with unnamed foreign powers. Following Trump’s recipe, he bragged about his enormous achievements and the bright future that would soon come under his leadership At the last pre-election rally of his party, he roared: “Let us never forget how they tried to bring down our state. Let us always protect and defend it… Let us go out and defeat them! Defeat them decisively!”

While Vucic was addressing this rather sparsely attended rally, at least 150,000 people gathered at Slavia, one of Belgrade’s main squares, which had witnessed innumerable protests over the years. In a completely different atmosphere, one of the student speakers said, “Today is the last rally, and it’s important that we all come here to send a message of love and peace and that we see each other on the 25th at the polling stations.”

Before Serbia’s 6.45 million voters went to the polls on October 25, several different scenarios were discussed in the press at home and abroad. One was that Vučić and his right-wing populist Serbian Progressive party (SNS) would win but that mass unrest would ensue. According to another scenario, Vučić would lose and not accept the results, which could lead to state violence against opposition activists. The third was that Student List would win and face numerous challenges in their effort to dismantle the long standing and thoroughly corrupt authoritarian bureaucracy. Government manipulation, civil unrest, and institutional paralysis figured in virtually all of the analyses.

Much also depended on the turnout. If turnout went above 70 or even 80%, the Student List could benefit. According to one Dutch commentator:

If there are long lines in front of the polling stations on Sunday morning—just like earlier in Hungary this year—the elections could lead to a historic upheaval for Serbia. If many voters stay at home, there is a good chance that Vučić has weathered the biggest protest storm in years, and the autocratic leader will be able to move the country further to his hand.
On Election Day

From early morning, citizens lined up in front of the polling stations, promising a hefty turnout. The turnout was 70%. From the outset, observers reported numerous irregularities, including suspicions of vote buying.

Tough guys with balaclavas and dressed in black began to appear as the voting day progressed. More and more physical attacks on citizens and journalists in all parts of Serbia have been reported. The possibility of violence provoked by the state and the ruling party was on everybody’s mind.

But the supporters of the Student List were in high spirits. As always, they made a lot of noise, including songs, and waved red-and-white balloons and banners. But at the same time, they called on citizens not to gather near places like the center of the capital where more and more police and non-uniformed persons were gathering.

The polling stations closed at 8:00 pm, and the waiting started. Croatian political analyst and philosopher Žarko Puhovski said, a few minutes after:

In Serbia, it is very important for that regime to leave, because I really think that Vučić’s regime is not only autocratic, but has also caused damage to Serbia by primitivizing those parts of Serbia that were not primitivized even during Milosevic’s time. In all countries you have primitive and backward regions, but Vučić primitivized the whole of Serbia. And that is why it is good that this country and its citizens finally get rid of him.

And they did.

After the Elections

At 9:35 pm, Aleksandar Vučić addressed the headquarters of the Serbian Progressive Party and admitted defeat. The Student List had won with 53% of the votes, which means 141 seats in the parliament. The United Serbia party of Vučić captured only 38.8% of the vote, which amounts to 103 seats. No other parties secured seats in the parliament except for a few very small parties representing minorities.

Outside, throughout Serbia, the singing immediately increased. The blaring of car horns became deafening as citizens filled the streets to celebrate the victory, many barely believing what had just happened. While celebration round the country was gaining momentum, cameras in Belgrade filmed the men in black running away from Ćaciland, while police forces watched in silence. The only time when citizens came close to violence was when they dismantled the Ćaciland tents, which had become the symbol of Vučić’s style of governing.

Vučić’ didn’t wait long before revealing his true nature. His further comments in his concession speech are telling:

This was the validation of a revolution carried out with the direct support of various European countries and the American "deep state"—the faction that opposes President Trump… I congratulate them—though they are merely the ones carrying out the work, the "dirty work" devised by someone else to bring down a sovereign nation… You’ve succeeded for the moment. But for how long?… We will defeat this evil sooner than they think.

The Student List offers a lesson to all progressive movements around the world. Their success is the result of rebellion, energy, persistence, solidarity, courage, humor, nonviolence, utopian aspirations, and strong bottom-up organization. Their victory differs in two main respects from other comparable electoral efforts in other parts of the world. Serbian students formed a movement and not a party, and they do not have a strong, charismatic personality that could function like a father figure. And they succeeded.

The task in front of them is enormous, and it is hard to predict what the future will bring. As the poet Branko Miljković wrote, “Will freedom be able to sing as the slaves sang about her?” One can hope so.

With the nation’s focus on the upcoming midterm elections, the Trump administration is quietly proposing changes to rules for the 2030 census that would threaten American democracy for decades to come. If we don’t act now, the next census could erase millions of people from the count.

The last Census in 2020 undercounted Latinos by almost 5%, three times the undercount of the 2010 Census, making this racial-ethnic group second only to American Indians and Alaska Natives in undercount. Latinos are now at even more risk of being undercounted by the next Census. The Trump administration has created fear and mistrust of the government by unleashing Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) terror on our communities and is now scheming to strip us of political power and economic resources.

For the first time in history, Trump's Census Bureau has proposed removing questions on race and ethnicity from the census and excluding noncitizens without a green card from the census count. The proposed rule changes are part of this administration’s racist and anti-immigrant agenda to unravel civil rights protections and erase immigrants from our nation.

Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.

Our organization, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, is sounding the alarm on how these changes would harm Latino and immigrant communities. Census undercounts have real world consequences, not only in the loss of congressional representatives, but also in the reduction of lifesaving resources like funding for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as funding for public education and school lunches. More than 300 federal programs allocate resources based on Census data.

The constitution mandates a numerical count of every person living in the United States every 10 years, regardless of immigration status, and requires that congressional seats and federal tax money be apportioned based on the number of people living in each state. The census has included questions on race since it was first initiated in 1790.

Removing questions on race and ethnicity would make it harder to track whether Black and brown communities have equal access to education, housing, and healthcare, and make it more difficult to monitor and address racist exclusion from resources and opportunities.

The proposed rule to exclude noncitizens without a green card would not only exclude undocumented immigrants but also exclude refugees, asylees, and residents with pending immigration applications. LatinoJustice objects to treating such residents as absent from our communities for purposes of representation.

Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.

Adding a question on immigration status to the census would further discourage Latinos—regardless of their immigration status—from participating in the count at a time when trust in the government is at an all time low in our communities. ICE terror has made many immigrants afraid to interact with the government in any way—whether to report being the victim of a crime, access medical care, or accept disaster assistance. A census designed to heighten those fears could erase millions from the count.

The Trump administration is proposing another rule change that would cause even more confusion and lead to an undercount of students, snowbirds, and those in non-traditional housing by using tax records to establish residence. All of these proposed changes seem aimed at reducing census participation and undercounting vulnerable communities.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF has worked to promote participation in the census—as imperfect as it is—because we know what a huge impact the count has on our communities. We submitted commentary opposing the dangerous rule changes proposed by the Trump administration. It’s not too late for you to submit your objections, too. But you need to act now.

The open comment period on the proposed census rule changes ends on November 2. We’re calling for the comment period to be extended at least another 90 days so that advocates and experts have the opportunity to weigh in, but we don’t know if the extension will be granted.

Latinos’ enormous contributions to our economy and society make America what it is. Each and every one of us deserves to be counted.

When I first ran for the Princeton school board, I did something I doubt my opponents ever considered. Before knocking on a single door, I asked respected leaders in my community to vouch publicly for my character. I wanted voters to hear from people they trusted that I was a mother, a neighbor, and a public servant, not a threat.

I lost anyway. In a down-ballot race, where many voters know little about the candidates beyond their names, I believe mine worked against me the moment voters read it.

My experience is not unusual. Since 9/11, Muslim American candidates have been held to an impossible standard: we must be flawless, and even then, we are viewed through the lens of terrorism. A new report from the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, Punished for Participating, documents this pattern across more than 31 case studies from 2001 to 2026. Despite historic gains (more than 255 Muslim Americans held elected office by this summer), Muslim candidates face a mainstreamed backlash built on conspiracy theories of a "Sharia" takeover, gendered stereotypes, political violence, and presumptions of antisemitism. The report's core finding is painfully simple: Muslims are punished for doing one of the most American things there is, running for office.

Islamophobia is not a Republican monopoly. Some self-styled centrists in the Democratic Party reach for the same smears, and for the same reason: they feel threatened by the rise of progressive Muslims who are winning.

Recent election cycles proved the point three times over.

In New York, Zohran Mamdani was branded "a jihadist candidate" by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, while former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, mused on the radio about Mamdani in City Hall during "another 9/11." The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding's new toolkit on countering Islamophobia cites an analysis of more than 35,000 posts on X targeting Mamdani, with an estimated reach of 1.5 billion people. Seventy-two percent framed him as an extremist or terrorist.

In New Jersey's 12th Congressional District, which includes Princeton, Democratic candidate Dr. Adam Hamawy is a retired Army combat surgeon who once saved Senator Tammy Duckworth's life after she was wounded when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq. Dr. Hamawy was called a "radical extremist" by a Democratic primary rival over testimony he was subpoenaed to give as a witness in a trial three decades ago.

In Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has been called a "jihadist" by President Trump himself, who has taken to calling him "Muhammad," and Republicans are making false allegations about his associations with terrorist groups.

Here is the reason for hope: All three won their primaries, and Mamdani went on to become New York's first Muslim mayor. American voters are growing more sophisticated at spotting Islamophobia and are more willing to reject it.

But winning does not erase the toll. ISPU's research finds that 63% of American Muslims reported religious discrimination in the past year. Its Islamophobia Index, which measures how strongly the public endorses anti-Muslim stereotypes, jumped from 25 in 2022 to 33 in 2025. After the 2024 election, Muslims were the faith group most likely to fear for their personal safety.

Every Muslim candidate carries that weight onto the campaign trail, and the CSRR report warns that this hostility discourages other Muslims from running at all. Living under constant accusation is grueling.

What stuns me most is who is doing the accusing. Islamophobia is not a Republican monopoly. Some self-styled centrists in the Democratic Party reach for the same smears, and for the same reason: they feel threatened by the rise of progressive Muslims who are winning. There is nothing moderate about recycling the far right’s oldest slander. When a so-called centrist calls a Muslim candidate an extremist, they are borrowing a right-wing script and selling it as common sense.

Voters are tired of elected officials who answer to wealthy donors, corporate special interests, and foreign governments instead of ordinary people and our most vulnerable communities. Progressive Muslim candidates are winning because they speak to that frustration: Hamawy on Medicare for All and medical debt, El-Sayed on rejecting corporate influence, and Mamdani on affordability. Rather than shift their allegiance back to everyday voters, some entrenched politicians would rather cast suspicion on the people beating them. It is a game of thrones, played with our names.

Voters are tired of elected officials who answer to wealthy donors, corporate special interests, and foreign governments instead of ordinary people and our most vulnerable communities.

This is not a new American fight. In 1869, Frederick Douglass argued that the nation’s strength lay in being a “composite nation,” open to people of every race and creed. In 1915, Louis Brandeis, who would soon become the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, told an audience at Boston’s Faneuil Hall:

Let us not forget that many a poor immigrant comes to us from distant lands, ignorant of our language, strange in tattered clothes and with jarring manners, who is already truly American in this most important sense; who has long shared our ideals and who, oppressed and persecuted abroad, has yearned for our land of liberty and for the opportunity of aiding in the realization of its aims.

Douglass and Brandeis believed American ideals should reach beyond ethnicity, skin color, or religion. The question before us is whether America will fulfill the aspiration they championed, or fall back on the creed of the Confederacy and the defenders of Jim Crow. The nativists and bigots never went away. They simply found new targets until the country was roused to fight for its ideals. Now is the time to recognize that this collective courage is needed again.

There are concrete ways to end this bigotry. CSRR calls for state and federal task forces on Islamophobia, modeled on those confronting antisemitism, and for law enforcement training to protect Muslim candidates and officials, who are frequent targets of threats. ISPU urges civic groups to train, equip, support, and protect Muslims who run for office. It also poses a question every leader should answer honestly: Do you use the words "radical" and "extremist" only when you talk about Muslims?

But the most immediate solution doesn't require a task force. We need our friends, neighbors, and allies to call out Islamophobia whenever they see it. We especially need elected officials at every level, from school boards to Congress, to speak up when a Muslim candidate or colleague is targeted, no matter which party the attack comes from. When allies stay silent, these smears look acceptable. When a colleague pushes back publicly, voters learn that these attacks are out of bounds.

Voters can keep doing what they did last year and this year: judge candidates and elected officials by our records. But let us be honest about what is under attack. It is not only our names. It is our faith. The smears insist that a devout Muslim cannot also be a faithful public servant. The opposite is true. My faith teaches that every person carries dignity, that justice must be upheld even when it costs us, and that a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable. Those values are why so many of us run: to fight for health care, fair wages, good schools, and equal protection for every neighbor. Our faith is not a threat to American democracy. It is the reason we show up to serve.

On a glowing September day in Vermont, most people were working or taking a walk in the woods or raking leaves or just being thankful for the beauty. Instead, seven faith leaders blocked the entrance to Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center with their bodies.

Protesting wanton and intentional cruelty all around the country, the seven prayed, sang, and spoke about how their beliefs—Methodist, Congregational, Unitarian, Episcopal, and Quaker—compelled them to obstruct access to the Targeting Center which launches many ICE raids. The seven stood up and witnessed to the universal principles that all major world religions teach us: Do no harm, love your neighbor, care for the needy, and welcome the stranger in our midst. They read the names of some who died in ICE custody, or were murdered by agents. For these actions they were arrested, carried off, and booked, then prosecuted and arraigned in late October.

The leaders’ civil disobedience action spotlights the fact that, as some protesters put it, “ICE violence begins in Vermont.” Many ICE raids start in Williston, where 2 of the 3 national ICE Targeting Operations Division Centers are lodged in unmarked buildings. In the inconspicuous White Cap mini-mall surrounded by pine trees, the Targeting Center where the leaders protested sits next to a dentist, a medical imaging office, a café, and the local newspaper’s circulation staff. As if the ICE center were just one more office. But its job is surveillance of social media and multiple databases to help ICE target which individuals to pursue everywhere, leading to thousands of people being hunted down and whisked away, sometimes injured or even killed. In the second Trump administration, more than 600,000 have been detained.

“We are not the first of the people arrested there and we will not be the last. We will continue as long as it takes to stop ICE for good.”

After the faith leaders’ blockade, more people rallied, and October began with a full Week of Action to expose and protest the ICE presence in Williston, a former Abenaki hunting ground which became a dairy and agricultural center, then urban sprawl. The first of the week’s actions was a nationally publicized funeral for those who have been murdered or died in ICE custody, and the week culminated in a peaceful protest on the front porch of the ICE Law Enforcement Resource Center (the second Center in Williston). The festive scene was set with a floral couch, a rug, music, and song—plus lots of chalked admonitions on the building and driveway like, “You don’t have to erase this,” and handwritten notes taped to the windows.

Rather than confront the peaceful protesters, ICE withdrew; the word was that many local personnel had been sent home for the week. Only two local police kept a respectful distance in the almost empty parking lot, appearing briefly and politely when a camera had been covered up. It was a far cry from the debacle of March 12, when ICE officials insisted on precipitating a massive confrontation involving their own officers plus dozens of state troopers and local police—to pursue three people for whom they didn’t have a warrant, who were ultimately released.

Last week, the focus was back on the faith leaders, who were arraigned in Vermont Superior Court. The State Police (who arrested them) bypassed the local prosecutor Sarah George, who earlier said she has better things to do with taxpayer dollars than prosecute people who are peacefully protesting ICE. At that time, the Democratic State Attorney General, Charity Clark, disagreed, even though she herself has engaged in public protest at times, including at ICE. She feels that she cannot pick and choose whom to prosecute for political reasons. Her decision to go after a number of anti-ICE activists has riled up some of her supporters, particularly those who applaud her relentless pursuit of more than 70 lawsuits against Trump.

The faith leaders’ arraignment was much lower key than the prominent cases in nearby Federal District Court (such as those of Rumeysa Ozturk, Kseniia Petrova, and Mohsen Mahdawi). Spectators could even keep our phones and car keys. Outside the courtroom, a young Black man in dreads wearing a T-shirt with a clenched fist told me and a couple of men in clerical garb which door was ours. The benches inside were less comfy than the feds’, but the greater closeness to Judge Colin Owyang made up for it. Soon the court was packed with supporters for six women and one man: a United Methodist minister, two United Church of Christ ministers, an Episcopal priest and the archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, a Quaker leader, and a Unitarian Universalist minister (in alphabetical order Catherine Bock, 78; Jessica Derise, 54; Rebecca Girrell, 47; Elizabeth Gleich, 36; Karen Johnston, 58; Earl Kooperkamp, 69; and Susan McMillan, 65). People were chuckling and chatting as they rarely do in the more formal federal court.

The faith leaders were called on one by one, each pleading not guilty. The rulings were uniform. The leaders were not to visit the ICE facility except in the context of their “lawful pastoral duties.” They were to avoid contact with the property manager. They were not to discuss the case among themselves except with a written joint defense agreement (which they executed before leaving the courthouse).

One moment of humor occurred when the visibly pregnant Rev. Gleich appeared. After the judge stated the followup court date, he said “subject to contingencies” with a smile.

“If I’m actively giving birth, I won’t be here,” said the Rev. Gleich with a sparkle in her voice.

“In that case,” said the prosecutor, “the state would not seek a warrant.”

Coming out of the courthouse, a huge “ICE OUT OF WHITE CAP” sign greeted us across the street, as well as numerous supporters. I was especially moved to see the 90-year-old daughter of a Dutch resister to the Nazis, an indefatigable presence for democracy all her adult life. When the faith leaders emerged with their noted human rights attorney Robert Appel, there was a huge cheer. They spoke sequentially to reinforce their message, each in a strong, bold voice accustomed to a pulpit. They said that the rulings represented an “escalation of judicial tactics” versus the fewer conditions meted out to earlier protesters.

Their words were powerful: “Join us in standing with our friends and neighbors against the lawlessness of ICE.”

“Violating human and civil rights is the real crime which must be stopped.”

Bringing people to court on these minor charges “is a poor use of resources and an ineffective scare tactic.”

“We will not be deterred. We will continue to sit and stand and kneel and pray.”

They emphasized the importance of this particular Targeting Center in terrorizing communities and persecuting people with no criminal history: “We are not the first of the people arrested there and we will not be the last. We will continue as long as it takes to stop ICE for good.”

To be continued, as the days darken and winter sets in. And if the last few months are any indication, they will be far from alone.

On Long Island there are four contested races for the House of Representatives. Two are currently held by Democrats and two by Republicans. The outcome on Long Island could well determine which party has a majority in the House. If you vote Republican for the Senate and House of Representatives, you are voting against congressional roadblocks on Trump.

If you vote Republican this is the kind of country you are voting for.

In a campaign speech in Port Huron, Michigan, Donald Trump accused the Democratic nominee for Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of being a terrorist and claimed that if El-Sayed and the Democrats win, “they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.” Trump also told American Jews that “any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves.”

Meanwhile the Trump crime family and its allies are using the United States government to enrich themselves, often betraying the interests of the country.

In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech billionaire Republican candidate for governor, ran a campaign ad attacking Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton featuring Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar. Acton has had no contact with her mother since she was 12 years old and was raped by her stepfather who fled the state to avoid prosecution. Acton’s mother abandoned her children and left the state with him. Current Republican Gov. Mike DeWine described the ad as “deeply, deeply troubling” and called on Ramaswamy to take down the ad, but he refused. Donald Trump accused politicians who condemn the ad of whining, said he would run an ad like that, and advised Ramaswamy to stick with it. No Long Island Republican officeholders or candidates, including Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman who is running for governor, has publicly condemned Ramaswamy or the ad.

On the same day that Trump Justice Department Homeland Security agents invaded the Washington DC home of congressional Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), at a rally in Ohio, Trump insulted Somali immigrants, calling them “low-IQ people” and claiming they “don’t have pants to wear.” Trump also celebrated removing protected status from thousands of Haitians who sought refuge in the United States.

Meanwhile the Trump crime family and its allies are using the United States government to enrich themselves, often betraying the interests of the country. The website Center for American Progress has an update counter showing Trump and sons raking in almost $3 billion from shady deals, including almost $2.5 billion from cryptocurrency. The family has profited from new foreign luxury real estate and golf developments; Ivanka Trump’s husband’s investment firm negotiated a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia; Melania Trump received a $40 million payout from Amazon for a documentary project; the president secured an immunity deal from the Internal Revenue Service for past due taxes; and the president claims as his own a $400 million Boeing 747 jet “gifted” by Qatar to the United States

In 2022 Eric, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Donald Trump were sued by New York State for fraud.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington recently to meet with President Donald Trump, discussions over Artificial Intelligence were hotly anticipated as an urgent matter of national relations, as it was this past May during the previous US-China summit. Disappointingly, little of substance has come of this meeting as well, despite fresh worries over AI doomsday scenarios from industry insiders, and pleas for both regulation and international cooperation.

Once again, instead of hashing out guardrails to contain a fever-pitched “AI arms race,” the discussion revolved primarily around trade and resources. This discouraging result comes amid an atmosphere in the US in which tech CEOs and politicians claim that China winning the “race” would spell the end of Western civilization. Given the proclaimed stakes, an apparent lack of substantial AI discussion during the summit appears either as baffling incompetence, or an indication that the “arms race” threat may not be what it appears.

In reality, mounting evidence seems to indicate that the “China threat” is nothing more than a performative manipulation, wielded by tech CEOs and White House officials to justify their deeply unpopular AI program. The real threat, in Americans’ eyes, seems to be coming from the inside, as huge majorities remain concerned over data centers encroaching on their communities, AI-driven job loss, and other harms borne from the unregulated technology.

Deeply Unpopular AI Needs Justification

Pew Research reported in March of this year that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI use in daily life. Gallup polling found in the spring that 71% of Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers. It is only earners of $200,000 or more, according to a Quinnipiac poll, who consider AI in daily life as more good than bad. Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found last week that 3 out of 4 Americans feel that AI companies are not doing enough to ensure that their products do not inflict serious harm on society. Meanwhile, Americans are watching as companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce lay off thousands of employees, arguing that AI can step in, contributing to 80% of Americans saying they want the government to fund workforce transition programs, according to a May Harris poll.

In spite of the disturbing World Cup commercials and the endless billboards, the AI industry has a trillion-dollar messaging problem that may cast it into the “death valley” of start-ups, where profitability doesn’t arrive in time to make up for balking venture capital.

The “China threat” is a handy solution.

Business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.

This “threat” builds on a long history of Sinophobia in America, from “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, to anti-immigrant lynching, and since 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it has been combined with Red Scare hysteria. China’s economic rise in the past 50 years has come with enhanced military potential in the region, as it brought Hong Kong to heel, and began projecting power in the South China Sea and beyond. Some analysts believe we are already in a “New Cold War.”

Today, anti-Beijing rhetoric is a rare area of bipartisan agreement in Washington. And while some analysts believe that the US and China are running qualitatively different “AI races,” business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.

China’s “Existential Threat” to Democracy

Businessman and television personality, Kevin O’Leary, who is facing strong opposition from residents of Box Elder County, Utah, where he plans to build a 9 gigawatt data center, proclaimed on a CNN panel, “If you want China to lead, take over… our democracy, our free speech, how we live with technology, just stop building data centers, it’s that simple.”

Equally breathless rhetoric from Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir referred to China’s technology landscape as a “Borg-like thing that’s controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” Alex Karp of Palantir also asserted the urgency of his own corporation being given greater leeway to operate in spite of concerns about privacy rights: “So when people are worried about surveillance, of course, there are huge dangers there, but you know, you will have far fewer rights if America’s not in the lead.”

The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.

This rhetoric is also the official stance of Washington. In the Trump White House’s “AI Action Plan,” titled “Winning the Race,” the authors are explicit: “As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” This type of language is evocative of the Manhattan Project in World War II, and the space race during the Cold War.

But as in those equally propagandized endeavors, the existential threat posed by Chinese AI supremacy is unclear. Advances in AI-driven operations have increased the capabilities of militaries to generate and rapidly attack targets, but visions of autonomous robotic warfare remain far away. The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.

Rhetoric of the “Race” Will Have Consequences

It is irresponsible and dangerous to use anti-China “AI arms race” rhetoric. During Trump’s last term, his anti-China narratives attempting to cover up the administration’s Covid-19 blunders had devastating impacts as violence increased against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, and the “China Initiative” chilled intellectual exchanges and disrupted lives. Similar rhetoric during the Cold War led to persecution of academics, activists, and professionals during McCarthy’s Red Scare. If this Trump administration doubled down on the anti-China narrative, we may see similar repression and hate foment again—tactics clearly already in the administration’s wheelhouse.

Worryingly, it does not appear that the “AI Arms Race” will slow down any time soon. Signs are emerging that increasingly powerful AI systems are frightening both Washington and Beijing in their potential to disrupt the global economy, incentivizing the two to consider some high-level guardrails. But even with the recent PR frenzy surrounding Jacob Coxon’s “whistleblowing” against Anthropic’s lack of safety considerations, CEOs and politicians do not seem to be backing down from using China as a spur in the race—arguing to instead balance beating China with skirting AI-induced doom.

As the US economy becomes increasingly supported by AI promises and projections, a collapse of the “bubble” may even be accompanied by increased anti-China rhetoric as justification for Silicon Valley’s need for a bailout.

We must incorporate critique of this narrative into the popular resistance against AI; in the movements against data centers, AI encroachment into education, IP theft, and more.

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lost the first round of the Brazilian election and fell behind in the polls, I thought he would lose the election. So, the fact that he won is a stunning comeback. It took the three weeks between the two elections, hundreds of hours of street and online mobilization by Lula’s Army of Supporters, to defeat the conservative candidate, Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro. Another member of the Bolsonaro family, of course!

Lula’s winning magic was helped by a video. It’s a clip between the two men from their debate that rightfully deserves to be immortalized. In it, Bolsonaro asks him: “Why are 73% of the prisoners voting for you?” And the wise Lula answers: “I want 100% of the prisoners’ votes. Including your dad’s vote!” The people in the studio laughed. This exchange made Brazilian society laugh too, wake up, and think, after seeing a dynamic performance by Lula on live TV. It was the opposite of former US President Joe Biden in that infamous debate.

Bolsonaro (son of the ex-president Jair Bolsonaro who is imprisoned), who had pledged to join President Donald Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” security and political initiative, is the big loser. Flávio reportedly fled Brazil after losing. Nobody has to be a genius to advise him: “Flávio, you lost. Concede with dignity. Don't follow Trump's infamous playbook. Show some grace in defeat.” But Bolsonaro losing is great news not only for the people of Brazil, but also for the flora and fauna of the Amazon rainforest.

Thus, Lula, who is a former worker, a unionist, and a pragmatic politician, prevents the return to power of the far-right with the Bolsonaros.

Thus, Lula wins a fourth term as Brazilian president, after a dramatic run-off. The crucial matter is that Lula, alone, defeated Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, and Flávio Bolsonaro together. After all, defeated are those who stop fighting! Musk said Brazil's presidential election results do not “add up.” Relax, Mr. Trillionaire! Next to Lula, the Amazon rainforest won big time, ensuring it will not become a place for giant companies worth billions who want to mine for diamonds, gold, and extract petrol from its lands. And Anne Applebaum wrote in an X post: “In one day, two politicians—Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vucic in Serbia—with ties to Trump and his family have lost surprise elections, thanks to high turnout. The rise of the international far-right is not inevitable.”

Lula has four fingers on his left hand! The one finger that's missing, he lost at 17 years old when he was working as a metalworker and a mechanical lathe crushed his pinky finger. As he has said, “I arrived at three in the morning [at the hospital] smelling like work overalls, smelling like grease” and he looked so bad that the doctor didn’t bother to save his finger. In his eyes, that was the result of poverty.

During his years in power, Lula has supported democratic institutions and made important progress on protecting the forest—there is a web of laws protecting the Amazon now–and local communities who depend on it for their survival, but of course, for a few analysts, he had a mixed record in other areas. The economy has problems, but the same happens in countries like Germany and Japan.

Someone must acknowledge that deforestation has dropped drastically under Lula’s government, which has “set a target of completely halting illegal deforestation by 2030.” It reactivated the Amazon Fund, which is a mechanism backed by countries like Norway to finance conservation and monitoring, and stepped up enforcement through satellite imagery and policing. Lula also launched on November 6, 2025 the Tropical Forests Forever Facility to help developing nations to keep their forests intact.

The win in Brazil, the win in Serbia, the probable win in Israel against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s disastrous far-right coalition, and the upcoming midterms in the US, which will also test control of Congress, show that the power belongs to the people. That’s democracy in other words, and the people must have the final say.

Thus, Lula, who is a former worker, a unionist, and a pragmatic politician, prevents the return to power of the far-right with the Bolsonaros. So, this is a great result not only for the workers and democracy, but also for the giant Amazon lung. An electoral win for all the species that have lived there for thousands of years! Money is not above everything as capitalism’s big corporations teach, while in the end, the poor get crumbs if they’re lucky. The “pro-worker” left, headed by Lula, may have its own problems, but it is far better for society and the environment. The right thinks mainly of the plutocrats and the big profits; it leaves barbarism, which is a society in ruins.

The tireless Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said about Lula’s victory: “He will continue to fight for Brazilian workers and democracy over the next four years.” All the progressives and their grassroots movements around the world breathed the fresh air of the Amazon again.

I’ve read The New York Times since I was a teenager. It was once a way to keep up on the news. It’s now a daily way to experience a living nightmare of a world.

I’m thinking, of course, of Donald Trump’s world—although it could be Vladimir Putin’s, too—and that’s just to start down an ever-lengthening grim list. This, in all honesty, is not the world that anyone should want to be on at a time when humanity has discovered at least two ways of doing this planet in, the slow-motion version known as climate change and the (more or less) instantaneous version of nuclear war. And in this strange world of ours, who honestly knows what Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might be able to do when it comes to creating a potential third pathway to ultimate destruction? (Not this old man, that’s for sure.)

Consider it strange, given that nuclear weapons are clearly also doomsday ones, that, in the 80-plus years since the US dropped two of them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with devastating effect, including the deaths of more than 200,000 people (almost 40,000 of them believed to have been children), nine countries have come to possess far more devastating versions of just such weaponry. It’s now estimated that there are more than 12,000 nuclear weapons on this planet, with the US and Russia each believed to possess more than 5,000. That’s enough, of course, to destroy any number of planets, with most of those weapons six to 50 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Worse yet, their cumulative numbers only continue to grow in this world of ours, and they are ever more devastatingly powerful.

Can you explain to me what kind of creatures would plan for, pour funding into, and work to create anything-but-obvious or easy-to-produce ways of bringing about their own extermination, not to speak of that of all life around them?

Given our history over all these centuries (and the global hellscapes we’ve already created), what could possibly go wrong? Count on this (if you’re still counting): In the near future, the number of countries in possession of such weaponry will undoubtedly only rise again.

Once upon a time, end-of-the-world scenarios were nightmarish fantasies of fiction, the sort of thing that novelists like George Orwell or Aldous Huxley came up with and that I read with fascination in my youth.

Now, who needs a dystopian novel when, just sitting down each morning (or evening) to read the Times, as I still do (one day late, of course, since I read the paper version, which says plenty about this old man), has a strangely end-of-world feeling to it? After all, we humans have come up with at least a second (slow-motion) way to do in ourselves and every other living thing on this planet that has gained the all too mild label “climate change.” Why it’s not “climate devastation,” “climate destruction,” “climate catastrophe,” or something even worse? Change, really? Gee, climate mutation doesn’t sound so bad either, does it?

In mid-October, as I was starting this piece, I went out on my daily early morning walk in New York City, wearing just khakis, a long-sleeved shirt, and a light jacket. By 8:30 am, I had already tied my jacket around my waist and rolled up my shirt sleeves—and I still felt slightly uncomfortable.

I know, I know, any passingly hot day or even a warm few weeks doesn’t truly prove a thing. Still, only recently, record highs were “forecast to stretch all across the central and eastern United States, with temperatures running about 20°F above average, according to Weather.com meteorologist Rob Shackelford.”

In addition, the British medical magazine The Lancet‘s Commission on 21st Century Global Threats recently offered this apocalyptic scenario (as reported by The Guardian): “’Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years,’ the report said, adding that, while their likelihood remained low, they had the potential to end humanity in the case of nuclear conflict by injecting enough particles into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and cause famine, or via AI-created biological weapons.”

And as Jeet Heer recently pointed out at The Nation magazine, “AI is clearly the most dangerous technology that humankind has developed since nuclear weapons, and our current lack of oversight for it is a travesty.”

Am I surprised? Not really... sigh...

Living in a Dystopian Novel of a World

In truth, I’m already too damn old to genuinely grasp that third possibility for ultimate destruction, involving AI—though anything AI-related makes me instantaneously anxious as hell. Though it’s not possible anymore to avoid AI if you’re simply looking for something online, I still do my damnedest (so to speak) to avoid it otherwise, since I prefer to be on a planet where the best and worst things in life aren’t caused by some almost unimaginable computer-created irreality—or do I mean surreality, since this world seems (thank you Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin!) ever more surreal in all too many ways?

Of course, here’s the truly strange thing: Can you explain to me what kind of creatures would plan for, pour funding into, and work to create anything-but-obvious or easy-to-produce ways of bringing about their own extermination, not to speak of that of all life around them?

I know, I know, that first way of doing us all in, atomic weaponry, still passes for war. But explain to me, what a country could possibly win with more than 5,000 nuclear weapons? Honestly, how mad can you be to purposely create ever more world-ending weaponry to—yes!—(theoretically) defend yourself?

In truth, if this heavily nuclear-armed world of ours and leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin weren’t our reality, this piece would be the most unbelievable kind of dystopian fiction around.

And then, of course, we humans put in power characters like Donald Trump, who, at the United Nations this September, implicitly threatened to use such weaponry to “annihilate” Iran, or Vladimir Putin, who has actually threatened to use nuclear weapons in any future conflict with other European powers that might develop out of his war on Ukraine. Ask yourself, would you really choose to put either of their trigger fingers on the American or Russian nuclear arsenals?

And how much madder do you have to be, as president of the United States (no less), than to put so much of your extra energy into promoting anything that will burn down (or do I mean burn up) this planet of ours? That, of course, is what “our” president is now doing when it comes to the full-scale promotion of the ever greater use of oil, coal, and natural gas. And, of course, he not only continues to essentially deny that climate change is even happening, but at the UN last year called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Consider him nothing short of a promoter (of course, who doesn’t know that he’s a promoter?) of a world-ending reality—or do I mean surreality?

Honestly, I’d like to bring George Orwell and Aldous Huxley back from the dead so many years later, because I’d love to read Orwell’s next novel: 2030 or Huxley’s Brave New Trump (or, for that matter, Brave New Putin). And give me some credit here, since I haven’t even bothered you with the possibility that India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed, could someday engage in a globally devastating “limited” nuclear war, creating what’s known as a “nuclear winter” on this planet that might kill not just Indians and Pakistanis but billions of the rest of us.

In truth, if this heavily nuclear-armed world of ours and leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin weren’t our reality, this piece would be the most unbelievable kind of dystopian fiction around. And yet, keep in mind that, at this very moment, given climate change, we’re already experiencing a slow-motion version of nuclear-style disaster on this planet of ours. Hopefully, I’m (mis)reading the times (as well as the Times) when it comes to our future nuclear peril. Unfortunately, when it comes to the slow-motion version of nuclear war, which we call climate change and the overheating of this planet of ours, a distinctly dystopian future is already well underway.

“Nothing is inevitable but everything is possible.” My friend and comrade once said that in reference to the vibrant movement moment of the Black Lives Matter uprisings after the heinous Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

These words have been a mantra for me since I read them. Like many of you, I’m terrified of the state of the world and my country's role in its suffering. When I consume the news, take a tally of the rights our people have lost, and hold the memory of those who are no longer here, I am at times resigned to believe that “it’s over” and that “nothing matters.” When the onslaught is constant, giving up becomes alluring.

Hope is a necessary and useful tool for our social movements in the struggle against authoritarianism. My attempt here is to share my perspective on possibility and the role it plays in tumultuous times like these.

Winning this election means stopping authoritarian consolidation within our government, which clears the way for defeating the MAGA movement for a second time in the 2028 presidential election.

Authoritarianism always tries to abolish memory—capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, evangelical Christian, fascist imperialists want us to be trapped in their now. As if their now is inevitable. Authoritarianism wants us to believe that only one thing is happening.

While destruction and great loss has occurred in President Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, it does not mean that it is inevitable that it will continue to occur in perpetuity. Since the colonists first came to this land, horror has followed. And so have miraculous acts of resistance, political gains, and life-altering wins. That’s because human beings chose resistance and strategy in the face of oppression. Abolitionist movements of the past engaged in highly sophisticated, multi-century, strategic political struggle to free enslaved Black people from bondage (movements composed of enslaved people and abolitionists like Fredrick Douglas). In hindsight, people over and over again made the conscious choice to engage in the long arc of protracted struggle.

Nothing; not a moment, administration, movement, law, nor empire lasts forever, nor is any of it inevitable. Or more relevant to the point I’m trying to make, nothing is one thing constantly and always. Change will occur. History is never one note. There are variations over time and in those variations are the inspirations for interventions where dominant ideas are changed. These changes, or fluctuations and fissures, are opportunities of possibility to exploit to use against our enemy.

Capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, evangelical Christian, fascist imperialists want us afraid and isolated. We are facing a multi-pronged attack. MAGA and billionaire oligarchs are launching attacks in a variety of ways. Using electoral intimidation and rigging, tech over-dependence and surveillance, and right-wing takeovers of media through monopolization, to name a few. Billions of dollars are being spent to keep us apart and to internalize a false narrative: “It’s over,” “Nothing matters."

This false narrative of the inevitable has begun to make its way into some contemporary American movies. Movies like Don’t Look Up, A House of Dynamite, and Bugonia. All were released within a few years of one another, the latter two came out the same year (2025). Each of these movies come to similar fatalistic conclusions: Doom is inevitable.

This is not true, but it does serve a strategic purpose. This fatalistic view is both a real felt experience of perceived reality and a constructed reality, created by fascists and tech oligarchs. David Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery into Skydance Media to form the far-right Skydance Corporation is Trump’s fascist administration controlling the narrative (literally by having the reins to CNN, TikTok, HBO, and movie studios like Warner Bros.) to attempt to further sow disillusionment toward sociopolitical change, hopelessness, and a belief that MAGA is invulnerable.

I am not arguing a promise. “Change” and "possibility” are neutral. Neither is inherently good for our social movements or means sure defeat for the opposition. Change and possibility do not mean that things will get better tomorrow or that things will only get worse forever. Octavia Butler teaches us through her writing that the only lasting truth is change. This onslaught will end, the impact we’re being hit with by this administration will stop. Though the consequences of those blows will linger. As a result of this administration's actions, suffering will continue, people will continue to die. Whether that lasts a few years or many decades, at least in part, is dependent upon what our social movements do when an opportunity presents itself to strike our own blow(s). I see these midterm elections as one of those opportunities. Elections are strategic interventions. Winning this election means stopping authoritarian consolidation within our government, which clears the way for defeating the MAGA movement for a second time in the 2028 presidential election.

A far-right authoritarian political movement (MAGA) is controlling the government. In other words, the United States has a fascist federal government. Democrats and Working Families Party candidates winning a majority in the House and Senate will shorten the reach of this fascist administration. That matters. Like it mattered for Black people not to be considered three-fifths of a human in the Constitution, like it mattered when Roe v. Wade was won, and how having political power matters to ensure a sitting congressperson’s house isn’t raided. The MAGA movement is positioning itself toward one-party, minority rule that can't be challenged through democratic channels (that is fascism). Disenfranchising voters serves authoritarianism. Losing the midterm elections serves the strategy of our enemy.

Our social movements are tasked with quelling the further consolidation of power of this authoritarian regime.

Y’all, our social movements need to win majorities in the US House and Senate to slow the rise of fascist law. Races like Angie Nixon in Florida, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Will Lawrence in Michigan, and Justin Pearson in Tennessee are so important for building a line of defense to save our lives.

Fascism is here. The position we find ourselves in isn’t one that sets us up for immediate liberation. The fight of the rest of this decade is to defang authoritarianism.

There is a difference between forever and experiencing the current reality. History tells us that forever does not exist in the political sphere. We are swimming in the waters of this decade's dialectics, wading in the multiple truths of our given moment in time. Contradictions can be generative if strategy leads the decisions of our social movements when opportunities present themselves.

Some things are inevitable. If my phone slips out of my hand it will fall. Gravity ensures that. Fascism is a powerful force, but it is not gravity.

I grew up believing that fidelity to language is fidelity to truth. Scripture taught me that truth is a form of prayer and that naming is part of justice. Then I learned how language is trained to look away. In the American conversation about the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and Palestine, words are rinsed until they shine with neutrality, while the bodies they describe grow dim. The result is a strange theology of news, where grief must pass an examination before it is shared, and where power writes the glossary.

In the weeks after October 7, anchors found an ease of speech they rarely grant Palestinians. Faces from southern Israel filled our screens—named and mourned. By mid-October, Israel had killed thousands in Gaza, many of them children. The camera kept its distance. The word that leapt to the teleprompter was caution. Images blurred and numbers hedged, context was treated as suspicion rather than care.

The grief of one people became a national ceremony; the grief of another, a footnote.

I want a common speech that lets readers feel that a child pulled from rubble requires no preface.

If language is a vessel for conscience, these choices matter. A hospital becomes a “compound,” bombardment becomes an “operation,” a family under rubble becomes “collateral.” Such phrasing allows atrocity to appear as policy, and policy to pass as inevitability. We are told this is balance, when in reality it scolds both the arsonist and the burning house.

As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once observed, “In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim.” The stakes of language decide whose grief is recognized and whose life is made expendable.

What we call balance often conceals allegiance. The United States supplies weapons, funding, diplomatic cover, and ideological shelter to Israel. Washington fast-tracks munitions while vetoing cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations, demanding the press describe the result as a “cycle.” Institutions obey through habits as much as manufactured consent because the script is already written.

Editors learn which nouns invite trouble. Reporters learn which verbs are preferred. Freelancers learn the cost of clarity.

The money is not incidental. Contracts enrich the usual firms as careers rise in their shadow. The casualties are an afterthought. The ledger sits backstage, while the performance onstage goes by the name of neutrality. The empire supplies language and weapons, while it is language that returns the favor by laundering intent.

Every culture keeps a book of sorrows. In ours, some sorrows earn public sympathy more readily than others. When a Palestinian journalist is killed, headlines bend into the passive voice, and the subject disappears. When a Palestinian American is beaten at a checkpoint or murdered, procedure replaces justice. Families who bury their children must clear a test of civility, then defend the right to weep without a preface.

To mourn openly is treated as a provocation. To ask for equal mourning is to be accused of provocation.

This is how imperial culture works. If Palestinian grief is marginalized, policy can proceed. The audience is soothed by the idea that tragedy has no author, that rubble is a natural event, and that history began yesterday. In such a world, the right dead receive sympathy, while the living must demonstrate moderation.

If the prophets have any lesson for journalism, it is this: Speak without fear where the truth is plain. Refuse to wrap cruelty in fine phrases. Follow conscience where it burns, even when it threatens comfort.

We were told that social media would democratize speech. Instead, many Palestinians and their allies discovered another border regime. Posts vanish without explanation and archives dissolve, as certain words trigger shadow bans. Meanwhile, coordinated networks flood platforms with talking points until the algorithm mistakes noise for truth.

People adapt. They speak in code. They smuggle testimony through poetry. They post with patience. The work continues because memory continues. Forgetting is the most dangerous technology.

Before my essays, I wrote sanctioned paragraphs inside large institutions. I learned how official speech is constructed, and how clarity is stripped from a sentence . . . One is encouraged to prefer symmetry over accuracy.

The effect is spiritual and does violence to one’s soul. Conscience is taught to whisper. The room obeys, when it should sound an alarm.

Our grief must first earn a hearing; our dead are assigned numbers rather than names. Empires hold territory and vocabulary alike. As such, recovering our speech is part of recovering our dignity.

The phrase “U.S. imperialism” may sound antique, but the reality is current. It lives in supply chains, military aid, diplomatic vetoes, and the expectation that our media will avoid language that might complicate partnership. It governs which deaths are described and which are rendered abstract. It shapes curriculum, philanthropy, and the scope of respectable debate. Above all, it trains the public to treat Palestinian life as a question, not a fact.

Imperial culture does not announce its arrival with banners. It moves through careful renaming. It borrows the aura of reason while pruning history. It requests deference in the name of complexity, and it rewards those who provide it with access.

Say occupation where there is an occupation. Say siege where there is a siege. If a journalist is killed, name the bullet and the chain of command. If a neighborhood is erased, name the policy that permits erasure. Then listen to survivors.

Such speech is an act of repair. It gives words back to the people who have lived under them. It restores trust between the public and the page.

There are journalists in the United States who begin from testimony rather than performance; who respect context over an alibi; who resist the symmetry that mistakes management for justice. Chris Hedges and Moustafa Bayoumi are among them. Their work does not flatter power. It honors the living by telling the truth about the dead. It remembers that language can also be occupied, and that freeing it is part of the same struggle.

To name is a civic and spiritual duty. Will you reflect? Will you testify? Will you remember the stranger? These are disciplines of attention. When we choose the word compound for a hospital, or incident for a massacre, we are answering those questions in the negative. When we choose accurate names, we widen the circle of humanity.

I do not write to police the language of others. I write to examine mine. I want a Western vocabulary that does not reduce Palestinians to a problem or political question in need of management. I want a common speech that lets readers feel that a child pulled from rubble requires no preface.

Empire teaches us to treat reality as talking points. Faith teaches the opposite. If the prophets have any lesson for journalism, it is this: Speak without fear where the truth is plain. Refuse to wrap cruelty in fine phrases. Follow conscience where it burns, even when it threatens comfort.

I offer these lines in the name of tenderness and law, memory and justice, which belong together when language is healthy. Violence is asymmetrical, just like truth. The world deserves words that admit as much.

Support journalists who center Palestinian testimony with patience and respect. Hold editors to their standards. Share stories that restore names and faces. Each act strengthens the possibility of a public language that does not betray the people who must live under it.

This is the work of citizens and of writers. It is the work of the heart.

Excerpted from If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness by Yahia Lababidi. Copyright © 2026 by Yahia Lababidi. All Rights Reserved.

In almost every interview I have conducted in recent weeks, and in nearly every conversation with Palestinian citizens of Israel on the streets of our towns, I have heard the same fear.

People are no longer talking primarily about civil rights, equality or better living conditions. They are talking about survival, and about whether they will be able to remain on their land.

At the entrances to our towns, Israeli election billboards are everywhere. Among them are those of the Religious Zionism party, whose leaders advocate extending the land seizures and settlement building pursued in the occupied West Bank to the Galilee and the Naqab, or Negev.

These messages confront us on the roads we travel, at the entrances to the places we call home.

How are people supposed to carry on calmly amid such threats?

For many people I have spoken to, voting is not about faith in parliamentary politics or expecting an Israeli government to deliver justice. It is an attempt to protect themselves, or at least to delay what they fear is coming.

As Palestinian political activity inside Israel has faced severe restrictions since 7 October 2023, voting remains one of the few political acts that does not carry the risks associated with protest.

My father is 70 years old. He has never voted in an election to Israel's parliament, the Knesset. This time, he will.

He is the son of a displaced Palestinian family and spent his childhood under Israeli military rule. Now he fears for our future on this land, for his grandchildren, and for the possibility that his family's history could repeat itself. He does not underestimate the danger. Neither do I.

A painful reckoning

Since 2018, I have held a clear ideological position against participating in Israel's Knesset elections.

I believed, and still believe, that our presence in this framework has harmed our political discourse. Too much of our struggle has been reduced to parliamentary work, while building independent political tools and organising ourselves as a community have been pushed aside.

In fundamental ways, this framework contradicts our vision of liberation and an end to the occupation. That is why I chose to boycott.

But today I find myself questioning that decision. After a painful political and intellectual struggle, I reached a conclusion I never expected. At this stage, we are too weak to boycott.

I turned down invitations to join initiatives encouraging Palestinians to vote. How could I ask others to vote when I was unsure myself? As a journalist, I covered the election campaign without calling on anyone to vote or boycott, and I stepped away from the noise to wrestle with my thoughts. It was exhausting.

At this stage, we are too weak to boycott

I have watched Israeli society's shift further towards the far right since 7 October, alongside the weakness and paralysis of Palestinian politics. Even amid a genocide in Gaza that has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, the Palestinian political leadership has failed to agree on a decision that could bring us together. Well, except for postponing Palestinian elections.

We are at rock bottom. We cannot even secure the simple right to harvest our olives safely. We lack effective political tools, a unifying national project and a clear way out of this devastation. There is nothing wrong with admitting it.

For me, boycott is not a moral position that can simply hang in the air. It is a political tool. It must have meaning, impact and a place within a larger political project, or at least offer an alternative.

An individual's refusal to participate can express a principle. A collective boycott that can challenge a system requires organisation, shared objectives and a way to turn refusal into political power.

The politics of remaining

I am not questioning the legitimacy of boycott. I am questioning what it can achieve now, when that collective project is missing. If participation cannot liberate us, and boycott offers no practical alternative, what do we do with the few possibilities that remain?

I have listened to people who want to vote even if all they hope for is to delay the demolition of a single home. Yet the fear now reaches beyond demolitions to displacement from the Naqab and the Galilee. "We're next," I hear everywhere.

When people fear losing their homes and land, how can I dismiss their concerns from the comfort of political theory?

We are a frightened community, and I do not think we fully understand the political and moral meaning of simply remaining: holding on to our place, surviving and enduring in the face of war and killing. That, too, is resistance.

How many around us have considered leaving? How many already have? How many of us have quietly wondered whether we can go on living here? The right to remain is no longer something we can take for granted.

We need reasons and resources to remain. I do not believe the Knesset itself can provide them. What matters is whether people coming together around Arab electoral lists might also rebuild collective political action beyond parliament.

Our crisis will not be solved by a few more Knesset seats. We need to rebuild ourselves politically and socially, far beyond any election.

I will vote.

I know that any alternative government would be no dove of peace. Changing governments will not end the occupation, dismantle colonial structures or transform a system built on Jewish supremacy. I have no illusions about that.

But I cannot bear the thought of Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir remaining in power for another year. I want to see these blood-soaked men defeated, even if only for a moment. Anger is not a political strategy, but neither can I pretend it plays no part in my decision.

Voting without illusions

I understand the argument that Palestinian participation can help Israel present itself as a democracy while concealing structures of domination and inequality. Yet after all this bloodshed, I struggle to see how my ballot could restore the state's moral legitimacy. Participating does not mean endorsing the system; it means making a choice within the narrow space still available.

Perhaps political change will not prevent catastrophe. Perhaps it will only delay it, giving people a moment to breathe. When possibilities are so scarce, I do not want to let even one slip away.

I will vote for the slightest possibility that conditions might improve for Palestinian prisoners, even though their cause does not receive the place it deserves on Arab parties' electoral platforms.

And I cannot turn away from the pleas of Palestinians on the other side of the wall: "For God's sake, get this government off our backs. We just need to breathe, even if only for a little while."

I am not presenting voting as salvation. My reservations remain. I still believe liberation will not come through the Israeli parliament, but through our ability to build institutions, organize collectively and act as a people. Yet political convictions must remain accountable to the lives of those in whose name we hold them.

I think of my father, who lived seven decades without voting in an Israeli election and now plans to do so because he fears for his grandchildren. I cannot dismiss what that means, or the concerns of the many others who see a ballot as one remaining attempt to protect their place on this land.

I will go to the ballot box carrying all my old doubts with me. And at this rock bottom, I do not want to leave a single stone unturned.

We’re just days out from November 3, and already millions of Americans are heading to the polls or dropping off their mail-in ballots, while threats to their freedom to vote continue making front-page news.

Since returning to office, President Donald Trump and members of his administration have desperately tried to take over our elections—a move that is both unconstitutional and has, thus far, failed. But these realities haven’t stopped him from indicating a willingness to have federal officers show up at polling places, something that has been illegal since the Civil War. He has continually railed against vote-by-mail, despite the US Supreme Court blocking his most damaging plans. And where he has failed to pass federal legislation or successfully move executive orders, he has repeatedly attacked our elections. In fact, he spread false or misleading claims about our elections on 70% of the days of his second term.

And while Trump’s efforts continue to fail to pass legal muster, there are two intertwined threats built into his continued public flirtation with election interference: anti-voter actions themselves, and the confusion and chaos created by floating these plans in public.

The job of the media ecosystem—whether print journalists, TV pundits, or content creators on TikTok—is to make sure the American people know the truth.

The media ecosystem has a big role to play in mitigating that second threat.

Even if Trump and his allies know they will lose in court if they try these illegal moves to subvert the election, they can still successfully control our elections if they cause enough noise to overwhelm voters and discourage turnout.

The confusion is the point. Clarity is the cure.

Consider the rumors about the federal government deploying its agents in connection with voting.

Surely, the Trump administration knows that sending ICE to polling places is illegal and unpopular. And the administration is already backtracking on earlier statements. But as voting gets underway, the media and anyone with a platform must avoid sensationalizing, verify any reports before sharing, and make clear that the presence of ICE or other federal agents at voting sites would be straightforwardly illegal. That doesn’t mean dismissing the tangible fears Black and Brown voters may have. Instead, we can reassure voters by highlighting election workers' preparations, encouraging voters to cast their ballots with their neighbors (as millions of Americans have already done), and emphasizing the steps voting rights advocates are taking to protect access to the ballot.

While the fears of ICE feel unique to 2026, we have been down a similar road in the past. In 2022, there was extensive media coverage of a handful of armed people in tactical gear who showed up at voting drop boxes in Maricopa County, AZ. As courts later confirmed, this was undoubtedly an illegal situation that should never have happened. Although it was isolated to two drop boxes in a county larger than Connecticut, the incident received widespread coverage throughout Arizona and nationwide, and spread quickly on social media. Coverage of important incidents like this should include the key context that lets voters know they can still vote safely.

The media is powerful, and its job is so important. In 1965, the media coverage of Selma’s Bloody Sunday allowed the whole country to see the reality of voter suppression, generating outrage in communities beyond those directly affected by it. Eight days after images from Selma aired on live broadcasts and appeared on the front pages of newspapers, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to a joint session of Congress, urging them to pass the Voting Rights Act.

The job of the media ecosystem—whether print journalists, TV pundits, or content creators on TikTok—is to make sure the American people know the truth. As we approach Election Day, that includes the reality that threats of election interference are desperate moves doomed to fail.

We cannot treat threats to deploy federal officers at polling places, efforts to restrict mail-in voting, or refusals to certify lawful election results as ordinary legal debates. We must call them out as attempts to control our elections that we, the American people, will not tolerate. This is how we instill confidence in the election and in our democracy.

After all the rhetoric undermining elections from the White House, it’s understandable that voters may fear the worst-case scenarios. Those steering the public conversation should remember the power of their work to dispel those fears with the truth.

The framers of the Constitution considered the role of the press important enough to list it explicitly in the First Amendment. Two hundred and fifty years after our founding, the media is as critical as ever in safeguarding our democracy.

At 80, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pulled off an extraordinary political victory. After losing the first round to Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, by 47 percent to 45 percent, Lula defied the odds to secure a stunning second-round victory, with 51.8 percent of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 48.2 percent.

His triumph confounded every pre-election poll and crowned a dramatic campaign revival that few had anticipated.

Lula’s victory in Latin America’s largest country does more than halt the far right’s return to power in Brazil. It breaks a succession of right-wing electoral victories across the region and deals a major blow to United States President Donald Trump’s increasingly interventionist agenda in the Western Hemisphere.

When Bolsonaro unexpectedly defeated Lula in the first round, the result sent shockwaves across Brazil and beyond. For the government, the defeat was particularly startling given its strong socioeconomic record. What followed was an extraordinary three-week political mobilisation that transformed the sluggish first-round campaign of Lula’s Workers’ Party into an existential confrontation over the future of democracy and sovereignty in Brazil.

The economic record was hardly that of a government heading for defeat. Brazil’s economy grew by a cumulative 9.2 percent between 2023 and 2025, compared with an average of just 5.6 percent among its South American neighbours. Unemployment fell from 9.3 percent in 2022 to a historic low of 5.4 percent in 2026.

Brazil also exited the United Nations Hunger Map in 2025, after having returned to it under the Bolsonaro senior administration. In the Amazon, deforestation fell to its lowest level in decades, a sharp reversal of the trend under his predecessor.

Not everything has been rosy under the Lula administration. Millions of Brazilians have remained trapped in credit-card debt, struggling with extremely high interest rates, while an explosion of online gambling has devastated the livelihoods of families. The run-off result sent a clear signal that there was social discontent.

Lula responded with unusually bold measures: a sweeping debt-relief initiative and restrictions on online betting, as well as expanded social benefits, fuel subsidies, and the transition from a six-day to a five-day working week. These policies sought to reconnect the government’s macroeconomic achievements with the everyday economic anxieties of Brazilian voters.

Bolsonaro offered a radically different vision for Brazil: sweeping spending cuts, privatisations, lower taxes and, above all, an iron-fisted response to crime and insecurity. His proposals included building five maximum-security prisons modelled on El Salvador’s notorious penitentiary system and authorising lethal force against heavily armed criminals.

Bolsonaro also pledged to pardon his father, sentenced to 27 years for plotting to overturn the 2022 election, and to grant clemency to those convicted over the January 8, 2023 assault on Brazil’s democratic institutions. For his supporters, this represented an opportunity to reverse what they considered judicial persecution. For his opponents, it threatened to rehabilitate the attempted coup and undermine judicial independence.

Lula’s campaign came back re-energised, with many young Brazilians mobilising at the grassroots level. The campaign was able to overcome even algorithmic bias by social media giants like Meta, which favoured Bolsonaro.

Ultimately, the election became a battle not only over Brazil’s democracy but also its sovereignty. Trump’s administration has intervened conspicuously in Brazilian politics throughout Lula’s term, imposing punitive tariffs, sanctioning a Supreme Court justice involved in Jair Bolsonaro’s prosecution and openly embracing his son’s candidacy.

In May, Trump received Flavio Bolsonaro in the Oval Office. Two days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Brazil’s two largest crime organisations as foreign terrorist organisations, a measure Flavio had publicly requested.

These designations carry implications extending far beyond electoral politics. They potentially open the door to US military operations on Brazilian territory under Washington’s expanding war on so-called “narcoterrorism”. The world saw how one such foreign terrorist designation enabled the US to intervene militarily in Venezuela and abduct its sitting president.

Whereas Trump seeks to draw Latin America’s largest country into Washington’s expanding system of hemispheric military dominance, Lula has defended Brazil’s strategic autonomy, insisting that cooperation against organised crime must respect national sovereignty.

He framed the election as a choice between a sovereign Brazil charting its own course and one subordinated to Washington’s geopolitical agenda. Sunday’s election result shows that the Brazilian people have made their choice.

Importantly, Lula’s victory may mark a turning point in Latin America’s rightward shift. Since Trump’s return to the White House, the right has scored a string of electoral victories in Honduras, Chile, and Bolivia, among others. But Lula’s re-election suggests that its momentum may be faltering.

The result comes just ahead of the US midterms and could deliver a significant setback to the strength of Trump’s leadership in the Americas. In Argentina, President Javier Milei — who regularly attacks Lula and threw all his weight behind Bolsonaro — has been sliding in the polls ahead of next year’s presidential election. In Chile, President Jose Antonio Kast has suffered an even more precipitous collapse in public support.

Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, for her part, has likely breathed a sigh of relief. A Lula defeat would have left her increasingly isolated in a region gravitating towards Mexico’s northern neighbour. Instead, Latin America’s two most populous countries and largest economies will remain firmly on the left for the foreseeable future.

It is too early to declare the region’s rightward turn over. But Lula’s victory raises the possibility that the wave has already crested. Brazil will not be joining Trump’s Shield of the Americas, and while the “Donroe Doctrine” remains a threat, its moment of greatest ascendancy may already be behind it.

Lula’s victory is a vindication of a lifetime spent fighting for society’s most marginalized and disenfranchised. And its significance extends far beyond Brazil’s borders. For defenders of democracy, multilateralism, international law, environmental protection and the sovereignty of the Global South, it sends a powerful message: the far right’s advance is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Not in Brazil. Not anywhere.

The Michigan Senate race between the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, and his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, is this year’s most important election.

It’s significant, on a number of levels, not the least of which is that El-Sayed is an Arab American Muslim of Egyptian descent. Prior to this, we’ve had four Arab Americans elected to the US Senate—former Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME), James Abourezk (D-SD), James Abdnor (R-SD), and John Sununu (R-NH)—none of them Muslim.

If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim in the Senate. This is a breakthrough that hasn’t been lost on Republicans and President Trump, who have made a determined effort to exploit it at every turn. They’ve done TV ads alleging that El-Sayed’s mother was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s. The problem with this charge is that El-Sayed’s parents separated when he was three; she moved back to Egypt and he grew up with his father in Michigan. But when using slanderous attacks to tarnish a candidate is the goal, facts don’t matter. And so, the GOP has persisted in spreading the Muslim Brotherhood lie on social media and by sending paid hecklers to El-Sayed’s campaign events pestering him with questions and comments like: “Will you denounce the Muslim Brotherhood?” A recent exchange of this sort backfired on the Republican instigators.

At a town hall when a young man asked whether El-Sayed would denounce the group, El-Sayed shot back, “Yes, absolutely,” and then pivoted by asking the questioner, “Why are you asking me this?” wanting to know whether it was because of his name and how he prayed. He then made clear that the document to which he would take an oath was the US Constitution and smartly compared the attacks against his religion with those leveled against President Kennedy—that Kennedy would be more loyal to the Catholic Pope than to the Constitution. El-Sayed concluded noting that he wasn’t running to be a Muslim senator, but a senator who happened to be a Muslim.

That exchange went viral on social media, drawing more than 50 million viewers the first night. The next day it was revealed that the heckler was a former staffer for a very conservative anti-Muslim Senator. He had been hired by a group that had received a very substantial contract to hire hecklers to disrupt El-Sayed events.

This brings into focus another reason why this election is so important: the role of dark money in American politics. Dark money refers to money raised by “super PACs” and independent expenditure funds that are not required to report donors before elections. This has allowed billionaires and special interest groups to amass large sums and spend them to defame candidates who oppose their agendas. Increasingly, these dark money sources are raising and spending more on campaigns than the candidates raise for themselves.

In the primary, El-Sayed was confronted by dark money expenditures of $70 million ($31 million from pro-Israel groups), much of it on negative attacks against him. Despite being outspent by a margin of 11 to 1, El-Sayed won. In the general election, it is estimated that another $100 million in dark money will be spent against him. If he wins, it will demonstrate the limits of dark money and help advance the argument that dark money should be banned because of its corrosive role in our democracy.

From the beginning of his campaign, El-Sayed has been a clear and consistent critic of US support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. This was the main reason why so much pro-Israel super PAC money was spent to defeat him. His Democratic primary opponent made support for Israel central to her campaign, at one point emotionally noting how much she loved and would always stand by Israel. Pro-Israel Jewish organizations denounced El-Sayed and did their best to tarnish him, labeling him antisemitic. This succeeded in costing El-Sayed some support from Jewish American Democratic voters. In spite of this attrition, he won the primary, with one pre-election survey saying he had nevertheless retained the support of a bloc of progressive Jewish voters.

Now in the general, El-Sayed is still being confronted by the same attacks and an organized effort among these same pro-Israel groups who are pledging to vote for his opponent. El-Sayed has made it clear that instead of spending billions to buy bombs to kill Palestinians, America’s wealth ought to go to build better schools, provide health care, and provide for people’s needs here at home. While this was once a taboo topic, it has resonated with Democrats and independent voters. This, in itself, is a breakthrough.

Finally, an El-Sayed victory will succeed in advancing a progressive agenda. Despite being attacked as a socialist, he maintains that he is a supporter of capitalism who wants to see it work to meet the needs of people. He makes this point with a mantra he uses to begin his rallies: “Money out of politics, money in your pockets, Medicare for all.” His arguments are simple: It shouldn’t be easier for a billionaire to make another billion than it is for a family to be lifted out of poverty. Health care should be seen as a human right for all, not a privilege that can only be afforded by some. And instead of spending billions for wars, we need to invest in schools and the quality of life here at home.

These are the challenges El-Sayed presents to our politics. If he wins, he will have succeeded in shattering taboos and raising issues that will have a lasting impact. And even if, God forbid, he loses, our politics will never be the same. On so many levels, this is a historic, transformative campaign.

For almost two months, an Air Force officer has been sitting alone in a cell, 24 hours a day. When they let him out to eat or exercise, he’s still alone, according to his attorney.

His name is Major Jason Watson. He hasn’t been convicted of anything. Under military law he is presumed innocent, yet he’s still in that cell.

I know something about solitary confinement. I also know what it feels like when a government would rather silence you than answer for its transgressions. That’s why I can’t stay quiet about Major Watson. And it’s why I think we need to talk about the kind of courage this country says it admires, right up until someone actually shows it.

What Major Watson Did

On July 1, Major Watson walked up the House steps of the US Capitol in uniform and stood there holding a sign that read “Impeach. Convict. Remove.” He was calling for the removal of President Trump and Vice President Vance. Capitol Police arrested him. The D.C. charges were dropped, but he was taken from the courthouse straight into Air Force custody and restricted to base. In August he went on CNN and said it again. The next day, the Air Force ordered him into pretrial confinement.

He now faces ten charges under three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ): three under Article 88 for allegedly using “contemptuous words” against the president, five under Article 92 for failing to obey orders or regulations, and two under Article 133 for “conduct unbecoming an officer,” as his lawyers confirmed in a public statement.

I’m not here to argue about uniform regulations. What bothers me, and what should bother anyone paying attention, is what the Article 88 charges and that solitary cell tell us about how power handles real dissent.

Major Watson has shown a steady, stubborn courage that’s rare anywhere, and rarer still when your career and freedom are on the line.

Watson didn’t hide behind a fake name. He didn’t retain or leak anything classified. He put his own name and face on what he believed, in public, knowing what it would cost.

Before he took that stand, he asked himself, “What’s the highest price that I’m willing to pay?” His answer was, more or less, whatever it takes. That’s what bravery looks like. You’re still afraid. You go anyway, knowing hell is coming.

Punished Before He Is Tried

Here is what troubles me most. The military is punishing Major Watson while claiming to follow the very rules that forbid it. Article 13 of the UCMJ says no one being held for trial may be punished, and that pretrial confinement may be no “more rigorous than the circumstances require to insure his presence.” The idea is straight-forward. Someone waiting for a court-martial is presumed innocent, and the military isn’t allowed to treat him as guilty.

Locking a person alone in a cell for months is punishment by any ordinary meaning of the word. Watson’s attorney has said solitary is usually reserved for people who are violent or disobedient, and even then only for a few days or a week. At Watson’s Article 32 hearing, the hearing officer said the isolation was required because he can’t be housed with civilian inmates.

Even if you accept that explanation, it doesn’t undo what isolation does to a person’s mind. And it doesn’t answer the bigger question: why is a peaceful man whose only “offense” was speaking locked up at all? You can’t even argue that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, because officially it isn’t punishment. When the people offended by your words also get to decide what counts as a crime, and what counts as punishment, the law stops being fair or predictable.

I can tell you from experience that solitary is built to grind you down. I was thrown into solitary in prison because I wouldn’t let a guard on a power trip treat me as anything less than a human being. My punishment for standing up for my dignity was a cell less than half the size of my usual cage. No window. No sunlight. Nothing to remind me there was a world outside. No contact with anyone, including my family, who went days without hearing from me and had no idea what was happening.

That kind of isolation isn’t about safety or order or paperwork. It’s about breaking someone, and about sending a message to everyone else. Major Watson stood up against an administration he believes is trampling the Constitution. For that act of conscience, they’re trying to make him disappear.

Article 88 and the Espionage Act

Article 88 makes it a crime for a commissioned officer to use “contemptuous words” against the president, the vice president, Congress, and certain other officials. It is almost never used. A CNN review found only two convictions under it since the modern military code took effect in 1950.

The military’s own Manual for Courts-Martial, as one legal analysis explains, says that criticism of an official in the course of political discussion, even strongly worded criticism, shouldn’t be charged under this article unless it is personally contemptuous. Watson put it simply at his hearing: “discomfort is not contempt.”

For that act of conscience, they’re trying to make him disappear.

How the article gets used is concerning. In 2021, Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller posted videos in uniform demanding accountability from senior leaders over the Afghanistan withdrawal, at one point saying he felt “contempt” for them. He was charged under Article 88 too. With prominent supporters cheering him on, his case went to a special court-martial, the lower-level forum. He spent nine days in the brig, pleaded guilty, and walked away with a letter of reprimand and a $5,000 forfeiture of pay. Watson’s lawyers summed up the problem: “The law will not make the same word a virtue in one officer’s mouth and a felony in another’s.”

I recognize this double standard because I’ve lived it. The Espionage Act of 1917 was written to catch spies. Today it’s regularly used against whistleblowers who tell the public what the government would rather keep quiet, and defendants usually aren’t allowed to argue that their disclosures served the public interest. Groups like PEN America, the ACLU, and Human Rights Watch have warned for years that laws this broad invite selective prosecution. The cases of John Kiriakou, Reality Winner, and Thomas Drake show those warnings were right.

Look at Courtney Williams, who worked in a support role for Delta Force at Fort Bragg from 2010 to 2016. She talked to an investigative reporter about sexual harassment and discrimination inside the unit. In April, the FBI arrested her, and she now faces four Espionage Act counts, each carrying up to ten years. Prosecutors say some of what she shared was classified. The reporter she spoke with calls the case retaliation against a whistleblower. Either way, plenty of former special operators talk openly about their units on popular podcasts without ending up in handcuffs.

Article 88 and the Espionage Act are different laws, but they end up doing the same job. They’re old, broad nets that can be thrown over anyone who speaks uncomfortable truths about those in power. Whether the target is a whistleblower or an outspoken officer, the result is silence. And every time we let these tools get dusted off, we make it easier to use them on the next person.

The Oath Wasn’t to a Person

Every public servant, civilian or military, swears to support and defend the Constitution. None of them swears loyalty to a president, a party, or a movement.

There’s a difference between the enlisted and officer oaths worth knowing. Enlisted members promise to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me.” Officers don’t make that promise. Under the officer’s oath, they swear to support and defend the Constitution and to “well and faithfully discharge the duties” of their office. That difference, as the Marine Corps itself explains, is deliberate. An officer’s final loyalty belongs to the Constitution and the rule of law, not to whoever is sitting in the Oval Office.

Watson has said his oath is exactly why he went to those Capitol steps, and that he acted out of duty, not partisanship. His point is that no leader is above the law. Yet “support and defend the Constitution” keeps getting bent into a demand for personal loyalty. People who stand on principle end up in solitary. People who look the other way get promoted.

Service and Speech

I have deep respect for the military and its traditions. The military can’t be anyone’s political tool, and service members have to follow lawful orders. The rules that keep uniforms out of partisan politics exist for good reason: they keep the military under civilian control and out of the hands of any one side. Those rules matter.

But this is about proportion. Joining the military doesn’t mean giving up your basic rights. Courts have long held that service members keep some free-speech protection, even if it is narrower than a civilian’s, as long as their speech doesn’t seriously threaten discipline or the mission.

So it’s fair to ask where the line really is. Does one peaceful protest justify criminal charges and months in solitary? A military confident enough to handle criticism from within its own ranks is stronger than one that keeps people in line through fear.

“I Was Only Following Orders”

We settled the question of blind obedience after World War II. At Nuremberg, the world rejected “just following orders” as an excuse. The principle that came out of those trials says acting on orders doesn’t relieve you of responsibility “provided a moral choice was in fact possible.” Our own military law requires service members to obey lawful orders, not unlawful ones.

We rightly honor people like Hugh Thompson, the Army helicopter pilot who landed his aircraft between American soldiers and fleeing Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968. He was treated as an outcast for years. The Army didn’t award him the Soldier’s Medal until 1998, thirty years later. We can’t keep telling every generation of service members that they have a duty to refuse wrongdoing, then crush the ones who actually say so out loud.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about this from a Birmingham jail cell. We have a duty to obey just laws, he said, and an equal duty to disobey unjust ones. But “one who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

That’s the tradition Major Watson acted in. He didn’t hide. He stood in the open, told his superiors where he stood, and accepted the consequences. If the right of conscience doesn’t belong to every citizen, it doesn’t really belong to anyone. And a country where no one can tell the powerful the truth isn’t a free country.

What We Owe Him

Major Watson has shown a steady, stubborn courage that’s rare anywhere, and rarer still when your career and freedom are on the line. He didn’t hide behind technicalities or double-talk. He put everything on the line for the principles he swore to uphold.

We owe him our voices, for his sake and for our own. When the government turns its full weight against someone who takes his oath seriously, we can’t just wait for politicians or courts to fix it. It takes ordinary people, standing together, to demand fairness, shine a light into those cells, and make sure the people who tell the truth don’t have to stand alone.

I encourage everyone to show support for Major Watson by spreading the word about his courage and how he is being persecuted for standing up for truth. You can also help by sending letters of support to Major Watson while he is being confined to the following address:

Jason P. Watson
Calvert County Detention Center
P.O. Box 9
Barstow, MD 20610

The US Senate is considering a bill to ease the environmental permitting of infrastructure projects. It’s a blatant giveaway to the fossil fuel and data center industries that would stifle input from the communities most impacted by their expansion.

Bill proponents claim it will ease the buildout of renewable energy. However, peer reviewed studies have shown that most renewable energy projects do not face significant permitting delays, and that permitting delays under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are mostly attributable to staff shortages and communication delays between project developers and permitting agencies—not the stringency of the permitting process itself.

If bill proponents really wanted to expand renewable energy, they would focus on reversing the disastrous repeal of wind and solar tax credits in last year’s budget bill, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” Under that law, there are no remaining federal tax credits for households to put solar panels on their homes, stifling the growth of distributed solar energy. And most utility-scale solar or wind projects that commenced construction after July 4, 2026 will also be ineligible for tax credits.

This bill strips the public of their right to have a say in what gets built in their communities, in whose interest, and at what cost to human rights, air and water quality, public health, and culturally important places.

Instead, the permitting bill limits the power of communities and state, local, and tribal governments to challenge fossil fuel and data center projects, stacking the deck in favor of project developers.

For example, Section 1202 of the bill limits the authority states and tribes currently have under the Clean Water Act to certify federally permitted projects as compliant with their own water quality standards. This would prevent states and tribes from requiring stronger standards than the federal government, allowing projects that they determine will harm water quality to go forward.

Additionally, the “project certainty” provisions in Sections 1401 through 1403 of the bill grant project developers the right to sue the government for “disparate treatment” if their project is denied a permit when similar projects have been approved in the past. This would effectively bar a future administration from denying permits for polluting infrastructure if this one greenlights them.

A Dream Bill for Data Center Developers and Fossil Fuel Companies

The proliferation of data centers is leading to a boom in fracked gas power generation, driving up greenhouse gas emissions and undoing progress in making the electric grid fossil fuel free. This is a giant step backwards happening at the worst possible time, with the Antarctic ice sheet collapsing, and drought and glacier loss threatening the world’s freshwater supply.

Backup diesel and gas turbine generators at data centers also emit toxic air pollutants such as particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, which are responsible for cancer, asthma and other respiratory diseases, and cardiovascular disease.

While families struggle with the high cost of living, massive (and growing) energy consumption by data centers is driving up utility bills for regular people. The permitting bill purports to address this problem by requiring data center developers to pay for the added cost of transmission to meet their demand, but that’s only one of the ways in which data centers impact utility bills. Increased demand for fracked gas from data centers is also driving up natural gas prices, and consequently household electricity and gas bills.

Direct water consumption by data centers for cooling servers, and indirect water consumption for fracked gas power generation to supply data centers, pose an additional threat to water availability in already water-stressed communities.

In spite of these serious concerns, the bill makes it harder for communities to use federal law to challenge proposals for data centers or their ancillary fossil fuel infrastructure (such as fracked gas pipelines and power plants).

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that fossil fuel infrastructure should not be built today, period. Bill proponents’ assumption that the increased buildout of renewable energy and transmission lines from deregulating permitting would more than make up for the simultaneous increase in fossil fuels is at odds with peer-reviewed science.

Easing permitting of fossil fuel infrastructure is discriminatory and contrary to environmental justice. Our environmental permitting system already allows for rampant race and class discrimination in the siting of polluting facilities. This racist bill will lock in protections for polluting corporations while depriving historically marginalized communities of even the limited rights they have today.

Speeding up infrastructure permitting will not lower energy bills either, contrary to bill proponents’ claims. It might increase the cost of living instead. In addition to data centers driving up demand for natural gas, natural gas prices could also rise if more liquid natural gas (LNG) is exported. Under the bill, LNG exports will get a boost from easier permitting of LNG terminals.

Despite greenlighting more fossil fuel infrastructure, proponents claim that the bill will reduce overall emissions. But that claim is based on seriously flawed modeling.

For one example, the models use the EPA estimates for leakage of methane, a short-lived but potent climate pollutant from oil and gas production, when accounting for the emissions impact of more fossil fuel infrastructure. But a number of independent studies have shown that the EPA seriously underestimates methane leakage.

For another, the models conveniently ignore emissions from US fossil fuel exports, because the emissions from burning the fuels occur in a different country. Ignoring emissions from exports is a bad faith shell game.

Assault on Democracy

This bill strips the public of their right to have a say in what gets built in their communities, in whose interest, and at what cost to human rights, air and water quality, public health, and culturally important places.

This is an end-run around democracy. Yes, bad faith actors sometimes misuse procedural protections for the wrong reasons, delaying or blocking good projects based on frivolous objections. But using that as a pretext to limit communities’ ability to have any say in projects institutionalizes the subordination of community rights to corporate interests.

That’s exactly why powerful industry groups such as the American Petroleum Institute (API) have come out in support of this bill. Senators who claim to care about addressing climate change should recognize that if they’re on the same side as API, they’re on the wrong side of the climate fight.

Progressive candidates should be winning landslide victories over corporatist Republicans and replacing corporate Democrats on the merits of an authentic people-first agenda and legislation that makes big corporations and their government toadies our servants, not our masters. If progressive candidates fail to deliver, they, too, should be replaced.

Voters, have a civic duty beyond casting a ballot or staying home in despair to impress upon the candidates what must be done—and how to meet the long-neglected necessities of the citizenry, especially the families and children and workers, so long deprived of overdue changes and reforms. For example, a majority or supermajority view the following as immediate “kitchen-table” needs.

1. “Affordability” is about more than high prices and interest rates. It is also about too many people having too little income and government doing too little to crack down on corporate crooks who drain consumers’ hard-earned dollars and savings in both Red and Blue States.

Passage of legislation to raise the minimum wage from a frozen federal $7.25 per hour to a living wage, will give tens of millions of workers a long-overdue raise.

2. Cracking down on the fleecing, cheating, and outright theft from consumers and workers can come from “law and order” criminal law enforcement and civil actions by the wrongfully injured plaintiffs. This enforcement has the backing of over 85% of the people who despise the double standard of justice, which they see every day.

3. Reverse the huge tax cuts, escapes, and evasions by large corporations and the super-wealthy like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg (see the October 2026 Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy report: After Two Rounds of Trump Tax Cuts, Corporate America Paid Less Than Ever in 2025) to the levels of the prosperous Nineteen Sixties. End huge corporate welfare outlays for the giant corporate freeloaders paid for by taxpayers and the massive billing fraud paid by patients and shoppers.

These restorations and prosecutions, supported by huge majorities of left-right voters, will more than pay for full Medicare for all, everybody in, nobody out, a real child tax credit, child care, maternal and family sick leave, and lots of public infrastructure projects, which will create good jobs in communities everywhere.

Don’t we need more of the money already extracted from taxpayers sent back home? How about the runaway, bloated, unaudited military budget and its giant corporate monopolistic military contractors like Lockheed Martin and its F-22 budget buster, or General Dynamics, the sole endless builder of the doomsday Trident submarines? Multiple nuclear warheads from only one of these subs can destroy 200 cities in the world within an hour. How many have Trump, Biden, and Obama, commissioned?

Read President Eisenhower’s Cross of Iron speech to newspaper editors in April 1953 to see how many schools, hospitals, bridges, etc. can be built by reducing gigantic military waste and corporate/Empire extravaganzas. (See speech.)

How about this? Who’s talking about raising Social Security benefits, unchanged since 1971, by raising the individual income cap, now $184,000 for Social Security taxes? Trillionaire Musk, the bosses of the subsidized oil and gas giants, the big bankers and health insurance giants, and the executives of the giant hospital chains, who make at least two million a month, paid Social Security taxes on only the first $184,000 of their income. In 2022, two hundred Democrats supported Congressman John Larson’s bill, the Social Security 2100 Act (H.R. 9519), which would expand benefits and strengthen the program’s finances by requiring higher-income Americans to contribute more.

Unfortunately, corporatist Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked a vote on the House floor on a measure overwhelmingly supported by about 60 million retirees. The Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 election to the Republicans in part due to Pelosi’s terrible obstruction.

Working people don’t recognize that each one of them who sends tax dollars to Washington every year sends more dollars than half the giant companies who have made enormous untaxed profits in the US and pay zero federal income taxes! The average taxes paid by corporations are just barely above 10%. Compare that to working people’s tax payments. (See, the ITEP report mentioned above.)

There are so many ways to landslide the corporatist candidates from both Parties. See my recent column: Winning Strategies for Progressive Candidates in the Final Stretch, the online report Crushing the GOP, or my later book “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People,” pages 219-232.

There are simple, clearly reasoned and just changes and transformations in these works. You can add public funding of public elections, which will stop corporate lobbyists from raiding Congress and the US Treasury with their cash registers politics. Other ideas and strategies can be found in my column at Nader.org, radio/podcasts (ralphnaderradiohour.com), interviews with the media, public letters, and many tweets. Other authors have put forward similar advances.

Although there has been very little disagreement with how justice, fairness, economic production and life-saving proposals can save and improve lives, almost none of them have been adopted by these campaigners.

WHY?

Here’s my take:

1. Campaigns get into routines and ruts that impede new thinking, readjustments, or re-directions by the candidates, regardless of Party.
2. Campaign staffers become possessive and turf-minded and reject the truism that “none of us are as smart as all of us.”
3. Candidates contract out too much of their campaigns to corporate-conflicted consultants who take over campaigns, become control freaks, and exclude outside inputs, such as from progressive civic groups and labor unions. (See my column: Midterm Elections Too Close: Dems Need to Fire Their Corporate-Conflicted Political Consultants)
4. Candidates are indentured to the strings-attached commercial campaign donors and corporate PACs. This is a big inhibition, even though it may cost candidates votes as the price of these corrupting dollars register with the electorate.
5. Frenzied campaigning, especially in the last few weeks before election day, freezes thinking. An accelerating schedule of repetitive meetings and events exhaust the candidate, while stale messaging bores the media—just when that messaging most needs reworking.
6. Gross inaccessibility. Try getting through to any campaigns. Many have no telephone numbers or street-level campaign headquarters. Just email addresses, P.O. boxes, or websites for receiving donations. Even worse—try getting through to either Parties’ campaign committees, such as the Democratic or Republican National Committee, to discuss policies, programs, strategies, and ways to clean up elections and empower the people.

Alas, the days are dwindling to November 3, 2026, as are many opportunities to elect enough determined lawmakers who will stop the lawless, lying, corrupt, cruel, violent, war-making, people-exploiting, corporatist Tyrant Trump and his worsening dictatorship over our Constitution and Republic for which it stands.

It is only going to get much worse and war-like with Trump in the next two years unless he is impeached and removed from office (“You’re Fired!”) or induced to resign and install a Trump rubber stamp J.D. Vance presidency, letting Trump play golf at his Mar-a-Lago retirement compound. See my October 2, 2026 column titled: What Could Persuade Trump to Resign Should Democrats Win Congress?).

With soaring health care costs and a plunge in coverage rates, there is growing interest in Medicare for All. Polls show that a large majority of the public now favors a universal Medicare system, with even a substantial share of Republicans now backing it.

A universal Medicare system has a huge amount to recommend it. Of course, the main point is to ensure that people can get the health care that they need, but it also eliminates a vast amount of waste in the national health care system.

In addition to the $300 billion a year that we spend directly on operating the nation’s health insurance system, another $1.6 trillion is spent on administrative costs running our health care system by providers like hospitals and doctors’ offices, according to analysis by David Himmelstein, Terry Campbell, and Steffie Woolhandler. These additional costs are all the office personnel and various navigators involved in assisting patients in dealing with insurers. They found that in the United States we spend roughly 31 percent of each dollar in health care spending on administrative costs, whereas under Canada’s universal Medicare system, the cost is just 16 percent of spending.

The difference would come to around $900 billion a year, or $6,700 per household. Even that may be an understatement. Even if the United States spent the same share of health care costs on insurers as Canada, it would still be spending far more per person on these costs, because our expenditures on drugs, medical equipment, and doctors are close to twice as high. In short, there is a huge amount to be saved by having a universal Medicare system.

But the other part of this picture is also enormously important. Much, perhaps most, of the insurance system is designed to keep people from getting care. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s just how insurers work. They make money by not paying claims.

Sometimes this takes the form of nickel-and-diming people on claims, adding deductibles that may not be appropriate, or raising co-pays as high as possible. But it often means making it difficult for people to get access to expensive drugs or medical equipment or high-priced medical tests. Given the current structure of these industries, that may actually be desirable.

To be specific, suppose a doctor recommends a new cancer drug with a price tag of $100,000 a year, when it’s possible that an older generic drug, available at 1-2 percent of this price, could be just as good. Wouldn’t we want someone to be asking questions before making such a large commitment of public money?

The same story applies to tests like an MRI. Hospitals can charge several thousand dollars for an MRI. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to ask if an X-Ray for a couple hundred dollars is just as good?

But drugs, medical equipment, and medical tests don’t actually have to cost huge amounts of money. They are expensive because the government grants the pharmaceutical industry and the medical equipment industry patent monopolies.

Without these government-granted monopolies, both drugs and medical equipment would be cheap. It’s rare that a drug is expensive to manufacture and distribute. In a free market, the vast majority of drugs would sell for $20 or $30 a prescription, and many for less. We currently are spending around $750 billion a year on prescription drugs and other pharmaceutical products. That would likely fall to around $150 billion in a free market, for savings of close to $600 billion, or $4,500 per household.

The cost of medical tests and medical equipment would have a similar plunge. In that world, there would be little reason to keep a doctor from prescribing the drug they considered best for their patient, or the tests likely to produce the most accurate diagnosis. The difference in price between newly developed drugs and old generics would usually be negligible, as would the savings from using an X-Ray as opposed to the latest MRI.

This is just the Econ 101 principle that we maximize economic efficiency when items are available at their marginal cost. As the econ textbook tells us, the government-granted patent monopoly both raises prices and creates an enormous incentive for corruption (see “opioid crisis”).

It is necessary to pay for the research and development process that leads to new drugs and medical equipment, but this is not an impossible lift. We just pay for the research upfront. We already do this to the tune of more than $50 billion a year through the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies.

This sum would have to be tripled or quadrupled to make up for the loss of patent-supported research, but there is no reason to think that paying for research with direct public funding would be any less effective than with government-granted patent monopolies. In addition to eliminating much spending on pointless me-too drugs, there would also be the advantage that all research can be fully open. That means that instead of squirreling results away to be the first to secure a patent monopoly, researchers would be promptly sharing results (that would be a condition of funding) so that others could quickly benefit from successes and be warned away from dead ends.

I recently reviewed analyses of the work behind the development of four breakthrough drugs or treatments. In all four cases, all the key breakthroughs were the results of research funded by either the government or private charities. The pharmaceutical industry only came in to secure patent monopolies and do late-stage testing. The government can pick up the tab for the late-stage testing, which is not high science. And we don’t need the patent monopolies when the research is already paid for.

Replacing the system of patent-supported research with public funding will be a big undertaking and will face massive political opposition. The pharmaceutical industry would be prepared to spend billions to defeat a change to a system that has earned it trillions of dollars over the last decade. But this is a change that is a necessary part of moving to a healthcare system that provides quality healthcare to all at a reasonable price.

There will be other issues in moving to Medicare for All. We need to get out doctors’ pay (primarily specialists) more in line with the rest of the world. They currently get more than twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries. And we will have to pace the transition; doing it overnight is likely to be a disaster. But it is long past time we start to go down this road.

I’m the Mayor of Lochbuie, Colorado, and my residents are worried about our water supply. So we passed a five-year moratorium on AI data centers. Your town can, too.

Like many other parts of the country, our state is facing a serious water-supply problem. Colorado’s water supply depends heavily on mountain snowpack, and our Colorado River system has been overburdened for years. This problem is exacerbated by reduced reservoir levels, population growth, and irrigation-intensive agriculture.

At the same time, climate change has led to record heat and droughts.

Our small town reflects communities across the country. According to a recent Gallup poll, over 70% of Americans oppose data centers in their local areas.

A single large-scale data center, depending on location and available resources, can use as much water as our entire town uses. Meanwhile data center energy use makes climate change worse, further endangering our shared future. Data center emissions are projected to skyrocket by 2035.

Water is a finite resource and can’t always replenish fast enough to meet growing demand. We don’t want hyperscale data centers coming into our town and overburdening our already stressed water resources—and polluting our air and groundwater while they’re at it.

Big data centers claim they bring jobs to communities. A closer look shows how flimsy these claims are. In reality, data centers create very few permanent jobs. Most data center jobs are temporary construction jobs, and most of those don’t go to local community members.

“I do want to see businesses in our community that create jobs, but I don’t see how a data center does that when it takes up so much land and produces so few jobs,” Shannon Donnelly, one of my constituents, told me. “We need a clear, evidence-based understanding of the costs and benefits before we make such big decisions that impact people’s lives.”

Shannon is not alone. I heard many comments like these at our town board meetings about water use, noise, and other pollution from data centers.

So I wrote up a proposal for a moratorium on AI data centers in Lochbuie. The ensuing public meeting drew more attendees than I had ever seen. They overwhelmingly supported a moratorium, and it passed easily.

What happened next reflects another troubling reality about how data centers are encroaching on unwilling communities: Brighton, which borders Lochbuie, announced a proposal for a data center there. A town boundary would not protect our water, air, animals, or residents.

“We’ll see the lights and hear the noise,” constituent Desirae Zima told me. “We’ll have to live with the traffic, the infrastructure demands, the industrial equipment, and the potential impacts to water and electricity resources. We will be the neighbors dealing with the impacts to our quality of life.”

Fortunately, opposition from Brighton residents was strong enough that the developer withdrew its application for the proposed data center and the city council voted to advance a one-year moratorium on any such construction. It awaits final approval.

Our small town reflects communities across the country. According to a recent Gallup poll, over 70% of Americans oppose data centers in their local areas. Nearly 500 cities, towns, and counties nationwide have enacted or are considering moratoria on data centers.

Congress and the federal government have so far refused to meaningfully regulate the data centers cropping up across the country. So for now, state and local measures like these represent the best tool to protect our communities.

Artificial Intelligence has not yet surpassed good old-fashioned human common sense.

Wars and riots, autocracies and teetering democracies, extreme poverty and rapacious wealth, environmental collapse—that's us. But do we have to be that way?

A grassroots movement thinks not. And its core vision has reached the top levels of academia and international governance. Various proposals have been put forward on how to get there but all agree on one thing: We have to stop growing.

In fact, the idea of infinite growth on a finite planet doesn't make sense to most people. Yet that's precisely the basis of most national economies today. It has been since the modern concept of the gross domestic product (GDP) was introduced as a measure of economic and, by extension, social well-being over 90 years ago. Since then, legions of economists, politicians, and their patrons in the world's leading capitalist countries have championed constant growth to justify the continuous extraction of resource wealth from predominantly impoverished countries and transforming it, with cheap labor, into products and services that make a tiny fraction of humanity obscenely rich, while leaving nearly half in poverty.

As one participant in the assembly said, "They want to build a data center but not give us any data on it."

Picture kids in a cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now picture Elon Musk. That's essentially it. Of course, there's also the fraction of us who live mostly in the Global North—not just the billionaires—who live in relative comfort for now: kids in school, roofs over our heads, food on the table, health insurance.

But none of us is going to escape the failed logic of infinite growth. The global resources-to-products conveyor belt also spews more and more carbon into the air, as the planet gets warmer and warmer and the future of our food and water supplies becomes less and less certain. With climate change raging down the pike at us and coastal sea levels rising, the neoliberal metaphor "a rising tide lifts all boats" has taken on new meaning.

The alternative?

Don't grow, at least not by building more things we don't really need. Grow socially, instead. With everyone in on it, from the kids in Congo to New England prep schoolers. That's what the degrowth movement is all about.

At a recent citizens' assembly on degrowth here in Gijón, an industrial town in northern Spain, a participant raised the issue of the regional government's support for building a giant data center in the community. His concerns are the same as those of most citizens in the US, according to recent polls, or in any other country in Europe: the enormous demands of such centers on local water and energy resources, the potential pollution associated with these, and the lack of public input in the decision-making.

On par with these worries was the question of the purpose for the data center itself: Who would actually benefit from it?

No one at the meeting bought the government's pitch that it will be the local workforce or economy as opposed to, overwhelmingly, transnational investors in digital commerce, social network companies, and the burgeoning AI and surveillance industries. Think Google, Amazon, and Meta. Think OpenAI and Palantir.

And think governments. Whether the democratic socialists in Spain or the plutocrats in the US, the playbook is remarkably similar: Make huge data centers seem essential to our modern lives, to our economic competitiveness—don't let the Chinese or Russians get a leg up!—and simultaneously cloak them in obscurity. Twist regulations to allow them to dodge normal public scrutiny, as is being done in at least one community in Spain and is being attempted by the Trump Environmental Protection Agency.

As one participant in the assembly said, "They want to build a data center but not give us any data on it."

The sum of these changes would effectively end neocolonialism, by allowing poor countries to obtain just compensation for their mineral riches and not be compelled to extract them for slave wages.

Since its social and intellectual rejuvenation in France earlier this century, the degrowth movement—to break the world's addiction to GDP growth, along with the environmental ruin and deepening wealth gap it engenders—has been growing, particularly in Europe. There have been fits and starts,and the debate over exactly how to pull it off has been discursive. But momentum continues to build and, to date, thousands of academic papers and several books have been published on the topic, international conferences have been held, and grassroots organizations, like the one in Gijón, have sprung up.

Drawing on two decades of these debates—along with new research on poverty, climate, and capital—two landmark reports have been published this year, based on the consensuses of hundreds of economists, political and social scientists, and environmental experts, on not only the "what" and "why" of the degrowth imperative but the "how."

The Global Justice Report was published in June by the World Inequality Lab of the Paris School of Economics with over 40 contributors, including economist Thomas Piketty, author of the seminal Capital in the 21st Century (2014). It outlines a strategy of global transformations in labor, healthcare, education, taxation, and trade and investment institutions that are aimed at promoting pro-social global growth rather than material growth for "a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth, and power."

The United Nation's Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth, released in July, proposes similar targets, and the general strategies of the reports largely overlap. But The Roadmap, spearheaded by UN poverty expert Olivier de Shutter and hundreds of collaborators, is much more detailed on how it could be done. Their plan is to build on existing institutions and past regional successes in reducing poverty and improving labor conditions in various countries.

How would all this get paid for? At least initially, from taxes on corporations and the uber rich.

Among other measures, the reports propose substantially reduced work hours and a seismic shift away from certain manufacturing jobs to those with livable wages in education, healthcare, child and elderly care, and other social support infrastructure. Workers would be paid fairly and have a major role in company governance, on par with stockholders. Essentially, less things would be made and patterns of overconsumption—driven today by intensive marketing of intentionally short-lifetime products—would be reduced, but to the benefit of the consumer rather than stockholders.

To further address poverty, family care workers who are unpaid in today's economies would be fairly compensated. A livable allowance would be available for the unemployed, essentially eradicating poverty. Local and more sustainable agriculture would be fostered to promote food security and self-sufficiency in all countries rather than the socially and environmentally costly exportation of monocultures.

The sum of these changes would effectively end neocolonialism, by allowing poor countries to obtain just compensation for their mineral riches and not be compelled to extract them for slave wages. At the same time, they would lead to huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and rein in humanity from further exceeding the ecological boundaries for sustaining life on our finite planet.

How would all this get paid for? At least initially, from taxes on corporations and the uber rich. New global institutions or repurposed ones, like the existing World Bank or International Monetary Fund, would lend money for the various transition projects but with mandates for pro-social investments as opposed to pro-GDP-growth ones with austerity programs and permanent indebtedness. In the Global Justice Report plan, the new funding institutions would eventually be self-sustaining on their own bonds and investment portfolio and not require further input from wealth and income taxes.

Why would self-serving billionaires or the plutocracies they have strangleholds on get on board with this? They probably wouldn't. In fact, maybe even China, currently out-capitalizing the capitalists, wouldn't either.

The authors of the Global Justice Report anticipated this, so they modeled scenarios in which the countries that stand to benefit the most participate while others don't. It turns out that those poorer countries represent the great majority of humans on the planet, and their rich neighbors absolutely depend on their cheap natural resources and labor to be so rich. That's how neocolonialism works. So the authors predict that even if the transformations got off the ground without the rich, soon the latter would have no choice but to join the club.

Utopian? Sure. In fact, most people at the citizen's assembly here were pragmatic about their chances of moving the needle, but they were there to try. They're aware that utopias have a very practical, aspirational function if they move us in the right direction—that is, away from the precipice of dystopian alternatives.