On April 17, CODEPINK and the local University of Michigan community gathered to hold a vigil in honor of UM researcher Dr. Danhao Wan on the one-month anniversary of his death. According to reports, Dr. Wang died after jumping from an upper floor of the G.G. Brown Building on North Campus, shortly after being targeted and questioned by federal authorities.

Over 30 members of the local community attended the vigil, bringing candles and flowers. They joined in a traditional Chinese bowing ceremony. During the vigil, CODEPINK and US Peace Council member Bob McMurray spoke to the crowd: “Tonight, I want us to remember there is a Mom and Dad mourning the loss of their son; there are people here in the university research community feeling his absence every day; and we, as the human family, have lost a brother.”

For weeks, Dr. Wang’s death went uncovered by the media. By the time it hit the news, the Chinese Consulate in Chicago had already confirmed the incident as a suicide and demanded an investigation of the “unwarranted interrogations and harassment of Chinese students and scholars.”

This is not the first time a Chinese scholar has been targeted at the University of Michigan; it is part of a broader pattern of political discrimination. In the last year, five Chinese scholars have been accused of various crimes, detained for months on end, and ultimately deported after the quiet dismissal of their cases due to a lack of evidence.

When individuals like Dr. Wang are targeted, it is not only their livelihoods that are threatened, but the very purpose and meaning they have built their lives around.

This discrimination is not new. In 2018, the Trump administration launched the China Initiative, a deeply flawed and racially biased program that targeted Chinese and Chinese Americans for “suspected espionage.” More often than not, federal authorities targeted individuals with no evidence of wrongdoing—simply for their identity. As a result, a new climate of suspicion and fear took root across academia. Though few convictions were made, many Chinese scholars suffered permanent professional and personal harm. They began to self-censor, withdraw from collaborations, or leave the United States entirely. For them, the US was no longer safe.

Although the China Initiative was formally ended under the Biden administration due to widespread criticism of its racial bias, its underlying logic has not disappeared. Instead, it has evolved into a broader atmosphere of suspicion directed at Chinese scholars, particularly in fields tied to advanced technology and science. At the University of Michigan, this pattern is especially visible.

Take the case of Dr. Chengxuan Han, a Chinese PhD student who was arrested for mailing roundworms commonly used in biological research. In most academic contexts, such an error would result in a minor administrative penalty. Instead, she was jailed for months and subjected to a full criminal prosecution. This outcome was wildly disproportionate to the alleged offense and one that effectively ended her academic trajectory.

Another scholar, Dr. Yunqing Jian, was accused of "agricultural terrorism” for breaking protocol and shipping materials to the US without the proper paperwork. Renowned biologists refuted this claim, saying it was impossible to use Fusarium graminearum, the fungus Dr. Jian studied, as a bioterrorist weapon. In the world of research deadlines and red tape, scholars say it's typical to try to streamline research by acquiring your own materials, even if that means skipping some paperwork. Dr. Jian has spent years researching how to mitigate the harm caused to crops by Fusarium graminearum, which is native to North America. While she did break protocol, it is absurd to accuse her of weaponizing the fungus, especially without any evidence.

Similarly, the cases of UM scholars Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang demonstrate how ordinary research practices were reframed as criminal acts merely because of the identity of the scholars. Even though charges against them were dropped and the cases dismissed, the damage had already been done.

The three scholars had spent months in jail awaiting their trial. In a letter, Zhiyong Zhang spoke of his confusion over the situation:

I like the research atmosphere in the University. I like the people here. They are kind and polite. I am living a happy life here. However, unfortunately and apparently, some people don't like us. They want to connect us with politics. But what is politics? I didn't know what politics is when I was 13 years old, at which age I decided to study biology. Now I am also confused about what politics is. It's so abstract. We didn't hurt anyone, and we don't want to hurt anyone, either. We just want to do research and find something that can benefit humanity. That makes me feel my life is meaningful, although I can not make much money.

Zhang decided to study biology because his grandfather and father were both diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in their mid-30s: “I thought I could change to study neuroscience to cure the disease of my family and all the people who are suffering the pain from the disease… So this is what I am doing here.” At 32, he worries he will soon suffer the same fate.

Originally, the three scholars were informed by the University of Michigan that they had 30 days to pack and leave. Since they’d spent all their free time in the laboratory, they decided to use their last few weeks to visit the Grand Canyon. While there, the UM administration backtracked on their words, informing the scholars they had to leave immediately. At the airport, while attempting to return home, they were intercepted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and arrested.

This was no coincidence. The UM administration not only provided the wrong information, but they also had terminated their SEVIS status, which gave them permission to live and study in the US, making them vulnerable to federal authorities at passport control.

The repeated pattern points to a system in which Chinese researchers are treated as potential threats merely on the basis of their identity—which is all a part of the larger campaign to paint China as an enemy of the United States.

Dr. Danhao Wang’s life and work stand in stark contrast to this narrative. An assistant research scientist in the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, Dr. Wang dedicated his career to advancing semiconductor technology. His research focused on gallium nitride, a material critical to modern electronics and essential for improving the speed, efficiency, and energy consumption of devices ranging from smartphones to renewable technology systems.

He made significant contributions to understanding how these materials behave at the atomic level, correcting long-standing assumptions and helping to unlock new possibilities for high-performance electronics. His work also explored how next-generation semiconductors could remain stable under extreme electrical conditions, paving the way for more efficient energy systems and emerging technologies.

We must put increased pressure on the University of Michigan and other universities to do more to protect their international students.

The repercussions of this research are vast. Semiconductors with such high performance potential could potentially make the data center industry obsolete by enabling a smaller device to do what normally takes an entire facility. For the US, gallium nitride semiconductors are the key to significantly improving its high-power weapons systems, and China’s current dominance over the material is considered a looming threat. This is all part of the US preparation for war against China, and the ongoing arms race around strategic resources and technology.

It’s reported that Dr. Wang was planning to return to China in May and already had a job set up. This raises even more questions over the circumstances of his death, and many Michigan locals have begun calling for an independent investigation.

Like most scientists, Dr. Wang’s research stemmed from deep intellectual commitment and passion. Years of specialized training, long hours in the lab, and a singular focus on discovery defined his life’s work. When individuals like Dr. Wang are targeted, it is not only their livelihoods that are threatened, but the very purpose and meaning they have built their lives around.

His death is a profound tragedy. And while the full circumstances remain unclear, it occurred within an environment where Chinese scholars have repeatedly been subjected to intense surveillance and unfair targeting.

The broader political climate cannot be ignored. Increasingly, US policy and rhetoric have framed China as a primary geopolitical adversary, particularly in areas like technology and national security. This framing has filtered down into academic spaces, where international collaboration between the US and China is now essentially criminalized.

The Chinese Consulate in Chicago has criticized the US for “overstretching the concept of national security” and has called for a full investigation and accountability. These demands should not be dismissed.

There must be transparency around the circumstances leading to Dr. Wang’s death. There must also be concrete safeguards to prevent discriminatory investigations targeting international scholars. This includes stronger legal protections, clearer institutional accountability, and accessible mental health support for those under investigation.

Universities, in particular, have a responsibility to protect their students and researchers. The University of Michigan is clearly doing the opposite. They are not protecting their students; they are instead actively targeting them by aiding these discriminatory investigations, putting all international students at risk.

We must put increased pressure on the University of Michigan and other universities to do more to protect their international students, to preserve the integrity of academic research, to protect international collaboration, and to ensure that scientific progress is not undermined by federal discrimination. If institutions fail to act, the cost will not only be measured in lost careers but in lost knowledge, lost innovation, and lost lives.

In the Trump 2.0 era, many Americans have begun to engage in a new “conscious consumerism”—avoiding the companies that have bent the knee to the president. Data firm Numerator found that 38% of US consumers have participated in some form of a boycott over the last year, and 48% said they would stop buying from a company that had differing political views. Some may have felt that outdoor retailer REI would be an ideal place to shop during this time, a home for like-minded, outdoorsy people who care about the environment.

As an REI worker, I’m still expected to evangelize about REI’s mission—the outdoors, sustainability, and community. But ever since we started unionizing at REI in 2022, it’s now become a facade. REI’s leadership has endorsed leaders who gutted public lands, greenwashed their use of AI, deployed a union-busting law firm, and rigged their governance structure to shut out different perspectives. REI, a favorite of outdoor-loving liberals, has gone Trump.

The first public sign came when REI endorsed the Trump administration directly. The executives of the “co-op,” without any direct feedback from the members whose values and opinions they claim to base their decisions on, signed a letter of support for then-nominee for Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who ended up being confirmed in a vote of 79-18. In the year since his confirmation, Burgum has spent much of his time opening federal lands up to oil and gas drilling and trying to make the “Gulf of America” name stick. While REI’s new CEO has issued an apology since, the damage is already being done.

But throughout our union effort, from organizing to now bargaining, we’ve seen up close how the co-op has aligned itself with President Donald Trump. REI has met our unionization campaign by hiring a law firm with deep ties to pro-business, anti-worker cases, Morgan Lewis. This firm has been contracted to bust unions in everything from Amazon to professional baseball.

As REI has continued to stonewall us at the bargaining table, it’s opened itself up to a new opportunity for “conscious consumerism.” We have authorized a boycott should the company fail to agree on a contract with its 11 unionized stores.

Its reputation has earned the respect of the Trump administration, as the president installed Crystal Carey, a former partner at Morgan Lewis, as the general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In that role, Carey is responsible for setting the agenda for the NLRB as it weighs decisions on union elections, unfair labor practices, and more—including major cases regarding our union campaign. Morgan Lewis also handled the president’s taxes for many years. That’s who REI chose to hire—one of Trump’s favorite law firms.

Perhaps the most damning example of how REI is taking a page from the Trump playbook is how they’ve changed their governance structure. As a co-op, REI members elect the board of directors each year, seemingly a symbol of democratic governance and participation. Any co-op member can vote, and any member can run.

Last year, we decided to nominate two members to the board, Tefere Gebre and Shemona Moreno, longtime labor advocates, outdoor enthusiasts, and progressive leaders. Both were ideal candidates for REI’s board, but instead, their candidacies were rejected outright in favor of a slate of candidates handpicked by REI executives.

In response, we urged co-op members to vote down this slate. They responded overwhelmingly in support—members defeated the slate of candidates, and the board was left with multiple vacancies in response. An expression of will like this—again, from the very members whose values the co-op's executives claim impact their decisions—should have prompted REI to look inward and reflect.

Instead, REI took the Trump route. REI didn’t like the results, so they changed the rules. They moved up the board election to December, after holding it in April and May for years. This came in the middle of negotiations, which prevented us from speaking out against this anti-democratic move. Holding the election over the holidays meant participation would be low, and members couldn’t hear another perspective on any of the co-op’s preferred candidates. It’s a microcosm for how Trump is trying to change the rules of our democracy with the SAVE America Act and gerrymandering.

Of course, REI isn’t alone in cowering to the president. Another major retailer, Target, has also kept its head down during the second Trump administration. The company pulled back its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives and remained silent as Immigration and Customs Enforcement ran amok in the company’s home state of Minnesota. And Target has paid the price as it has faced boycotts from customers and protests outside its stores.

While many corporations have bowed their heads to the president, it wasn’t always this way. During the first Trump administration, we even had companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook speaking out against Trump’s immigration policies.

As REI has continued to stonewall us at the bargaining table, it’s opened itself up to a new opportunity for “conscious consumerism.” We have authorized a boycott should the company fail to agree on a contract with its 11 unionized stores. We do not take this decision lightly, but we know that REI members and customers have our backs in the fight for a fair contract and in the fight against Trump.

For anyone breathlessly wondering what artificial intelligence will achieve in the coming years, yesterday provided me with a remarkable answer.

Time travel.

Early in the morning, I received an email message from me in the year 2035, made possible by an AI agent that identified a suitable wormhole in the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. So far it can only send bits and bytes, but organic material seems just a matter of time. (I expect to bump into myself at the store any day now.)

The gist of the message from my future self? The United States in 2035 is actually doing okay.

Rather than writing shrill jeremiads to decry the current state of affairs and finishing them with vague admonitions to “act now,” the left needs to cultivate a habit of curiosity about alternative methods of collective action, drawing inspiration from around the world.

Apparently authoritarianism, greed, and disinformation reached all-time highs by the summer of 2026. Relentless attacks on democracy and voting rights, a spate of climate-related disasters, and a rise in unemployment caused by AI led to broad despair. The United States’ 250th birthday on July 4 was marked not by celebration but by simmering tension and polling that suggested the highest levels of pessimism in the nation’s history.

And then something unexpected occurred. Things got better—and fast. In fact, by some measures, Americans in 2035 are doing better than they ever have before. How did it happen?

It started with successive feats of staggering collective action, taking the spirit of Minnesota’s activists and multiplying it nationally. Responding to a leaked Trump administration memo that revealed a clear plan to use Immigration and Customs Enforcement forces to suppress midterm voting, millions moved beyond demonstrations, staging a general strike just after Labor Day that was then echoed by business across the country. The resulting economic disruption drew widespread attention, as well as concern from Wall Street and large corporations, who persuaded the government to completely stand down.

Then, on Thanksgiving, a coalition of 200 civil society organizations and labor unions (cumulatively representing more than 40 million people) announced that they had created a massive “health security fund” to cover health expenses for those in the United States expected to lose coverage because of the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Matched by high-net-worth individuals who agreed to donate their tax breaks from the bill to the fund, they pooled over $600 million and created an easy way for those facing medical emergencies to access it. The following spring they created a similar fund for those in areas rocked by climate catastrophes where insurance markets had collapsed.

This work drew enormous attention, and the group awakened to its power, realizing that the only chance it stood against unprecedented concentrations of power and wealth—and a sclerotic political system—was to keep combining in unprecedented ways. Calling itself the Movement of Movements (“MoM”), it became a perpetual engine for progress, joining forces behind a single charismatic action every quarter.

In one instance, the group orchestrated a major sell-off of AI-related stocks to protest the lack of safety standards for the new technology, resulting in the rapid introduction of new federal and state regulations. In another, it funded the construction of 25,000 affordable housing units in critical areas across the country and purchased over 600,000 acres of adjacent land, roughly the size of Rhode Island, for conservation. In another still, it enlisted its widely distributed membership to map threats to safe voting in real time, significantly reducing voter intimidation during the 2028 election. Next up, they will be carrying out a “coordinated unfollow” of the 200 most incendiary propagandists on social media (from both the political right and left) and buying out three major corporate polluters to shut down their plants (while providing compensation for all affected employees).

The organizations making up this coalition left behind their fragmented organizational agendas and competition for resources, first temporarily and then permanently. Their leaders—among them some of the most charismatic influencers in the social sector—expertly managed the territorialism and fights over credit that had undermined them in the past, creating something intentionally big and charismatic. A group of innovative young billionaires, many of them wealthy heirs, cast off the conventions (and self-aggrandizement) of their parents’ philanthropy to jointly underwrite the work, shoring up operational gaps for organizations joining the collaboration.

The group also benefited from a simple, overarching objective to guide its work—a return to decency, care, and well-being in American life. That translated into action in three areas, each embraced by more than 70% of Americans. The first is reducing autocracy and corruption in American government; by 2035, 99% of candidates running for office have signed a pledge to follow the rule of law, support fair elections, and recuse themselves from any policy questions that would directly enhance their family’s wealth. The second is catalyzing pro-social investment in science and technology, addressing the self-defeating disinvestment of the Trump administration by funding gaps in critical research that can save lives and stimulate the economy while introducing clear global safety standards for AI and similar advances. The third is making sure that everyone has access to free education, healthcare, and emergency recovery support—period.

The values and vibes of the movement have had as much resonance as its accomplishments. Always nonviolent and favoring in-person interaction, its leaders have summed up their operating principles in two sentences: "Ours is a movement rooted in two things: taking back power for the people and caring for our neighbors by sharing what we have so that no one suffers. There will be no violence, nastiness, or assertions without facts and we will respect all people." While this fairly generic statement drew criticism from some quarters, the way the group carried out its work and generated real results for disenfranchised groups—rather than merely nodding to them—converted most of those critics.

Above all, they made it fun. Jettisoning the rhetoric of despair, they got people in the country to once again believe that they had power, and they made exercising it collaborative and joyful. They realized that charismatic actions—increasingly sourced directly from the public—were important but perhaps less so than the habit of doing big things together, escaping from isolation and rampant mistrust. Older people made way for younger people, richer people made way for poorer people, whiter people made way for other people. They invested strenuously in joy and meaning and celebration, seizing the crisis to rebuild the solidarity and community that have deteriorated so much in recent decades. Their confidence and sense of security grew as their numbers did, and they created a permanent mindset shift in the American electorate, forming the basis for a permanent revival in Democratic politics and governing. Regularly joined and emulated by other groups (e.g., universities, supportive businesses, a surprising collection of progressive male athletes), their momentum now seems unstoppable.

I cannot wait for the next dispatch from the future.

* * *

Fanciful? Maybe.

But consider that every single one of the actions imagined above has already happened somewhere in the world, and often on a much larger scale. In the last decade alone, farmworkers in India achieved a 250-million person general strike, soccer fans in Europe joined together to put an immediate halt to a greedy scheme to defund all but the richest clubs on the continent, and donors pooled funds to relieve over $40 billion in medical debt for more than 27 million Americans. Fueled by incredible connectivity and growing worry, these efforts have shown that massive, sustained change is possible when action is sufficiently concentrated. They recognize the paramount importance of focus and cooperation in emergencies and gain confidence and safety through their numbers.

They have also introduced a remarkably innovative set of new tactics, jointly investing in financial markets (e.g., the “wallstreetbets” Reddit community), combining purchasing power (e.g., cooperative ownership and “buycotts”), withholding labor and attention (e.g., coordinated unfollowing and digital walkouts), and providing safety for those under political attack (e.g., protection funds for activists and whistleblowers) to foster great progress. The greatest examples of recent, massive collective action are captured here in a newly released report. While some of these approaches might be hard to reproduce—and all require hard work and organizing—none are out of reach.

They also build “on-ramps” for broader participation since traditional approaches like protests and petitions cannot alone meet the moment. Only a fraction of the public is comfortable taking to the streets—with a skew toward liberal elites—so these methods provide other options and give youth, in particular, new ways to engage. The best of these movements utilize hundreds of fresh techniques, which is especially important as suppression and surveillance from those in power become more sophisticated and pervasive.

Rather than writing shrill jeremiads to decry the current state of affairs and finishing them with vague admonitions to “act now,” the left needs to cultivate a habit of curiosity about alternative methods of collective action, drawing inspiration from around the world. This breaks us free of tired dogma about how change happens, building hope and agency and stimulating other new ideas. Activists from the Global South and former Eastern Bloc countries, consistently challenged by autocratic regimes, have particularly powerful insights to share.

Thorough analysis and intellectual fatalism won’t meet the moment. Simply put, President Donald Trump, his administration toadies, and a cabal of billionaires are hellbent on controlling the nation and, to the degree possible, the world. The only way to stop them is to come together—rapidly, morally, and joyfully—on a scale larger than anyone has seen before.

There is little doubt that most of the benefits of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act flow to the wealthy. But the White House has put considerable effort into promoting the idea that the law benefits working class people too, in particular those who earn tips.

To drive that point home, they staged an April 13 photo op with a DoorDash delivery to the White House. But the stunt was actually a good reminder of the gap between the White House’s rhetoric and reality.

First, it helps to understand that the "no tax on tips" policy applies to very few workers; less than 3% of workers are tipped. And its effects are even narrower than that. The policy is actually a deduction (topping out at $25,000) that can be claimed by tipped workers to lower their taxable income. But many tipped workers—about 1 in 3, or possibly close to 40%—do not earn enough to file taxes, so this deduction does them no good.

Now on to the White House event. When DoorDash driver Sharon Simmons "delivered" his McDonald’s order, President Trump commented that she “picked up an extra $11,000” because of the new policy. As Paul Waldman (and others) noted, this was mathematically dubious, given the $25,000 cap on the deduction. Indeed, Simmons would later explain that she earned $11,000 in tips, not that she saved that amount of money on her taxes. How much she saved on her taxes is unclear; by one high-end estimate, if she were paying a 24% tax rate she would have saved just $2,640.

If the goal of these kinds of policies are to provide some relief for workers—especially those earning a low wage—there are plenty of other options that would apply more broadly. Raising the minimum wage, for example, or eliminating the subminimum "tipped" wage would put more money in more workers’ pockets.

Speaking just after the White House photo op—and at a different "no tax on tips" event—Trump said the photo op was “a little tacky.” Given that Simmons is making DoorDash deliveries to pay for her husband’s cancer treatments, and the fact that his signature tax cut bill slashes food assistance and will cause millions to lose their health insurance coverage, "tacky" is an understatement.

I’m trying to return to the book I started writing a decade ago, and doing so has pulled my awareness of and relationship to the events of 2026 into the larger consciousness the book is struggling to address: What is power?

Can we broaden and expand this word? Can we merge it with collective awareness—you know, the idea of working together? Can we expand our awareness beyond the sense of dominance: power with, rather than power over? Yes, power with, in the “love thy enemy” sense, but without the cynicism and ignorance that usually accompany the word “love."

When we think of power, as I discuss in the book, the word itself commands that we carve the concept into something isolated and wieldable: a sword, a gun, a scepter. Power means power over. There is no basic concept of power—seemingly no word for power in the English language—that also means collaboration, collective participation: people working together, individually empowered at the same time that the larger whole is empowered.

Even when we examine the dark side of power—as in, power corrupts—the examination seems to hover as a warning rather than open up to larger awareness. Consider, for instance, this 2017 article in The Atlantic by Jerry Useem, titled (fasten your seatbelts!) “Power Causes Brain Damage,” which discusses a concept he calls “hubris syndrome.” The essential point the article makes is that people who gain a significant amount of power over others lose the ability to empathize with—or mime, as the article puts it—people in general, the lesser mortals who must follow the boss’ orders. Why am I suddenly thinking of Donald Trump, the world’s “Power Jesus”?

Let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate.

This inability to express or feel empathy, it turns out, is serious. It isolates the powerful into their own stereotypes and egotistical certainties, which lessens their ability to make good, or even rational, decisions. (Right, Donald?). And hubris syndrome isn’t merely psychological; it’s also physiological.

Citing neuroscience research, Useem writes:

And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, ‘mirroring,’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what (psychologist Dacher) Keltner has termed the ‘power paradox’: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

Useem quotes authors David Owen and Jonathan Davidson, who define hubris syndrome as “a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features, he adds, include: “manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.”

The idea is that we’re naturally connected and subconsciously “mimic” others: We laugh when others laugh, tense up when others grow tense. It’s not faking an emotion to fit in; it’s participating in, feeling, the collective emotion that fills the room. “It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from,” Useem writes. But: Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” leading to what the psychologist calls an “empathy deficit,” which saps the powerful of most, or maybe all, of their social skill, leaving them, even as they generate endless obeisance, socially isolated souls.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that what is commonly thought of as power—power over others, aka, dominance—isn’t power at all. It’s an illusion of power that weakens, and perhaps destroys, those who hold it. Consider the rise and fall of dictators, the toppling of empires, the comeuppance of kings and queens. Let them eat cake.

The article does an excellent job pointing all this out, but at a certain point it falls into a linguistic trap. Useem writes despairingly: “This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?”

My answer is this: Knowledge in all its basic innocence is, indeed, power, but rarely is this “power over” someone. Knowledge of how to walk, how to read... this is a child claiming her life. And the entire family is empowered. As the child learns how to function independently, Mom and Dad learn how to parent. Yes, knowledge—power—can be used to further the interests of our darkest impulses. We can use what we learn to blackmail, extort, cheat, bully, win, etc., etc. But let’s break the automatic linguistic link right now between power and dominance. True power enlarges the whole; it doesn’t isolate. As the child learns to function, the family grows.

Yes, the power of self-defense is sometimes necessary, at the individual and, yes, the national level. And power can enable us to win, whether a game or a fight. Hurray! But the point my unfinished book is trying to make is that such power exists in a larger context, just as we exist in a larger context—and this context is ever opening and expanding before us. The US relationship to the rest of the world is larger than Donald Trump’s, or any president’s, ego. It’s larger than our military.

Rather, every last one of us, from newborns to geezers, is a participant in creating who we are, and who we are becoming. Perhaps no one says it better than Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being."

We cannot separate fossil fuels from the ongoing US and Israeli war on Iran. The volatility surrounding the Strait of Hormuz has shaken the global economy, restricting the passage of oil from the largest producers in the Gulf region.

The economic costs of this illegal, unjust, and unpopular war are mounting alongside the heartbreaking human costs—including troops lost and thousands killed throughout Iran and Lebanon.

But there’s also a rapidly increasing environmental cost. The first two weeks of Operation Epic Fury alone emitted 5 million tons of carbon dioxide—equivalent to the 84 lowest-emitting countries combined.

The international community must end this war—and address the deeper climate crisis—before more damage is done. Luckily, a vehicle of hope opens up at the end of April in Santa Marta, Colombia, offering a prime chance for countries to move toward a more secure future and livable planet.

The First-Ever Conference to End Fossil Fuels

Governments are gathering in Santa Marta for the first-ever global diplomatic conference explicitly focused on transitioning away from fossil fuels. Co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, the convening brings together dozens of countries, alongside civil society and Indigenous leaders, to do what decades of climate negotiations have failed to do: confront fossil fuels directly.

Unfortunately, international climate negotiations centered on the United Nations process have failed to move us meaningfully closer to a just transition by refusing to confront fossil fuels. Instead, they have relied on emission targets, offsets, and market mechanisms that allow extraction to continue.

Fossil fuels are the lifeline of the modern military-industrial complex. At the same time, militaries exist in part to secure access to fossil fuels.

The Santa Marta conference breaks from this framework. It creates space to ask a more fundamental question: What would it take to actually phase out fossil fuels—and who stands in the way?

The Santa Marta conference is a crucial initial step for stakeholders to commit to a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. Groups will address the processes, timelines, and actions needed to get to a negotiated agreement for a fossil fuel phaseout, which will be further developed in a future gathering in the Pacific nation of Tuvalu.

The Military-Oil-Industrial Complex

But taking that step seriously requires confronting another issue that has been deliberately sidelined: militarism.

Fossil fuels are the lifeline of the modern military-industrial complex. At the same time, militaries exist in part to secure access to fossil fuels. The infrastructure of war, from weapons production to military bases, locks governments into long-term fossil fuel dependence while also acting as the enforcement arm of fossil fuel interests. Militaries protect oil supply chains, secure trade routes, and shape geopolitical outcomes around these fuels in favor of dominant powers.

Military control over oil and gas long shaped the architecture of global power. This dynamic is visible across the globe. US aggression toward Iran continues to escalate tensions around oil, and the US intervention in Venezuela is inseparable from the country’s position as a major oil producer. In Palestine as well, Israel’s US-backed occupation and control of offshore gas deposits, among other resources, is part of the broader system of colonization that cannot be separated from land, infrastructure, and energy.

As long as nations invest in their militaries at the expense of everything else, fossil fuel dependence won’t be broken. The $2.7 trillion in global military spending in 2024 siphons resources that are desperately needed to achieve a full fossil fuel phaseout and global just transition: healthcare, education, jobs, renewable energy, and direct spending to confront the climate crisis.

The United States is the worst culprit as the highest military spender in the world. The Pentagon is also the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world—it has a larger carbon footprint than most entire countries. Next year, President Donald Trump is demanding a shocking $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. Even now, estimates suggest that the US is spending $1 billion to $2 billion per day on its assault on Iran, while the US contributed just $2 billion to the Green Climate Fund in the span of 10 years.

Santa Marta Must Address Militarism, Too

Militarism does more than protect the fossil fuel system. It actively undermines the possibility of a just transition. That’s why we, along with other groups part of the Santa Marta conference, are calling on countries and stakeholders to consider three demands:

1. Address critical gaps in military emissions reporting.
2. Reduce the dependence of militaries on fossil fuels.
3. Reverse runaway military spending to support a just transition.

Achieving this will require coordinated pressure at all levels—by governments, international bodies, Indigenous and Afro-descendant leaders, academics, organizers, and civil society—to get to a fossil fuel phaseout and a more secure world.

The conference in Santa Marta represents a break from decades of delay through the UNFCCC process. But it will only matter if it confronts the full system driving this crisis. Fossil fuels and militarism are part of the same architecture of power. If governments are serious about combating climate change, they must be willing to do more than set targets. They must be willing to challenge the political and economic structures that sustain extraction and war.

That means investing in the real work of a just transition: shifting economics, redistributing resources, and repairing harm that has been done to frontline communities. That means no new fossil fuel expansion. No false solutions that prolong dependence. And no continued investment in systems of violence that undermine the possibility of a just transition.

We can continue to fund war and extraction or we can choose to invest in our communities, in care, and in a future that is not built on sacrifice. Santa Marta opens the door. What comes next depends on whether we are willing to walk through it and to demand our governments to do the same.

Before stepping into the classroom, I spent 12 years as an investigator with the California State Bar, examining cases of attorney misconduct. I chose to teach because I saw a meaningful way to serve my community, and I understood there would be sacrifice. Still, it took 10 years before my salary caught up to what I earned in my final year as an investigator.

In California, becoming an educator is neither easy nor inexpensive. In fact, it is one of the most challenging states to obtain a teaching license. Despite this, teachers remain among the most underpaid professionals relative to their level of education. According to the US Census Bureau, teacher earnings have not only lagged behind comparable fields, but have experienced a steady annual decline.

The debate is not whether schools have enough money, it is about what we choose to spend it on. Today, many educators cannot afford to live where they teach. Teaching, while never lucrative, used to offer a stable path to a middle class life. Educators could buy a home, live in the communities where they worked, and maintain the financial stability expected of other professions with similar levels of education. Sadly, even the most modest of those expectations are rapidly disappearing. I only own a home because I purchased it prior to switching my career.

Most educators did not choose this career for the money, but there is a clear difference between modest compensation and exploitation. Nearly 1 in 5 teachers in Los Angeles are housing insecure. And nearly 60% of educators across the country take on second jobs outside of teaching to make ends meet. It is unacceptable that the people responsible for educating our children are struggling to hold their head above water.

These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.

Teachers are also expected to subsidize their classrooms out of their own pockets. These stories are often framed as heartwarming and altruistic, but they reflect systemic failure and a lack of meaningful investment in public education. Few other professions require employees to pay out of pocket while already being underpaid.

The consequences of this underinvestment are becoming impossible to ignore. As the cost of living rises, fewer educators can afford to remain in the classroom. A teacher shortage has already hit Southern California, and the impact is profound. Nationally, teaching shortages have led to larger class sizes, burnout, and financial strain on the education system.

Education is expected to operate in scarcity while other sectors experience enormous growth. The education technology market alone is projected to grow by $170.8 billion by 2029. In the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, more than $1.6 billion has been spent on edtech. Framing this as a funding problem misses the point; it is a question of priorities. We are told we can’t make investments in educators, while billions continue to flow toward technology and outside contracts instead of the classrooms they are meant to serve.

And yet, during recent labor negotiations in Los Angeles, we were told a familiar refrain: There is no money.

This was the backdrop of three educational unions, representing more than 70,000 workers, on the brink of striking across Los Angeles. At the center of the dispute for United Teachers Los Angeles was a straightforward demand: a salary structure that reflects economic reality. As negotiations stretched over 14 months, frustration grew not only among educators but across school communities, culminating in escalating public pressure, organizing efforts at school sites, and an overwhelming strike authorization vote that made clear teachers were prepared to act if necessary.

Only when the possibility of a strike became real did the district return to the table with urgency. We ultimately won the majority of our demands, including overhauling the outdated pay system that kept incoming educators at artificially low salaries, raising the starting salary from $68,966 to $77,000 for teachers, and securing an average salary increase of 13.86% across the board. This is evidence that the “no money” claim is negotiable, not factual.

Just as significantly, for the first time in California, educators in Los Angeles have secured four weeks of paid parental leave. This is a historic breakthrough that now sets a precedent for teachers across the state of California, as well as the entire country. Additionally, we won a major expansion of student support, including more than 450 additional social workers, to address the growing mental health crisis among our youth.

These victories for Los Angeles educators are not perks. They are the foundation of a functioning school system, and a respected career.

When teachers are paid a living wage, they stay. When they can afford to live in the communities they serve, schools are more stable. And when students have access to trained mental health professionals, they are better able to learn. Investment is what makes public schools strong. Without it, everything else collapses.

For too long, the narrative has been that we cannot afford to support teachers. We’ve just shown we cannot afford not to. The lesson from Los Angeles is simple: School funding is not fixed by scarcity, but by priorities. And when educators and school workers organize, those priorities can change—for the better.

I’m generally disgusted that here in the US we almost always frame war in terms of its economic impact. But in this case the price of oil illustrates how America is deceiving itself about the true cost of its decision to choose, yet again, to go to war.

There are two prices of oil right now, and between them is an unprecedented gap. One is the paper price, the Brent futures you hear about on TV, sitting around 100 dollars as I’m writing this. The other is the physical price, what a refinery actually pays for a real barrel on a real tanker. Dated Brent has hit 144 dollars. The spread is the widest it has ever been. Forty dollars. Before the war it was less than a dollar.

The paper price is the market telling us a calming story. The physical is describing reality. When those two come back together, and they always do, it’s paper that moves to meet physical reality. America is experiencing a similar gap. We are telling ourselves a story about our position in the world that is about forty dollars above what’s actually arriving at the dock.

The war is the clearest picture of what we’ve chosen. It’s not about Iran’s nuclear program. It’s a resource war aimed at China, routed through Iran, and the administration’s own advisors have said so on the record. Look at the pattern. Venezuela first. We seized their oil, kidnapped their leaders, routed half a billion dollars through a Qatari bank account. Then Iran. Airstrikes, a blockade, the Strait of Hormuz closed. Then Netanyahu’s pitch to pipeline Gulf oil overland to Europe and away from Asian buyers. Then pressure on Denmark over Greenland. Then Lebanon, where Israel is now openly planning to occupy eight to fifteen percent of the country with our weapons and our political cover, on top of everything we are still arming in Gaza. Then secondary sanctions threats against any bank anywhere that dares touch an Iranian barrel.

To war or not to war was our question, and we answered it wrong.

The theory is this. Break the world’s energy flows before China’s navy can project force. Keep oil priced in dollars. Strangle Chinese growth before they catch all the way up. It is coherent. That is the problem. The coherence is the indictment. We think we are going to get back to our status as a respected world power through bullying and through being wannabe gangsters, and the strategy is so openly cynical that even the foreign policy establishment is now celebrating it in public as Trump’s best hand against China.

This is not just a Trump problem.

The House has forced four war powers votes and they have all failed, partly because Democrats themselves keep defecting on their own resolutions. Four Democrats voted against the first one in March. And when Hakeem Jeffries and the Democratic leadership actually had a shot to force another vote in late March during a pro forma session, they kept it off the floor. They waited until mid-April, after the troops had been rallied, by which point the war was well underway and the vote was mostly symbolic.

That is a failure of leadership on something as basic as stripping war powers from a madman. Jeffries has not called any of the defecting Democrats out. Not publicly. Not privately as far as we can tell. No pressure, no cost, no consequence.

Remember when Democrats did a sit-in on the House floor over gun violence? Cameras on, refusing to leave, forcing the country to look. That is what resistance would look like. This ain’t that. Both parties see our path to prosperity and relevance through war. That is why the response has been letters and press conferences and votes they knew would fail. Neither party wants to actually close the barn door on executive war-making because both parties want to use it when their turn comes.

And this pattern is older than Iran. In 2011 we went into a sovereign country with drones and jets, killed the leader’s protective guards, and set up his murder by local opposition forces. Call it whatever you want. That’s what happened. What was Gaddafi working on at the time? A pan-African gold-backed currency meant to price African oil in something other than dollars. The project died with him. When the dollar gets challenged, we break the challenger. Both parties have done it. The rules-based order we like to lecture other countries about has a pretty big asterisk on it, and the asterisk reads “except when it touches the dollar.”

The strategy is already backfiring, and everyone who can count can see it. China’s clean tech exports hit 21.9 billion dollars in March of 2026 alone, up 70 percent year over year in a single month. The oil shock we engineered to hurt them solved their solar overproduction problem for them. Iranian oil has been priced in yuan since April of last year. Tankers paying tolls to cross Hormuz are reportedly paying in yuan too. Deutsche Bank is now openly naming this war as a potential catalyst for the erosion of the petrodollar.

Gallup’s global leadership approval poll from April 3 has China at 36 percent and the United States at 31. Widest gap in China’s favor in twenty years. U.S. net approval at negative 15, the worst in the history of the poll. That data was collected in 2025, before the January withdrawal from 66 international organizations, before the Iran war. The real number right now is almost certainly worse. Pew and the European Council on Foreign Relations say the same thing in different words. In most of Europe and Latin America more people now name the United States than China as the greatest threat to their country. ECFR put it cleanest. If there is a race for global popularity, America is currently losing to its Indo-Pacific rival. We are forcing the world to make choices, and we are not going to like the outcome.

We should be forcing ourselves to make choices instead. When we look at China, we are not looking at an enemy. We are looking at a reflection of our former selves, and we do not want to see it.

Sam Walton had a rule. Until you’re number one, you copy number one. He used to get arrested for crawling around competitors’ stores with a tape recorder, because the point of walking into a Kmart wasn’t to find what they were doing wrong. It was to walk out with an idea you didn’t have when you went in.

That’s what China is doing to us. And what they are copying is our playbook, the one that created the largest middle class in the history of the world. Hamiltonian industrial policy. State banks. State-directed investment in strategic industries. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures from 1791. The American System. Lincoln’s land grant universities, the transcontinental railroad, the Homestead Act. The Arsenal of Democracy, where FDR forced competing firms to share their intellectual property because winning the war mattered more than winning the quarter. Apollo. DARPA. The NIH. The internet itself. Every single one was public capital, public purpose, public coordination, with private firms executing. We invented it. We ran it for 150 years. China picked it up off the floor where we dropped it in the 1980s, and is running it now.

Their space program is decades younger than ours and they have a space station, they are landing reusable rockets, they are scaling rapidly, and they are sharing their information. They are not competing for every single thing. They are working in unison to do better. The systems they are using are our own. We are being beaten by ourselves.

And we didn’t just invent the playbook. We invented the tempo. The Arsenal of Democracy built a wartime industrial economy from scratch in about four years. Ford was rolling a B-24 off the line at Willow Run every hour by 1944. Apollo went from Kennedy’s speech to a boot on the Moon in eight years. Rural electrification, the interstate system, the Manhattan Project. None of it took generations. China gets the tempo part too. They built the largest high-speed rail network in the world in about fifteen years from zero. EVs from nobody to global dominance in a decade. Solar in under a decade. Shipbuilding, drones, batteries, the whole deck, faster than we ever went, using our methods, while we tell ourselves a twenty or thirty year timeline is realistic.

When I was a kid we couldn’t compete with China because their labor was too cheap and they didn’t care about pollution. Then we were overregulated and our workers wanted too much. Then it was currency manipulation. Now it’s that they are too far ahead on robotics and we will never catch up. The excuse changes every decade. The underlying move never does. We explain why we can’t, instead of doing the thing.

This is the part that matters most, because it is bigger than this administration. The entire American establishment, both parties, both sets of think tanks, the Pentagon, the corporate class, the press, has quietly agreed that American renewal is a generational project. Twenty years to reshore semiconductors. Ten years for permitting reform. Slow and steady. Patient. Serious. That timeline is a lie. Nothing we have ever actually built in this country got built on it. Generational change isn’t about being pragmatic, it’s about putting off the work. It lets everyone currently in power keep their arrangement running while the country erodes underneath them. It assumes our place on earth is god-given or immutable. It’s neither. And it’s crumbling quickly unless we do something about it.

Which brings me to the thing I actually want to say. This is a choice between destruction and construction. Between valuing death and valuing life. Between taking responsibility for our future and hoping it all works out.

The American people allowed this. Voted for some of it. Looked away from the rest.

Destruction is what we are doing right now. Destruction is the blockade. Destruction is hobbling the Chinese by working through proxies, cutting off oil, kidnapping Venezuelan leadership, pressuring Denmark over Greenland. Destruction is arming a genocide. Break other people’s things because we have forgotten how to build our own.

Construction is the other path. Construction is Hamilton’s playbook, at speed. Reindustrialize. Repatriate the supply chains we offshored. Pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, steel, rare earths, shipbuilding. Repatriate health care from extractive finance back to something that serves the people paying for it. Rebuild public research. Rebuild the grid. Build rail. Build housing. Do it fast, because fast is the only tempo that has ever actually worked for this country.

Construction is also how you become useful to the world again. China is going to electrify the global south whether we like it or not. We can help build the world into a future like the Jetsons or we can try and bomb it into a future like the Flintstones. If we choose the Flintstones the world may turn their collective backs on us. A rules-based order means following rules, including the ones against wars of aggression and the ones against arming genocides. A democracy means practicing it. You get your respect back by being the thing you claim to be, not by bullying the people who have noticed you aren’t.

And this is where the responsibility piece lands, because I mean the word we. The American people allowed this. Voted for some of it. Looked away from the rest. Trusted that the serious people would handle it while the serious people were handling themselves. There is no version of this that gets fixed by waiting. Not for the other party, not for the next election, not for someone else to show up. We is the job description. It has to be, because hoping it all works out is how we got here.

The world is already choosing. Gallup, Pew, ECFR, they are telling us in every language they have that they have seen enough. The question is whether we will choose too. To war or not to war was our question, and we answered it wrong. The next question is what we build instead. And that one is still open.

Ever think a drone could chase you down the street or fire a bullet through your living room window because you pissed off Trump, Miller, or their ICE thugs? If the answer is “that’s science fiction,” please read on: that reality may be only a few months away, and every single part of the spying and death-dealing infrastructure needed to make it happen has been quietly assembled by the Trump regime over the last fourteen months.

This Tuesday, while America was obsessively watching the latest bizarre twists in Trump’s Iran debacle, Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon rolled out a $1.5 trillion budget request that contained a line item almost nobody’s talking about: a 24,000 percent increase, from $225 million last year to $54.6 billion this year, for an outfit called the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group.

That’s the largest year-over-year jump for any program in the entire defense budget, and it’s earmarked to build out AI-driven autonomous human-killing systems inside the Special Operations Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida.

USSOCOM “[P]rovides elite, combat-ready forces... Their responsibilities include counterterrorism, unconventional warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, and psychological operations.”

The very next day, U.S. Southern Command announced its own Autonomous Warfare Command focused on the Caribbean and Central America, where Trump and Hegseth have already been criminally blowing up small boats without warrants, trials, or congressional authorization in defiance of both US and international law.

Read those two announcements side by side and you’ve discovered the operating manual for what comes next. To understand why that concerns every American who ever thought about protesting against Trump’s GOP and their ICE Frankenstein’s Monster in person or on social media — and not just the Venezuelan fishermen drifting dead off Curaçao — we’ll first have to travel back three months to a tree-lined street in south Minneapolis, and the morning Renee Nicole Good dropped off her six-year-old son at school.

She was 37 years old, a published poet who’d earned her English degree from Old Dominion, the mother of three, and wife of Becca Good. A few blocks from the school, she came across an ICE operation in her own neighborhood, complete with unmarked vehicles, masked agents, and the shrill whistles that Minneapolis neighbors had been blowing for six weeks every time the masked thugs showed up.

Renee stopped her SUV sideways in the street and pulled out her phone; a few minutes later, ICE goon Jonathan Ross fired three shots through her windshield and window, killing her about a mile from where George Floyd had died five years earlier. Her wife, who’d been standing behind the vehicle questioning the agents, was filmed by bystanders running down the snowy street and staggering back, crying and covered in her wife’s blood.

I’m starting with Renee because she’s the human face of where this country already is under the police state Trump and Miller are assembling, not where we’re headed. By the time she was shot, ICE agents had opened fire on nine people in five states and Washington, D.C., since September. None have been criminally charged.

Just a few days after her killing, federal agents in Minneapolis were reportedly telling bystanders and legal observers “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead,” and in Portland, Maine, an ICE thug was caught on video telling a woman who’d been filming him, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

That’s the culture Trump, Miller, and the GOP have built using human agents with automatic weapons, masks, and fake license plates, while smashing car windows, kicking in front doors, beating and killing with impunity, and now “detaining” some 70,000 people without the due process the Constitution requires.

What Republicans are now preparing to do is hand that deadly, violent, invasive culture a targeting algorithm and a fleet of autonomous death-drones.

To understand what’s coming unless Congress steps in to stop it now, you must first know about what’s already been built in Gaza that’s the template for the Trump regime. An Israeli intelligence whistleblower told the Israeli magazine +972 in April 2024 about an AI system called Lavender that ranked the entire population of Gaza by “probability of militant affiliation.”

Lavender then automatically generated a “kill list” of roughly thirty-seven thousand people living in Gaza, based on things like intercepted cell phone metadata and social media activity. It fed that list to human officers who spent an average of twenty seconds rubber-stamping each name before the Israeli Air Force bombed each target’s home, killing those “militants” and their families.

The system had a reported error rate of about ten percent, which, in a population of two million Gazans, translates to thousands of civilians killed because the AI computer was mistaken or drew the wrong conclusions from their social media, phone, or travel activity.

Even more brutal, a companion Israeli system called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked those flagged men so they could be bombed when they were home with their wives and kids, because, as one officer told the reporters, it was “much easier” to bomb a family’s home than to try to target a military or business site.

And what about the families of these “militants”? Israeli command approved up to twenty civilian deaths — men, women, children — per low-ranking “militant” killed, and more than a hundred dead when bombing to take out a “senior commander.”

This is how automated killing at industrial scale actually works in real time, how it works right now as you’re reading these words, and it is not science fiction.

Now look at what’s being assembled here, piece by piece, based on the Lavender Israeli model and lessons learned from their experience.

ICE has signed contracts worth more than $60 million with Peter Thiel’s Palantir to build something called ImmigrationOS and a targeting app called ELITE, which stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement.

ELITE pulls data from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, DMV records, Medicaid files, utility bills, license-plate readers, and commercial data brokers (which typically include social media posts and often even emails when they come from “free” email providers), then populates a map with dossiers and assigns a “confidence score” to each person’s current address. If you update your address to get medical care, for example, that updates your score. Or post something on social media.

Stephen Miller, the architect of this dystopian enforcement regime, reportedly holds a six-figure financial stake in Palantir, which, as far as I can tell, nobody in Congress has yet demanded answers about.

Meanwhile, ICE has been buying and using Skydio drones for protest monitoring, Customs and Border Protection has been flying MQ-9 Predator drones (the same platform that killed people in Yemen and Pakistan) over anti-ICE demonstrations in Los Angeles, and the FAA quietly issued a nationwide notice in January creating 3,000-foot no-fly zones around every DHS and ICE vehicle, so that citizens and journalists can’t film federal immigration operations from the air.

That last piece is the the most alarming tell of all: you don’t close the sky above an enforcement agency unless you’re planning to do things there you don’t want photographed.

And it’s not just the feds flying this stuff. Four days ago, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used its “Drone as First Responder” fleet, a program it first sold to the public as an “emergency public-safety tool,” to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” rally in downtown LA, and then last month’s “No Kings” demonstration.

The drones are Skydio X10s, which the manufacturer advertises are capable of spotting a person from more than a mile away (8,000 feet), facially identifying an individual from a half-mile, and reading a license plate from 800 feet. Two officers can run eight of these drones at the same time, each automatically tailing “people of interest.”

This is how mission creep happens. A tool sold for saving lives ends up spying on us at a peaceful protest, logging our faces, our license plates, and the people we marched with. And once that data is collected, it flows — as all law enforcement data in America now flows — into the same Palantir-built federal databases that ELITE and ImmigrationOS are drawing data from right now.

Then there’s the Pentagon. That $54.6 billion Defense Autonomous Warfare Group request I mentioned is buried inside a $1.5 trillion budget big enough to hide almost anything. Southern Command’s new Autonomous Warfare Command is already using drones to blow up small boats in the Caribbean that the Trump regime claims are trafficking narcotics, without anything resembling due process or congressional authorization.

Ken Klippenstein reported this week that the same budget zeroes out funding for “civilian harm mitigation” — avoiding unnecessary civilian deaths — inside Pentagon operations. In other words, we’re building, out in the open, the infrastructure that produced Lavender and kills people in an automated fashion, and we’re doing it with no public debate and no discernible push-back from anybody in Congress.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a much smaller scale and overseas. Between 1967 and 1972, the CIA ran a program in South Vietnam called Phoenix that generated intelligence-scored capture-or-kill lists of suspected Viet Cong and eventually killed somewhere between twenty-six- and forty-thousand people, many of them innocent Vietnamese civilians mistakenly flagged by informants and unreliable data.

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

Phoenix was rubber-stamped up the chain of command and produced the same “responsibility gap” that Lavender’s defenders hide behind now in Israel, where nobody in particular is accountable because the list came from “the system.”

The lesson of Phoenix is that we must build friction, oversight, and human accountability into the machinery of state violence. But now we’re about to remove all of that, and Trump wants to use the system against people he’s already labeled “domestic terrorists” for filming an arrest, posting online, dissing Christianity or “traditional American views on morality,” or attending a protest.

With Renee Good, the decision to kill her was made by a human being who was operating inside a system that had already decided her neighborhood, her opposition to ICE, and her observer status made her a legitimate target. What happens when that decision is made in twenty seconds by a machine down in Florida, and executed by a hovering armed drone as the FAA has cleared the civilian sky so nobody is watching?

If Congress doesn’t act now, before this architecture is operational, it won’t get another chance. The time to ban autonomous lethal systems for domestic law enforcement is before the first Predator blows somebody up on a Minneapolis street, not after.

The time to demand transparency on Palantir’s confidence scores is before ELITE is fully deployed, not after.

And the time to call your senators and your House member at 202-224-3121 is this week, to tell them you want hearings on the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, a moratorium on armed drones for ICE and CBP to use inside the United States, an audit of ImmigrationOS, and an investigation into Stephen Miller’s financial interests in the contractor building the machine.

If you aren’t yet registered to vote in 2026, do that today. And if you want to help local and state officials push back against federal overreach, openstates.org will connect you to your legislators.

Renee Good deserved to go home to her son that morning. The next Renee Good deserves a country that decided, in time, not to let a cold, soulless machine make that call.

It can feel like a lifetime ago, but I grew up in an era of hope for combating the climate crisis. It was an era filled with energy to fight against fossil fuels—and leaders who seemed like they might finally listen to us. An era in which a livable future for all of us seemed almost feasible.

I’ve been organizing climate strikes since I was 12.

I began by protesting outside Brooklyn Borough Hall, not far from my house in Brooklyn, New York. Then I started attending meetings with Fridays For Future NYC, the New York City chapter of Greta Thunberg’s organization. I quickly became enraptured with the energy of the youth climate movement. Through it, I met some of my best friends, as we organized six strikes together in middle and high school.

In my senior year of high school, I was a core organizer for the March To End Fossil Fuels, a 70,000 person march in September 2023, that brought together a diverse cast of organizers—from the Center for Biological Diversity to the NAACP. I felt lucky to be a part of such a massive effort.

The United States may not be there, but Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among other countries, will be.

Actually phasing out fossil fuels, a topic older organizers told me had once been fringe, was now in the front and center of New York City streets and on the front page of The New York Times. By the end of 2023, I was Fridays For Future’s North American Delegate to COP28 in Dubai, an international climate conference that zeroed in on fossil fuels. It was all anyone was talking about, from grassroots organizers to the US negotiators.

Other fossil fuel phaseout activists and I were actually able to meet multiple times with the lead negotiators for the US, Trigg Talley and Sue Biniaz. The negotiators seemed receptive to adopting fossil fuel phaseout language in the COP28 Global Stocktake Text. We didn’t achieve that, but the phrase “transition away from fossil fuels” did appear in the final text. It was the first time the words “fossil fuels” had ever been included in the final text in the history of COPs.

When we got home from COP28, we were able to meet with John Podesta, who was then President Joe Biden’s top climate advisor. We urged him against allowing the construction of the CP2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal. Biden announced a pause on pending decisions for new LNG export projects, including CP2, on January 26, 2024. Finally, it felt like we were winning.

Looking at the news today, that era feels so far away.

Trump administration officials recently gathered in my hometown of Brooklyn to announce their plan to swiftly construct a $1 billion natural gas pipeline in New Jersey and New York Harbor. Construction on CP2 began this past June, and the Trump administration has pulled out of the Paris Agreement. While I still attended COP30 this past year in Belem, Brazil, the US federal government did not send a single negotiator, much less a delegation.

It is easy to lose hope for combating the climate crisis in times like these. But while the US government has relinquished its leadership, others are stepping forward.

In late April, Colombia and the Netherlands are convening the first-ever Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This will be the biggest step away from fossil fuels we’ve seen since the March to End Fossil Fuels.

The United States may not be there, but Canada, Australia, and Brazil, among other countries, will be. This is a crucial first step toward formal Fossil Fuel Treaty negotiations, and it is just the beginning of Fossil Fuel phaseout policy becoming the center of attention again.

We need a fast, fair, fossil fuel phaseout—and I have hope for it now, because of Santa Marta.

In the short run, Democrats' victory in gerrymandering Virginia to create four new blue Congressional districts is a good thing. It will restore balance to the critical 2026 House elections to offset Republicans' Texas gerrymandering which created four new red districts.

President Donald Trump was technically right when the night before the Virginia vote he told a conference of supporters, “I don’t know if you know what gerrymandering is but it’s not good.” Of course what Trump really meant is that gerrymandering is bad when it disenfranchises Republicans but good when it disenfranchises Democrats.

Here's what we do know: partisan gerrymandering is an affront to democracy by letting politicians pick their voters instead of voters picking their politicians. Given Republicans' successful gerrymandering, the Virginia gerrymander was the least bad immediate option. As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a sharp reversal of recent establishment Democrats' attitude, "When they go low, we strike back."

But looking forward, partisan gerrymandering should be illegal. As Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent to Chief Justice John Roberts' 2019 majority ruling that partisan gerrymandering is non-judiciable, “partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.”

You can blame John Roberts for debasing and dishonoring our democracy and irreparably damaging our system of government.

In his 5-4 majority decision in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, Roberts ruled that challenges to partisan gerrymandering are "political questions" that courts may not interfere with. Roberts may have disingenuously claimed in his confirmation hearings that he is nothing but an umpire calling balls and strikes, but in reality he changes the strike zone to favor Republicans.

Partisan gerrymandering blatantly violates the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Partisan gerrymandering treats voters of the then minority party in a state unequally to voters of the then majority party and gives the then majority party an unequal advantage in securing their future electoral control regardless of the will of the voters. Voters from different parties do not have an equal chance to affect the outcome of elections. As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent to Rucho a voter's constitutional equal protections rights“can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.”

It's obvious to a majority of ordinary Americans that partisan gerrymandering undermines fundamental democratic principles. An August 2025 Reuters poll found that 55% of respondents, including 71% of Democrats and 46% of Republicans, thought that the partisan gerrymandering taking place in Texas and California are "bad for democracy." Regular Americans understand the dangers of partisan gerrymandering better than John Roberts in his lengthy "legal" opinion that courts can't do anything to prevent it.

Since Rucho was decided in 2019, advances in computer algorithms have enabled the majority party in a state to construct voting districts to virtually guarantee with surgical precision their own electoral victory.

If Roberts and his Republican cohorts on the Court were honest, they would consider revisiting and overturning Rucho and giving lower courts the power to devise standards for deciding if a partisan gerrymander is too much. But given the partisanship of the Republican Justices, that's unlikely to happen.

If, despite the disadvantages of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats regain control of Congress, they should enact legislation term limiting SCOTUS justices (after which they may keep their lifetime judicial tenure by taking senior status) and increasing the number of Justices from 9 to at least 12. This can be done by legislation and does not need to overcome the nearly impossible bar of a Constitutional Amendment. To protect democracy, Court reform should be a key part of Democrats' political platform.

I’m tempted to give Elon Musk the title of world's worst neo robber baron. But when it comes to greedy and irresponsible corporate behavior, one CEO is outdoing even Musk.

When the history of this sordid second Gilded Age is written, the list of neo robber barons will obviously include Musk as well as Meta’s (Facebook’s) Mark Zuckerberg, Palantir’s Alex Karp, Palantir’s co-founder and board chair Peter Thiel, Oracle’s Larry Ellison (and his son, David), Google’s Sundar Pichai, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, and the Trump Organization’s monumentally corrupt Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump.

But one greedy, public-be-damned CEO stands out even above Musk, Trump, and the rest. His name: Jeff Bezos. His corporation: Amazon.

It is difficult for the human mind to comprehend all the ways Bezos is shafting Americans.

Start with prices. According to a newly unsealed filing released Monday in an antitrust lawsuit brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.

At a time when most Americans are having trouble making ends meet, Amazon’s push to raise prices — to enlarge its profits (and put more money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets) — is beyond unconscionable.

The New York Times’s David McCabe reports on unsealed evidence that Amazon punishes sellers on its marketplace for offering lower prices on other websites, like those of Walmart or Target. When it spots a competitor’s lower price, Amazon tells the brands to demand that rival sites raise their prices for the products.

The filing includes an email to Hanes from Amazon, with links to Target’s and Walmart’s lower prices, along with Hanes’s apologetic response that it “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.” And an email to Levi’s from Amazon, with links to lower-priced khakis on Walmart’s website, along with Levi’s response that Walmart had agreed to raise its price.

According to the lawsuit, Amazon has been able to exert pressure on different brands to raise their prices because of Amazon’s power and reach.

At a time when most Americans are having trouble making ends meet, Amazon’s push to raise prices — to enlarge its profits (and put more money into Jeff Bezos’s pockets) — is beyond unconscionable.

This is hardly Bezos’s and Amazon’s first brush with antitrust law. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states accused Amazon of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants who sell on its site and prioritizing its own products, resulting in “artificially higher prices.”

In September, the FTC agreed to settle another lawsuit against Amazon that accused it of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson reports that Virginia is subsidizing Amazon’s “second headquarters” in Crystal City, Virginia — just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C. — with $750 million in taxpayer funds, yet the corporation is wildly behind its job-creation pledge. Having promised to create 25,000 new jobs by 2038, it created a mere 1,600 jobs last year and is up to just 29 percent of the number of jobs it promised by now.

Speaking of Amazon jobs: Until earlier this month, attorneys for the National Labor Relations Board were prosecuting Amazon for firing employees that make Amazon deliveries because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a clear violation of labor laws.

But then, a few weeks ago, the NLRB attorneys — now firmly under control of Trump’s NLRB general counsel — announced they’d reached a “settlement” with Amazon in which Amazon agreed to pay the workers who’d been laid off for more than two years, two weeks’ worth of wages. Two weeks.

Amazon’s workers are among the worst-treated in America.

Ryan Haas of The Western Edge reports that on April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by a manager to turn around. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue picking items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.

Jeff Bezos couldn’t care less. As of April 2026, his net worth is estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world.

Like the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, Bezos’s consumption is of the conspicuous kind.

He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day star-studded event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian, and including a ceremony on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and a pajama-themed afterparty at the Arsenal.

His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington.

But what puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.

Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump cheerleader — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.

(That’s not all Bezos has done to ruin the Post. In February, he fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of its staff.)

Then he shamelessly paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back a tiny percentage. It was a blatant bribe of Trump.

And he does whatever Trump asks. After Trump complained to Bezos about a report that Amazon planned to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.

Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump's second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny.

That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era.

But his public-be-damned business practices, his especially conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Jeff Bezos the worst CEO of them all.

What can you do? You might share this post and boycott Amazon.

The large-scale US airstrike on Venezuela was unprecedented in modern history. The surprise attack forcibly kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, First Combatant Cilia Flores, from Fort Tiuna on the outskirts of Caracas. The US killed over 100 people in the early morning hours of January 3, 2026, including reportedly some civilians in the neighboring Ciudad Tiuna social housing complex.

We visited Ciudad Tiuna 50 days after the US bombing to hear the resident’s accounts. We were the second “solidarity brigade” to visit Venezuela and the first to arrive by air. The delegation consisted primarily of activists from the US, along with Canada, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. CodePink, Task Force on the Americas, Veterans for Peace, and World Beyond War were among the solidarity organizations represented.

A sign reads, "Welcome to the socialist city of Tiuna." (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

Ciudad Tiuna is a planned housing complex of some 20,000 units, part of the national Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela program. Apartments are allocated with priority to families displaced by disasters and to low-income households. As of December 2025, over 5 million units have reportedly been delivered nationwide.

We were enthusiastically greeted by a community-based club affiliated with the Abuelos y Abuelas de la Patria (Grandparents of the Homeland) mission, a government program empowering seniors in communal life. They organized a cultural presentation and introduced us to social and political organizations in their socialist city.

Our hosts also had a frank take-home message for us: “We never invaded; we liberated. Take our passion and love to give you strength to do what you must and rise up.”

A woman sang for Mother Earth accompanied by a shaman drum. A man read poetry by Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, remarking “not all North Americans fornicate with their mothers” (loosely translated from Spanish).

In a tribute to Cuba, residents said they do not speak of solidarity with Cubans because “we are one people.” They praised the Cuban’s courage, including the 32 presidential guards murdered by the US in the January 3 attack. They also highlighted Cuban’s generosity in helping Venezuela achieve “territory free of illiteracy” status by 2005. Programs such as Misión Barrio Adentro brought thousands of Cuban doctors into poor urban and rural communities to provide free primary care.

And most of all, they deeply lamented the current US military blockade of Cuba, which has prevented Venezuela from supplying vital oil to the island. The suffering imposed by Washington on the Cubans pained them deeply.

They do not speak of solidarity with Cubans because “we are one people.” (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

They shared a flyer titled “Never Again–January 3–Diplomacy for Peace,” which read in part:

Neither forgiveness nor forgetting! Memory is not resentment, but the heart of the people’s dignity who have been attacked. A people without justice becomes submissive. Impunity flourishes if we do not sow justice. We will not tire of weaving unity to triumph.

Their immediate demand is the release of their president and first lady. The flyer also calls for defense of popular sovereignty, no intervention by imperialism in Venezuelan affairs, and reparations for the “offended homeland.”

Their immediate demand is the release of their president and first lady. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

The flier concludes with a quote from Delcy Rodríguez: “The dignity of the Venezuelan people is the first line of defense. We have to preserve our integrity as a people, guarantee our territorial integrity, and preserve our national independence.”

January 3 was not unanticipated but nevertheless a great shock. During a walking tour, they described the terror of the sneak attack. They told us each time the Venezuelan people successfully resisted Washington’s attempts at regime change—attacks dating back from the founding of their Bolivarian Revolution 26 years ago by then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez—the siege has been racketed up.

“We were all running because we were being bombed.” (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

Fabricio, age 11, described a sky lit red with explosions and filled with US helicopters. The elders vowed, “Never again will we allow our children to be traumatized.” Government mental health workers have since been regularly visiting Ciudad Tiuna.

“Never again will we allow our children to be traumatized.” (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

They explained how they truly felt the horror that the Palestinians experience. The difference, they added, was that for them it was a single day while in Gaza it is every day.

At the time, many feared the attack could signal a protracted full-scale land invasion. Such an incursion, they warned, could well be launched in the future. (This was also the opinion of government officials that we conferred with.)

They are proud that the Bolivarian leadership remains firm and united. This they attribute to the support of the people such as themselves. The concessions forced upon the government under the threat of an even more devastating attack have been bitter to accept, but better than the alternative of greater destruction.

Dudar es traición—to doubt is to betray. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

Our hosts described themselves as Chavistas, militants in support of the current government. Some wore shirts bearing the phrase dudar es traición—to doubt is to betray. Their lived experience is of a nation under imperial siege—in a perpetual state of war with the threat of more. Under such circumstances unity is prioritized.

Under conditions of siege, unity is prioritized. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

They rejected speculation that the kidnapping was aided by traitors within, arguing that such narratives serve the purposes of the enemy of eroding unity by fostering distrust. They emphasized the continuity of revolutionary policy from Chávez to Maduro and now to Delcy, as she is affectionately called.

Conditions have changed, but not the leadership’s dedication. They noted that regional solidarity has weakened, leaving Venezuela ever more isolated.

Before we departed, several children gave us gifts: handmade wristbands in the national colors, decorated pencils, and a book on climate change from a Marxist perspective. Our hosts also had a frank take-home message for us: “We never invaded; we liberated. Take our passion and love to give you strength to do what you must and rise up.” The hardships caused by the US sanctions—including shortages of medicine and essential goods—are linked to the failure of North Americans to restrain our own government.

After being scared away by the US bombing, the wild parrots have returned to the community. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

Meanwhile, the wild guacamayas (blue-and-yellow macaws), which once came to Ciudad Tiuna to be fed by residents but disappeared after the bombing, have now returned to a community that asks only to be left in peace.

Venezuela is a territory of peace. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

On April 17, Congress voted to pass a brief 10-day extension of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. This sets the new expiration date for April 30, 2026.

Section 702 was added to FISA in 2008 with a provision that requires Congress to periodically reauthorize it. The measure allows national security agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to collect and monitor—without a warrant—any electronic communications sent to and from non-US persons “reasonably believed to be located” outside the US. Notably, Americans who send messages to people abroad may likewise have their data surveilled.

Law enforcement agencies have consistently abused this loophole to spy on US citizens in clear violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. The Brennan Center for Justice reports that, in recent years, the government has conducted warrantless “searches for the communications of 141 Black Lives Matter protesters; 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign; members of Congress; multiple US government officials, political commentators, and journalists; and tens of thousands of Americans engaged in ‘civil unrest.’”

Even President Donald Trump alleges being a victim of these “backdoor searches.” Ahead of the last renewal vote in April 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social, “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!! DJT.”

The Trump administration perfectly encapsulates the dangers that section 702 presents to the American public and the wider international community. Far from preventing terrorism, section 702 enables it.

Since returning to the White House, however, his tone has notably shifted. On April 15, Trump posted that Republicans must “UNIFY” to pass a “clean extension of FISA 702.” He continues, “While parts of FISA were illegally and unfortunately used against me in the Democrats’ disgraceful Witch Hunt and Attack in the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA Hoax, and perhaps would be used against me in the future, I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!”

Trump’s strong endorsement of section 702 is unsurprising. His administration has actively worked to undermine the rights and protections the Constitution guarantees. This includes: (i) subpoenaing social media sites to turn over the personal data of users who have criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement; (ii) actively exploring a proposal to detain US citizens and deport them to prisons in El Salvador; (iii) violating states’ rights by threatening to cut funding to sanctuary cities as well as commandeering state and local officials to do the federal government’s bidding; (iv) working to disenfranchise voters via the election-rigging SAVE America Act; and (v) his administration’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, among many other examples.

Trump is more than willing to risk your rights and privileges for the sake of the America he desires. For a petty narcissist obsessed with revenge, section 702 is another dangerous and powerful tool for furthering his authoritarian agenda.

Already, Trump is actively exploiting section 702 to advance his illegal wars. On April 14, he posted, “Our Military desperately needs FISA 702, and it is one of the reasons we have ⁠had such tremendous SUCCESS on the battlefield, both in Venezuela and Iran.” These ‘successes’—or more accurately, war crimes and violations of international law—include kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro; assassinating Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; and inciting a reckless war of choice that has seen the US and Israel deliberately target schools, hospitals, and residential buildings.

The Trump administration perfectly encapsulates the dangers that section 702 presents to the American public and the wider international community. Far from preventing terrorism, section 702 enables it.

To be clear, however, the reasons for ending section 702 go beyond the Trump administration. First, the measure undermines the very rationale for FISA. FISA was enacted in 1978 following the revelations of widespread warrantless surveillance under the Nixon administration. This included not only the infamous Watergate scandal, but also spying on anti-war protesters and civil rights activists under the guise that they were linked to foreign communist groups. FISA requires intelligence agencies to obtain authorization for electronic surveillance and other investigative actions. It also establishes the FISA court to oversee requests for surveillance warrants.

Section 702 bypasses these safeguards. Once the government collects a target’s data, the FBI and other agencies can search through it to find Americans’ phone calls, text messages, and emails without a warrant or approval from the FISA court. Section 702 allows the government to engage in the very kinds of Nixonian abuses FISA was designed to prevent.

Keeping in line with Trump’s interests, Johnson’s proposal would permit the federal government to continue its assault against the American public and the global community unimpeded.

In fact, section 702 originally grew out of a secret warrantless surveillance program authorized by the Bush administration following the 9/11 attacks. The New York Times exposed the Terrorism Surveillance Program (TSP) to the public in 2005, triggering a wave of lawsuits. In 2006, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that TSP violated FISA and the Constitution. Despite this, as the American Civil Liberties Union notes, “Congress weakened FISA in 2007 and then again in 2008 to permit the warrantless wiretapping that the law had previously prohibited.” Instead of shutting down Bush’s unconstitutional program, Congress effectively codified it.

Second, and relatedly, section 702 cannot be meaningfully reformed precisely because the measure is antithetical to FISA itself. In 2023, amid another FISA renewal debate, then-FBI director Christopher Wray told Congress that he was “especially concerned” about a proposal that would require the government to obtain a warrant or court order before accessing information obtained using section 702. He remarked that, “A warrant requirement would amount to a de facto ban, because query applications either would not meet the legal standard to win court approval; or because, when the standard could be met, it would be so only after the expenditure of scarce resources, the submission and review of a lengthy legal filing, and the passage of significant time.”

This makes sense. After all, the entire point of section 702 is to authorize a warrantless surveillance program. A warrant requirement would effectively render it useless.

More modest attempts at reform have been proposed and even implemented. The 2024 Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), for instance, introduced a few provisions aimed at restricting backdoor searches. Yet, within a few months, the FBI was already violating those new requirements. While the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) contends that RISAA has led to a steep decline in backdoor searches, the reality is that the FBI failed to track all such queries in 2024 and 2025. Whether RISAA has had any real impact is thus unknown. That said, even if a decline occurred, RISAA—and similar proposals—would still have failed at solving the fundamental problem: prohibiting warrantless government surveillance and mass data collection.

This is the dilemma reformists face: A warrant requirement is a “de facto ban,” but any other form of restrictions will, at best, only lessen the number of people whose constitutional rights are violated.

The proposed three-year extension unveiled by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) on April 23 is no better. It includes minimal new oversight and penalties for abusing the spy program, but no warrant requirements. As Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) remarked: “Instead of ending warrantless surveillance or creating more transparency about government spying, this bill only requires a few more Trump administration officials to check a box. That always leads to more abuses, not less.” Keeping in line with Trump’s interests, Johnson’s proposal would permit the federal government to continue its assault against the American public and the global community unimpeded.

Third, while Trump and the CIA make sweeping claims about the terror attacks that section 702 has prevented, there is little publicly available evidence to support this. According to the Cato Institute, there is only one well-documented, independently corroborated case of section 702 preventing a terrorist attack on American soil: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot. In that case, section 702 was used by the NSA to track an exchange between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi, who was living in the US. The NSA passed this information to the FBI, which identified Zazi and disrupted the attack before it took place. Importantly, however, the NSA allegedly received the courier’s foreign email address from the government’s British Intelligence partners. At best then, this success was a byproduct of productive intelligence sharing between allies. Rather than proving the necessity of section 702, this incident underscores how Trump’s inane attacks against key US allies undermine our national security.

Congress should end section 702 and shift their focus to implementing more meaningful guardrails and oversight to FISA. At a time when constitutional rights are under unprecedented threat, Congress must act in the best interest of the public. While there’s still time, I urge everyone to contact their representatives and express their opposition to extending section 702.

Presidents release their federal spending priorities annually in the form of a federal budget proposal. This is a moral rather than a practical document—the president’s budget virtually never passes Congress as written. Instead, it expresses the values of presidents and how they want to see the nation’s revenues raised and investments spent. It’s a blueprint for the kind of country they want us to be.

These priorities fluctuate depending on which administration and party is in power. The fiscal year 2027 budget proposal from President Donald Trump is a shocking departure from values most Americans hold.

The budget proposal builds on the values legislated through Trump’s so-called “One Beautiful Bill,” passed last year, which stole from the rest of us to give tax breaks to the uber wealthy and the richest corporations.

If we judge Trump’s values by this budget, we could reasonably conclude he values only Pentagon bloat, aggressive assaults against immigrant families, and stripping rights from transgender people. Meanwhile, families and communities are essentially thrown to the wolves.

We must demand robust investments in family, community, and basic human needs. These are our national values, not war and the prosecution of immigrant children.

The most eye-popping number is the proposed $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon—a huge increase over the already astronomical $1 trillion spent this year. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has brazenly abused immigrants and US citizens, would also get billions more—over and above the unprecedented sums it got in the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

What wouldn’t get an increase in Trump’s budget? Programs that actually help people. This budget proposes a 10% cut to all non-Pentagon discretionary spending.

The Department of Health and Human Services is cut by 12.5%. The Department of Agriculture, 25%. The Department of Labor is slashed by 26%, and the Environmental Protection Agency is cut in half.

Jobs Corps for young people and work assistance for seniors are eliminated. After-school programs and food assistance for children are slashed. The federal government’s signature housing program, HOME, is zeroed out entirely.

At a time when families are navigating rising living costs, stagnant wages, and a tight job market, this budget proposes deep cuts to the programs that help them get by. Education, food and housing assistance, home energy assistance, and worker rights—all either zeroed out or drastically reduced. Even the children’s summer food program and the fruit and vegetable benefits of food stamps are cut.

Mind you, all this would come on top of the historic $1 trillion cut to Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs under the “Big Beautiful Bill.” Those cuts aren’t a proposed blueprint—they’ve already been passed into law.

Children feel these effects the most. Reduced access to Head Start and school-based nutrition and disability services doesn’t just affect the present moment—they shape lifelong outcomes. Food insecurity, unstable housing, and a lack of early education create barriers that no child should have to try to overcome.

Transgender people, already under aggressive attack, are targeted in this budget—for example, historic cuts to the National Institutes of Health include eliminating research on the health of trans people.

The document also repeatedly scapegoats the trans community for cuts to programs that have virtually nothing to do with them. For instance, university programs that support vulnerable students were eliminated because the administration claims they fund “clothing needs for transgender people.” Cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association were justified, in part, because the agency allegedly held a workshop for transgender people.

These disinvestments destabilize entire communities and local economies. Public health suffers and income inequality increases.

A nation’s strength is not measured solely by its military spending or economic indicators. It is measured by whether its people—especially its most vulnerable—have what they need to live with dignity. This budget fails that test.

We know what works. Investments in education, nutrition, health, housing, care, income, and work supports. These investments stabilize communities and improve the economy. Choosing to cut these programs is not inevitable. It is a policy decision whose adverse effects will be felt for generations.

We must demand robust investments in family, community, and basic human needs. These are our national values, not war and the prosecution of immigrant children. Because when we disinvest in people, we all pay the price.

This op-ed may be republished with attribution to InsideSources.com.

CBS News is inviting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to join them at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this week—to sit at their table, surrounded by journalists he’s banned from Pentagon press conferences.

Many, including journalists who work at CBS, are calling this invitation distasteful, given Hegseth’s attacks on truth, the First Amendment, and journalism. However, given CBS’s hard pivot to the right after being absorbed into the Ellisons’ media sphere—and with warmonger Bari Weiss at the helm—maybe it’s just what makes sense for CBS. This is just one example of mainstream media not only refusing to ask questions of war criminals, but blatantly befriending them.

This move is particularly interesting given Hegseth’s last few months.

He oversaw and commanded the operation that kidnapped the head of state of another country when the US attacked Venezuela earlier this year. He also oversaw targeted strikes that extrajudicially killed Venezuelan fishermen under the auspices of drug smuggling. Just last month, he started the US war against Iran by using AI to target an elementary school in Minab, killing nearly 200 children in an instant. He’s been in lockstep with President Donald Trump in terms of genocidal rhetoric toward seemingly any country he wakes up hating that day. Now, the Hegseth War Department is reportedly planning a war on Cuba—a country 90 miles away from the United States that has done absolutely nothing to us except try to send emergency medical aid after Hurricane Katrina.

Yet the media keeps framing these threats as if he’s bluffing, as if he hasn’t ordered horrific military actions before, as if the blood of 168 little girls won’t still be dripping from his hands as they sit across from him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

The Minab school bombing has seemingly stuck with people in terms of Hegseth’s brutality. Surely, the deliberate targeting of an elementary school is a war crime. Shortly after the bombing, members of Congress submitted a list of 10 questions for Hegseth to answer. It included questions about the use of artificial intelligence in target selection, what steps he took to mitigate civilian harm, and what coordination had been done with Israel. He was also asked what mitigation measures he would take in the future. March 20 was the deadline given to him by Congress, and the day came and went without a word from him.

If the attack in Minab that killed little girls and boys had been an accident, I imagine he could have answered those questions easily. That is one of his many war crimes, possibly one of his most blatant. But a person only needs to commit one war crime to be a war criminal; it just depends on who holds him accountable. If Congress couldn’t get answers to its questions, you would think outlets like CBS would be responsible for having him on their shows and demanding answers, as real journalists would. But instead, they invite him to dinner.

On top of the targeting of a school, Hegseth has also repeatedly—during a ceasefire and delicate negotiations—threatened to bomb Iran’s energy infrastructure. Intentionally attacking power plants or electric grids is a war crime under international law. If carried out as Trump and Hegseth have articulated, wiping out Iran’s power would mean millions of people could die in ways most people in the US can’t even imagine. Power in hospitals would go out, ventilators would shut down, and incubators would stop working. Food would spoil, and transportation—for the sick and injured—would fail. Their blood would be on Hegseth’s hands. Yet the media keeps framing these threats as if he’s bluffing, as if he hasn’t ordered horrific military actions before, as if the blood of 168 little girls won’t still be dripping from his hands as they sit across from him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, journalists like those at CBS should be demanding answers he refused to give to Congress. With a war secretary who bans the press from his briefings, this might be their only chance to get them.

Writing more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian Plutarch gave us an eloquent description of what modern historians now call “micro-militarism.” When an imperial power like Athens then, or America now, is in decline, its leaders often react emotionally by mounting seemingly bold military strikes in hopes of regaining the imperial grandeur that’s slipping through their fingers. Instead of another of the great victories the empire won at its peak of power, however, such military misadventures only serve to accelerate the ongoing decline, erasing whatever aura of imperial majesty remains and revealing instead the moral rot deep inside the ruling elite.

There is mounting historical evidence that America is indeed an empire in steep decline, while President Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran is becoming the sort of micro-military disaster that helped destroy successive empires over the past 2,500 years—from ancient Athens to medieval Portugal to modern Spain, Great Britain, and now the United States. And at the core of every such ill-fated war-making decision lay a problematic leader, often born into wealth and prestige, whose personal inadequacies reflected and ramified the many irrationalities that make imperial decline such a painful process.

During that demoralizing downward spiral, imperial armies, so lethal in an empire’s ascent, can err by plunging their countries into draining, even disastrous “micro-military” misadventures—psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the loss of imperial power by trying to occupy new territories or display awe-inspiring military might. Although such micro-militarism often chose targets that proved strategically unsustainable, the psychological pressures upon declining empires are so strong that they all too often gamble their prestige on just such misadventures. Not only did such disasters add financial pressures to a fading empire’s many troubles, but in a humiliating fashion, they also invariably exposed its eroding power while exacerbating the destabilizing impact of imperial decline in the capitals of empire (whether Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, London, or Washington, DC).

In our moment, when the bombs stop falling and the rubble is finally cleared from the streets of Tehran and Beirut, the impact on US global power of such a de facto defeat will become all too clear—as alliances like NATO atrophy, American hegemony evaporates, legitimacy is lost, global disorder rises, and the world economy suffers.

Even if Trump destroys Iran’s infrastructure or eventually negotiates a face-saving peace deal, by every metric that really matters, Washington has already lost its war with Iran.

Let me now turn from the disasters of the present imperial moment to the lessons of history to explore the sort of lasting damage that Donald Trump’s micro-military misadventure in the Middle East might be inflicting on this country’s declining imperium.

The Defeat of Athens in Sicily

The date was 413 BC. The place was ancient Athens, then the seat of a powerful empire, long dominant around the rim of the Aegean Sea but losing influence to a sustained military challenge by Sparta. At the port of Piraeus, a “certain stranger,” as the historian and philosopher Plutarch recalled, “took a seat in a barber’s shop, and began to discourse [on] what had happened as if the Athenians already knew all about it.” Stunned by this stranger’s report of a military debacle in far-off Sicily, the barber “ran at the top of his speed to the upper city” of Athens, where the news sparked “consternation and confusion.”

What that stranger described was the greatest military disaster in the history of the Athenian empire. Two years earlier, in the midst of the protracted Peloponnesian Wars, the aristocrat Nicias—an indifferent, indecisive leader who used his inherited wealth to court popularity with lavish spectacles—persuaded the citizens of Athens to deliver a theoretically bold blow against a rival imperial power, Sparta, by attacking its ally Syracuse in Sicily in hopes of crippling the enemy, capturing riches, and recovering Athens’ ebbing hegemony.

Instead of victory, however, Athens’ vast armada of 200 ships and some 12,000 soldiers suffered a devastating defeat. Not only was the fleet destroyed (largely because Nicias proved “an incompetent military commander”), but his surviving soldiers were captured, confined on a starvation diet in a stone quarry, and sold into slavery. Athens never recovered.

Within a decade, the city had been starved into submission by Sparta’s impenetrable blockade of a naval choke point in the Dardanelles Strait, stripped of its empire, and subjected to autocratic rule by a pro-Spartan oligarchy.

Portugal’s Debacle in Morocco

Our next date is 1578. The place is Portugal, the seat of a lucrative empire that had controlled commerce across the Indian Ocean for decades but now found its hegemony challenged by Muslim merchant princes allied with the Ottoman Empire.

In its capital, Lisbon, a headstrong young king, Sebastian, suffered from sexual impotence and a fiery temperament that made him a fanatical “captain of Christ.” With the idea of striking a lethal blow in his country’s global war against Islam, the young king persuaded the flower of his nation’s aristocracy to follow him on a latter-day crusade across the Mediterranean Sea to Morocco. There, at the fateful Battle of Alcácer Quibir, Portugal’s army was slaughtered by local Muslim forces. Some 8,000 Portuguese troops were killed, 15,000 captured, and only 100 escaped.

The defeat was so devastating that it not only destroyed the king and his court but also precipitated the country’s incorporation into the Spanish empire for the next 60 years. In the aftermath of such reverses, the Portuguese Estado da India (or state of India) at Goa was reduced to selling permits to any ship captain who could pay, whether Hindu, Muslim, or Christian. With Portuguese commercial dominance removed from the Indian Ocean, Muslim merchants and pilgrims could once again move across it unimpeded.

Though the Portuguese empire would survive for another three centuries, it would never recover the commercial hegemony that had once allowed it to dominate the world’s sea lanes from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, across the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic to the coast of Brazil.

Spain’s Disaster in the Atlas Mountains

And now to jump several centuries, another significant date for imperial disasters is 1920. The place was Madrid, where Spain’s leaders were already reeling from the psychological stress of their country’s long imperial decline, culminating in the loss of its last colonies, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898 with the rising United States.

Seeking regeneration through further colonial conquest, Spain’s conservative leaders reacted to that demoralizing defeat against America by expanding their small coastal enclaves in northern Morocco to establish a protectorate over the whole region and its arid Atlas Mountains. Spain’s inept monarch Alfonso XIII, who liked to play soldier, cultivated a clique of military favorites who shared his passion for the recovery of lost imperial glory by pacifying that rugged terrain. As resistance to Spanish rule by Berber Muslims escalated into the bloody Rif War of 1920, one of the king’s favorite generals led his troops into the Battle of Annual, where Berber fighters slaughtered some 12,000 of them.

Nonetheless, through the influence of the king and his military cronies, Spain clung desperately to those profitless Moroccan mountains. The Spaniards would, in fact, dispatch 125,000 more troops there, including its Foreign Legion led by the man who, in the 1930s, would become the leader of a fascist Spain, Francisco Franco, for a protracted pacification campaign that featured both mass slaughter and military innovation. In a desperate quest for a victory that defied both economic and strategic rationality, Spain produced some 400 metric tons of lethal mustard gas to conduct history’s first aerial bombardment using poison gas, raining mass death down upon Berber villages. And in military history’s first successful amphibious operation, the Spanish navy also landed 18,000 troops and a squadron of light tanks at Al Hoceima Bay in September 1925 to flank and soon defeat the Berber guerrillas there.

Such micro-militarism, however, not only plunged Spain into a protracted pacification campaign with soaring costs, heavy casualties, and mass atrocities, but also unleashed political forces that would destroy its struggling democracy. As the masses protested that misbegotten war, King Alfonso backed a military favorite, General Primo de Rivera, in imposing a decade of dictatorship that finally gave way to a short-lived Second Republic. In 1936, however, only a decade after the Rif War ended, General Franco flew his Army of Africa back from Morocco over the Mediterranean Sea, launching a Spanish civil war that would defeat the Republic and establish a fascist dictatorship that would rule the country for nearly 40 dismal years of economic stagnation.

The End of the British Empire at Suez

Arguably, when it came to imperial decline, however, the most revealing date was 1956. The place was London, the seat of the once-proud British Empire, where the suffocating stress of a painful, protracted global imperial retreat had pushed British conservatives into a disastrous micro-military intervention at Egypt’s Suez Canal, leading to what one British diplomat would term the “dying convulsion of British imperialism.”

In July 1956 (as described in my recent book Cold War on Five Continents), Egypt’s charismatic president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, ending British colonial control there, electrifying the Arab world, and elevating himself to the first rank of world leaders. Although British ships could still pass freely through the canal, the country’s conservative prime minister, Anthony Eden, a vain aristocrat and determined defender of empire, would be deeply unsettled, if not unhinged, by Nasser’s assertive nationalism. Indeed, his leadership throughout the crisis would prove so unbalanced that senior Foreign Office officials would become convinced “Eden has gone off his head.”

In response to the news of the canal’s nationalization, an apoplectic Eden would immediately convene a council of war at 4:00 in the morning. Calling Nasser a “Muslim Mussolini,” a reference to the former fascist ruler of Italy, Eden ordered “him removed and I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.” Making his meaning perfectly clear, Eden asked his foreign minister: “What’s all this nonsense about isolating Nasser or ‘neutralising’ him as you call it?” He then added pointedly: “I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered.” With the British secret service MI6 failing in multiple assassination attempts, however, Eden’s government began plotting with the French and Israelis to launch a secret, two-phase invasion of the Suez Canal Zone.

On October 29, the Israeli army led by the dashing General Moshe Dayan swept across the Sinai Peninsula, destroying Egyptian tanks and bringing his troops within 10 miles of the canal. Using that fighting as a pretext for its own intervention (supposedly to restore peace), in just three days, an armada of six Anglo-French aircraft carriers smashed the Egyptian air force, destroying 104 of its new Soviet MIG jet fighters and 130 additional aircraft.

With Egypt’s strategic forces destroyed and its military virtually helpless before the might of that imperial juggernaut, Nasser deployed a geopolitical strategy brilliant in its simplicity. He had dozens of rusting cargo ships filled with rocks and then scuttled them at the canal’s northern entrance, quickly closing one of the world’s main maritime choke points and so cutting off Europe’s oil lifeline to the Persian Gulf. By the time 22,000 British and French forces began storming ashore at the canal’s north end on November 6, their objective of securing the free movement of ships had already been snatched from their grasp.

By the end of that micro-military disaster, Britain would be reprimanded by the United Nations; its currency would require an International Monetary Fund bailout to save it from utter collapse; its aura of imperial majesty would have evaporated; and the once mighty British Empire would be on the road to extinction. In retrospect, the Suez Crisis would not only expose the full-scale decline of British power, but also show the world that the country’s ruling Conservative establishment, with its illusions of imperial and racial superiority, was no longer capable of global leadership.

America’s Defeat in the Strait of Hormuz

Another date likely to prove all too significant when it comes to the history of imperial decline is February 28, 2026. The place was Washington, DC, home to what had been history’s most powerful imperial state that had dominated much of the globe for nearly 80 years through a mixture of military alliances, deft diplomacy, and economic leadership. By then, however, cracks had distinctly begun to appear in its edifice of power as US global hegemony faced an increasingly strong economic challenge from China, its massive military suffered two searing defeats in Afghanistan and Iraq, and its economic globalization produced an angry populism at home.

After a populist campaign based on promises to restore both working-class prosperity and America’s global power, Donald Trump took office a second time in January 2025 promising a “golden age of America,” a “thrilling new era of national success” in which the country would “reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world.” Born to wealth and privilege himself, Trump returned to office convinced of his unique “genius” for leadership and believing that “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Wielding raw economic and military might to compel obeisance from friend and foe alike, the president, inspired by a delusional sense of divine mission, began attempting to bend the world to his will. But during his first year in office, nothing seemed to work as planned. Indeed, most of his initiatives produced the sort of backlash that only served to show how far the United States had fallen from 1991, when the break-up of the Soviet Union made it the world’s sole superpower.

With its alliances in tatters, its world leadership forfeited, and its aura of military might evaporating, the only trajectory for US global hegemony now seems to be downward.

On April 2, 2025, on what he called “Liberation Day,” Trump announced a roster of punitive tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing largely from Chinese imports that faced an initial duty of 34%—later raised to a fully punitive 100%. But at their October 2025 meeting in South Korea, China’s leader Xi Jinping forced Trump to back down by cutting US access to his country’s storehouse of strategic rare earth minerals.

In January, with his tariff initiative losing its luster, Trump plunged the NATO alliance into crisis by demanding that Denmark give him the island of Greenland, threatening to impose new tariffs on European allies unless they complied. Within a week, however, vociferous European resistance had led him to retract that threat at the Davos economic summit, claiming he was satisfied with NATO’s offer of a “framework of a future deal.”

On February 28, 2026, with his tariff initiative failing and his Greenland gambit checkmated, Trump joined Israel in a seemingly bold strike on Iran that soon had the makings of the sort of fateful “micro-military” maneuver that appears to go with imperial powers in decline.

In the first few days of war, US and Israeli bombing killed Iran’s leadership, destroyed its navy, and eliminated its air defenses, leaving the country seemingly prostrate before the might of America’s air-power juggernaut. After a week of devastating bombardment that seemed to stun the world with its lethality and precision, on March 6 Trump demanded that Iran offer an “unconditional surrender” and signal its capitulation by “the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader.” In exchange, he promised that the US would “work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction.”

But much as Nasser had done at Suez in 1956, Iran’s leadership reversed the war’s geostrategic balance by closing a critical maritime choke point in the Strait of Hormuz. By striking five freighters with drones in the first week of war, Iran’s leaders, taking a leaf from Nasser’s geopolitical playbook, effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic, cutting off gas, fertilizer, and oil shipments that plunged the world economy into an unprecedented energy crisis. By the end of March, Iran’s choke hold over the strait was so tight that it began collecting “tolls” from freighters to permit passage.

Blindsided by the strait’s unexpected yet utterly predictable closure, on April 5, Easter Sunday, an unsettled Trump posted a social media message saying: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!!” He added: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell—JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” Two days later, Trump threatened that, unless Iran opened the Strait of Hormuz, he would attack its civilian infrastructure so severely that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

After the collapse of subsequent negotiations between the two sides at Islamabad, Pakistan, on April 12, Trump plunged ever deeper into the Iran quagmire, ordering the US Navy to “begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” and “interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.” With characteristic bluster, he added: “We are fully ‘LOCKED AND LOADED,’ and our Military will finish up the little that is left of Iran!”

Even if Trump destroys Iran’s infrastructure or eventually negotiates a face-saving peace deal, by every metric that really matters, Washington has already lost its war with Iran. Like all weaker powers in asymmetric warfare, Tehran has been willing to absorb relentless punishment, while inflicting pain that the dominant power can ill sustain. The US will soon run out of targets in Tehran, but Iran has a whole world of damage that its cheap drones can do to the elaborate, exposed petroleum infrastructure on the south shore of the Persian Gulf.

Like Britain at Suez in 1956, Washington will likely pay a heavy price for its “micro-militarism” in the Strait of Hormuz. Close allies, the bedrock of US global power for 80 years, have refused any military support for Washington’s war of choice, prompting Trump to call them “cowards.” In response to his thundering threats of civilian and civilizational destruction (both war crimes), Trump has been condemned by world leaders. Oblivious to the dangers of war in a region that is the epicenter of global capitalism, Washington is now proving ever more dangerously disruptive of the global economy, making China look like a far more stable choice for world leadership. Moreover, while the US military has proven its tactical agility in destroying targets, it clearly can no longer capture meaningful strategic objectives.

With its alliances in tatters, its world leadership forfeited, and its aura of military might evaporating, the only trajectory for US global hegemony now seems to be downward (like so many great powers of the past). By the time Trump’s micro-military misadventure in the Strait of Hormuz is over, the decline of US global power will have accelerated drastically and the world will be trying to move beyond the old Pax Americana toward a new, distinctly uncertain global order.

In 2001, forensic artist Richard Neave and his team reconstructed a face the world thought it knew. What emerged was not the pale, European Christ of Western art, but a Middle Eastern man with dark hair, brown skin, and features shaped by the climate and culture of his time.

Historian Joan Taylor reached a similar conclusion. Jesus likely had olive skin, dark eyes, and stood at an average height for a first-century Jewish man living under Roman occupation. He was not outside history but fully inside it, shaped by the religious and economic pressures of his world.

He was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. In his own language, he would have been called Yeshua.

This is not a minor correction. It changes the story.

It changes not only who Jesus was, but how systems treated him and how they still treat the vulnerable now.

Jesus moved through a world shaped by imperial rule and internal fragmentation. Fear and political instability were not background conditions. They structured daily life.

When he was arrested, the pattern was familiar. He was identified, taken at night, questioned, and beaten. The Gospels preserve competing accounts of responsibility and meaning, reflecting early struggle over what his death signified. What they agree on is simple. He was handed over to the state.

His execution was not an accident. It was policy.

Crucifixion was a Roman instrument of control, designed not only to kill but to make suffering visible and instructive. The body became a warning. Power was communicated through exposure, through the public display of consequence.

That is what makes the story so difficult. It was legal. It was orderly. It was widely understood as justified by those who authorized it. And it was still wrong.

That is what makes crucifixion more than a method of killing. It functioned as a public technology of state control, designed to bind suffering to authority itself. The body became a message. Power was asserted not only through death, but through visibility, through the instruction embedded in pain made public.

Modern systems of violence rarely depend on that kind of visibility. They tend instead toward distance and procedural insulation. Harm is distributed across chains of authorization. It is classified and carried out through mechanisms that separate decision from direct encounter. What changes is not only the method of force, but the organization of moral perception itself, how responsibility is dispersed and how suffering is rendered remote even when it is extensive.

Today, in the Gaza Strip, images continue to emerge of destroyed neighborhoods, displaced families, and children pulled from rubble. These realities are interpreted through competing frameworks of meaning, including security, survival, trauma, and political necessity, each carrying real historical and emotional weight.

But the scope of this violence does not remain contained in one place.

Across the wider region, children have been killed and injured in multiple arenas of conflict. In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, and in Iran, families have buried children whose lives ended in strikes and attacks justified through competing claims of defense and deterrence. No side is untouched by the loss of childhood life, even if the scale, cause, and context differ sharply across each setting.

This is not equivalence. It is recognition. Distinct political realities can still produce a shared human outcome: children reduced to collateral within systems that speak the language of necessity.

And yet even recognition can drift toward abstraction when it remains at a distance.

That distance collapses when the scale shifts.

A family member of mine is a special education teacher in a district marked by poverty, where food insecurity is a recurring presence in daily life.

Jesus’ teaching becomes sharper here. He does not offer “feed the hungry” and “clothe the naked” as metaphor or aspiration, but as commandment. These are not symbolic ideals. They are the ethical floor of his vision of human life.

The other day, they shared something a student created in class: a graphic novel about home life.

Inside it, a third grader drew a refrigerator marked with X’s and wrote simply, “no food.” He drew his mother in bed with X’s over her eyes. His siblings stood nearby saying the same thing: no food.

There is a silence that follows stories like that. Not because they are rare, but because they are real.

In that moment, the commandment to feed the hungry is no longer distant or theological. It becomes immediate and unresolved. It presses against every broader claim about necessity and allocation of resources.

In a society capable of directing vast resources toward military power, the persistence of child hunger is not a failure of capacity. It is a reflection of priorities.

The same world that produces advanced systems of defense and deterrence also produces a third grader who draws a refrigerator marked “no food.”

In the same moral field where children abroad are killed in war, children here experience deprivation that is quieter but no less real.

The distance between those facts is not only political. It is ethical.

What matters, then, is how violence becomes normalized within systems of authority. Responsibility disperses. Each actor follows procedure. Each decision appears limited in scope. Yet together, they produce outcomes no single participant fully controls or can easily disown.

This is how injustice becomes durable. Not only through hatred, but through structure. Not only through intent, but through obedience.

As Henry David Thoreau argued, when law turns individuals into instruments of injustice, moral responsibility does not dissolve into the system. It returns to the individual. Refusal, in such moments, becomes a form of ethical clarity.

That claim is not simple. It raises questions of risk and competing obligations. It also raises a harder question: what happens when moral clarity demands attention to suffering both far away and right in front of us?

The world does not lack information about Gaza. The images are constant, and the interpretations are global. What remains uncertain is not awareness, but response. Whether recognition becomes action, or whether it is absorbed into the ordinary language of necessity.

To return to the crucifixion is not to collapse history into the present. It is to recognize a recurring structure in how power operates: a Jewish man from the Middle East, judged as dangerous, processed through systems of authority, and killed in the name of order.

That structure does not belong to one century.

It appears wherever human life is subordinated to the maintenance of political, institutional, or economic control.

The question is not only what we see.

It is whether what we see—far away and close to home—will change what we can no longer ethically afford to ignore.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the temporary ceasefire is the culmination of an American policy defined by strategic incoherence. At the center stands Donald Trump, whose shifting positions, confused war objectives, and conflicting actions have not only failed to ease regional tensions but have actively deepened them.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s threats to blow up the whole country, including its bridges and power plants. At the same time, he touted a military “big day,” presenting potential war crimes as diplomatic tool, aggression as diplomacy, and destruction as leverage.

Trump inflated, almost delusional, promises ahead of potential talks come across less as statesmanship and more as a calculated sales pitch to the American public. His vows “to end up with a great deal,” coupled with an almost obsessive focus on Barack Obama by insisting his agreement will be “far better” than the one negotiated over a decade ago. An approach that reflects a tendency toward messaging driven less by policy depth and more by projection, comparison, and to frame outcomes in terms of self-aggrandizement and personal glory. Instead of articulating clear strategic objectives, his policy relies on distinguishing himself and image cultivation to project authority and superiority, leaving the underlying substance vague and open to question.

By manufacturing optimism and exaggerating progress while promising an imminent “great deal,” Trump appears to be negotiating with himself—or detached from reality—seeking to construct a narrative of success regardless of the facts on the ground. The performative optimism stands in sharp contrast to his simultaneous threats and pompous rhetoric, suggesting not confidence but a measure of desperation.

This yo-yoing of positions does more than create confusion; it erodes the credibility. Diplomacy depends on a baseline of predictability and mental stability.

Trump’s rationale for extending the ceasefire because of “internal divisions” within Iran is unconvincing. If internal debate within Iran is seen as warranting a pause, what should be said of a policy where direction shifts from one moment to the next? Differing political views are the essence of a normally functioning political system, whereas impulsive, erratic, personalized decision-making is not.

All of this unfolds as Trump continues issuing maximalist demands for conditions he helped create. For instance, he demands the surrender of enriched uranium that would not exist had he not abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Likewise, the Strait of Hormuz was closed as a consequence of his and Netanyahu’s war, not as its cause.

The consequences of these Israel-driven U.S. policies are felt by ordinary Americans at the gas pump and in grocery stores. The Strait of Hormuz has become a battleground, destabilizing global energy supply chains and economies worldwide. Yet despite these cascading effects, the core strategy remains unchanged. Trump continues to operate within an echo chamber of Israel-first sycophants that assume military might alone can deliver results, even as the policy falters and the war spills across the region, threatening roughly one-fifth of the world’s energy infrastructure.

This is not merely a political flaw or a matter of mismanagement. It is rather a strategic vulnerability shaped by Israel-first loyalists pulling U.S. strategy in directions that ultimately undermine U.S. national interests. In the absence of clearly defined national objectives, as in the first Israel’s war in Iraq, each step risks drawing the U.S. deeper into the polluted water of the Gulf, while simultaneously advancing an environment of chaos that serves only Israel’s calculated aims.

In this framework, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent statement that the war with Iran is “not over” an embedded message to Trump ahead of the proposed peace talks in Pakistan?

Negotiation between countries, especially in the context of war is not selling real estate deals, where haggling and the threat of retracting an offer are routine tactics. The craft of negotiation in this case operates on an entirely different level. Culture, national dignity, historical memory, and political positioning shape both the process and the outcome. Leaders are not merely bargaining over financial assets or credit ratings, they are navigating domestic demands, legitimacy, and the perception of strength or weakness on the global stage.

In this regard, threats or the constant withdrawal and reintroduction of proposals are not leverage, they are weakness. Unlike commercial transactions where the “Art of the Deal” is largely concluded at the moment of signing, international agreements mark the beginning of an ongoing, often long-term relationship. What may pass as hard-nosed bargaining in business can, in international diplomacy, be interpreted as bad faith, an approach that tends to invite resentment and resistance instead of compromise. This is why since last Tuesday, Trump was left waiting for Iran to come to the negotiation table.

Effective diplomacy requires serious leadership, consistency, and an understanding of the symbolic as much as the substantive. Agreements endure not because one side is pressured into submission, but because all parties can present the outcome as preserving their dignity and advancing mutual interests.

The lack of strategic maturity is indicative in a proclamation in the morning signaling openness to de-escalation; by midday, the message splinters, issuing threats and ultimatums while simultaneously hinting at imminent breakthrough deals; by the middle of the night, amid his insomnia, it escalates to threats of total destruction. This constant shifting of positions is not a minor stylistic quirk. It is possible that, at least some of this, is associated with his nocturnal communications with Netanyahu, who is apparently wagging him left and right.

This yo-yoing of positions does more than create confusion; it erodes the credibility. Diplomacy depends on a baseline of predictability and mental stability. When signals shift faster than the wind, uncertainty breeds mistrust, and negotiations drift from closed rooms into fiery statements played out for public consumption, creating an opening for Israel to drive the war and breed destruction and more chaos.

Since November of last year, residents in Monterey Park, a city outside of Los Angeles, have been fighting against a multi-billion dollar investment firm to stop a massive data center from being built in their residential neighborhood. For months, residents have educated themselves, organized, reached out to the community, and showed up at local City Council meetings to urge municipal governors to reject the developer’s permit application.

The group, No Data Center Monterey Park, has been tremendously successful. Just this past week, the City Council passed three ordinances banning data center construction in the city and declaring them a public nuisance. The Council also created a ballot measure to be voted on during a special election on June 2, called Measure NDC (No Data Center), potentially adding a second set of protections in the city. This came after months of persistent and strategic organizing and action that is emblematic of what the strongest local democracy can look like.

This story has been unfolding in similar ways all across the country as data centers are pushed by the Trump administration and Big Tech. Counties across the nation—rural and metropolitan—are fighting back against data centers and having success. Data Center Watch reported in 2025 that from May 2024 to March 2025, $64 billion in data center projects had been blocked or delayed. It is a moment that few expected, but gives hope for the future of community organizing against corporate domination.

What is making these data center fights so successful? There is a lot we can learn from why this national movement is both so widespread as well as so effective—from high-level takeaways about winning fights for justice in this moment, as well as low-level nuts and bolts organizing strategies that communities are using successfully. Seeing it through these lenses, the anti-data center movement may in fact be a signal of a new direction for social justice organizing we have yet to tap into.

Data Centers Are an Unlikely, But Perfect Organizing Target

While data centers may seem an unlikely target for social justice movements, upon examining the features of the fights themselves, they reveal themselves to be a strong target for organized resistance. For one, data centers are an extremely local and tangible piece of infrastructure. Data Center Watch notes in their analysis of fights across the nation that the main concerns of residents are things like utility bills increasing, water usage and pollution, impacts on their property values, and noise and air pollution as well as the sicknesses they can cause.

The fact that local government has the power to stop infrastructure development that is supporting a national agenda is remarkable.

Tangibility and nondiscrimination are some of the strongest aspects of the fight—something that has been a thorn in the side of other movements in recent years. For example, the climate justice movement has frequently found difficulty with the fact that climatic changes are slow, long-term, and subject to local variation. Movements for racial justice are hampered by a consequence of the very problem they’re trying to solve: namely that people of different races and ethnicities have different experiences, creating extra work to move those whose privilege blinds them from oppression. Similarly, the movement for justice in Palestine is driven by empathy for those who are experiencing unimaginable violence, and much more rarely firsthand experiences of that genocidal violence.

In contrast, everyone in a locality breathes the same air, has to use the community’s water, and is subject to the electrical grid and its price fluctuations. This has brought a rare solidarity to the fight that has not been seen in many major social justice issues of the past handful of years. Focusing on the material dimension, in the manner than union organizing does, forces a politics of solidarity that cuts across partisanship, as everyone is suffering at the hands of the same financial oppressor.

Due to these local, tangible impacts, the composition of the anti-data center movement has also been noted as different from typical social justice movements—not falling only within the purview of the left or liberal center, but also including those who identify as Republicans. Data Center Watch reported that 55% of politicians taking stances against data centers are Republican, and 45% are Democrat. Those who lean left are concerned about environmental impacts. Those who lean right are widely opposed to tax abatements for developers. And issues of power consumption, grid strain, and prices increasing are cross cutting.

Add to this that the current push for data centers is intrinsically linked, materially and ideologically, to the Trump administration and Big Tech’s push for AI to pervade every aspect of society. Pew Research reported in September of last year that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI (50% Republican, 51% Democrat), and only 10% are more excited than concerned. Moreover, 61% of polled respondents wanted “more control… over how AI is used in their lives”—61% of Republicans polled and 63% of Democrats. Distaste for AI and how strongly it is being forced on society is also bipartisan, as it is becoming a material reality for people regardless of their politics.

These aspects of the fight help explain why the movement is so widespread and able to block tens of billions of dollars of proposed development. But they do not tell the entire story of the success. One other major factor contributing to widespread victories in the anti-data center movement is the fact that most of these proposed data centers are subject to municipal law.

The tactics that appear to be most widely used to stop data centers are through local legislation that bans development through ordinances and zoning, local moratoria, rejecting permits that need to pass through local legislature, or by voting projects down via referendum or ballot measure. The fact that local government has the power to stop infrastructure development that is supporting a national agenda is remarkable. It speaks to the power of local politics—when there are mechanisms in place for actually wielding that power. When they are able to organize effectively, residents are actually able to use the democratic mechanisms in place in their municipalities to exert a level of control over their lives and futures.

This combination of factors makes the anti-data center movement incredibly powerful and strategically sound from a change-making perspective. The tangibility of the infrastructure and universality of effects make a clear group of people who stand to be harmed and can be organized. The instruments of local governance allowing people to effectively wield power allows for straightforward calls to action that can yield immediate, tangible results. The tractability and clarity of this type of fight puts in perspective what effective campaigns can look like.

Can Social Justice Movements Focus on the Material?

There is much to learn from this movement against data centers in the US. It differs from other nationwide movements in the not-too-distant past and even the present, and those differences are worth examining critically.

The most notable takeaway is that focusing on material, local outcomes has generated decentralized, locally contextualized organizing spaces that have not been as present in some other recent major movements. For example, the youth climate movement in 2018 was legitimately critiqued for being too focused on the national scale, and began organizing without understanding the local politics. In my experience, this movement was constructed as local groups fighting for national issues, rather than local groups fighting for local issues. As a consequence, it was plagued by conflict when local groups expanded and bumped up against other long-time local organizers—who were often minoritized folks fighting environmental injustice.

Part of the power of the anti-data center movement is that it has the power of firsthand evidence because the effects are felt by everyone in the community. This stands in contrast to the movement to end the genocide in Palestine, which is often more about empathizing with the plight of people across the world—an absolutely worthy plight to organize around, as the genocide is unacceptable and should be stopped. But an issue across the world makes organizing difficult because the effect that moves people to action is mainly brought about via media or personal connection, and relies on empathy.

Acknowledging the reality of national and international issues, or systemic issues, but then being able to pinpoint their real manifestations and effects in your own life and the life of your community, should be the organizing paradigm we work within.

The nature of the anti-data center movement’s balance between the national and local scale appears better struck than what I experienced in the youth climate movement. People are fighting tangible infrastructure that poses harms to their immediate lives, but are simultaneously fueled by, and noting disdain for, the national push for AI and Big Tech’s greed. There is real power in this type of organizing, and it goes to show that national issues have local effects and targets that can be focused on.

These tactics could be applied to other national and international arenas, such as the climate crisis or the genocide in Palestine. The climate crisis has no shortage of local effects and targets. Organizers could rally around environmental injustices such as pollution from oil and gas, or around food justice to counter the power of Big Agriculture.

Or in the case of Palestine, focusing on the local effects of municipalities supporting the weapons and surveillance industries to the detriment of the local economy supporting life-giving jobs could be a valuable, material reframing. Inevitably, these militarized economies also come home, as the technologies and tactics used in Palestine are now being weaponized against local communities to fuel the deportation regime.

Acknowledging the reality of national and international issues, or systemic issues, but then being able to pinpoint their real manifestations and effects in your own life and the life of your community, should be the organizing paradigm we work within. Systems cannot function unless their local units act to fuel the system. Oil and gas relies on countless local offices, workplaces, university programs, and even gas stations or pipeline projects. Workers and infrastructure fuel the machine. The same is true for Big Tech, the military-industrial complex, Big Agriculture, and more.

Furthermore, the decisions to support local jobs and infrastructure that supports militarism or fossil fuels take away resources that could otherwise be put into community programs that truly generate prosperity. The anti-data center movement clearly identified that building data centers not only creates massive harms for the community, but also directs resources wastefully, which should otherwise be used to create schools, affordable housing, and community infrastructure. We need to learn to identify and challenge those local units so we dismantle the system in a way that is manageable.

Another benefit to applying this organizing paradigm is that targets and campaigns become much more manageable and concrete. When you fight a data center, you know that your goal is to cancel the contract, or enact a municipal ordinance banning construction of the infrastructure. Contrast this, for example, with the No Kings rallies, which are aiming at a lofty symbolic goal of “reject monarchy and authoritarianism,” without any clear tangible goals. I personally know local organizers who have struggled with this for Palestine solidarity as well, fighting for somewhat vague resolutions condemning genocide rather than dismantling of tangible projects supporting the violence.

Returning the Left to its Roots

If anything, this argument may be easily subject to the critique of, “This is always what the left has been about; this is nothing new.” That is a fair point, but a truth of ideas rather than a truth of reality.

The anti-data center movement is a strong example of anti-corporate, material politics that has been desperately missing from major movements in the US aside from the labor movement. It is a testament to the power of focusing on material circumstances, and evidently can bring together unlikely allies who have been wedged apart by other political fights.

None of this is to say, of course, that material politics should exist separately from focuses on race, gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, internationalism, or any other domain of social justice. We cannot properly understand the anti-data center movement without recognizing environmental justice, and the fact that many centers are being built in minoritized communities on purpose. We cannot understand Big Tech’s illegitimacy without understanding politics of patriarchy, neoliberalism, and colonial drives for extraction.

But it is to say that perhaps some social justice movements of the past decade have been too focused on fighting the world at scale without understanding how it manifests in their own neighborhood, or how it can be fought locally. There is power in fixing our own community. We should learn how to wield it.