In the aftermath of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by US forces in early 2026, the Trump administration has repeatedly proclaimed the full “cooperation” of Venezuela’s interim leadership, prominently naming Acting President Delcy Rodríguez as a key partner. Under the clear framework of international law, however, these assertions are legally meaningless—null and void from their inception. Cooperation, to carry legal or diplomatic weight, must be freely given. What has been presented instead resembles consent extracted under duress.

A growing body of evidence indicates that the purported “partnership” with Rodríguez and the interim government was not the product of diplomacy or mutual interest, but of military intervention, direct threats, and sustained economic coercion. Reports circulating widely describe a leaked audio recording in which Venezuelan officials were issued a fifteen-minute ultimatum by US forces following Maduro’s ouster: comply or face lethal consequences. While the recording has not been independently authenticated, neither its gravity nor its substance has been officially denied or investigated. The allegation remains unrefuted and gains plausibility from its consistency with publicly observable executive conduct.

At the same time, US officials publicly took credit for controlling Venezuela’s transitional arrangements. State assets, including oil revenues, were placed under American authority. Sanctions were explicitly framed by senior Treasury officials as instruments of “economic statecraft,” designed to impose maximum financial pressure to influence political outcomes. In substance and by their foreseeable consequences, this strategy operates as a form of hybrid coercion—seeking regime change through economic collapse rather than direct military engagement. This is not diplomacy; it is coercion through threat and deprivation, as a matter of law and practice.

International law leaves little room for ambiguity. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties provides that any agreement secured through the coercion of state representatives is legally void, and that arrangements born of the threat or use of force are nullities as a matter of law. These provisions reflect foundational principles: the legitimacy of state action rests on the free will of its representatives. Consent given under the barrel of a gun—or under the crushing weight of engineered economic catastrophe—cannot be recognized as valid. By this standard, claims of Venezuelan “cooperation” do not demonstrate diplomatic success; they amount to admissions of coercion.

That Rodríguez now serves as interim president under these conditions does not confer legitimacy on her actions as a freely acting representative. If her authority emerged under duress, shaped by ultimatums and bounded by ongoing threats of renewed military action or economic devastation, then any subsequent “cooperation” attributed to her must be treated with profound skepticism. Acting where refusal is not a viable option is not partnership; it is submission enforced by power.

The broader danger lies in normalizing coercion disguised as consent. If executives can compel foreign leadership changes through military or economic force and then cite “cooperation” from installed interlocutors as proof of legitimacy, international law is rendered meaningless. Domestic safeguards erode as well: war-powers constraints are sidelined, congressional oversight is bypassed, and a precedent is set for repetition elsewhere, wherever the next “strategic interest” is declared. This is not solely a Venezuelan concern; it is a warning for global governance and democratic accountability.

Every claim by the Trump administration regarding Venezuelan “cooperation” after the forceful removal of President Maduro must therefore be regarded as legally and morally suspect. International law does not grant impunity to victors, validate arrangements imposed under threat of annihilation, or recognize coerced submission as consent. Until coercion is replaced by a genuinely free and verifiable process grounded in real diplomacy, all current assertions of cooperation with Hon. Delcy Rodríguez and the interim Venezuelan government are, by definition and by law, null and void.

He broke it! He did not wait for permission to change things. He simply bent and, in most cases, broke it. If the answer was going to be no, why wait for the no is his strategy. The strategy is to test the basic mores of the country. Don't ask about tearing down the West Wing of the White House. He ordered the dismantling of DEI and government and businesses fell into line. It resulted in one of the biggest reductions in workforce in government employment with workers surprised and left scurrying to find new job security. Vastly significant portions of Black women, estimated 300,000 "lost their good government job." He did not ask for permission to do that. He demanded that historical language be sanitized in museums and on official signage erasing historical social and racial justice messaging. He just did it. As he bombed boats in the Caribbean Sea, killing a hundred people, he did not ask whether it was legal but simply let the incendiary devices fly. The justification offered was that they were bringing drugs to America which was not feasible or truthful given where the boats were. When he commandeered ships carrying oil from Venezuela he did not ask. He hijacked the ships without seeking permission. He sent troops into American cities without respect for local governments using the weight of the national government.

Trump's right-wing agenda has inspired and turned loosed a viciousness embodied in the actions of trained and also hastily onboarded federal law enforcement that are acting more like storm troopers than anything else. Renee Good was shot three times as she served as a monitor observing these storm troopers. She seemed to try and connect appealing to the humanity of the federal agents, as observed on video but was spurned and in futility she tried to drive away. As she turned the wheels on her vehicle to leave the hatred and right-wing zeal of a federal agent stepped in front of her vehicle and discharged his weapon. He killed her for no apparent reason other than she for watching and monitoring the action of these federally protected agents. She was not an immigrant, but she was a mother, wife and an American citizen. They shot her three times. Then approximately two and a half weeks later, early on a Saturday morning Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at the VA was shoved to the ground, brutally beaten by this death squad and shot nine time in five seconds. He died on the spot. He also was an American citizen exercising his right to protest trying to safeguard the community from this lawless occupation. The Trump administration quickly swung into action to discredit and devalue their lives by calling them "terrorists". This is a word DHS and Christie Noem use to justify any and all ICE shootings and killings. ICE and immigration officials have discharged their weapons into the American public at least 16 times. The headlines, as the media try to collect information, expands not necessarily daily but certainly. In January 2026, The Wall Street Journal identified at least 13 instances of immigration officers "firing at or into civilian vehicles" but by the end of the month that figure was obsolete. There is a violent, murderous hatred embedded in the attitudes of these so-called officers of the law.

Local government has tried to resist. In Montgomery County, Maryland there is currently a bill, The County Values Act, that would require a judicial warrant for ICE to access nonpublic areas in county facilities. It would also prohibit the use of county-owned parking lots, garages and vacant lots for immigration enforcement. There is also The Unmask ICE Act, that would prohibit federal, state and local law enforcement from wearing masks on the job. That seems only fair since because in many jurisdictions it was already illegal for citizens to be masked! Currently some 15 states have proposed bills to prohibit law enforcement officers from wearing masks. The federal law enforcement agencies claim that masks are to protect DHS officers and their families by shielding their identities. That is ironic since cameras are in use by ICE and other federal agencies to build a facial recognition database. There are and has been attempts to pushback against federal masks and the conduct of federal agents. Bills have been proposed in Alaska, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee. Each of these legislative bodies are appalled by the dangers of troops in the streets and are seeking to reestablish democratic norms. Twenty-one state attorney generals penned and sent a letter to Members of Congress urging them to pass legislation to prohibit immigration agents from wearing masks. They warned that ICE agents wearing masks “have the effect of terrorizing communities rather than protecting them.” They further stated in the letter that “the commonplace use of masks and the failure of ICE to identify themselves as law enforcement makes everyone less safe and weakens the integrity of our justice systems.” The pushback is admirable and needed but the issues are far more than masks but the overall viciousness and violent attacks being carried out with impunity on American streets against immigrants and citizens alike.

These bills and letters are local governments and political leaders operating within the culture and structure of American conformity where decorum is presented and the traditional rules of law applies. Civil protest and discourse are exercised believing that the structures have power. They have been trained to abide by the rules of civility. Meanwhile the federal behemoth is trampling standard political decorum by bending things until they break and using the weight of the federal government to crush any the resistance. What is needed now and before it is too late is the deliberate creation of a constitutional crisis.

The 10th amendment has swung in opposite streams through US history. Its purpose was to maintain boundaries between the federal government and the states. It was ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights. This is one reason why it took so long for slavery to be abolished in the United States. The federal government was restrained in ordering states what to do and nearing the Civil War battles were fought within certain territories of whether they would become a free state or a protectorate of enslavement. It took the Civil War for slavery to be abolished. Then with federal troops stationed in the former slave states there were several years where enfranchisement and relative freedom was advanced. That period is called Reconstruction. The federal government used its powers to enforce political and social inclusion. However, the racists fought back through acts of terror and sabotage until Reconstruction ended with federal troops being withdrawn from the south. Once again, those former slave states were free to institute Black codes and legally enforced racial stratification and separation. The federal government did not intervene for another 100 years until the civil rights movement challenged the legalities of racial segregation by pushing and passing laws using the weight of federal government to restrain the racial excesses of local governments. We in the racial justice movement wanted the federal government to regulate the behavior of the states. So, you can imagine the angst I have in this historical moment for a stronger state and local government.

The irony is that in this historical moment I would like to see a strong local and state government that is able to muster its own law enforcement to confront, challenge, question, apprehend, and arrest masked federal armed marauders. This requires local governments to call upon local law enforcement to be loyal to the local community and committed to protecting the community from the violence being perpetuated by federal authorities.

The local authorities need to have future employment predicated on whether local law enforcement is committed to the safety of the local population or will continue to stand assisting federal agents as they assault the population. They need to be tested as to whether they are more loyal to local government or obedient to federal agents who are racially targeting, terrorizing, assaulting, shooting and killing the local population. This is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. Local government must demand that members of local law enforcement go after masked agents, arrest them for every act that threatens, every person kidnapped without due process, each violation of property rights, and for acts of violence against the local population. In other words, local law enforcement should be pressured to do what they have always done in every social and racial justice uprising - demand order, protect property, people, and make arrest!

We are in a civil war, and the tables of history have turned because the federal government is trampling over all the rights at the local level.

This historical moment demands that we find strategies to bend it back and maybe do our own breaking in this horrific moment of American history. When this federal behemoth monster is subdued then we can redress normal order. However, as the behemoth tramples the landscape in America bending things until he breaks them something more graphic and demonstrative is need then bills that are proposed and passed but have little to no impact. Local governments and the states need to precipitate a national and constitutional crisis where the local governments challenge the legalities of national government in more than letters, bills and grassroots petitions.

Local governments need to demand local officials to enforce local laws, and in most cases laws that are already on the books. This would be the wake-up call that is needed for the courts to pay closer attention, create a vigorous debate in Congress, and challenge the powers of these grotesque beings that are occupying our cities and towns and shooting and killing our neighbors and friends.

Something is rotten in the Department of Labor. I’m not talking about the recent news that Secretary of Labor Chavez-DeRemer is being investigated about claims she used taxpayer money for personal trips disguised as business-related. Or that she allegedly engaged in an improper tryst with a subordinate.

If true, these are serious issues that call for appropriate responses. But, from my perspective as an attorney who committed a 39-year career to a government agency I continue to care deeply about, they pale in comparison to something that’s out in the open, carefully curated for all to see: the Department’s latest social media campaign.

Just take a look at the past few weeks’ postings on the Labor Department’s Facebook or X accounts. One might ordinarily expect to find content that reflects the Department’s worthy mission of lifting up all workers in the United States, regardless of race, religion, or national origin. That might include reminders about employers’ responsibilities under wage and workplace safety laws Congress enacted over the past several decades, or maybe spotlight a series of particularly impactful enforcement actions that vindicated workers’ rights.

Don’t hold your breath. Instead, watching a jarring graphic with a dystopian soundtrack, you’ll be instructed to “Remember who you are, American.” Those words are placed below the header, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”—a slogan promptly recognized by visitors to the Facebook site as a haunting echo of the 1930’s Nazi propaganda poster featuring Adolf Hitler and the slogan “One People, One Nation, One Leader.”

That’s only one of a steady drumbeat of similar phrases, like “Faith in God. Law and Order. Pride in Our Homeland…central tenets of the American Way of Life.” We learn that “[u]nder President Trump, the globalist dominance of our government is over,” and that a year ago “our country was dead.” Now, however, we’re “the hottest country anywhere in the world because we finally have a President who puts America first.”

We’re instructed not to “believe the fake news lies.” Multiple entries feature paintings and posters depicting 1940’s-era churchgoers and families with beatifically smiling children, all white. And most prolifically, we’re treated to one hero-like depiction of Donald Trump after another, mostly in bold silhouette, with captions like “Americans First,” “NEVER SURRENDER,” “Second to None,” “Trust the Plan, Trust Trump,” "PATRIOTS IN CONTROL,” and “One of One.” We learn that “No President has cared more about hardworking Americans than President Trump.”

There’s so much wrong with all this it makes the head spin. Most blatant is the unmistakable resemblance to the style and messaging of the Nazi propaganda machine. As described by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, during the Third Reich “public adulation for Adolf Hitler was an ever present feature in the public square of German life.” Hitler was portrayed “as the living embodiment of the German nation,” radiating strength as the savior of a beaten-down German nation, and idolized as a “gifted statesman who brought stability, created jobs, and restored German greatness.” Take a look at the Labor Department’s Facebook page and see if that description resonates.

Add to that: the posts’ repeated targeting of undefined “globalists”—a recognized “dog whistle” for racist, anti-Semitic and anti-government conspiracy theorists—as the shadowy characters responsible for our country’s woes, not unlike Nazi propaganda demonizing Jews and other “outsiders”; the Christian imagery and language, smearing the line that separates church and state, and implicitly, if not explicitly, promoting white Christian Nationalism; the full-on outrageous assertion made on X, just days after the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, that “Mass Deportations are Improving Americans' Quality of Life.”

Appalling as all this is, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Substantively, in addition to the countless other ways Trump’s presidency has been a disaster for this country, he has been no friend to US workers—undermining their wages and economic security, weakening job creation, and assaulting their rights to organize. Federal worker ranks have been terrorized and dissembled by DOGE, and soon tens of thousands will be judged not by merit alone but by their loyalty to Trump. Religious prayer services have been introduced at the agency’s headquarters. Labor Department employees are demoralized. And for months, an enormous banner with Trump’s face has been hanging off the front of the Francis Perkins Building, sternly looking down at the passersby below.

Still, the Facebook/X campaign brings the Department to a new low. It dishonors the government agency whose charge is to support the workers of this country. It has no business deifying any President, particularly one already drunk with power. Nor should it be promoting a white, Christian nationalist vision for this country, that was built by immigrants -- people of all colors, places of origin, and beliefs. As a Labor Department veteran, I’m ashamed. And as a first generation son of Jewish refugees who lived through the horrors of Nazi Germany, I’m aghast, at seeing history rhyme, if not repeat.

This poem no one should have to recite to their grandchildren.

In 1965, as excessive state violence was being unleashed against the Black citizens in Selma, Alabama, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sent out a nationwide call to faith leaders: “The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all America help to bear the burden.”

Dr. King’s call for others to join him in leading a march to Montgomery was answered by clergy from across the country, marking a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement.

Sixty-six years later, in the same spirit and with the same clarity as King’s 1965 call, clergy in Minneapolis asked faith activists from across the country to join them in praying with their feet against the atrocities being committed by Immigration Customs and Enforcement against the good people of their state.

Upon hearing that my presence might be helpful, I immediately packed my tallit (Jewish prayer shawl), and on behalf of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, I jumped on an airplane. Arriving in Minneapolis on Thursday, here’s what I witnessed:

Images of Luis Ramos, a terrified and bewildered five-year-old in a tiny plaid coat and blue knit bunny hat, were dominating local media coverage. Coming home from school, just steps away from his front door, ICE agents took Luis from his father’s car using him as bait to lure his pregnant mother out of their home.

By the time I arrived in Minneapolis, only two days later, Luis and his father had already been whisked away to a detention facility in Texas.

Like Selma, Minneapolis has become this generation’s frontline in the struggle for freedom and justice.

Thursday night, as we were preparing for the next day’s mobilization with nonviolence training, a person with a distressed look on their face asked to make an announcement. Along with informing us that a car full of children had been tear gassed today, they had just received a message from one of the local schools warning people not to be deceived by flyers offering “food assistance” since this was one of the tactics being used by ICE to lure parents from their homes. There were other examples of ICE’s cruelty. Immigrants injured by ICE agents have been taken to hospitals and registered using false names so that their families couldn't find them.

In the face of this inhumane behavior, and given Minnesota’s expected below zero temperatures, it would have been easy to remain home, feeling depressed and yet powerless to help. But I recalled Rev. Jesse Jackson’s words, “both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.”

With this in mind, on the coldest day the Twin Cities area had experienced in seven years, I joined hundreds of other clergy and faith leaders at the Minneapolis St. Paul International (MSP) airport to protest Delta airlines complicity in over 2,000 deportations.

The designated “free speech zone” for legal protest was bursting at the seams with more than a thousand bundled-up Minnesotans who had turned out to support those of us who were to engage in civil disobedience.

Our action consisted of over 100 faith leaders kneeling down blocking the terminal, holding signs picturing the detained and disappeared. We prayed and we sang: “everybody’s got a right to live/love/learn and “before this campaign fails, we’ll all go down to jail.” The assembled supporters chanted “Justice for Renee Good!”

With the bottom half of my face tucked into the bundles of warm clothing, I closed my eyes, and began quietly humming a nigun (wordless melody sung in a repetitive circular manner) to myself.

The man kneeling next to me, who I soon learned was the Community Engagement Organizers (CEO) program at Macalister College, asked if I was okay. He was grateful for our presence and wanted to make sure how we were handling the frigid temperatures.

The police lined up behind us with long clubs and chemical agents they had threatened to use. They arrest us. One by one, many in religious stoles, we stood and offered our bulky mitted wrists for handcuffing.

The crowd’s chants turned from “Justice for Renee Good!” to “Let them pray! Let them pray!” and we began to realize the significance. Our prayers were both exposing and healing the rot to which our country has been subjected for the past year that is now festering like an open infected wound.

While prayer can sometimes be meaningless, hypocritical, or even damaging. There are other times, when it can have a profound impact. As the Jewish siddur (prayerbook) Mishkan T’Filah says “prayer Invites God’s Presence to suffuse our spirits. Prayer may not bring water to parched fields,” but it ”can water an arid soul." The souls and spirits of the people of Minneapolis certainly need watering at this time.

On Saturday, I was preparing to leave Minneapolis when we received the news that Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, had been beaten and shot to death by federal agents. I traveled instead to the site of this murder to join with others who were holding a vigil and turning the crime scene into a holy site. I took the tallit I have been wearing over the last year to mourn the passing of my father off my shoulders and laid it on the pine branches among the crosses, candles, sage brush bundles, mala beads, and kuffiyehs. As the crowd circling the site wiped tears from their eyes, “Somali aunties,” who momentarily felt safe to leave their homes, to provide hot food from their kitchens to their fellow mourners.

Riding the city bus back to my hotel, I noticed that my fellow passengers were carrying gas masks and eye goggles for the tear gas that wafts through the city’s freezing air and one knew not when they might get tackled to the ground and sprayed directly in the face with a chemical agent. It felt more like being in the Occupied West Bank than in an American city.

Picking up a quick lunch, I had to knock on the door to be admitted to the restaurant. In order to check into my hotel, I had to use the doorbell to be let in, and to get into Ubers, I had to show a code. Because everyone is aware that ICE agents could barge in at any moment, they are taking extra precautions trying to keep themselves and their neighbors safe.

Many of the Uber drivers in Minneapolis are of Somali ethnicity. One driver, a US citizen who has been in the country for over 20 years, told me about having to show his naturalization papers (he now keeps them with him at all times) while trying to do his job. Another, a young Somali-American woman, told me that she has just spent days too afraid to leave her house, but then today had to get back to work because she needs to pay her rent.

What is unfolding in Minneapolis is frightening, but the response of its people has been inspiring. Between delivering groceries and supplies to those afraid to leave their homes, to roaming the streets with whistles strung around their necks so they can alert others when ICE is spotted, to rabbis and Jewish activists, including myself this past Sunday, keeping watch outside churches so Latinx communities can worship together, to providing emotional support—the work of care, mutual aid, and resistance, week after week, should fill us all with pride. And what was so moving to encounter was the degree to which everyone—from hotel staff, to restaurant workers, to Uber drivers—all expressed gratitude that so many of us had traveled to support them as they defend democracy for the entire country.

Like Selma, Minneapolis has become this generation’s frontline in the struggle for freedom and justice. And like Selma, it will be the disciplined, caring, and prayerful response of Minneapolis' people and their supporters that will win out in the end.

I was born and raised in Minnesota. One of my childhood homes in south Minneapolis is less than a mile from the scene of Saturday’s brutal Border Patrol killing. The victim was 37-year-old Alex Pretti, a US citizen born in Illinois and a registered ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital.

Pretti’s crime: He was “Minnesota nice.”

Before proceeding further, please watch this New York Times video.

But be warned, the footage is violent, graphic, and disturbing:

Footage and analyis of Alex Pretti killing

Similarly, a detailed CNN compilation of bystander videos confirms that Border Patrol officers took Pretti’s gun before shooting him an estimated 10 times:

And USA Today also offered a second-by-second analysis:

Now contrast what you just observed with the Trump administration’s four-step playbook for avoiding accountability: Lie, double-down, deflect, and cover-up.

Step #1: Lie

Almost immediately, the Department of Homeland Security issued a false statement exonerating Border Patrol officers and blaming Pretti for his death:

• “At 9:05 AM CT,… an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun….”

No. Pretti approached the officers with a cellphone as he filmed their encounter with two protesters. Then he tried to aid a protester whom officers had shoved to the ground.

• “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect, but the armed suspect violently resisted.”

No. The officers didn’t even know that Pretti had a gun until seven of them had already swarmed, pepper-sprayed, and wrestled him to the ground. Then one of the officers exclaimed with surprise, “He has a gun!”

At that point, several officers were on top of Pretti. A gun matching the description of the one that DHS said Pretti owned (and for which he had a permit in the open-carry state of Minnesota) emerged from the group. After Pretti had been disarmed, an officer shot him in the back at close range. As the officer continued firing, another officer shot Pretti as he lay on the ground.

The agents fired a total of at least 10 shots.

Step #2: Double Down

During a six-minute press appearance, Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino doubled-down on the lies. He said that an “individual approached Border Patrol agents with a nine-millimeter semi-automatic handgun.”

No. It was a cellphone.

“The agents attempted to disarm this individual, but he violently resisted.”

No. Pretti was on the ground when officers noticed his gun and took it.

“Fearing for his life and lives and safety of fellow officers, a Border Patrol agent fired defensive shots.”

No. Two agents fired a total of 10 shots as Pretti lay on the street with his hands over his head.

“The suspect also had two loaded magazines and no accessible ID.”

I don’t know what an “accessible ID” is, but Minnesota is an open-carry state and Pretti had a permit to own the gun.

“This looked like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

There is no evidence supporting that claim.

“The officer was highly trained and had been serving as a Border Patrol agent for eight years. The officer has extensive training as a range safety officer and less lethal officer…”

Two officers fired a total of 10 shots at a man who had been disarmed. What about the second shooter? And what training recommends firing 10 shots at a defenseless US citizen lying on the ground?

Bovino then took questions but refused to answer them:

Q: “When did agents learn that he had a gun, and did he ever brandish that weapon at them?

Bovino: “This situation again is evolving. This situation is under investigation. Those facts will come to light. This particular incident is being investigated, just like we investigate other similar incidents like we’ve done over the past several years. It’s in the hands of professionals as facts will come to light.”

The videos show that Pretti never brandished a weapon at anyone. As for an investigation, the federal government had refused to allow Minnesota officials to participate after an officer killed Renee Nicole Good two weeks earlier. But this time, Minnesota officials took two extraordinary steps: the state obtained a warrant to search the public street where the officers had killed Pretti; and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order barring federal officials from altering or destroying evidence.

Q: “Did he have an additional gun, or was the gun removed from the scene?... From the video, it doesn’t seem like he pulled a gun on anyone…. When did the gun come out?”

Bovino: “Again, this situation is evolving. This is under investigation. Those facts will come to light…”

The gun never “came out” until Border Patrol officers discovered and removed it after forcing Pretti to the ground.

Step #3: Deflect – Blame the Victim…and Anyone Else

Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, Stephen Miller, tripled down on the lies. Others quickly followed.

• Miller said Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin.”

• Trump blamed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) for “inciting insurrection.” He posted that they were leading a “subversive effort” against law enforcement “the likes of which we have not seen, probably, since the Civil War.”

• Attorney General Pam Bondi offered Walz a deal. One of her demands revealed the true motive behind Trump’s aggressive immigration surge in Minnesota: leverage. Trump is looking ahead at the November midterm elections, doesn’t like what he sees, and is preparing to upend them. That’s why Bondi told Walz to turn over the state’s voter rolls and maybe it “will help bring back law and order to Minnesota.“ (A few days earlier, Trump’s Justice Department had already subpoenaed numerous Minnesota officials, including Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)

• Homeland Security Secretary Kristia Noem parroted Bovino’s lies that Pretti “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.” She said that her assertion of “domestic terrorism” was just “the facts.”

• Vice President JD Vance posted that the events in Minneapolis were “engineered chaos” caused by “far left agitators, working with local authorities.”

• On Fox News, FBI Director Kash Patel characterized Pretti as a violent actor.

Step #4: Repeat – and Cover-Up as Needed

Trump’s minions had falsely smeared Renee Nicole Good as a “domestic terrorist” too. Then the Justice Department announced that the civil rights division would not even investigate whether her killer had used excessive force—as it typically has done in such situations. Instead, the Department would investigate the victim and her partner. Days later, six senior career federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned over the issue.

Noem announced that DHS would lead the Pretti investigation—with assistance from the FBI.

Bovino’s “Choices”

In a press conference on Sunday, January 25, Bovino lectured Minnesotans on “choices,” suggesting that Pretti’s choices led to his death. But Pretti chose only to exercise his First and Second Amendment rights. For that, Trump’s newly expanded paramilitary organization chose to execute him in broad daylight. Bovino, Trump, and Trump’s sycophants chose to lie about it.

In the aftermath of Pretti’s killing, thousands of Minnesotans also made a choice: In sub-zero temperatures, they protested the federal government’s aggressive occupation of Minneapolis that had led to yet another death. They know that the whole world is watching. And if I know anything about Minnesotans, they will prevail.

“The border between democracy and authoritarianism is the least protected border in the world.”

Ivan Krastev, Bulgarian chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, dropped that assessment on Jon Stewart’s weekly blog last week.

Four days later, that stark reality took a quantum leap with the brutal murder of registered nurse Alex Pretti by a member of President Donald Trump’s paramilitary army in Minneapolis. Pretti is not the first killing by an agent of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) in recent weeks.

Renee Nicole Good was maliciously shot through a car window by an ICE agent earlier in Minneapolis. Keith Porter was shot and killed while celebrating on New Year’s Eve by an off-duty ICE agent in a Los Angeles suburb. At least six others have died in ICE detention facilities, including Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres, who was strangled in what an El Paso autopsy has ruled a homicide.

Yet the Twin City murders of Good followed so soon by Pretti, two white US citizen observers who were appalled by the violent ICE invasion of their city, has transformed the dialogue on whether our country has crossed the road to authoritarian rule.

Neither could be easily demonized by the administration despite desperate attempts by HHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Vice President JD Vance, Press Secretary Karoline Leavett and other administration attack dogs to label them as “domestic terrorists” and justify their murders.

The violence has escalated as Trump, Miller, Vance, and Noem seek to secure and expand their power through what they believe will intimidate and force consent for their authoritarian rule. But they are also afraid of the growing popular resistance.

The usually compliant major media rapidly rejected the administration's lies and cover-up efforts. Almost immediately, the media rejected the excuse that Pretti was planning a “massacre” of ICE agents with a firearm he had a legal permit to carry under Minnesota law. That was especially hypocritical considering the administration’s regular celebration of those on the far right who bring lethal weapons to protests from Kyle Rittenhouse to militia seeking to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists pardoned by Trump.

“Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Federal Shooting,” blared a New York Times headline, as the Times had pioneered video documentation exposing the lies on Good’s murder. The footage, the Times wrote, shows Pretti “stepping between a woman and an agent pepper spraying her. Other agents then pepper spray Mr. Pretti who is holding a phone in one hand and nothing in the other. His concealed weapon is found and only after he is restrained on the sidewalk …and taken from him before the agents opened fire.” He was killed with 10 shots then, and the agents blocked a physician who saw the shooting from providing medical aid.

The Washington Post presented the clearest video evidence in a report labeled “Federal agent secured gun from Minn. man before fatal shooting, videos show.” Even the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal called the shooting “the worst … to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle for the Trump Presidency.” A Journal editorial dismissed administration “spin” saying it “simply isn’t believable.”

Few missed that the Pretti shooting occurred just a hours after tens of thousands of Minnesota residents marched through the streets of Minneapolis in minus 10 degree weather in a general strike and economic boycott to send a message of overwhelming public opposition to Trump’s Minneapolis invasion.

“I do believe that the real problem is that the border between democracy and authoritarianism is the least protected border in the world,” Ivan Krastev, also a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said, prompting Stewart to proclaim, “you can't just drop that in the middle of a podcast and expect me not to stand up and applaud. Say that again.”

State sponsored violence is the clearest signpost of a regime that has embraced autocratic rule, whether the dictatorship is appointed following an election, as in the case of Hitler or Suharto, marched on the capital by his paramilitary troops like Mussolini, imposed by a military coup like Pinochet and the Argentine “dirty war” generals, or through a bloody civil war like Franco.

ICE and CPB agents most resemble Hitler’s SA Brown Shirts, his paramilitary troops who engaged in violent assaults on political opponents even before Hitler was appointed chancellor by fading democratic Weimar Republic leaders. Two months before Hitler was anointed, a document was leaked in one Nazi sympathetic state that ordered “all orders of the SA or other paramilitary force were to be obeyed under pain of death,” as Benjamin Carter Hett points out in The Death of Democracy.

“While the junta’s national project had several ideological pillars—neoliberalism, social conservatism, and Pinochet’s authority – violence fueled it and made it possible,” writes Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen.

Social media posts from the White House and several executive departments have begun borrowing Nazi slogans and translating them to justify the ICE campaign. “One People, One Realm, One Leader,” posted the US Department of Labor this month, echoing the Nazi slogan "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." Just days after assuming office, Hitler declared “There can be only one victor: either Marxism or the German Volk,” notes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.

On Ezra Klein’s podcast, Atlantic journalist Caitlin Dickerson describes how after passage of Trump’s massive bill to extend the tax breaks to the super rich and nearly doubling the number of agents for the anti-immigrant campaign, there was a rush to fill the new ICE spots with “lots of people, it seems, within this new workforce who have absolutely no experience, who are learning how to enforce the law, how to carry a weapon, how to interact with the public, just starting from square one right now.”

“But we're also seeing a lot of explicit references to white nationalist ideas and the kind of dog whistles that we've all become used to when Trump is president. The fact is that if you're a member of the Proud Boys or you're a follower of QAnon, you recognize these exact phrases that are being used as a kind of call to action and to apply for a job as an ICE agent.”

They’ve all received a message, Dickerson continues, from anti-immigrant campaign leader Stephen Miller, who said on TV: “To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you, is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.”

“Obstruction” to Miller and company has become a license to threaten, assault, and arrest anyone bearing witness—especially filming—ICE violence and brutality. Legal citizens have been dumped far away from where they were picked up, even in unsafe conditions. Agents are now also using technology to identify observers for economic retaliation, an escalation of the goal of intimidation and seeking to silence observation and dissent.

Miller, Dickerson emphasized, “is just underscoring that argument that you're not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive. And in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.”

The violence has escalated as Trump, Miller, Vance, and Noem seek to secure and expand their power through what they believe will intimidate and force consent for their authoritarian rule. But they are also afraid of the growing popular resistance symbolized by the massive march in Minneapolis in horrific freezing conditions, and the solidarity protests from coast to coast in red states and blue.

In Jacobin, Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of Twin Cities Sunrise Movement, described the increasingly effective fightback campaign in her state. Their tactics have focused on targeting corporations like Hilton, and Home Depot to stop collaborating with ICE, and have been especially successful in tormenting ICE agents in hotels at all hours with noise intended to drive out the agents and create conditions where “ICE agents won’t want to stay there, and hotels won’t want to house them.”

“I think about it as leverage and power looking everywhere ordinary people have leverage and seeing where we can pull those levers. Under a functioning democracy, you play the game of public opinion," said Shiney-Ajay. "If you convince the majority, then you can get legislation or win an election. But what we’re living under right now is not a democracy.”

“A lot of establishment advocacy groups seem to be hoping we’ll show America that Trump is really bad, then in the midterms we’ll take back power… I don’t think that’s accurate,” Shiney-Ajay says. “Just look at what Trump is doing now and how similar it is to how authoritarians in other countries have grabbed power.”

“You have to look at what ways ordinary people are directly upholding a regime’s ability to logistically function, and switch from purely persuasion campaigns to the logic of non-cooperation. It’s like building a muscle of solidarity across race, across class. It’s something the Left talks about a lot, but I’ve never experienced it like this. And it’s truly ordinary people—it’s not majority organizers or activists. It’s people who’ve never organized a day in their lives but know something wrong is happening and want to do something.”

We all need to do something. That includes non-cooperation, continuing to bear witness; recording the abuses; pressuring media to report and expose the ICE lawlessness; organizing national economic boycotts and general strikes; mobilizing to win elections, and more. No one leader or political party will save us from fascism. We have to do it ourselves.

Do Americans who engage in lawful and peaceful protest enjoy the protection of the United States Constitution? Not any more, the Trump regime says in authorizing the shameless misconduct and lethal violence ICE agents are perpetrating against citizens in Minnesota.

ICE has invaded the state of Minnesota to show America that nothing can restrain Trump’s army of thugs. Not the Constitution. Not the laws which make it a crime to commit assault and murder. Not public opinion. And not thousands of citizens exercising their rights.

Although far from the first instance of ICE brutality, the slaying of Renee Nicole Good shocked the nation as a clear case of murder in cold blood.

The killing was not in “self-defense”—if a car is really hurtling toward you, you don’t pause to take out your gun, aim and shoot, because you know shooting won’t stop the car. You run. Good’s autopsy confirms that it was murder: the fatal bullet was the one fired into the victim’s left temple, when the ICE agent shot through the driver’s side window from alongside the car.

In response to the homicide, President Trump false asserted the agent had been run over, and charged the victim with the “crime” of having been “very, very disrespectful to law enforcement”; the chief of Homeland Security called Good a “domestic terrorist,” supposedly “stalking” ICE (meaning she followed them to observe their conduct); and the Department of Justice launched an investigation, not of the killing, but of the victim’s widow.

Meanwhile, the Vice President proclaimed ICE impunity. Speaking of Renee Good’s killer, Vance stated, “That guy’s protected by absolute immunity.”

The claim is legally baseless, but ICE agents got the message they can brutalize and even summarily execute at will, without consequences. And now, within weeks, ICE agents have committed another murder, this time of Alex Pretti, a citizen who was an ICU nurse, with a burst of bullets in the victim’s back while he lay defenseless on the ground.

Since the Supreme Court approved of ICE stopping individuals based on racial profiling, ICE agents have seized and frequently assaulted individuals simply because they appeared to be Hispanic—or Hmong or Somali or Native American. They are freely employing the same tactics in Minnesota.

Do you carry proof of citizenship with you? Neither do I. But in an echo of Nazi Germany, ICE agents demand to “see your papers,” particularly if you are non-white.

Targeting journalists and citizen observers. An official policy of breaking into homes without a judicial warrant. Detaining children. Handcuffing individuals until they come up with proof of identity. Dragging people out of their cars without probable cause to think they committed a crime. Assault on suspected “illegals.” Attacking nonviolent, peaceful demonstrators with pepper balls, tear gas, rubber bullets. Threatening with guns, shooting at cars, and now, actual murders.

These are the abuses of a conquering army, inflicted upon an occupied nation.

ICE and Border Patrol, the entities now inflicting these wounds on our democracy, are no more law enforcement agencies than was Hitler’s Gestapo. ICE is an unrestrained, racist, violence-craving gang, trying to impose Trump’s will on a state. It should be disbanded.

Hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans have taken to the streets to bravely defy ICE’s intimidation and violence, to insist on their rights under law, and to express solidarity with their neighbors who are ICE victims. And across the nation, many thousands came out in support.

In other places where liberty has been challenged, Americans and our leaders identified with a threatened people. “I am a Berliner,” President John F. Kennedy affirmed at the Berlin Wall in 1963. “I am a Greenlander,” some now say in response to President Trump’s threats to invade an ally’s territory.

The threats and the invasion have come home. If our constitutional rights are not to be erased, we must act with the courage displayed by Minnesotans. “I am a Minnesotan.” So are we all.

Kristi Noem, Donald Trump, Greg Bovino, and even whiskey Pete Hegseth are all out there trying to tell us that Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist who came to a protest with the intention to “massacre” ICE agents.

But that’s not their real message.

Back in 1980, I went into Uganda during the Civil War against Idi Amin to take over a refugee camp up in the Karamoja region. When I was leaving the country, going through the Entebbe airport (which had only intermittent electricity and considerable damage from the war), I was confronted by three armed men, two of them Tanzanian soldiers (who’d just successfully occupied the country as Amin fled to Saudi Arabia) and one a local Ugandan policeman.

One of the soldiers had an AK-47 over his shoulder and he grabbed the clip and rotated the gun down so the barrel was pointed right at my nose from a distance of about 6 inches.

“I could kill you right here, right now,” he said with a smile, “and nobody will ever know. Nobody will ever punish me. Now, give us half of your money.”

His message was essentially the same message that the Trump regime is trying to communicate to all of us today:

“We have all the power. You have none. We can get away with murder, repeatedly, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In other words: “Obey or die!”

It certainly worked for those three; I split the little money I had with them and they let me get on my plane.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

This “we have all the power and you have none” is the classic, eternal message of fascism, wherever and whenever it appears in the world.

Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino aren’t trying to convince anybody (other than the pathetic, brainwashed suckers who watch Fox “News”) that both Alex Pretti and Nicole Good were “domestic terrorists.” They know that both were merely well-intentioned citizens protesting the occupation of their city by masked federal goons.

Their real message — and Trump’s, Miller’s, and Vance’s real message — to Democrats and to America is:

“Challenge us and we will kill you. And we will get away with it. That’s how powerful we are, so you shouldn’t even try to resist.”

And it appears, indeed, that they will get away with it. They’ve already shut down the investigation of Renee Good’s murder, and have now seized the evidence from Alex Pretti’s murder. And suffered no consequences whatsoever for this naked obstruction of justice.

Hakeem Jeffries is hiding someplace in Washington DC, perhaps under the same table as Chuck Schumer. Both should be in Minneapolis right now holding ad hoc hearings and engaging the nation in nonstop media the way Noem and Bovino are: you don’t fight corrupt power by cowering. You have to show up.

Meanwhile, the generally useless and certainly feckless Republicans in Congress are anxiously counting their campaign contributions, particularly the ones to their leadership PACs that they can take with them when they leave office.

Billionaires are buying fancy homes around DC so they can continue to purchase Republican politicians, while rightwing media struggles to convince people that what they’re seeing with their own lying eyes isn’t true.

And the message under it all is:

“We’re in charge here. You may not resist us. We are in control, not you. Obey or die.”

Studies show that conservative men, and law enforcement officers particularly, are generally submissive men who need a “strict father” figure to tell them what to do and who crave regular reinforcement — often achieved by using violence — for their fragile sense of masculinity.

— When a young woman tried to make her peaceful protest known, these cucks felt threatened so they violently threw her down onto the ice and sprayed her in the face with liquid pepper and other chemicals.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When Alex Pretti tried to put himself between the CPB/ICE thugs and the young woman they were beating up, he enraged them by claiming some power for himself. Thus, he also had to be punished, so first they knocked him to the ground and sprayed liquid pepper into his face, too, to blind and disorient him.

Their message: “Obey or die!”

— When he staggered back up from that, again asserting his personal power, it was apparently the final straw: to preserve their masculinity, this man — like the woman who’d laughed at impotent officer Jonathan Ross two weeks earlier — had to be taken down.

Their message: “Obey or die.”

— Finding his gun — a symbol of male power they were offended he dared legally carry — was pure gold for them. They eliminated any threat his gun might have represented by removing it and then — like the cowards they are — put as many as ten bullets into his back.

He didn’t obey, so he had to die.

These craven weaklings, desperate to prove their manhood and reassert their power, murdered Alex Pretti for having dared to challenge them, and then applauded themselves as one said of Pretti’s death, “Boo hoo.” Just like Putin does when average people challenge him in Russia, Orbán does in Hungary, the Ayatollah does in Iran, Erdoğon does in Turkey, and El Sisi does in Egypt, among others.

This is how fascist men roll and have throughout history; it’s an entirely predictable playbook as Ruth Ben Ghiat, Mary Trump, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Miles Taylor can tell you: “Obey or die.”

It’s particularly ironic that right now, as a the USS Abraham Lincoln and a small armada of accompanying warships are scheduled to arrive off the coast of Iran by the end of this week, that Iranian state TV is running clips of ICE gassing and killing Minnesotans on a loop.

They’re openly saying that Trump is doing the same as they did a few weeks ago, therefore justifying executing their own “domestic terrorists.”

And now, in a pathetic joke, Trump says he’s going to punish Iran’s mullahs for killing their own people on the streets of Tehran at the same time he brags about and justifies gunning down Americans on the streets of Minneapolis.

The brutal, cold-blooded murders of Good and Pretti also show clearly that ICE’s and CBP’s presence in Minnesota has little to do with immigration; there are only an estimated 130,000 undocumented people in the entire state, although Texas and Florida each have millions.

Minnesota, however, is a swing state that Trump lost three times and Republicans are looking at an electoral disaster this fall: something had to be done to set an example there that might cow other Democratic-led states.

When Pam Bondi sent her letter to Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz saying that if he’d just turn his voting rolls over to her (presumably so she could “clean” aka “purge” the list to rig this November’s election), she’d pull ICE and CPB out of the state.

That’s how Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğon, et al remain in power, by intimidating the population at the same time they rig their elections. It’s the model Trump has in mind for 2026 America, and tried to execute in 2020 with his phony electors scheme, a conspiracy with over 140 Republicans who voted not to confirm Biden, and, when those didn’t work, finally the attack on January 6th.

Trump’s message on January 6th was the same: “Obey or die.” Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi barely escaped being killed by Trump’s murderous mob, and four police officers lost their lives at the hands of the GOP’s shock troops.

We’re nuts if we think Trump and the people around him wouldn’t try it again, particularly when they’re all looking at the possibility of prison time if an impeachment effort is successful because so many Republicans could lose their seats this fall.

Trump himself has already been convicted of fraud multiple times, as well as stealing money from a children’s cancer charity and raping E. Jean Carroll, and his lickspittles have to know that John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, and 40 other senior officials (including a Cabinet member) went to prison in the 1970s.

Trump is a weak, psychologically damaged man, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and most of the world’s other historic strongmen. Their weakness and emotional damage are what drive them to their “Obey or die” proclamations.

Such people not only draw others with a similar malady into their circles, but they also typically inflict generationally-destructive damage on their own countries when people push back against them.

These weak men, knowing well their own fear, sense weakness the way a mouse senses cheese. They smell fear, and right now, as Republicans and most Democrats have gone into hiding, Washington reeks of it.

History is unambiguous about what happens when bullies aren’t confronted early and publicly: their violence escalates, their lies morph into history and law, and intimidation against anybody who dares speak up becomes the new normal.

Soon, everybody is silent.

Good and Pretti weren’t accidents, and they weren’t about immigration: these intentional killings, these murders, were unambiguous messages as clear as the one I got in Uganda that fall afternoon: “Get in our way and we will kill you, and nobody will do anything about it. Obey or die.”

And unless Democratic leadership takes a cue from the good people of Minnesota and steps up and fights back hard, the next message will be even broader and bloodier, because authoritarians always interpret silence as permission.

There’s a fable about how Bear Bryant, the legendary coach of the University of Alabama, found the toughest players. He would, supposedly, drive through dusty Alabama towns with a dead dog tied behind his car. He’d then stop his car where the high school boys hung out and wait. The kid who came over and kicked that dead dog would get a scholarship.

JD Vance aspires to be the captain of the MAGA team when Trump moves on. The way to get there, he seems to believe, is to kick the dog, whichever one is most helpless (and not being eaten by Haitians), and show that he’s even meaner than Trump. His rhetorical style is all about the strong beating up on the weak, something Vance seems to relish. There are just too many examples of Vance’s delight in kicking to ignore.

Dog Eaters

The one that made these attacks Vance’s signature concerned the unsubstantiated story that his Haitian constituents in Ohio were eating their pets, which Trump and then Vance not only said, but then repeated despite denial from local authorities that it was happening. But Vance didn’t care. He went even further by admitting it was a false story, but one that he still proudly put forth:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

The hell with the Haitians he supposedly represented in the Senate. And to hell with the truth.

Zelensky Muggers

When Volodymryr Zelensky visited the Oval Office on March 25, 2025, to secure American support against the Russians invaders, Vance took the lead role in a carefully orchestrated effort to humiliate the Ukrainian leader. Vance accused Zelensky of campaigning for the Democrats and for not thanking Trump profusely for all of the US support.

Vance said to Zelensky, “I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”

The vibe of this made-for-TV reality show reminded me of how bullies operate: Trump pinning back Zelensky’s arms, while Vance landed the body blows.

Denmark Trashing

JD wants to be a point person in taking Greenland from the Greenlanders and Denmark. In a visit to the Pituffik Space base last March, he belittled the sacrifice made by Danes who lost more soldiers per capital than any other ally in Afghanistan. But, as he put it, that was

“years ago, just as, for example, the French honor the sacrifice of Americans in Normandy 80 years ago…. Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland…”

It must be such a rush for a leader of a country with 340 million people to threaten a county of 6 million. They can’t touch you. You’re invincible.

Killing "Domestic Terrorists"

Without waiting for an investigation of any sort, Vance jumped to defend the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, who killed Renee Nicole Goode in Minneapolis by firing three shots through her car window at close range:

“The reality is that his life was endangered and he fired in self-defense.”

No, the reality is that Vance wants to demonstrate to the MAGA world that he is a bad ass who owns the libs, over and over, and supports killing them, if necessary.

And stomping on reporters who dare question his unsubstantiated finding is blood sport:

“Everybody who’s been repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis when a law enforcement officer shot at her: you should be ashamed of yourselves, every single one of you.”

Kicking the Five-Year Old

You’ve got to have a heart made of stone not to show sympathy and kindness for a five-year-old who had his father taken away during an ICE raid. But if you want to be a MAGA leader, you have to look past any maudlin sentimentality even when the facts are lined up against you. According to the family’s asylum lawyer,

“The family was not eluding ICE in any way. They were following all established protocols, pursuing their claim for asylum, showing up for their court hearings, and posed no safety, not flight risk and should never have been detailed.”

Vance could care less about the facts:

“When they went to arrest his illegal alien father, the father ran. So, the story is that ICE detained a 5-year-old. Well, what are they supposed to do? Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death?”

Although the boy’s school and relatives offered to take care of the child, he was shipped with his father to a detention center in Texas.

So what? Why should Vance care any more about this child and his father than about dog-eating Haitians? Even though asylum seekers in the judicial process are legally here, Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, ignores the facts because the only facts that matter are proving that he will back ICE no matter what; that he will support the deportation of immigrants, legal or otherwise; that he will be seen as tough enough and mean enough to become the MAGA crown prince.

Cruella de Vance.

P.S. As the world learns that Alex Pretti was brutally murdered by federal agents, Cruella has yet to stomp on his dead body. Instead, he has issued a wilting word salad about “the engineered chaos” that is “the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.” You offer that kind of gibberish when you’re worried that a real investigation might make you look like a fool.

On January 24th, Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old white US citizen, was murdered by a Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis. This comes less than three weeks after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good.

Video footage shows Pretti, an ICU nurse, stepping in between a woman and a federal agent who was pepper-spraying her. That agent proceeds to pepper-spray Pretti who was filming the encounter with his phone in one hand and nothing in the other. Several agents approached and forced Pretti onto the ground. He was restrained.

Despite this, one agent unholstered his gun and fired one shot at close range. As that agent continued to fire, another grabbed his gun and fired additional shots. In total, at least 10 shots were fired within five seconds.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately began spreading their state-sanctioned propaganda. Via Twitter-X, DHS posted that federal agents were conducting a “targeted operation” when an armed individual approached. “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. […] Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots.” Without offering a shred of evidence, DHS wildly speculates that “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Like Good, the Trump administration immediately labelled Pretti a “domestic terrorist.”

Both Good and Pretti were victims of state-sanctioned executions conducted by federal agents illegally occupying the state of Minnesota against the will of its people and its elected officials.

Regardless of your thoughts on ICE’s presence in Minnesota specifically or the Trump administration in general, this is beyond debate: there was absolutely no reason for federal agents to fire a single shot—let alone ten. Pretti was not a threat to anyone—let alone several heavily armed federal agents. They chose to abuse the power and “absolute immunity” that the Trump administration granted them to publicly execute a US citizen at their own discretion.

We vote for representatives, not kings.

The Trump administration, in their utter disregard for the safety and well-being of Americans, has unleashed an army of poorly trained, heavily armed, masked agents without any guardrails or accountability. Several news outlets have reported that the federal investigation into Renee Good’s murder is more focused on any possible ties between her wife, Becca Good, and activist groups rather than Ross’ conduct. Thus far, six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have resigned over the Justice Department’s reluctance to investigate Ross.

An FBI agent who was working with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) also resigned. Shortly after opening a civil rights investigation into Good’s death, she was ordered to reclassify it as an investigation into an assault on the ICE agent. The FBI also blocked the BCA from participating in the investigation.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already announced that DHS will be leading the investigation of the Border Patrol agent that murdered Pretti. To emphasize, the department that, before the investigation even began, fabricated a series of lies meant to publicly exonerate Border Patrol agents will be investigating their conduct.

Given this precedent, why exactly would federal agents show restraint? Why deescalate when excessive violence is unconditionally excused? Even if they murder someone, President Trump will only go as far as acknowledging “that mistakes sometimes happen” and “that 99% of our ICE officers are doing the right thing.” Following Pretti’s murder, Trump wasted no time defending Border Patrol. He claimed that federal agents “had to protect themselves” against “the gunman.”

While Trump highlights Pretti’s gun as some kind of excuse, whether he was armed changes nothing. This is America – a country with over 80 million gun owners whose right to bear arms is inscribed in the Second Amendment. A fact that President Trump and his allies are usually so eager to point out. Pretti had a permit to carry a concealed handgun. Not only was he completely within his rights to carry, no video shows him even holding it.

Even Noem refused to directly answer whether Pretti brandished his weapon. Instead, she insisted that “I don’t know of any peaceful protestor that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” Yet, of course, she does. The J6 protestors were armed, attacked law enforcement and yet Noem supported Trump pardoning them. Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to another state, went to a peaceful protest armed, shot three people and received widespread praise from the Trump administration.

DHS is so blatantly lying that even staunch Trump supporters like Tim Pool are questioning the official state narrative.

The Trump administration’s careless indifference towards the truth means that, regardless of what they say, we must continue to record and share videos of federal agents. We simply cannot trust the words of an administration whose first impulse is to justify the death of US citizens.

But, there is a deeper worry. It may be tempting to see these lies as an attempt by the administration to justify the violence. An attempt to use the state’s massive propaganda machine—which includes media outlets like Fox News, the New York Post, Bari Weiss’s CBS and Elon Musk’s X—to convince the American public that federal agents are trying to faithfully execute their jobs.

By his own admission, Trump is only limited by his “own morality.” Even if his own supporters disagree with him, Trump remains steadfast–as he puts it, “MAGA is me.” Driven by narcissism, greed, and a litany of grievances, Trump shows little regard for the Constitution, Congress, court rulings, and the “international rules-based order.”

I would add to this list: the people. To think that Trump cares about convincing the public is to believe that Trump still cares about their opinion. Trump does not. He has ‘joked’ about cancelling the midterm elections. In August 2025, his administration quietly removed an online tool from Regulations.gov that allowed advocacy groups to collect and submit public comments to federal agencies. Doing so makes it much harder for individuals to weigh in on agency regulatory proposals. He also pursues a series of unpopular policies including seizing Greenland, occupying Venezuela and renaming the Kennedy Center.

Most Americans think ICE is making cities less safe, but Trump doesn’t care. Hours after Pretti’s murder, Attorney General Pamela Bondi sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) making three demands:

1.Walz’s office must share state records on Medicaid, and Food and Nutrition Service programs with the federal government

2.Repeal sanctuary city policies, force all state correctional facilities to fully cooperate with ICE, honor immigration detainers, and permit ICE to interview detainees to determine immigration status

3.Grant the Department of Justice complete access to the state’s voter rolls to confirm that its registration policies comply with federal law

These demands are a direct assault on the sovereignty of Minnesota. A day after a major statewide economic blackout and protest, the Trump administration is ordering Walz to betray the will of his own constituents. And to be clear, these are demands. As Bondi emphasized on Fox News, Walz “better support President Trump. He better support the men and women in law enforcement because if he doesn’t, we are.”

For the Trump administration, Minnesota is not about immigration enforcement or fraud. It is a trial run for his administration’s fascist apparatus. He is testing whether there are any limits to his power beyond his own judgment. After all, thus far Congress and the Supreme Court have utterly failed to keep him in check—not that either has really tried.

Walz cannot capitulate to the Trump administration. But we also cannot depend on elected officials to solve this problem. Now is the time for collective action—not just in Minnesota but across the entire country. After all, there is one thing that Trump definitely cares about: the economy. A nationwide economic blackout and protest would hit him where it hurts.

No matter which state you live in, you are not safe from Trump. Do not be fooled by victim-blaming narratives that fault Good and Pretti for being ‘where they were not supposed to be.’ The notion that we, as Americans, cannot protest unlawful law enforcement is a repulsive austerity policy masquerading as genuine critique. It is to surrender ourselves unconditionally to the whims of the state.

We vote for representatives, not kings. If ever our elected officials fail to reflect our will, then they must be made to submit—not the other way around. Trump has forgotten how things work; we would all do well to remind him.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, wanted to change his agency’s dietary recommendations, he did something very simple. He took the food pyramid and turned it upside down. After years of promoting healthy grains, pulses, and vegetables, the agency was now favoring meat and dairy.

It seemed like a joke. It wasn’t.

Kennedy called his upside-down pyramid, with meat at the top and whole grains at the bottom, “Eat Real Food.” A better name would be “Support Cattle Farmers and Have a Heart Attack.”

The Trump administration’s topsy-turvy approach applies to every aspect of American policy.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it.

The United States needs undocumented immigrants to maintain the economy by filling jobs in agriculture, the construction industry, and the service sector. So, the Trump administration is deporting them.

The United States is the only major industrialized country without universal healthcare. So, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for people to access medical insurance.

The United States, before 2024, was the largest oil and gas producing nation on the planet, but needed government support to make the transition to clean energy. So, the Trump administration eliminated those clean energy subsidies and invested even more into expanding the fossil fuel sector.

In other words, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to harm people and the planet. They are like comic book villains, and they don’t even realize it

The upside-down nature of Trump’s approach to policy can perhaps best be seen in the foreign policy realm.

Donald Trump has talked over and over again about the importance of peace. He has lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. When asked about his New Year’s wish this year, he said, “Peace on Earth.”

But all he has done recently is promote war. His administration bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. The United States invaded Venezuela right after the New Year in order to kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

The administration is now preparing to attack Iran. Trump has insisted that the United States must seize Greenland, by force if necessary. And the US president expects that the government in Cuba will fall as well, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will one day be that country’s leader.

The Trump administration has emphasized the critical importance of US sovereignty. It doesn’t want any other country or any international institutions interfering with US policies.

However, the Trump administration doesn’t care about the sovereignty of any other country. Trump believes he can intervene anywhere. Even close allies are not off limits. He has suggested absorbing Canada. And he seems willing to fight a fellow NATO member, Denmark, in order to control Greenland.

Respect for sovereignty is a bedrock principle of the United Nations. All states rely on this principle to safeguard their borders and protect against the interventions of other countries. Trump’s challenges to sovereignty in Venezuela and elsewhere threaten to unravel the world order.

This contempt for international treaties and institutions led the administration early on to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate as well as the UN Human Rights Council. This year, he has ordered the withdrawal from 66 international organizations, half of them connected to the United Nations. These include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body responsible for the yearly Conference of Parties (COP), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From 2005 to 2024, carbon emissions in the United States dropped 20%, a rare bit of good news from a country with the second-highest rate of emissions in the world. Last year, under Trump, US emissions made a dramatic U-turn, rising by 2.4%.

Trump has nothing but contempt for international law. He has done more than just denounce legal bodies like the International Criminal Court. He has actively sought to destroy the ICC with sanctions. And he has threatened even more sanctions if the ICC doesn’t rewrite its founding document to ensure that Trump and his cronies are never prosecuted for the war crimes that they have most definitely committed.

The violations of sovereignty, the withdrawal from international institutions, and the contempt for international law: These all form a different kind of war. The Trump administration has launched an offensive against the very edifice of the world order. He wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.

This is the world of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-right adviser. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller recently told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Power, as even authoritarian leaders learn, has its limits. Autocrats can’t change their societies by force alone. They are overthrown by peaceful protests. They are tried in court and sent to jail.

History is littered with the wreckage of empires that attempted to rule by force alone. That is the iron law since the beginning of time.

And it is just a matter of time before the Trump administration discovers that it too faces limits. The European Union is banding together to fend off any attempt on Greenland. The US courts are laying down limits on what the Trump administration can and cannot do, with even the conservative Supreme Court ruling recently that the administration cannot send the National Guard to Chicago against the wishes of the mayor and the governor.

And popular protests continue throughout the United States, most recently to protest the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of a young mother in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it. An upside-down pyramid is not stable. Eventually, it will collapse.

Climate change isn’t looming somewhere down the road. For millions of families, it’s already showing up as higher insurance bills, higher utility costs, flooded roads, closed schools, and budgets stretched past the breaking point. And for others, it’s far worse—lost homes, lasting health impacts, and lives cut short. The damage from the climate crisis isn’t a distant projection. The bill is real, and it’s already due.

The problem is who’s paying it.

Right now, American families and state governments are picking up the tab for climate disasters while the fossil fuel companies that knowingly caused the damage keep raking in record profits. Every storm that wipes out a neighborhood, every heatwave that overwhelms hospitals, every wildfire that shuts down a school adds another line item to public budgets, and another cost pushed onto taxpayers and our families.

That imbalance is why, from January 26 to 30, advocates, lawmakers, students, workers, and faith and community leaders across the country are coming together for a Make Polluters Pay Week of Action. It’s the opening push of the 2026 legislative session and a clear signal that polluter accountability is no longer a fringe idea, but a governing priority.

Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill.

The logic is simple: If you caused the harm, you should help pay for the repair.

This is how we already handle toxic waste, oil spills, and industrial contamination. We don’t send the cleanup bill to families who live nearby. We send it to the companies that made the mess. Climate superfund laws apply that same common-sense principle to the climate crisis, and voters understand it.

In fact, support is growing fast. Recent polling shows that 77% of voters now support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages, including majorities of Republicans and Independents. Support has jumped more than 10 points in the past year as the real-world costs of climate damage become impossible to ignore.

In 2024, Vermont and New York became the first states in the nation to pass climate superfund laws, requiring fossil fuel companies to contribute billions toward disaster recovery and climate resilience. In 2025, nearly a dozen more states introduced similar legislation. In 2026, that momentum is only accelerating.

The Week of Action reflects that reality. Across the country, states will introduce new climate bills, hold lobby days and town halls, deliver petitions, publish op-eds, walk out of classrooms, and rally public support—all aimed at starting the year with one message: Taxpayers shouldn’t be the default insurer for fossil fuel pollution anymore.

This push is happening now because delay has a cost. Every year we fail to act, the damage compounds and the bill gets bigger. A recent study found that climate costs to the US economy likely topped $1 trillion in 2025. That’s money coming out of household budgets, local tax bases, and already stretched state services.

This is also happening as federal accountability collapses. Agencies meant to protect communities and prepare us for disasters, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Weather Service, are being gutted, with another 1,000 FEMA jobs reportedly on the chopping block just as disasters intensify. At the same time, President Donald Trump is cozying up to fossil fuel executives, helping them dodge accountability and fight efforts to make polluters pay.

Every dollar collected from polluters is a dollar that doesn’t come from taxpayers. Climate superfund funds can build flood protections, harden the grid, prevent wildfires, create lifesaving cooling centers, and keep hospitals and schools functioning during disasters. It also supports good jobs, since rebuilding roads, bridges, and energy systems requires skilled labor. For families, stronger grids mean fewer outages and repairs, and ending fossil fuel subsidies and loopholes can free up billions to lower utility costs, expand clean energy access, and invest in communities instead of corporate giveaways.

The fossil fuel industry wants this conversation to feel radical. It isn’t. What’s radical is a system where companies profit while the public pays, where disasters are treated as unavoidable acts of nature rather than the predictable result of decades of pollution.

Big Oil accountability is coming. The only question is how much longer taxpayers will be left holding the bill. The Make Polluters Pay Week of Action is about answering that question with action. Not someday. Not after the next disaster. Now.

Alex Pretti was a strong man. An ICU nurse at the VA, he showed up every day with courage and care, standing by veterans on the precipice of death. Brave, kind, generous, he had skills that could save lives and the presence to accompany people through the heaviest moments at the end of life. When not at work, he hiked the beautiful nature of Minnesota with a beaming smile. He was the kind of man every parent dreams of raising, the kind of neighbor who makes a community feel like home. He was a real man.

On Saturday, January 24th, when not on the job, Alex showed up to a protest to bear witness. Just weeks after Renee Nicole Good was murdered, and then smeared as a terrorist by the Trump administration despite video evidence of her peaceful protest, Alex knew that recording was essential. He understood what we all must: that witnessing is an act of patriotism, a constitutional duty to hold power accountable when they try to twist reality before our eyes. When he saw a woman accosted by thugs, he went to help her. He stood between her and the attackers, one hand in the air and the other holding a phone to record. He was pushed to the ground and shot ten times. He was murdered, executed publicly.

The thugs who pushed her down, who executed him in front of dozens of witnesses who recorded every second, they are not strong. They are cowards. The soulless man who sat on a toilet in a marble bathroom in the White House in the middle of the night spreading lies about Alex on social media is not strong. He is a coward. This is what cowardice looks like: destroying thousands of lives of public servants who maintain our quality of life, trampling on the Constitution repeatedly, throwing our global standing into uncertainty threatening war on allies, unabashedly brandishing Nazi ideology. These are the acts of the past year of Trump’s administration, not of strength, but of pathetic weakness. This backward, weak, unimaginative, soulless being is not a strongman. Trump is the weakest, most pathetic man this country has ever known.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world.

Stop Calling Cowards Strong

As we fumble for ways to understand the current global political moment, scholars and political analysts have guided our collective attention toward the "strongman" type of leadership. Putin, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Trump, and many others who follow ethics of domination and oppression are placed under this banner, this political framework. Given what we are seeing in the United States, I believe it is dangerous to keep using such a false descriptor of these dynamics of dehumanization. These men are not strong. Their violence is not power; it is the telltale marker of weakness. They resort to brutality because they possess no moral authority, no true courage, no capacity to lead through anything but fear.

Trump and any other leader who attacks communities that sustain our collective wellbeing are the weakest, most pathetic, spineless people in the world. Trying to understand what we are experiencing now through the language of "strongmen" is dangerous and inaccurate. We have to name reality with more intention. Men deserve better than this. People are raising boys into beautiful, strong men like Alex Pretti. In Trump, in Steven Miller, and the thugs who carry out their unconstitutional orders, we are seeing cowards who are so weak that they must destroy humanity because they cannot stand their own emptiness.

I Have Seen This Before, Many of Us Have

I think often about my childhood in Romania these days. My mom telling me about her beloved mentor who was disappeared because he held views that were dangerous to the dictator's fragile sense of self. I think about my dad who was tortured, whose body and spirit never recovered. I think about the pathetic leader who built monstrous palaces while his people starved, who paraded in fur coats while we scrounged for clothes from bins donated by German churches.

Ceaușescu turned neighbors against one another through a system of informants. Neighbors received special favors, maybe a bag of flour when no one else had any, to report any dissent in the neighborhood. A few people around Ceaușescu, the corrupt politicians, got richer and richer the more we were undernourished and the more our future was uncertain. They were untouchable. The Epstein files have made clear this too is a reality here: one system of justice for the powerful, another for the rest of us. Different rules. Different accountability. Different worlds.

Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people.

My parents risked everything, my father's body and mind bore the scars of torture until his last breath, so that I could live in a place where I could speak freely, think freely, question power without fear. To see that precious dream of freedom, bought with their blood and sacrifice, now being crushed by what increasingly resembles the Securitate, Romania's secret police, is a betrayal beyond words. To live these things all over again, yet with more vivid brutality than I ever imagined, is unspeakably painful to describe. People are being disappeared. The pathetic, spineless monster is building his palaces while loving, generous neighbors are being murdered in the streets. ICE is recruiting people by offering bonuses, turning our neighbors into spineless thugs too, just as Ceaușescu's informants were recruited with bags of flour.

Ceaușescu was a spineless coward building his palace around him. My grandfather, who went into the fields every day and raised the chickens and pigs that kept me alive, he was strong, he was a strong man. My dad, who risked his life to escape authoritarianism because he believed that somewhere a place existed where I could speak my mind freely, he too was brave and strong. Your grandfather who worked double shifts so his children could go to college. Your neighbor who checks on the elderly woman next door every morning. Your co-worker who goes to immigration court to bear witness. The man at the grocery store who remembers everyone’s birthdays and makes them handmade cards. These are strong people. These are real men and women. This is what strength looks like.

What True Power Looks Like

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher, wrote that unless colonial structures are radically overturned, any decolonization that just swaps elites leaves intact a brittle, violent form of power built on the permanent dehumanization of the masses. This is what we see now: brittle, violent power terrified of true strength. Fanon understood that we cannot simply replace one set of elites with another, we must radically overturn the structures themselves. This is what we are called to do now: refuse to reinforce systems that reward spineless cowards with authority, and instead build the world Alex Pretti died protecting. A world where showing up for your neighbor is valued more than hoarding wealth. Where recording truth is patriotism. Where welcoming immigrants and refugees, people like my father, welcoming little boys like Liam Conejo Ramos, fleeing authoritarianism in search of freedom, strengthens rather than threatens our communities. Where offering sanctuary is recognized as the strength it is, not twisted into a crime. Where collective wellbeing matters more than individual domination. Trump and his thugs are terrified of this vision. They are terrified of Renee Good smiling instead of cowering. They are terrified of Alex Pretti walking toward thugs to make sure a woman is not brutalized by them. They are weak cowards.

Trump and his thugs, and other thugs like that anywhere in the world, are afraid of true power. They are afraid of our true power, our true strength. They are terrified of Alex Pretti, someone who embodied true strength, who was skilled, kind, and moral. Because true power exposes them for what they are: morally corrupt, spineless, empty, weak thugs.

Strongmen do not have power of over us. They are afraid of us. It is time for us as a collective to remember what true power is. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. They are weak. They are pathetic. And they know it.

The strength we have, the strength we see in the community members who rush toward a 16-year old child who is abducted by ICE and thrown out of the van after being brutalized, the clergy who kneeled in protest at the airport, the strength we see embodied in Alex Pretti walking to protect a woman being brutalized by thugs, that strength is not rare, it is the fabric of our communities. It has always been here, quietly holding us together while cowards build palaces and spread lies. It is time we recognize this power for what it is: unstoppable, abundant, and ours. We are strong. We, who care for each other, are strong. This is real strength. And it is ours.

More focus is needed on the downsides of the AI “revolution,” which is better understood as a speculative bubble (built in part through shaky circular financing deals between chip maker Nvidia, cloud provider Oracle, and model builder OpenAI, among others) that’s liable to burst. If and when that happens, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s preemptive lobbying for a taxpayer-funded bailout is likely to pay off, leaving the public on the hook. That would be outrageous, of course, considering how much direct and indirect financial support tech giants have already received from federal and state governments, before and throughout the ongoing artificial intelligence frenzy. On the other hand, if AI “succeeds”—destroying millions of jobs, pillaging communities, and despoiling ecosystems in the process—working people will have subsidized our own subjugation. Widespread opposition to planned data centers across the political spectrum suggests that the public understands this.

Here’s a tangible downside: The prices of many essential goods are already rising as a result of the anti-democratic rush to build hyperscale data centers and the growing use of AI programs in numerous sectors. In what follows, we explain how the proliferation of both AI software (i.e., seemingly immaterial computational tools) and hardware (i.e., the resource-intensive and highly polluting infrastructure underpinning those tools) is driving up the costs of necessities now and in the future.

Skyrocketing Electricity Bills

Energy-hungry AI systems require immense amounts of computing power. That’s why tech giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are investing billions of dollars to expedite the construction of massive, primarily gas-powered data centers across the United States. This AI-driven surge in electricity demand, combined with the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on renewable energy supply and battery storage, is putting increased strain on the power grid. The result? Higher utility bills.

According to a Bloomberg analysis published in 2025, “Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers.” The rapid development of data centers connected to PJM Interconnection—the largest power grid operator in the United States, serving 67 million customers throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic—increased the cost of procuring electricity by $9.3 billion from June 2024 to June 2025, with expenses only expected to rise further.

If this trend continues and data centers become the majority-users of a utility, then utilities may demand even deeper sacrifices from everyday ratepayers to keep their most powerful customers happy.

Residential ratepayers are shouldering this burden unfairly. As the beneficiaries of state-granted monopolies, for-profit utilities are subject to state regulation of prices. Public utility commissioners are supposed to set rates that enable customers to receive affordable power and utilities to cover operating costs and make enough profit to attract investors to fund infrastructure expansions and upgrades. For years, however, increasingly captured commissioners have been approving rate hike requests that pad the pockets of utility executives and shareholders (to the tune of $50 billion per year in excess profit, according to the American Economic Liberties Project).

Now, there’s mounting evidence that state regulators are subsidizing Big Tech’s out-of-control power consumption by forcing customers to fund discounted rates for data centers. This is a boon for investor-owned utilities, which profit from greater energy use. For the rest of us, it makes it harder to scrape by every month. If this trend continues and data centers become the majority-users of a utility, then utilities may demand even deeper sacrifices from everyday ratepayers to keep their most powerful customers happy.

Automated Health Insurance Denials, Home Insurance Rate Hikes

Earlier this month, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the so-called Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model. This pilot program allows six companies in six states to use AI to determine whether traditional Medicare enrollees’ requested medical care should be covered.

Reporting on this AI-powered prior authorization program last year, the New York Times noted that “similar algorithms used by insurers have been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits, which have asserted that the technology allowed the companies to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut patients off from care in rehabilitation facilities.” Firms tapped to manage the WISeR Model “would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims,” the newspaper observed. “Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”

An early warning that CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz is imposing “AI death panels” aimed at preventing seniors from accessing needed healthcare is apt. It’s also worth stressing that Medicare Advantage and private insurance plans have already been using AI-powered prior authorization, with costly and deadly effects for ordinary people.

Property insurers, too, are increasingly relying on AI to project—with zero transparency and questionable accuracy—climate risks, which is contributing to coverage withdrawals and rate hikes in communities around the United States. According to a recent report from McKinsey & Company, the insurance industry’s growing use of AI has led to “a 10 to 15% increase in premium growth.” While industry profits and executive compensation are on the rise, homeowners and renters alike are being hurt by the declining availability and affordability of home insurance. A climate and insurance-driven foreclosure wave, which would starve municipal budgets and could trigger a broader economic crisis, is a real possibility.

Algorithmic Price Gouging

Two shoppers could walk into the same grocery store at the same time and purchase the same product—and yet be charged different prices. This was the conclusion of a recent experiment conducted by Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union. The study, which focused on online grocer Instacart, found that nearly three-quarters of items tested were offered to customers at multiple price points, with an average difference of 13% between the lowest and highest prices.

What the hell are we doing building ruinous housing for super-computers when we could—and should—be building healthy housing (and clean energy and mass transit) for people?

How is this possible? Unfortunately, this increasingly common practice of “surveillance pricing” is the logical outcome of allowing rent-seeking firms to transform our personal data into an asset that can be endlessly mined. AI is turbocharging this phenomenon, from RealPage’s rent-gouging software to Delta Air Line’s use of Fetcherr, an AI-fueled pricing technology.

Negative Environmental and Health Externalities

AI is already wreaking profound havoc on public and environmental health. The rare earth elements used in the microchips that power AI systems tend to be mined in ecologically harmful ways. Data center construction implies habitat destruction, and completed facilities produce significant amounts of toxic electronic waste, which typically contains mercury, lead, and other hazardous materials. Data centers consume tremendous amounts of water, sometimes dispossessing local residents of access in the process. Making matters worse, Big Tech’s quest for cheap electricity is leading it to build data centers in all kinds of places, including drought-stricken states like Arizona and Nevada, compounding preexisting water shortages.

Moreover, most data centers are being powered by planet-heating fossil fuels, especially methane gas. In addition, forecasted AI-related energy shortfalls are leading utilities to keep aging coal plants running and even to revive particularly dirty “peaker” plants, while the use of on-site diesel generators is also growing.

On top of the fact that fossil fuel-powered data centers spew heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere, research has shown that AI degrades air quality in other ways. Specifically, across its full lifecycle—from chip manufacturing to data center operation—AI contributes to the emission of fine particulate matter or soot, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. These pollutants are linked to numerous adverse health impacts, including lung cancer, asthma, heart attacks, cardiovascular disease, strokes, cognitive decline, and premature mortality. One study estimates that data centers are on track to account for at least 1,300 premature deaths and $20 billion in public health-related costs per year in the United States by 2030. These deleterious consequences are poised to hit already-disadvantaged populations the hardest. That includes the low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods currently fighting back against Elon Musk’s xAI data centers in South Memphis.

Deferred Green Economic Development Means Climate-flation

What the hell are we doing building ruinous housing for super-computers when we could—and should—be building healthy housing (and clean energy and mass transit) for people? The opportunity costs of supporting Big Tech’s AI data center buildout are striking.

A new analysis from the Rhodium Group estimates that for the first time in two years, US greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025. The 2.4% uptick in national GHG pollution was driven in large part by data centers and crypto mining. This regressive form of economic development is destabilizing the climate and leaving people less materially secure. It is also being pursued as a reactionary alternative to green economic populism.

It seems clear that a major reason why the ruling class is so heavily invested in AI’s triumph is because they dream of burying organized labor and worker demands once and for all.

Despite recent efforts to decouple climate and affordability, the two issues remain inextricably linked. There’s mounting evidence that climate inaction is exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis. The best way forward is to fight for policies that would simultaneously decarbonize and democratize our society, to confront climate chaos and grotesque inequality at the same time.

Failing to do so, as we are now amid AI-mania, will only lock-in more fossil fuel pollution, thus aggravating extreme weather and with it, supply chain disruptions and price shocks. Current and future generations will be forced to endure a more brutish and expensive world full of economic insecurity and uneven, but rampant, suffering.

Endgame: Wage Repression, Tyranny, and Unlimited Rent Seeking

Some AI-related costs have not yet been realized. But if Silicon Valley oligarchs succeed in empowering firms all across the economy to eliminate jobs (and deskill further pockets of the workforce), skyrocketing unemployment would empower bosses to suppress wages. It seems clear that a major reason why the ruling class is so heavily invested in AI’s triumph is because they dream of burying organized labor and worker demands once and for all. Meanwhile, the collision of declining pay and rising prices would push more and more people closer to the brink.

How are people supposed to enjoy the leisure time ostensibly provided by AI advancements if they can’t afford basic necessities? Is rapid access to information a net-positive no matter the quality of that information? Isn’t it more likely that society’s capacity for critical thinking will be further degraded? And if we deprive the next generation of literacy while immersing them in a poisoned information ecosystem, doesn’t that increase the likelihood that authoritarian demagogues will retain power?

That’s why billionaire techno-fascists are trying so hard to imprison us within their AI-dominated world. Whether by preempting regulation of AI inside existing borders or violently establishing new, regulation-free jurisdictions where they can impose their will, a tiny class of digital overlords and their political allies are seeking to end democracy so they can extract rents with no constraints. We can’t afford to let their dystopian vision become reality.

In 2022, my wife and I lost our first child. We named them June. They were deeply wanted and fiercely loved. In one fateful appointment, our entire worlds changed. We learned that June had a severe fetal bladder abnormality and was unable to produce amniotic fluid. Without it, their lungs would never develop. They would not survive.

We made the impossible decision to end the pregnancy—an act of compassion, love, and medical necessity.

At the time, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had a total ban on abortion care and counseling.

No exceptions for rape. No exceptions for incest. Not even to save a veteran’s life.

Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.

After our loss, the only way I felt I could keep breathing was to turn that grief into meaning. I shared our story with lawmakers to help reverse this dangerous policy so that veterans and their families could turn to the VA—no matter the circumstance or where they lived. That fall, the VA finally took steps to reverse the ban, signaling a long-overdue shift toward care, autonomy, and dignity.

But that progress was short-lived.

The VA just finalized a new abortion ban policy that, once again, excludes exceptions for rape or incest and offers only vague assurances that it will intervene if our lives are at risk. They initially implemented this enormous change in secret without telling veterans or their families.

In effect, it returns the VA to what was once the most extreme abortion ban in the country—an outright prohibition on care and counseling that applies to every VA facility nationwide, regardless of state law.

This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.

And it is not happening in isolation. The same administration driving this ban is also working diligently to eliminate gender-affirming care, defund programs for minority and underrepresented veterans, and strip inclusive language and data collection from federal policy. The message is unmistakable: Some veterans count. Others don’t.

Veterans are not a monolith. We are a diverse community—LGBTQIA+, people of color, disabled, parents, caregivers, survivors, and yes, women too. Our community exists at every intersection of identity and experience, and our families serve alongside us. Our care cannot be conditional. Our humanity is not negotiable.

Policy is never just about one issue. It is intersectional—because our lives are intersectional.

Reproductive care cannot be separated from gender-affirming care, from disability access and mental health, from racial justice, or maternal health. Our needs don’t exist in silos, and neither do we. When one right is taken away, the loss reverberates across all the others.

I’ve seen what’s possible when we refuse to stay silent—how lived experience can reshape policy and expand care that has never existed before. And I know exactly what is at stake when care is denied. Pregnancy can change on a dime.

June’s life, though brief, transformed mine. Through their memory, I found purpose. I found a voice. And in their honor, I will continue working to ensure that no veteran or family ever has to face what we faced alone.

We should be building systems rooted in care, equity, and truth. We should be honoring the fullness of who veterans are, how we serve, and how we build our families. Instead, our fundamental rights are being stripped away—one policy memo at a time—and once again, we are being asked to fight for the right to make personal decisions about our health, our futures, and our families.

I will not allow June’s legacy to become another casualty of politics. Their life will be a call to care.

This moment demands more than endurance. It demands action.

The policies we pass—within the VA and beyond—shape the futures of veterans and the people who love us. Had my wife not been able to access critical care in her time of need—had we not been given the chance to make the most compassionate choice amid impossible circumstances—we might never have known the joy of raising our child today, a joy born from grief and shaped by love.

Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.

Because in the end, we are all only human.

The Trump administration’s exercise in armed regime change in Venezuela should have come as no surprise. The US naval buildup in the Caribbean and the attacks on defenseless boats off the Venezuelan coast—based on unproven allegations that they contained drug traffickers—had been underway for more than three months. By the end of December 2025, in fact, such strikes on boats near Venezuela (and in the Eastern Pacific) had already killed 115 people.

And those attacks were just the beginning. The US has since intercepted oil tankers as far away as the North Atlantic Ocean; run a covert operation inside Venezuela; and earlier this month, launched multiple air strikes that killed at least 40 Venezuelans while capturing that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.

Both of them are now imprisoned in New York City and poised to face a criminal trial for narco-terrorism and cocaine importing conspiracies, plus assorted weapons charges. Even more strikingly, President Donald Trump recently told the New York Times that the US could run Venezuela “for years.” On how that would be done, he (of course!) didn’t offer a clue. Naturally, a Venezuelan government forged in the face of a possible US occupation would comply with the whims of the Trump administration—assuming that such a government, capable of stabilizing the country and earning the loyalty of the majority of its people, can even be pulled together.

Trump’s rush to war in Latin America is a phenomenon that, until recently, seemed long over. Its revival should raise multiple red flags, given the history of Washington’s failed efforts to install allied governments through regime change. (Can you spell Iraq?) In fact, given this country’s lack of success with such attempts since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it’s a good bet that regime change in Venezuela will not end well for any of the parties concerned, whether the Trump administration, the new leaders of Venezuela, or the people of our two countries.

Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s.

In the meantime, Trump has already suggested that he might entertain the idea of launching military strikes on neighboring Colombia. After a White House phone call between that country’s president Gustavo Petro and him, however, Time Magazine speculated that, when it comes to “who’s next?,” it might not be Colombia but Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, or even Iran. What’s not yet clear is whether Trump and crew will use the US military, CIA-style covert action, economic warfare, or some combination of all of them in pursuit of their goals (whatever they might prove to be).

The one thing that should be clear by now is that pursuing such global regime-change campaigns would be sheer madness. Going that route would sow chaos and instability, while harming untold numbers of innocent civilians, all in pursuit of a futile quest for renewed US global supremacy.

When, long ago, President Trump first started using the term “Make America Great Again,” I assumed he was thinking of the 1950s, when a surge of post-World War II economic growth and government investment lifted the prospects of a select group of Americans (while pointedly excluding others). That period, of course, was when the efforts that produced the modern civil rights, women’s rights, and gay and trans rights movements were in their early stages. Prejudice was the norm then in most places where Americans lived, worked, or got an education, while McCarthyism cost untold numbers of people their jobs and livelihoods and had a chilling effect on the discussion or pursuit of progressive goals.

Such a return to the 1950s would have been bad enough. However, Trump’s fixation on actually grabbing territory and his hyper-militarized interpretation of the 200-year-old Monroe (now, Donroe) Doctrine suggest that perhaps he wants to take America back to the 1850s. If so, count on one thing: We’ll pay a high price for any such exercise in imperial nostalgia.

Intervention as the Norm: The History of US Aggression in Latin America

The Trump administration’s attempt to control Latin America and intimidate its leaders and citizens is, of course, nothing new. At the start of the 20th century, President Teddy Roosevelt announced his own “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which went well beyond the original pronouncement’s warning to European powers to avoid challenging Washington’s dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt then stated that “chronic wrongdoing… may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”

The Office of the Historian at the US State Department points out that, “[o]ver the long term, the [Roosevelt] corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, but it did serve as justification for US intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.”

In fact, there were dozens of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean in the wake of Roosevelt’s statement of his doctrine. Later in the century, there were US-aided coups in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973); invasions of Cuba (1961), the Dominican Republic (1983), and Grenada (1983); armed regime change in Panama (1989); the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua (1981) and death squads in El Salvador (1980 to 1992); and support for dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay in the 1970s and 1980s.

In all, according to historian John Coatsworth, the United States intervened in the Western Hemisphere to change governments 41 times from 1898 to 1994. Seventeen of those cases involved direct US military intervention.

In short, the Trump administration is now reprising the worst of past US policies toward Latin America, but as with all things Trumpian, he and his cohorts are moving at warp speed, and on several fronts simultaneously.

The Perils of Regime Change

Although Trump officials are no doubt celebrating their removal of Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, the battle there is far from over. When the US drove Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in a six-week military campaign in 1991, there was a great deal of celebratory rhetoric about how “America is back” or even that the United States was the single most impressively dominant nation in the history of humanity. But as historian Andrew Bacevich has pointed out, the 1991 Gulf War was just the start of what became a long war in Iraq and the greater Middle East. In Iraq, the ejection of Hussein was followed by relentless bombing, devastating sanctions, and a 20-year war of occupation that ended disastrously.

Wishful thinking was rampant in the run-up to the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, with administration officials bragging that the war would be a “cake walk” and would cost “only” $50 to $100 billion. When all was said and done, however, that war would last 20 years at a cost of well over $1 trillion; hundreds of thousands of civilians would die; and hundreds of thousands of US military personnel would be killed, maimed, or left with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI).

The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power.

The opportunity costs of America’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere have indeed been enormous. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that the taxpayer obligations flowing from those conflicts exceeded $8 trillion. As the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies has noted, that $8 trillion would have been enough to decarbonize the entire US electrical grid, forgive all US student-loan debt, and triple the investment in green energy and related items initiated by the Biden administration under the Inflation Reduction Act (investments that have since been rolled back by the Trump administration).

Of course, that money is gone, but given the experience, you might think that this country’s leadership (such as it is) would go all in to avoid repeating such costly mistakes, this time in Latin America, by attempting to dominate and control the region through force or the threat of it. Consider it a guarantee that such a policy will never end well for the residents of the targeted nations. And count on this as well: It will also exact a high price on Americans in need of food, housing, education, a robust public health system, and a serious plan to address the ravages of climate change.

Why Venezuela? Oil, Ego, and the Quest for Dominance

The Trump administration’s original rationale for pursuing regime change in Venezuela was to stop the flow of drugs into the United States, a position that didn’t stand up to even the most casual scrutiny. After all, Venezuela isn’t faintly one of the more significant sources of drugs heading into this country and, in particular, it isn’t a supplier of fentanyl, the deadliest substance being imported.

Donald Trump has since stated repeatedly (as in a January 3 press conference), that the intervention he ordered was, in fact, about seizing Venezuela’s oil resources and developing them to the benefit of the US through the activities of American oil companies. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world,” he said, “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

Writing in The Nation, Michael Klare pointed out that upping Venezuela’s oil output would, in fact, be no simple matter. Trump’s comments, he suggested, were “imbued with nostalgia and fantasy” and “all this flies in the face of economic and geological reality, which stands in the way of any rapid increase in Venezuelan output and oil profits.” That country’s oil supplies are, in fact, mostly in the form of heavy crude, which is particularly difficult to extract, and its infrastructure for accessing such oil is decrepit, thanks to years of sanctions and neglect. As Klare points out, the London-based consultancy firm Energy Aspects has suggested that it would take “tens of billions of dollars over multiple years” to restore Venezuela’s oil production to the higher levels of years past.

Realism, however, has never been Donald Trump’s strong suit, and his dream that seizing Venezuela’s oil resources will be a piece of cake only reinforces that point. The same can be said for his assertion that the United States could rule Venezuela, perhaps for years, and that everything is bound to go smoothly. The disastrous consequences of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, suggest otherwise.

Beyond oil, the intervention in Venezuela satisfies Trump’s personal will to power, advances Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s goal of weakening and perhaps overthrowing the government of Cuba (by denying it Venezuelan oil), and puts progressive governments in Latin America on notice that if they don’t bend the knee to US economic and political demands, they may be next.

Interventionism on Steroids: A Recipe for American Decline

Since the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife in Venezuela, administration rhetoric about possible attacks on Colombia and the seizing of Greenland has only accelerated. At another moment in history, perhaps such claims could have been dismissed as the idle bluster of an aging oligarch. But the Trump administration has already acted on too many of its most outlandish policy proposals—with its attempt to seize and control Venezuela high on the list—for us to treat the president’s aggressive statements as idle threats.

The Venezuelan debacle—which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done—is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power. The question is, given the administration’s costly and dangerous military-first foreign policy, how much damage will this country do to people here and abroad on the way down?

Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. There could be a shift from this country’s current addiction to war as a central feature of its interactions with other nations to a policy of restraint that would recognize that the days when the United States could presume to run the world are over. In truth, US dominance was always overrated, given fiascos like the interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where the US could not impose its will on much smaller nations with far fewer resources and far less sophisticated weaponry. Those experiences should have taught policymakers of both parties to proceed with caution, but the learning curve has, at best, been slow, painful, and erratic—and in the era of Donald Trump, seemingly nonexistent.

Warmed-over appeals to restore American greatness through the barrel of a gun are, of course, dangerously misguided, as our recent history has so amply demonstrated. It is long past time for us to demand better stewardship from our elected and appointed leaders.

Were Washington to put down its sword and invest in the real foundations of national strength—a healthy, well-educated, unified population—it could play a constructive role in the world, while delivering a better quality of life and a more responsive government to the American public. This would not mean eliminating the ability to defend the country by force if need be, but it would mean acknowledging that the need to do so should be rare, and that a more cooperative approach to overseas engagement, grounded in smart diplomacy, is the best defense of all. That, in turn, would mean a smaller military (and a far more modest military budget) that could free up resources to address urgent needs, from dealing with climate change and preventing new pandemics to reducing poverty and inequality.

At this moment in our history, the vision of a less militarized America may seem like a distant dream, but striving for it is the only way out of our current predicament.

Will a jury in Middle America’s flyover country care enough about the genocide in Gaza to acquit four protesters arrested for nonviolent civil resistance? Will it matter once they’ve seen “Bringing Gaza Home?”

That’s the question eight jurors will decide in Toledo a few weeks from now when they hear from four activists arrested October 3 for blocking the entrance to the local office of US Sen. John Husted (R-Ohio). They, along with the local peace movement, had run out of patience with Husted because of his continuing support for Israel’s genocide.

The final straw was when Husted refused to even make a statement supporting our friend and fellow Toledoan, Phil Tottenham, a former Marine, who was abducted in international waters by Israel during last fall’s Sumud Flotilla. That simply demanded the strongest nonviolent response we could make. We simply could not sit in comfort here in Toledo and watch this obscenity and simply hold a sign on a street corner to protest. We had to do more.

The other three people arrested were Al Compaan, professor emeritus of physics, University of Toledo; Nancy Larson, retired counselor-social worker; and Steve Masternak, retired industrial engineer. Two others were arrested but have since pled guilty and paid fines.

Our hope at trial is that our fellow citizens and neighbors will be as horrified by what Gazans have suffered as we are and decide it’s time to stand and be counted.

Information we will show the jury is included in the extensively documented Veterans For Peace report, Bringing Gaza Home. The report is compiled from information published by international news outlets such as the Guardian, Al Jazeera and Anadolu Agency, reporting on the effects of two years of Israel’s US-funded genocide in Palestine.

What makes it local to Toledo, county seat of Lucas County, Ohio, is comparing the destruction in Gaza to what Lucas County would be like after similar bombardment. The methodology simply compares Gaza’s area and population to Lucas County’s and calculates the comparable numbers.

We will hold up large photos and show videos of human casualties and physical destruction in Gaza, and describe to jurors what the effect would be in our own neighborhoods. We will tell the jury, “If this sounds utterly impossible or like a horror movie script, it’s neither. But for the grace of God this could be us instead of Gaza.”

• 27,292 county residents would be dead, including 350 medical personnel, 528 people seeking food aid from official sites, and 61 reporters and media workers;
• 93 people would have starved to death;
• 737 would be imprisoned without charges or trial;
• 450,170 tons of bombs would have been dropped on our county in two years—four times what was dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, London, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki combined in World War II;
• Over 34,300 people would be wounded; over half women and children;
• 324,520 people (75% of the county population) would be infected with disease from polluted water and open sewers;
• 384,500 people (90% of the population) would have endured severe lack of food;
• Over 90% of residential buildings would be destroyed and 92% of all schools would require complete reconstruction;
• 264,000 people (62% of the population) would have lost legal documentation for property ownership; and
• Over 340,000 unexploded bombs would lie buried in Lucas County.

Our hope at trial is that our fellow citizens and neighbors will be as horrified by what Gazans have suffered as we are and decide it’s time to stand and be counted, that blocking the entrance to a senator’s office is a minimal response to a genocide.

AI is being diffused throughout society under chatbots, models, and agents which are explicitly reactionary and create communicative and physical walls to defend the status quo.

Capitalism has elected AI as the next tool to distribute and dismantle labor, create a new power structure in the world, and repress social and political movements. Unchecked, it will bring us right up to a collapse brought on by war and climate chaos.

Forget about the Terminator stories of Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence. These are closer to sci-fi than to reality. We don’t need to speculate about things that don’t exist in the AI realm. What we do need to look at are the things that already exist and are being deployed massively.

The main objective of AI is the automation of historical automation itself. AI holds an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social classes other than the owners of the algorithms. Complete economic and social planning for the rich. In particular, they want to reduce the power that the working class has exercised in the past, the power to push toward the future and gain the political, social, and economic transformations that reduce or eliminate inequality and injustice.

Data centers today are nightmare factories.

A key and complementary objective of AI is to create an overwhelming monopoly over knowledge, codified via Large Language Models, Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks, and other Machine “Learning” models. This monopoly is being designed to utterly transform social relations and install a reactionary hegemony that widely surpasses neoliberal capitalism and feeds a far-right dystopia.

The third essential objective has to do with the control of violence and political repression. For that effect, AI provides different tools to be used in declared and now mostly-undeclared states of war. During the Gaza genocide, human targets were chosen with AI, its models were used to determine the biggest impacts for sequences of targets in order to achieve maximum infrastructure and human suffering consequences. Obviously, AI is used to maximize efficiency in all war logistics, calculating payloads, schedules, and material distribution. In Ukraine, most of the war is being conducted with drones, many of them autonomous and with self-selecting target capabilities powered by AI. Automated killing machines that don’t question orders or targets are not only available, but already deployed in different war fronts. On the other hand, automated political repression and persecution in the streets and protests is growing, though it is currently at the data gathering and training phase. In the USA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deploying different apps developed by companies like Palantir to maximize social disruption and to capture the most vulnerable people in the country.

There is huge pressure to prevent any meaningful regulation of AI, in particular for AI used by police and the military. Surveillance with facial (FRT) and body recognition is used outdoors to map out movements and participants in protests and actions. Mapping of movement connections and alliances can be done via online pattern recognition, as well as out in the streets. Automatic protest repression combined with purposeful miscommunication and disinformation might make the usual protests simply nonviable.

And of course, AI can is being used for hacking by private companies and states. Considering the hackable systems now in place throughout society and the economy—banking systems, social security, electric and transport systems, aviation and navigation systems, pension management, surveillance apparatus, healthcare systems and, of course, all the internet and the data in public and private servers—massively disruptive events at large or small scale are inevitable. Many political and social movements will be targeted. This can mean accounts erased, financial assets blockaded, and growing personal political repression via the suppression of communication capacities. This can also happen at a much bigger scale, targeting cities, countries or entire regions.

For the most important investments and political efforts, AI is being introduced as a labor replacement tool, a cultural hegemony monopoly creator, a military and surveillance weapon. Most of this is being done with people actively engaging and inviting the models into their everyday life (even more than it already was). The resistance to large data center projects is important and inspiring, but the overwhelming threat of AI goes well beyond its emissions, water consumption, and land occupation (although they plan on multiplying by many factors the current numbers, especially in Europe). Data centers today are nightmare factories.

So far, AI hasn’t been able to deliver on a key aspect: successfully automated processes that allow for the mass firing of people, substituted by effective algorithms. This is clear: 95% of all investment made by companies in AI has led to no profit, which is making capitalists nervous. But it hasn’t in any meaningful way stopped its spread.

When we say AI, we mean Machine Learning, Robotics, and Expert Systems. Currently AI is mostly a process of recognition, classification, and very high probability calculation, based on massive amounts of data with a good human interface. The interface is the most important trick for the general public. The public debate surrounding this issue is deeply anti-historical and anti-materialist, almost entirely it is white noise.

AI is not replicating or reproducing human intelligence. It is trying to encode human activities into repeatable procedures that can create reproducible algorithms. As it is not imitating our biological intelligence, it is trying to imitate what it can more or less “comprehend” about the previously referred algorithms—it is copying labor and social relations, their mechanisms and their predictable outcomes. Like other abstractions that rule our lives, such as money, algorithms produce real outcomes. AI ushers an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social relations, in particular the power of the working class to impose political, social, and economic transformations that reduce inequality and injustice.

AI’s neural networks don’t mimic the human brain at all, but instead automate the “labor of perception,” classifying and interpreting written, numeric, and visual data and establishing associations. This creates a synthesis of knowledge, of the collective form of knowledge that comes from social cooperation. As explained before, another of its objectives has been to establish a monopoly over knowledge, scrapped from every website, database, online encyclopedia, and bite it is fed. It is then no wonder that Elon Musk and the far-right are going after Wikipedia.

These are some of the reasons why attempting to hard-code ethical rules or constraints into these models will not work, as they will not change the underlying political and economic functions of the data it is trained under and the algorithms generated and fabricated. Of course we understand that language itself is an algorithm, all the data as well and, of course, the internet as well. But with AI, we’re talking about a new level of control. The fundamental abstract purposes of AI as it exists now are the extension of quantification, control, and exploitation. The Labor Theory of Automation posits that AI is the result of a set of technological advancements that have abstracted automation to the point where it can automate itself. As we now have the technical ability to make such machines and capitalism has the economic incentive to massively deploy them, they want to use it to reorganize the division of labor even further in their favor. It is the apex of automation: Automation of Automation.

Facing such seemingly insurmountable odds, social and ruptural movements cannot but ask what to do about AI. There are basically two options: Drop out of the grid or acquire tech capabilities that allow us to resist the onslaught of these algorithms of collapse.

As a guest on the 2019 podcast “Post-doom with Michael Dowd,” terrestrial ecologist Tom Wessels agrees humanity is entering a “bottleneck,” a condition that can afflict any species that ceases to live in relationship and reciprocity. Ballooning populations get stuck trying to claim space in an un-expandable hole, and many die.

This is what’s going through my head as I idle in an impossibly long single line of traffic on the road into Mount Kisco, New York. My kids are in the back of the car, asking for snacks. It is three days since Renee Good’s murder, 10 days since the end of the deadliest month in the deadliest year for people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.

“No snacks,” I tell the kids, scanning for parking. “You should eat your meals. Then I wouldn’t have to throw away food and bring a buffet everywhere we go.”

Pedestrians pass our car with protest signs as car exhaust blows through the vents. I feel an unexpected pang of tenderness for our quiet kitchen table, its leftover bowls of cereal and uneaten peanut-butter toasts. I already know I’ll give in, as all mothers do, when they can, when their children want to eat.

This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.

“But we compost the food,” my 7-year-old says, “so it’s actually good for the Earth when we throw it away.”

Our eyes meet in the rearview mirror as I prepare a response, but then the car behind me beeps and I see a distant light has turned green.

We crawl past the demonstration and I honk in support. Upbeat `80s pop blares from a speaker, backdrop to the protesters’ screams, whistles, and bells. My three-year-old, already a musician, moves his head as close as his car seat will allow, trying to deconstruct the music and noises.

“Go again, mommy,” he says. But at that moment I find a miraculous spot, just down the street from the main event, open perhaps because of the one-hour limit on the meter. I claim the space anyway; lug the kids, coats, and backpack out of the car; lock the doors; fill the meter; and grab hands for the walk toward the protest.

A few steps into the journey, a woman asks if she can photograph my kids. I smile and say, "No thank you," covering their faces with my hands. Photos become a constant request over the next hour. Many people ask, but others just lift and click. My son picks up a sign in the grass and I read it to him: No Fascist USA. More phones point in our direction.

I survey the crowd and think of something Monique Cullars-Doty, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, said on the news the other day. “America has never addressed its love affair with white supremacy,” she said, connecting the ICE murder of Renee Good to the state-sanctioned violence that has assaulted Black and brown communities for centuries.

It is one thing to agree with this assessment—that white supremacy made colonialism possible, slavery imperative, resource hoarding commendable, ecological collapse acceptable, and ICE inevitable. It is quite another to admit our complicity, to connect our daily transgressions—a need for the latest gadget, an idling tailpipe, a thoughtless unkindness—to the generations of violence that made all this possible.

I squat in the wet grass and dig through the backpack, dipping my fingers deeper until I hear crinkling plastic. The kids hold out their hands expectantly and whisper, “Yes!” when their favorite granola bars emerge from the bag.

The music stops abruptly, and a woman with a kind face speaks over a microphone. She is Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter, simply by association evoking a simpler time, a sepia time, a time of acoustic guitar and faith in good intentions.

Thinking of her grandfather makes me think of mine—a Jewish Romanian immigrant’s son who stood with Black neighbors in 1950s Milwaukee when other Jewish neighbors, newly minted “white” by America’s slippery standards, wanted to prevent more Black families from moving in. My grandfather now floats above the scene, a beloved figure whose own people’s history was weaponized as justification for more land grabs and violence.

Guthrie’s granddaughter begins to sing:

This land is your land; This land is my land

And my blue-eyed son who loves music, the child I’ve always somehow felt the need to remind people is technically Jewish despite his blonde hair and last name, drops his snack, steps forward into the circle, and opens his mouth to sing along. A hundred phones rise in unison to capture the image.

I resist the urge to cover his face, crouch next to him, and try to join in. But the words catch in my throat.

My land. Your land.

As far as I can tell, not a single Indigenous Lenape person, the first peoples who walked this place now called Mt. Kisco, is present.

This land was made for you and me.

Behind the song circle is a vast cement parking lot, and before it a busy road. The bear, wild turkey, wolves, birds, and aquatic species once so abundant as to be considered eternal, are nowhere to be seen.

From California to the New York island

Places unnamable and unknowable, claimed in this song that once defined a movement, but never created a path or vision for us all.

And yet, here is my son singing, somber, understanding that what he’s participating in is important. And there is my daughter, running around behind the crowd, feeling the joy of community together, the freedom of cool air on her skin. The wrongness and the beauty of it all seem too hard to untangle, and I wonder if this is one way the bottleneck shows up—as the end of the road for a fundamental myth.

In the 2019 interview, Wessels addresses this. He speaks with curiosity about what might come next. Communities for much of human history were “…actually emotionally quite rich,” he says. “They had vibrant relationships within their clan community, they had a vibrant relationship with Mother Earth, they had stories and myths that made that linkage even stronger… so life could have been physically hard, but might have been experientially rich.”

Is there a way for us to treat our past myths with tenderness, while still recognizing where they went horribly wrong? Can we compost rather than discard them, and maintain the parts that serve? Can we teach our children new myths to carry them to a richer, more vibrant, gentle, reciprocal, and inclusive world?

This land is no one’s land. This land was not made for you and me. This land is part of us, as we are part of it.

The song ends, and worries of a parking ticket push a new world’s mythologies from my mind. I grab my son’s hand and scan for my daughter, whose silhouette I spot immediately. She’s reaching for the branches of an ancient fir tree by the road, drawn in by its shade and pungent scent, as so many have been before.

As Trump’s violent dictatorial grip over America worsens, his violations of our Constitution, federal laws, and international treaties become more brazen. Only the organized people can stop this assault on our democracy by firing him through impeachment, the power exclusively accorded to Congress by our Founders. This is one of the few things that Trump cannot control. According to a PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) poll, “A majority of Americans (56%) agree that ‘President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,’ up from 52% in March 2025.” Trump’s recent actions will only further increase this number.

In earlier columns, I discussed the potential power of 1) The Contented Classes; 2) The small minority of progressive billionaires; and 3) The huge potential of the four ex-presidents – George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, who detest Trump but are mostly silent, and are not organizing their tens of millions of voters angry about Dictator Donald’s attack on the rule of law.

A fourth formidable constituency, if organized, is retired military officers who have their own reasons for dumping Trump. Start with the ex-generals whom Trump named as Secretary of Defense (James Mattis), John Kelly, as U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, and Mark Milley, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A fifth constituency is the legal profession, and their bar associations at the national, state, and local levels. There are over one million Attorneys in the U.S. who, when they are admitted to the state bars to practice law, are designated as “officers of the court.” This status makes them quasi-official persons with a monopoly to represent clients in courts of law.

Bruce Fein and others have called on licensed attorneys to become “our first responders” to violations of the rule of law, especially by government entities.

So, what have they done? A tiny minority are bravely on the legal ramparts representing clients victimized by Trump and winning many cases at the federal district court level, only to be often stalled by the circuit courts of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court.

As far as the bar associations are concerned, during Trump’s first term of serial lawless actions (he said in 2019, “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as president”), they were largely silent and AWOL. Bruce Fein and I sent two letters to all 50 state bar associations calling for them to stand up for the rule of law over Trump’s regime. Not one responded to our letters. (See Letter to Bar Associations, February 14, 2025).

We informed these bar associations and the American Bar Association (ABA) of the courageous “white papers” issued in 2005-2006 by three task forces brought together under then ABA President Michael Greco. They charged the Bush/Cheney regime with three impeachable offenses. The task forces had liberal and conservative lawyers working together on these statements. (See the ABA White Papers).

Greco’s successor to the one-year presidency of the ABA told him she was not going to extend the ABA’s watchdog project on the lawless presidency. This abdication has continued to this day, with one exception. Both the ABA and many state/local bar associations took a collective position in March 2025 against Trump’s punishing law firms for representing disfavored clients. They called his “lawlessness” an attempt to “remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.”

In June, the ABA punctuated this charge with a federal lawsuit against the Trump regime. (Pending).

Going beyond protection “of the guild,” the New York City Bar Association released a report in late 2025 that called out the Trump Administration’s “ongoing abuse of presidential power and a grave breach of the public trust.”

Other bar associations signed a statement accusing the Trump administration of “treating [the law] as merely advisory, narrowly instrumental, mercilessly enforceable, or utterly irrelevant.”

It is not surprising that these actions by the bar associations received very little media coverage. They were not backed up with any further actions, testimonies, convocations, or alliances with grassroots groups to show the media that they mean business. There was no call for impeachment or even congressional hearings to expose these known, ongoing serial violations of the law, the Constitution, and treaties. (See Letter to President Trump – 22 Impeachable Offenses, April 30, 2025. New version to be released later.)

Reporters and others understand the difference between statements for the record and action on the ramparts. Words not followed by the exercise of these bar associations’ manifold status and power are largely ignored, especially when they are in legalese, and lacking conclusory judgments about Trump’s unfitness for office. Incredibly, Trump declared, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not the Constitution or the laws of the land.

Trump is a shameless, arrogant bloviator who is self-indicting daily. Critics who want to deter his slanderous and absurd outbursts should use tough, accurate language to describe his vicious actions and autocratic control of the federal government. Words like “dictator,” “serial law violator,” “extortionist,” “inciter of violence,” “persecutor of innocents for purposes of vengeance or bigotry,” “racist,” “abuser of women,” “chronic egotistical liar about serious matters of state,” “shredder of safety and health protections” and constantly “delusional,” and so forth.

New leaders from the legal community (including prominent law professors) need to immediately come forth and jolt this largely AWOL profession into action, with all its unused powers for justice and the rule of law behind our constitutional Republic. Lawyers are called members of a learned profession. They operate within ethical standards. Why aren’t they seriously working to counter Trump’s assault on the administration of justice in America?