Few of the members of Donald Trump’s administration best illustrate the phrase “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” than Robert Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to run the Health and Human Services Department. Every now and then, he says something reasonable, even helpful. And then he says all of the other things he likes to say.

While for many years, the alarm over the American diet, fueled as it is by high doses of calories and capitalism, was sounded from elements of the political left, a post-Covid realignment has emerged, “a scrambling of left and right, where all of the sudden, some progressive food policy ideas were being adopted by parts of Trump’s base alongside health freedom activism driven by the pandemic,” says Helena Bottemiller Evich, who led food coverage at Politico and now runs the online publication Food Fix.

Last summer, that shift was cemented when Kennedy suspended his own presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump and the phrase “Make America Healthy Again,” MAHA for short, entered into the mainstream. How MAGA somehow came to be seen as an agenda that could include MAHA seems to be a real-life case of an idea jumping the shark (or, more appropriately, the whale head): Could the man who regularly feasts on fast food, whose private golf club menu features the “Trump Trio”—a cheesesteak egg roll, three honey stung chicken fingers with ranch, and fried pickle chips with campfire sauce—usher in an era of healthier eating for Americans?

Trump’s appetite for power saw the advantage of bringing Kennedy into his campaign, a point he acknowledged following Kennedy’s confirmation. “He had tremendous support, unbelievable support, and I think a lot of that support came my way when we decided to do a little merger.”

But what kind of “little merger” is this, really?

Kennedy finds himself in Part II of an administration whose Part I proposed—on the birthday of Michele Obama, whose White House vegetable garden and signature focus on child nutrition was ridiculed by Trump and other conservatives—to let schools cut the amount of fruits and vegetables served to nearly 30 million American public school kids.

Kennedy supports limiting the amount of less healthy (though often less expensive) food that can be purchased by families on SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, saying the federal government “shouldn’t be subsidizing people to eat poison.” Meanwhile, House Republicans have proposed a budget bill supported by the President that will likely lead to a 20 percent cut to the program—it’s hard to see how less food will make poor families healthier.

The firing of Food and Drug Administration staffers last week includes the very workers in charge of reviewing safety of new food additives and ingredients, which will make Kennedy’s call for eliminating chemicals and dyes in food a lot harder to realize. The cuts prompted the head of the FDA’s food division, Jim Jones, to resign. “I was looking forward to working to pursue the department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Jones wrote. With the gutting of staff, he wrote, “it would be “fruitless for me to continue in this role.”

The MAHA PAC website says the organization is “leading the charge for sustainable farming practices that rebuild our soil, reduce chemical reliance, and promote biodiversity.”

But Project 2025, which has guided much of the policy agenda of the Trump administration, has other plans. “If farmers are allowed to operate without unnecessary government intervention, American agriculture will continue to flourish, producing plentiful, safe, nutritious, and affordable food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can and should play a limited role, with much of its focus on removing governmental barriers that hinder food production or otherwise undermine efforts to meet consumer demand.” And the MAGA folks who freaked out that the government was going to take away their gas cars and gas stoves aren’t going to let their Twinkies go without a fight.

The MAHA site also calls clean air, water, and food “non-negotiables,” saying the PAC promotes “candidates and policies that remove harmful chemicals and pollutants to ensure every American lives in a toxin-free environment.” It’s hard to see how that squares with “Drill, baby, drill,” the mantra of the man they supported for President, or his assertion that climate change and the corona virus were “hoaxes,” or with the polluting industries who helped put the President back in office.

Is Kennedy right that our current food policies have helped lead to poorer health for Americans? Sure. He’s right twice a day on that score.

But it would take the flexibility of the most esteemed and experienced yoga practitioner to follow the twisted logic that Kennedy’s better ideas will get traction in an administration so dedicated to dismantling the very guardrails that might help him accomplish any goal that might make any Americans healthier. (And with the MAHA crowd apparently unbothered by the devastating cuts to USAID and the roundup and deportation of immigrants, it’s clear they only care about making Americans healthier—to hell with the rest of the world.)

To make progress on the progressive part of his agenda, Kennedy will have to go to war with his boss, the president, and every other department of his administration, not to mention the rest of his own unsteady, unscientific, unhealthy agenda.

Among the significant differences between Donald Trump’s first term as president in 2017 and his return to the White House in 2025, this time around he appears more in control and better prepared. And despite the drastic measures of his first weeks in office, the opposition he is facing appears more subdued and less focused.

Though he won the presidency in 2016, Trump was not yet master of the Republican Party. The party’s “old guard” found him not conservative enough, a personal embarrassment, and too erratic to lead the Grand Old Party. His Make America Great Again movement, though substantial, had not yet demonstrated its capacity for mobilizing its ranks to sway members of Congress to fully embrace Trump and his agenda.

That has clearly changed. Trump’s control of the Republican Party, its apparatus, and congressional cohort are complete. His opponents have been silenced or faded into the background.

In the end, it will most likely be Mr. Trump’s own hubris and the contradictions between his promises and his policies that will prove to be his undoing.

In 2017, to bolster confidence in his administration, he brought on board a number of older, respected individuals to fill sensitive posts in the White House and Cabinet. Some of them, at times, served as a check on his penchant for unpredictable behavior.

The cast of characters in the 2025 Trump White House and Cabinet are themselves more unpredictable and less qualified to serve in their assigned posts than the 2017 appointees. The number one qualification is being a longtime Trump devotee—or having made amends and groveled sufficiently for any past opposition.

The most significant difference between Trump 2017 and Trump 2025 is that he now has a more clearly defined agenda and is more prepared to impose it.

When Ronald Reagan won in 1980, he arrived in Washington with a well-developed conservative game plan designed by the Heritage Foundation to transform the federal government according to conservative principles. In 2017, Trump entered the Oval Office with an array of ideas, complaints, and actions to be taken, but without a plan to implement them.

In 2025, many of the ideas, complaints, and actions are the same as 2017, but they are now bigger, bolder, more thought through and backed up by extensive plans for implementation developed by the very same Heritage Foundation that helped guide Reagan’s time in the White House. And just as Heritage helped populate Reagan’s administration with hundreds of staff in agencies to help implement the conservative agenda, this year Heritage boasts of having tens of thousands of vetted individuals waiting to serve in the new Trump administration.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, his “hatchet-man,” are running roughshod over the federal government’s institutions and workforce. Entire agencies have been shuttered, and tens of thousands of workers have been fired or placed on indefinite leave, setting the stage for the kind of Trump takeover in 2025 that he was unable to accomplish in 2017.

There’s one final difference to be noted. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was greeted by an eruption of mass protests. They came in waves with advocates for women’s rights and immigrants, and those calling for more restrictive gun laws and an end to police brutality each in turn making their mark. While there have been protests since last November’s election, they’ve lacked the numbers and emotional intensity of those in Trump’s first term.

Much has been written about the threat posed by Trump 2025 for democracy and the impact of the programs and staff that have been terminated by the Trump-Musk wrecking-ball approach to reform. Much less attention has been given to the public’s reaction to these developments. Opinion polls are one way to measure that—a recent Washington Post poll indicates that the American electorate is as divided as ever. 45% approve of Trump’s job performance as opposed to 53% who disapprove. What also comes through in this poll is that there are significantly more respondents who say they “strongly disapprove” than those who say they “strongly approve” of Trump’s job in office.

Given this, why the lack of intensity in the public’s reaction to White House’s actions? One reason may be that the Trump-Musk “shock and awe” assaults on so many targets in just a few days have left the opposition disoriented and demoralized. Add to this the lack of Democratic leadership. In a recent discussion, an elected Democratic leader outlined his party’s approach as simply to keep proposing amendments to Trump’s budget bills to demonstrate how the GOP wants tax cuts for the rich while placing greater burdens on the working class. This, he said, would drag Trump’s favorable ratings down, enabling Democrats to win back the Congress in 2026. This isn’t leadership. It’s crass opportunism and yet another reason why no coherent or effective opposition has been mounted to President Trump’s efforts to take excessive power in his second term.

In the end, it will most likely be Mr. Trump’s own hubris and the contradictions between his promises and his policies that will prove to be his undoing. Just one example: Polls show that while his supporters love his bold actions, what they most want to see is the drop in prices and inflation that Trump promised during the campaign. But his use of tariffs and the mass deportation of migrants (who perform essential tasks in the agricultural and service sectors) will inevitably cause prices to rise, without the results that Trump voters were promised. If the improvements in the daily lives of his supporters don’t come, Trump2 could end worse than Trump1.

Get ready.

The resistance to billionaires running our government is growing. Bernie Sanders is touring the Red State Midwest and drawing massive crowds. Federal workers are pissed. Republican politicians are in hiding, refusing to do town halls even when their constituents demand them or try to set them up.

Comrade Krasnov’s…er, Trump’s polling numbers are collapsing as fast as his embrace of Comrade Putin is growing. Fascism expert and On Tyranny author Professor Timothy Snyder notes over at BlueSky:

“Nervous Musk, Trump, Vance have all been outclassed in public arguments these last few days. Government failure, stock market crash, and dictatorial alliances are not popular. People are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.”

James Carville told Dan Abrams:

“This whole thing is collapsing. … I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.”

At the same time, four Republicans have now thrown Nazi salutes, three over this past weekend at CPAC. They think they can overcome their fear of the people by intimidating us.

These fascists are getting panicky, and panicky would-be tyrants are dangerous.

This is a moment of maximum peril for our nation and our freedoms because if, as Rachel Bitecofer documents, Trump and his followers really are following Hitler’s script to seize total power and turn America into an authoritarian dictatorship, the next step may well be to exploit an attack on America.

There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.

Germans remember well that fateful day ninety-two years ago this week: February 27, 1933. It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack.

A Dutch communist named Marius van der Lubbe had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The German intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians still argue whether rogue elements in Hitler’s intelligence service helped him; the most recent research implies they did not, but simply watched him proceed.)

And then van der Lubbe took down the prize of Germany, the Parliament building (the Reichstagsgebäude), setting it ablaze on that February day.

Hitler knew the strike was coming (although he apparently didn’t know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was van der Lubbe who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.

“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history,” he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. “This fire,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion, “is the beginning.” He used the occasion — “a sign from God,” he called it — to declare an all-out “war on terrorism” and the groups he said were its ideological sponsors, the socialists and Jews.

Two weeks later, the first detention center for “terrorists” was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected “allies” of the infamous terrorist. Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, Hitler had pushed through legislation — in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the “liberal” philosophy he said spawned it — that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.

His Decree on the Protection of People and State allowed police to intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; and police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

It was the beginning of the end of a democratic Germany.

Similarly, in 2002, the new Russian President Putin was engaged in a war with Chechnya, trying to subdue and subsume a nation that has been both under Russian rule and independent over the past several centuries, very much like Ukraine.

A theater in Moscow was seized that year by “Chechen rebels” who began executing theater-goers: Putin ordered poisonous gas apparently made of something like fentanyl poured into the theater, and it let his police take back the theater (although many of the hostages, along with their tormentors, died from the gas).

Putin used the attack as an excuse to escalate his years-long conflict with the parts of Chechnya that still were fighting for their independence from Russia; he launched a major WWII-style land invasion and bombing campaign. Tens of thousands died, entire cities were destroyed, and Chechnya was largely subdued within the year.

In the aftermath of that 2002 theater attack and subsequent war there was speculation from multiple sources and countries that Putin knew the attack was coming and welcomed it, believing he could use it as an excuse to escalate his low-level conflict with Chechnya to elevate his own profile while finally seizing full control of the region.

It was an echo of the Moscow apartment bombings in 1999 that then-Prime Minister Putin used to leverage himself into the presidency the following year. He’d used those terror attacks to consolidate his power, and repeated the trick in 2003 beginning with the 2003 arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of Yukos Oil. By the following year most serious voices of dissent or opposition in Russia were either dead, in prison, or fleeing for their lives.

There’s a long history of leaders using national emergencies to raise their popularity, expand their own power, overwhelm opposition politicians, scapegoat minorities, suspend constitutions and elections, and provide a legal façade for ending or weakening democracy.

Both George W. Bush and Benjamin Netanyahu — at a time when their popularity was in the toilet and charges of impropriety were swirling (in Netanyahu’s case, actual criminal charges) — ignored multiple warnings of attacks coming.

The 9/11 and October 7 attacks — predicted by agencies and nations warning American and Israeli intelligence services respectively — were then successfully used by both to consolidate their own popularity and power.

Which is why this is such a dangerous moment that requires vigilance and preparation.

Trump’s popularity is now collapsing as his largest campaign donor takes a chainsaw to the American government, threatening virtually every aspect of federal and state functions from Social Security to Medicaid to medical research and foreign aid. An attack on America that would enable him to play the role Bush did after 9/11 would be very politically useful.

In an extreme case, which he has publicly mused about, an attack could justify his declaring a national state of emergency, suspending elections, and putting the Constitution on ice. He could then shut down media he doesn’t like, imprison people who speak out, and suspend the 2026 and 2028 elections.

All legally.

At the same time he’s contemplating this, the FBI — America’s premiere counterterrorism organization — is being scattered with as many as 1500 agents leaving Washington, DC. An open apologist for Putin has been put in charge of our intelligence services. And the senior leadership of our military was just purged, replaced with toadies who’ll praise Trump as if this were North Korea at every opportunity.

And the JAG officers of each branch of the military along with their senior commanders — the people who would determine the legality of presidential orders to, say, shoot at protestors or open detention camps for journalists and dissidents — have been fired and replaced by loyalists who’ll do whatever Trump demands.

Brett Holmgren was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until a few weeks ago; he recently warned that the threat levels right now are at unprecedented highs.

Muslims around the world are incensed by Israel’s slaughter in Gaza; Ukrainian expats and refugees are furious about Trump’s embrace of Putin; and the Afghanistan-based Islamic State-Khorasan has already carried out attacks killing 13 Americans along with a recent slaughter in Moscow.

And, pointing to the deadly New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans last month, Holmgren added:

“I think it illustrates that while we have been quite effective as a government and across administrations at disrupting plotting overseas and going after terrorist leaders, we have a lot more work to do when it comes to countering violent extremism at home…”

Anybody remember the bombs left at the RNC and DNC on January 6th? The bomber is still at large, not to mention groups across the political spectrum — and recently fired federal workers — who may have grievances against our government. And people from nations around the world where USAID was keeping friends and relatives alive but isn’t any longer.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong in my concern that we’re facing the very real possibility of an imminent attack that will be exploited by Trump to put a final nail in the coffin of American democracy, but we all — and Democrats, in particular — need to be ready. The Reichstag Fire scenario could be closer than any of us expect.

As the saying goes: “Stand back and stand by.”

Enough already of the media’s lazy indifference to the vast undercount of the Palestinian death toll from Netanyahu’s genocidal daily bombing and shelling of Gaza’s defenseless civilian population. I’m referring to all the media – the corporate media, the public media, and the independent media. They all stick with the Hamas Ministry of Health’s (MOH) count of named victims whose corpses have been identified by hospitals and mortuaries. For months there have been no operating hospitals and mortuaries to send their grisly data to the Health Ministry.

The official Hamas count that all sides like to cite is now over 48,000 deaths. As American doctors back from Gaza before the Rafah closing last year said—just about everybody surviving in Gaza is sick, injured, or dying. They put the death estimate almost a year ago at a minimum of 95,000, not counting tens of thousands of families buried under the rubble when Israeli F-16s blew up entire apartment buildings.

Why would all sides to this one-sided Israeli war of extermination rely on Hamas’ figures? Well, Hamas has an interest in low-balling the number of deaths to limit the rage of its inhabitants and allies abroad for not protecting the people of Gaza and not providing them with shelters. The Israeli super-hawks want to keep the undercount low to dampen down the international rage, boycotts, and demand for more sanctions and ICC prosecutions. The Biden administration and now the Trump regime also benefit from a low number.

Here is the Washington Post’s esteemed foreign affairs editor Karen DeYoung’s reply on September 6, 2024 to my inquiry:

“We use the Gaza MOH [Ministry of Health] figures – as does the United Nations, World Health Organization and virtually every other humanitarian organization – while noting that independent media are not allowed to enter Gaza and the casualty counts are most certainly underreported… The Lancet [British Medical Journal] report notes that based on other ‘recent conflicts…it is not implausible to estimate’ that four times as many have died than those listed by the MOH…The time will come, I believe, when an independent accounting can be done.”

But six months later the time still hasn’t come. The Biden State Department had a much higher estimate of deaths but refused to release their analysis, obstructing our Freedom of Information request filed last May 24, 2024. All kinds of estimates and projections by reputable universities, specialists, global health groups and UN agencies point to a much higher death and overall casualty toll. But the State Department won’t come forward with a reasonably estimated number that can replace Hamas’ statistical immolation.

For example, in late 2023, the chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh—Professor Devi Sridhar—said that if the destruction continues, half a million Palestinians would die in 2024. The devastation has gotten worse—the bombings, the genocidal denial of “food, water, medicine, electricity, fuel” in the omnicidal words of the high Israeli military officials, the spread of diseases, untreated injuries, babies born into the rubble, infants starved, lack of potable water, sick elderly without critical medicines, and more. This is the result of 110 thousand tons of bombs (Israeli admission) daily tank shelling and precise destructions. Yet neither she nor most other experts who have projected continuing mayhem have offered a number.

Interestingly, the media has no trouble estimating the Syrian deaths at the hands of dictator Assad (500,000) nor the deaths in the wars in Sudan or Ukraine. Only the Palestinians, who are not allowed to live, don’t get the respect of having their deaths accurately estimated. One team of Gazan undertakers said they buried 17,000 bodies in mass graves by February 2024, including 800 in one day.

Were the shoe on the other foot, Congress would not only have had intense public hearings: it would have declared war against Hamas. With total U.S. co-belligerency – from huge weapons supplies to the veto at the UN, Netanyahu gets away with blocking Israeli and all other reporters from going freely into Gaza, and shuts up those conscience-stricken Israeli soldiers who are sickened by what they were ordered to destroy. One of them said, “I felt like, like, like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”

Some columnists in the U.S. like Charles Lane and Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, Bret Stephens of the New York Times, do not believe the Israeli military consciously targets civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israelis scoff at such naivete; many want more annihilation of all Palestinians whom they regard as “subhuman,” “vermin,” “snakes,” or “animals” (racist words from high Israeli politicians over the decades).

Some 45 years ago, former UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister Abba Eban —under then Prime Minister Menachem Begin—wrote that Israel “is wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name.”

In August 2024, based on available historical, empirical, and clinical records, we estimated about 300,000 Palestinians had been killed. (See the August/September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen). By now it is over 400,000. Yet the media still uses the figure by Hamas and ignores the lives blown apart under the killing fields in Gaza.

At 400,000 and growing, far more Palestinians have been killed in Gaza than the combined total of deaths from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden in World War II. This week, Netanyahu dropped leaflets in Arabic signaling a forthcoming violent exclusion of Gaza’s trapped, unsheltered Palestinians from their homeland. More accurately estimated civilian casualties matters morally and for the intensity of the political, diplomatic, and civic resistance when the world learns the truer toll of death and injuries in this tiny enclave the geographical size of Philadelphia.

To remind the world of the daily Israeli violations of settled international law inflicted on Gazans (also in the West Bank and Lebanon), international law practitioner Bruce Fein compiled this concise list:

ISRAEL’S TEN VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL HUMANITARIAN LAW IN GAZA

1. Genocide Count I. Killing Palestinians in Gaza.
2. Genocide Count II. Deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
3. Genocide Count III. Destroying hospitals and maternal care necessities intended to prevent births by Palestinian women in Gaza.
4. Crimes against humanity. Extermination and persecution of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza as part of a systematic attack directed at Palestinian civilians.
5. Deliberately targeting civilians and civilian property for destruction.
6. Failing to provide for the security and welfare of the inhabitants occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza.
7. Impeding delivery of humanitarian assistance.
8. Forcible relocation of civilian population.
9. Use of military force causing civilian casualties vastly disproportionate to the importance of any legitimate military objective.
10. War of aggression against Gaza Palestinians.

Count on one thing: in some almost unimaginable future, no American president (if we even have them anymore) is going to rename a mountain for Donald Trump as he’s recently tried to do with North America’s tallest peak. He wants Alaska’s Mount Denali (to hell with Native American names!) to be called Mount McKinley in honor of President William McKinley, the man who, in the 1890s, launched this country as an imperial power of the first order.

Of course, it’s just possible that someday someone running (or do I mean: walking, hobbling, limping?) this country might rename the Bertha Rogers Borehole, the deepest hole (now plugged and abandoned) in North America, for President Trump. After all, it should be clear enough that, with a helping hand from the world’s richest man, he’s already taking this country down in a remarkable fashion. It seems that we now inhabit an ever more strikingly 3D world and call me D (as in depressed) about it.

Once upon a time, 3D was a form of movie-making in which — I remember this from my youth in the 1950s — something could seemingly fly off the screen and grab you by the throat (or an arrow, spear, or missile could whiz right at you).

Four more years of Donald Trump should worry anyone, whether your fears have to do with the dismantling of this country or the taking down of our world.

Today, 3D (at least to me) has quite a different meaning. The 3Ds of the world of my old age (and believe me they, too, can in some fashion reach right off the screen and grab you by the throat) are The Donald, Dysdopia, and Decline. And yes, I’ve admittedly done a little 3D fiddling of my own with that classic word “dystopia” meant for a deeply negative, apocalyptically horrific future world (think 1984, or do I mean 2025?) — the very opposite, in other words, of utopia. I’ve replaced its “t” with that extra “d” in “honor” (and indeed, that word does have to go in quotation marks) of Donald Trump who is already ushering us into what looks to be the most devastatingly disastrous presidency in this country’s long history.

Denier-in-Chief

In case you don’t think he’s taking us all for one hell of a ride, think again. After all, he and his family started cashing in on his second presidency even before it began. As the New York Times reported, three days ahead of his inauguration, he announced on his social media account that his family had issued a cryptocurrency called $Trump. And if that stumps (or do I mean $trumps?) you, I’m hardly shocked. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, in fact, that each of its memecoins quickly surged in value from eight cents to $75 before — of course! — dropping off a cliff. It’s now estimated that it made the Trump Organization and its partners an instant $100 million or more, while other crypto-traders lost an estimated $2 billion in the process. And if that doesn’t sum up Donald Trump’s presidency to come, I’ll be surprised.

In fact, I suspect that offered just a hint of the unnervingly dysdopian world we’ve entered. Let’s face it: we couldn’t find ourselves in a more dopily dangerous 3D moment today. After all, Donald Trump and his alter ego Elon Musk, the richest man on earth and growing richer by the hour, possibly even heading for the trillion-dollar mark, seem remarkably intent on stepping off-screen and grabbing us all by the throat, while dismantling the American government as we’ve known it. Their goal is evidently to leave both the courts and Congress, the other two parts of our tripartite form of government, in the dust (the mud?) of history.

After all, Vice President JD Vance has already made it clear that the courts — even the Supreme Court — can have no ultimate power to stop a second Trump administration from running rampant. Or, as he wrote recently in response to the first attempts of various courts to stop Donald Trump and Elon Musk from all-too-literally dismantling significant parts of the government, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive branch’s legitimate power.” Do tell! (Of course, as Joe Biden’s presidency ended, the Supreme Court granted Trump substantial immunity from prosecution for more or less anything he had done as president and now he may decide he doesn’t even need them anymore.)

Oh, and despite those three Ds, I actually forgot the fourth and most important one of all: denier. Yes, Donald Trump, the elected president of the United States, is a climate-change denier first class and, once again, this country’s denier-in-chief. In the past, he couldn’t have been blunter on the subject. In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastating path across the Southeastern U.S. in 2024, he called climate change “a scam.” He’s also dismissed it as a “hoax” invented by China. Worse yet, he ran successfully for president this time around on the phrase “drill, baby, drill” and the promise of a presidency fossil-fuelized to the hilt. It mattered not at all to him and his crew that the planet was experiencing its hottest months and hottest year ever; that his first month in office, this January, once again broke all heat records; and that climate scientists are predicting far worse to come.

Now back in the White House, President Trump has already taken steps to shut off moves made by the Biden administration to put money into green energy and withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement (again), while removing mentions of anything related to climate change from government websites. He’s clearly preparing to advance coal, oil, and natural gas development in any way he can. Consider it a deep irony that the executives of the major oil and gas companies, while distinctly in his camp, aren’t eager to over-drill, baby, over-drill, fearing that the price of their products could fall. Of course, to put all of this in even grimmer perspective, in the Biden years this country was already the historically top producer of oil and exporter of natural gas on this planet. In short, President Trump’s goal, it seems, is simply to turn up the heat even further. (Phew, I’m getting hot just writing this!)

In other words, in more or less every way imaginable, as the oldest president ever to enter the Oval Office, his next four years, fossil-fuelized to the hilt, seem all too intent on taking the planet down with him.

President Decline

Think of him as President 3D, or if you prefer 4D, or simply add in the Ds of your choice — disaster, dreaded, dumb, or [fill in the blank here].

Once upon a time, decline (even the decline of great nations) usually proved to be a long, slow process. There were admittedly moments — when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, for instance, leaving the U.S. as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth — when it happened more quickly, but they were rare.

Thanks to Donald Trump, however, it’s possible that the decline of that once-upon-a-time sole superpower could, in this moment, prove uncomfortably closer to the Soviet model than, for instance, to the fading of the British empire. The Big Triple (Quadruple?) D and his buddy, the richest man on Planet Earth, seem remarkably intent on taking us all over a cliff with them.

Admittedly, this country has been on its own trajectory of decline from its status as the planet’s sole superpower for quite a while now. Otherwise, the man once best known for being the host of a TV show, The Apprentice, and for the line “You’re fired!” (as well as for having overseen six companies that went bankrupt — You’re fired!), would never have won in 2016; nor would he be having such an instant blast firing people and closing down or simply shattering government departments the second time around. And again, it would have been inconceivable for Donald Trump to be elected president again if the American imperial world weren’t already declining at home and abroad.

All he’s really doing now is hurrying along the pace, as he (with a helping hand from the most prominent once-illegal immigrant on Earth) tries to wipe out so much, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Education Department. And — count on it — this country’s courts aren’t likely to be able to stop him in the end. Why, only the other day, Vice President JD Vance insisted that “if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” and obviously the same is true for the president. And in just that spirit, the Trump administration is already beginning to ignore or openly defy court orders on how to deal with parts of the government.

In the end, in his own fashion, Donald Trump may be in the process of closing down this country (at least as we once knew it) and lending a hand to doing the very same thing for Planet Earth (at least as we once knew it). Just what the results of all this will be, we obviously don’t yet know. Count on one thing, though: it ain’t going to be pretty and not just because, with his latest 25% tariffs on aluminum and steel, the costs of products that use either of them (and probably so much else) are going to rise grimly.

No question, though, that decline preceded him into office or, best guess, he never would have been elected in the first (no less second) place. After all, this country was already losing some of its stature globally long before The Donald decided to shut down most aid to the world, while doing his damnedest (with the 13 billionaires he’s appointed to his administration) to ensure that the already wildly wealthy will, in the future, leave the rest of America in a ditch.

And yes, he’s certainly going to be President Decline, Baby, Decline. Don’t, for a second, be fooled by his very open urge, in a strikingly McKinleyesque fashion, “to expand our territory” — to grab, that is, or at least dream about grabbing yet more territory for imperial America, ranging from Greenland and the Panama Canal to that 51st state Canada, and, of course, Gaza. The urge to return to a nineteenth-century version of imperialism, even as he does his best (or worst?) to take this country and this planet down, is striking, to say the least. Especially as, in the wake of the McKinley moment, the American version of imperialism normally involved a far more subtle kind of control over significant parts of this planet, rather than the Trumpian urge to simply grab what you can, bit by bit, island by island, country by country.

Of course, on a planet that itself is beginning to come apart at the seams, such a president, a man focused on himself above all else, is no small disaster. Four more years of Donald Trump should worry anyone, whether your fears have to do with the dismantling of this country or the taking down of our world. In fact, think of Donald Trump’s America as the planetary equivalent of a memecoin. While he and his family may win something significant, don’t count on that for the rest of us, including the 49.7% of American voters in the last election who bought into his scheme.

The Big D — whether you want to think of it as Decline, Dysdopia, Denial, or simply Donald — is now ours for four long, long years. And that couldn’t be sadder.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance threw a molotov cocktail into European politics with his speech in Munich last week where he said that Europe was abandoning “fundamental values” on democratic issues such as free speech and free press. “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance said, “there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”

The broader European reaction to Vance’s speech was a mixture of shock, outrage, satisfaction, and glee.

For the outraged, Vance’s hypocrisy was staggering. The man who represented a government that had voided the convictions for all who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in an effort to overturn a democratic election was lecturing Europe about values and democracy. The man who represented a government that has banned research funding based solely on the presence of specific words in the grant applications was lecturing about being offended by words. The man who represented a government that banned a news organization from being in the White House because it used the term “Gulf of Mexico” was lecturing Europe about free press. And, as a cherry on the cake, the man who represented a government whose leader would say that Ukraine was responsible for the Russian invasion was lecturing Europe on geopolitical security.

But there was a second category of responses to Vance’s speech—those who praised it as “refreshing” and important—where his blatant hypocrisy was both rationalized and diminished.

Vance knew he was being a hypocrite and these responses were precisely what he wanted.

Those who said, "Yes, it's hypocritical and I don’t like everything that’s happening in the U.S., but that doesn't invalidate his point” fail to understand that Vance's hypocrisy was the point. It was a conscious tool to undermine the very democratic values those in Europe who support him claim to protect.

Attacking European democracy, while representing a government that undermines democracy, fits perfectly with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon's famous political strategy of "flooding the zone with shit." You pump so much contradictory information into the public sphere that citizens can no longer distinguish truth from lies. Or, they simply don’t have the energy to care. And, in a sea of shit, everything stinks equally and thus everything is of equal value.

Here’s the central problem: if one minute you say “rule of law, democracy and free press are non-negotiable values,” you can’t then then turn around the next minute and say, “I don't like everything that's happening in the U.S., but JD Vance has a point.” If European politicians and opinion-leaders are willing to waive off Vance’s hypocrisy because he made some points with which they agree, what they are saying is that undermining the rule of law, the free press and free speech isn’t actually that important. And that's precisely the morally and ethically relativistic political ecosystem Vance wants to cultivate.

By getting European political allies to rationalize or tolerate Trump's attacks on democracy and law, what Vance was doing was carefully setting the stage for an environment where the same things would be rationalized or tolerated here in Europe. Those who waive off Vance's hypocrisy as secondary to his "main point" encourage the erosion of the very rights they claim to defend.

In short, if undermining democracy in the U.S. is dismissed as a mere rhetorical inconvenience, we set the stage for rationalizing and tolerating the same undermining process in Europe.

The hypocrisy wasn’t a mistake. It was a trap.

The Capitol’s phone lines have been overwhelmed this month, and some Democrats are complaining about the deluge of calls from voters who implore them to fight the Trump administration. Too often the responses to the calls have amounted to passing the buck rightward.

“It's been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans,’" Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer explained. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) is offended by what he’s hearing from constituents. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” he said.

Such reactions are political copouts. Those two congressmembers represent deep-blue districts, and both of their states are represented by Democratic senators. Responding to outraged constituents by telling them to “call the Republicans” is a way of dodging responsibility and accountability.

Mere shrugs from Democrats that they’re in the minority won’t wash.

It's easy enough for Torres, Beyer and others in the Democratic caucus to gripe about the volume of irate calls to their offices. And at first glance, telling constituents to contact Republicans instead might seem logical. But that’s actually a way of telling an angry Democratic base not to be a nuisance to Democratic lawmakers.

What’s more, as a practical matter, their constituents often have no way to message GOP members of Congress. The congressional email system doesn’t allow non-constituents to send a message to a representative or senator. And the first thing that a staffer wants to confirm on the phone is whether the caller is in fact a constituent.

Fully half of the nation’s citizens—and a large majority of Democrats—live in states with two Democratic senators. And so, routinely, when Democratic officeholders say that their agitated constituents should leave them alone and “call the Republicans,” it amounts to a brushoff that can be translated from politician-talk as “Stop bugging us already.”

But in primaries next year, some are liable to be held accountable. Few serving Democrats with blue electorates will face tight races in the 2026 general election—but if they’re perceived as wimps who failed to really put up a fight against President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, incumbents risk facing primary challenges propelled by grassroots anger.

The anger might seem overheated inside Capitol Hill bubbles. But it’s real for millions of engaged activists—the ones who volunteer in droves and can get behind insurgency campaigns with plenty of fundraising, canvassing power and social-media impacts.

Mere shrugs from Democrats that they’re in the minority won’t wash. “The rules of the Senate are designed to protect the rights of the minority, and Democrats have tools to grind Senate business to a halt to delay and defy the Trump-Musk coup,” the activist group Indivisible points out. “The three biggest weapons? Blanket opposition, quorum calls, and blocking unanimous consent -- parliamentary guerrilla tactics that can slow, stall, and obstruct at every turn.”

The needed opposition goes way beyond procedural maneuvers. The tenor and vehemence of public statements every day, from the hundreds of Democrats in the House and Senate, set a tone and convey messages beyond mere words on paper and screens.

The week after Trump’s return to the Oval Office, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) traveled to California and met with donor powerhouses in Silicon Valley, where he reportedly “said Democrats were reaching toward the center, while Trump will swing harder right.” Here we have the prospective next House speaker pledging to move in the direction of a president whom Gen. Mark Milley has described as “fascist to the core.”

Jeffries’ goal of hugging “the center” may play well with rich tech executives, but it shows notable indifference to the large bulk of Democratic voters. Early this month, CBS News reported that its polling shows “the nation's rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly looking for more opposition to President Trump from their congressional delegation.” The trend has been emphatic. Only 35 percent want Democrats in Congress to “try to find common ground with Trump,” while 65 percent want them to “oppose Trump as much as possible.”

Hugging “the center” may play well with rich tech executives, but it shows notable indifference to the large bulk of Democratic voters.

A rally last Thursday at Jeffries’ central Brooklyn office drew hundreds of protesters. One of them, Molly Ornati, an activist with the group 350 Brooklyn Water, said: “He’s acting as though this is a normal part of the political process, when this is a completely never before seen violation of the Constitution, of federal laws, separation of power, democratic principle—all of the key American values. He’s not standing up with the level of outrage that people meant to see, that Democrats want to see.”

The next day, on his latest California trip, Jeffries spoke in the Bay Area and generated headlines like “Hundreds Protest Outside Event With House Minority Leader” and “Oakland to Hakeem Jeffries: Do Your Job!” One of the local TV news reports summed up a theme of the demonstration this way: “Democratic Party has been paying lip service to the working class.”

To most registered Democrats, there’s nothing more important for lawmakers with a “D” after their names to do than battle tooth-and-nail against the Trump-Musk agenda for gutting the government while enriching the wealthy at everyone else’s expense. While Trump’s forces are setting fire to the basic structures of American democracy, Democrats in Congress are widely perceived to be wielding squirt guns. That’s no way to prevent tyranny or win the next elections.

Only a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump is well underway toward destroying crucial rights of American workers.

Currently, the best known of these threatened rights is probably job security, for the sudden onset of Trump’s mass, indiscriminate firing of more than 200,000 federal government workers has sparked a furor. Employed by the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Forest Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other vital U.S. agencies, these workers appear to have been simply tossed out of their jobs without honoring the legal requirement of due process, including performance-based evaluations.

Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really “about power,” with Trump “gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”

Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions.

In addition, on January 31, Trump announced plans to nullify contracts recently negotiated and signed with the labor unions representing federal workers. Justifying this action, the president said that the contracts had been negotiated by former President Joe Biden “to harm my administration.”

Trump selected an appropriate figure to undermine workers’ rights when he appointed Elon Musk as the head of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and Trump’s largest campaign contributor, was well known as rabidly anti-labor, and had repeatedly clashed with workers at the giant companies he owned, among them Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Indeed, by January 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had 24 open investigations into labor law violations by these three firms, including alleged surveillance of employees at Twitter and interference with union organizing at Tesla. In turn, a day after the NLRB accused Musk’s SpaceX company of retaliating against workers who had dared to criticize his employment practices, SpaceX filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB, established by Congress in 1935, declared unconstitutional and terminated.

Not surprisingly, Trump moved quickly to paralyze the activities of the NLRB, a federal agency created to guarantee American workers’ right to union representation. By firing the acting NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, long before her term of office ended in 2026, Trump not only acted illegally, but left the NLRB without the quorum necessary to operate, thus shutting it down.

“We’re fighting that tooth and nail,” declared AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. The firing of Wilcox “did exactly what Trump wanted to do, which was to stymie the one agency that workers rely on when they’re in an organizing drive and taking risks and getting fired. They no longer have the board they need to protect them.”

As part of the same attack upon the NLRB, Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency’s general counsel, and replaced her with a Republican loyalist. During her tenure, Abruzzo had issued a series of memos that prohibited common anti-labor practices by corporations. These memos banned abusive electronic monitoring and surveillance of workers on the job, captive audience meetings (in which workers were forced to listen to anti-union pep talks), and severance agreements with overly broad non-disparagement and confidentiality sections (which prevented former workers from discussing workplace issues). These pro-worker directives and more were quickly reversed by her Republican successor at the NLRB.

The Trump administration also launched a devastating assault on another federal agency established to safeguard workers’ rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to bar workplace discrimination, the EEOC, too, lost the ability to continue operations when Trump quickly fired two of its commissioners. An administration official maintained that the two dismissed EEOC commissioners were “far-left appointees with radical records.”

These challenges to the independence and functioning of both agencies are quite extraordinary. The presidential removal of an NLRB board member and of two EEOC commissioners is unprecedented, for none have ever been fired before in the long histories of both agencies. Moreover, by congressional statute, these are independent federal entities, ostensibly shielded from presidential interference. And now, thanks to this interference, they are unable to operate.

As these and other curbs on workers’ rights have all occurred during the first month of the Trump administration, it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office. And there are numerous indications that that they will.

After all, the playbook for much of what the Trump administration has done so far―such as its mass firing of federal workers―is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-developed blueprint for Trump’s second term, and one of its key architects is Russell Vought, appointed by Trump as the new White House budget director. As an Associated Press dispatch notes, this office is “one of the most influential positions in the federal government,” acting “as a nerve center for the White House, developing its budget, policy priorities, and agency rule-making.”

Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions. These include banning public employee unions, as well as empowering the states to ban private sector unions and ignore federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor laws.

All told, these developments are forcing American workers to address the old union question: “Which Side Are You On?”.

Education has long been called the great equalizer—a fundamental tool for upward mobility and societal progress. Yet, the Trump administration is advocating for the complete dismantling of the federal Department of Education, or ED, a move that would profoundly harm millions of students, especially students with disabilities, those living in poverty, and those facing discrimination.

Eliminating the ED would strip away crucial protections, defund essential programs, and exacerbate the inequalities that already plague American education. It’s not just bad policy; it’s a direct attack on the very idea that knowledge should be accessible to all.

For my family, education was never just about personal achievement—it was about survival, progress, and the ability to dream beyond one’s circumstances. My paternal grandparents grew up in a small village in Kolkata, India, in large families with limited means. My grandfather, one of 11 children, grew up in a mud house and did not own a pair of shoes until high school. Yet, thanks to India’s government-funded education system, he and my grandmother attended public schools from kindergarten through their PhDs without paying a dime. Their access to education wasn’t determined by wealth or geography—it was a right.

President Donald Trump himself has said we “have to learn from history.” So why is the administration actively working to undo the progress we’ve made?

That right changed their lives. After immigrating to the United States in 1966, my grandfather eventually became the first Indian-born president of an American university. My late grandmother, too, built a career in academia, inspiring generations of students, including me. They passed down their belief in education’s power to transform lives, a belief my mother upheld when she ensured I attended one of the best public schools available in our Midwestern state. Today, my own career is focused on ensuring that all children have access to the same life-changing opportunities that shaped my family’s story.

That’s why I am deeply alarmed at the administration’s apparent push to destroy the very institution that safeguards equitable access to education in America. The plan to abolish the ED and send all education back to the states would be calamitous. While states and localities already control most aspects of education, the ED plays an essential role in leveling the playing field. It ensures federal funding for students in low-income areas (Title I), enforces protections for students with disabilities (IDEA), and holds states accountable for upholding civil rights in schools.

Without the ED, low-income students will lose critical support. Title I funding currently supports approximately 2 in 3 public schools in the United States. Eliminating this funding would lead to devastating budget cuts, staff layoffs, and program eliminations in schools serving low-income communities. Additionally, students with disabilities will be left behind. The IDEA program currently serves about 7.5 million children aged 3 to 21, accounting for 15% of all public school students. Without ED oversight and funding, these students may not receive the specialized services they need, hindering their educational progress and future opportunities. Civil rights enforcement will also weaken. Historically, federal intervention has been necessary to combat racial segregation, gender discrimination, and unequal educational opportunities. Without ED oversight, there will be no clear mechanism to address discrimination complaints, leaving marginalized students vulnerable.

The elimination of the ED would be particularly harmful to children in government systems. Those in state foster care could lose hard-won protections that ensure they receive a consistent education in their home communities instead of being bounced from school to school and are provided with a course of study appropriate for their age and abilities. They are also far more likely to require specialized educational services—and the federal funding to pay for it. In addition, the ED plays an important role in supporting English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programs so immigrant students attain proficiency and meet academic standards.

Finally, without the ED, higher education will become less accessible. Millions of college students depend on federal loans and Pell Grants, which are administered by the department. Without them, higher education will become an impossible dream for many. These consequences won’t just affect individual students—they will reverberate across society, deepening inequality and economic disparity for generations to come.

America’s education system is far from perfect. Teachers are underpaid and overworked, standardized testing is flawed, and school funding is wildly uneven. But abandoning federal oversight is not the solution—it’s a retreat into an era when education was a privilege reserved for certain groups and not a right.

Before the ED’s creation in 1979, education was almost entirely a state and local matter, and the disparities were staggering. Many students—particularly in the South, in rural areas, and in low-income communities—had little access to quality education. Black students faced legal segregation and underfunded schools. Girls had fewer opportunities in STEM fields and less access to higher education. Students with disabilities were often denied an education entirely. Federal actions, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, played a critical role in correcting these injustices.

President Donald Trump himself has said we “have to learn from history.” So why is the administration actively working to undo the progress we’ve made? If we allow education to be completely dictated by state governments—many of which are already erasing and rewriting history curricula—will we even be able to learn from our past at all?

Dismantling the Department of Education is not just a political talking point; it is an existential threat to millions of students who depend on federal protections and funding. If we want America to be a land of opportunity, we must fight to preserve and strengthen the institutions that make upward mobility possible. That means investing in teachers, improving curricula, and expanding access to education—not gutting the very foundation of educational equity. If you still aren’t convinced, take a walk past your local school and remember what it felt like to sit in those classrooms. Talk with a child about what topics excite them in school. Ask a grandparent how education changed their life. Then, truly consider what it would mean for these opportunities to be stripped away.

Knowledge is power; why would our own government want to take it away?

On February 7, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order “to address serious human rights violations occurring in South Africa.” The order charged “blatant discrimination” against “ethnic minority descendants of settler groups,” and mandated “a plan to resettle disfavored minorities in South Africa discriminated against because of their race as refugees.” His actions echo a long history of right-wing support in the United States for racism in Southern Africa, including mobilization of support for white Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Analysts in South Africa quickly pointed out the many factual errors in Trump’s diatribe. Even Afrikaners, who he alleges are persecuted, are unlikely to accept being refugees since South Africa is their home country. The post-apartheid constitution of 1997, echoing the African National Congress’ Freedom Charter of 1955, clearly states that South Africa belongs to “all who live in it.” But Trump’s misunderstanding is an example of the transnational scope of white racist nostalgia.

An essential component of opposing the MAGA offensive against human rights in the United States has been new understandings of U.S. history, as reflected in the 1619 Project and a host of other publications. Most often, however, this discussion has focused on the United States in isolation. Scholars such as Ana Lucia Araújo, in Humans in Shackles, and Howard French, in Born of Blackness, have pioneered wider global histories. But however influential this trend is among historians, it has not been matched by attention in the media or public debate.

The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest.

In the global history of white supremacy, the close relationship between the United States and South Africa stands out for centuries of interaction between the two settler colonies, with both ideological and material links from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Significant links between Black resistance movements in the two countries also date back at least to the early 20th century. But until the end of official apartheid in the 1990s, the closest bonds were between white America and white South Africa.

In a short history of the Boer War written by eight-year-old future CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1901, and published by his grandfather, Dulles noted that the Boers landed at the Cape in 1652, “finding no people but a few Indians,” and that “it was not right for the British to come in because the Boers had the first right to the land.” For Dulles, as for other U.S. policymakers until almost the end of the 20th century, it was axiomatic that only whites had rights.

The parallels between these two settler colonies were significant. Robert F. Kennedy, speaking to university students in Cape Town in June 1966, put it like this:

I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

The parallels were matched by a long history of interaction. The concept for the African reserves (later Bantustans) in South Africa was modeled on American Indian reservations. As noted by historian John W. Cell, Americans and South Africans debated how to shape “segregation” in urbanizing societies in the mid-20th century. The Carnegie Corporation of New York financed both the classic study of the situation of “poor whites° in South Africa and Gunnar Myrdal´s The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy.

In the early 20th century, mining engineer Herbert Hoover (later U.S. president) was the founder and director of the Chinese Engineering and Mining Corporation, which shipped some 50.000 Chinese laborers to South Africa to work in South African mines. The scheme was abandoned in 1911. Mention of it was recently deleted from Wikipedia, most likely in 2018.

Both countries were united during the Cold War through anti-communism. South African officials studied McCarthyist legislation in the United States and applied it at home through the Suppression of Communism Act. In both countries, “anti-communism” became a way to defy demands for civil rights. Although white racism in South Africa became the focus of international condemnation after the official adoption of apartheid in 1948, the United States and other Western countries systematically opposed sanctions against South Africa for decades until the rise of the international anti-apartheid movement resulted in the congressional override of President Ronald Reagan’s veto to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.

That success came after decades of campaigning in the United States and around the world, with heightened international attention coming in response to resistance in South Africa itself. The Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961, in which Nelson Mandela and 135 other leaders of the African National Congress were charged, evoked widespread anti-apartheid actions in the United Kingdom and other countries. The Sharpeville Massacre in 1960 and the Soweto Youth Uprising in 1976 precipitated even larger waves of protest, fueled by new media options. Resistance reached a new peak after the formation of the United Democratic Front in 1983.

Following the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990, and the first non-racial election that brought him into office, there was worldwide celebration at the end of political apartheid. In later years, it became clear that only a minority of Black South Africans had joined the elite at the top of a still sharply unequal society. Disillusionment and discontent over high rates of unemployment and poverty arose among the majority of Black South Africans.

But that is a very different sentiment than the nostalgia for the old apartheid order among white South Africans who left the country as well as many who stayed in South Africa.

The right wing in the United States as well as Great Britain, Canada, and elsewhere, has held a fascination for apartheid and has regretted its abolition. The global anti-apartheid movement unleashed unprecedented demands by citizens to rein in corporate activity that supported apartheid. In the same way that climate activists studied divestment, so too have conservative lobbying groups studied how to block divestment groups. The sympathy that even liberal Robert F. Kennedy expressed for South African white pioneers on a hostile frontier evokes the common ideology of legitimizing settler conquest. Trump’s Executive Order can only be understood in that context.

In a deeply disturbing and unprecedented move, the U.S. has begun transferring immigrant detainees to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They’re being held without access to their lawyers and families.

President Donald Trump has ordered up to 30,000 “high-priority” migrants to be imprisoned there as part of his larger mass deportation and detention campaign.

Trump claims these migrants are the “worst criminal aliens threatening the American people.” But recent investigations of those detainees have already challenged this narrative. And a large percentage of immigrants arrested in the U.S. have no criminal record.

We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all—and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time our government has invoked “national security” to deny marginalized communities their basic human rights. President George W. Bush created the infamous military prison at Guantánamo during the “War on Terror” to hold what his administration called the “worst of the worst.”

The prison has since become synonymous with indefinite detention—15 people still remain there today, over 20 years later. Notorious for its brutality and lawlessness, Guantánamo should be shut down, not expanded.

Of the 780 Muslim men and boys imprisoned there since January 2002, the vast majority have been held without charge or trial. Most were abducted and sold to the U.S. for bounty and “had no relationship whatsoever with the events that took place on 9/11,” reported the United Nation’s independent expert in 2023, who reiterated the global call to close Guantánamo.

The Bush administration designed the prison to circumvent the Constitution and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, refusing to treat the prisoners as either POWs or civilians. This legal fiction resulted in a range of human rights violations, including torture.

But the Constitution—and international law—still applies wherever the U.S. government operates. All prisoners, including immigrants, are still entitled to humane treatment, legal counsel, and due process.

“Never before have people been taken from U.S. soil and sent to Guantánamo, and then denied access to lawyers and the outside world,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the ACLU case challenging Trump’s executive order.

However, the U.S. does have a sordid history of detaining migrants captured elsewhere at the base. As legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn points out, the U.S. has detained Haitians at Guantánamo on and off since the 1970s.

In the 1990s, thousands of Haitian refugees fleeing persecution following a military coup were captured at sea. The U.S. held them in horrific conditions at Guantánamo so they couldn’t reach U.S. shores to seek asylum—which is a fundamental human right long enshrined under U.S. law.

Shrouded in secrecy, the U.S. continues to capture and detain asylum-seekers fleeing Haiti, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries at Guantánamo. Last fall, the International Refugee Assistance Project reported that refugee families are kept in a dilapidated building with mold and sewage problems, suffer from a lack of medical care, and are “detained indefinitely in prison-like conditions without access to the outside world.”

Trump’s order would take these abuses to a horrifying new level.

Currently, the base’s existing immigration detention facility can hold up 120 people. Expanding it to 30,000 will require enormous resources. The “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo already costs an estimated $540 million annually, making it one of the most expensive prisons in the world.

Then there are the moral costs.

The mass deportation and detention of asylum-seekers is not only unlawful but cruel—and not a real immigration solution. Instead, our government should prioritize meaningful immigration reform that recognizes the dignity of all people.

We should also shut down the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo once and for all—and pursue accountability for its decades of abuses. Otherwise, it will only continue to expand. “I can attest to the facility’s capacity for cruelty,” warned Mansoor Adayfi, who was subjected to torture and endured nearly 15 years at the prison.

Guantánamo’s legacy of injustice must end.

Here's a bold prediction for the start of the second Trump administration: The next four years will be the best yet for America's clean energy transition.

That may sound surprising, given the significant steps President Donald Trump has already taken to try to reverse American leadership on climate and clean energy. There's much still unknown about the potential impact of Trump's early executive orders, but one truth remains clear: Far from slowing down, we could be entering a period of unprecedented renewable energy progress.

There's already strong momentum behind the clean energy shift, and whether that momentum continues is less dependent on the federal government than you might think. Trump can't change the reality that, for a huge number of clean energy projects, the permitting authority rests not with federal agencies, but with state and local decision-makers.

Now more than ever, speaking up for clean energy in your community is one of the most impactful steps you can take for the planet, your local economy, and the health and safety of future generations.

This means that the main determinant of how much progress clean energy makes over the next four years isn't the Trump administration. It's your neighbors—and you.

Don't be distracted by all the ink that will be spilled in the coming months about Trump's efforts to slow progress on offshore wind and electric vehicles, or to roll back the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). For starters, experts agree that a full repeal of the IRA—which made the single largest investment in climate and energy in American history—is unlikely. This landmark law has been an economic boon to red and blue states alike, earning bipartisan support.

The way forward remains open for the vast majority of clean energy projects permitted mostly or entirely at the state and local level. There, local governments, influenced by support across the political spectrum, have become powerful engines of clean energy progress.

Solar and wind are now the cheapest energy options available, even without subsidies. Across the country, these technologies are increasingly boosting local economies, generating revenue for public services, creating well-paying jobs, and delivering health and climate benefits for millions.

Now, our often-overlooked town planning and zoning commissions or county councils hold the key to driving clean energy forward in the coming years. Right now, these spaces are often dominated by small numbers of highly organized opponents—many backed by the same fossil fuel-linked interests that are now shaping Trump's energy policy. Left unchecked, these opponents have become adept at stalling or derailing clean energy progress. As of early 2024, at least 15% of U.S. counties had effectively banned utility-scale wind or solar projects, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans support these technologies.

Here's the opportunity. With so few people in attendance at local hearings, noisy opponents can significantly influence local decision-makers. That also means every person who makes the choice to speak out in favor of clean energy projects can make a big difference.

Take Mesa County, Colorado, where volunteers with the Western Colorado Alliance came together to overturn a moratorium on solar development in spring 2024. The handful of volunteers who took the time to show up to the pivotal public hearing helped ensure that community support for solar growth was on clear display, outweighing the opposition and convincing local officials to lift the county's ban.

This small group of volunteers helped create jobs, improved health, made their grid more reliable, and had a bigger impact for the climate in one step, together, than through years of individual actions. Even one 500-megawatt solar array that gets built as a result will help avoid the carbon emissions of more than 80,000 people switching to electric vehicles.

With a focus on supporting more of these projects in communities nationwide, clean energy will continue to boom in Trump's second term and beyond, creating a more livable climate and stronger economy for all.

So how do you take action where you live? It's easier than you think—here's a guide to getting started. Visit your city, county, or town's website and see what's on the planning docket. Check your local media for news about clean energy. And when you hear about a proposed project, don't just assume it will happen—or that it will fail. Do your research, share what you learn with neighbors, and reach out to organizations like the one I founded, Greenlight America, for help.

Most importantly, follow the project's approval process and, when it's up for a vote, be there or write in to voice your support to local leaders. They say 90% of success in life is showing up. For clean energy permitting, it's more like 100%.

Now more than ever, speaking up for clean energy in your community is one of the most impactful steps you can take for the planet, your local economy, and the health and safety of future generations.

There will be hundreds of opportunities to make this impact across the country in the next four years. Together, project by project and community by community, we can all fight climate change and pollution and bring clean energy and its economic benefits to all of our communities. The power is in our hands.

Imagine being forced to leave everything behind, your home, your family, your dreams, because U.S. sanctions have devastated your country’s economy, making day-to-day living increasingly unbearable. You endure a treacherous journey, risking everything for a chance at stability and to help your family back home, only to be met with handcuffs and an indefinite sentence in one of the world’s most infamous prisons.

This is the fate of many migrants, including Venezuelans, fleeing an economic war waged by U.S. policies. One of President Donald Trump’s first actions was to sign an executive order expanding the Migrant Operations Center at Guantánamo Bay to detain up to 30,000 migrants, labeling them as “criminal illegal aliens.” Following mounting legal challenges and international scrutiny, the U.S. government has now deported 177 Venezuelan migrants who were detained at the naval base.

According to U.S. officials, 126 of them had criminal charges or convictions, and 80 were accused of being part of the Tren de Aragua gang. Fifty-one had no criminal records. Human rights advocates raised concerns about the lack of transparency in the U.S. classification of detainees, especially given the cases where migrants were detained at Guantánamo based on nothing more than their tattoos.

Locking up migrants on stolen land while troops sip Starbucks and grab a Big Mac isn’t security for the “homeland,” it’s a grotesque spectacle of unchecked power and horrific violation of human rights.

Yes, the U.S. government is using tattoos, sometimes nothing more than a name, a date, or even a tribute to a favorite athlete, as justification to label migrants as “gang-affiliated” and ship them off to Guantánamo Bay.

Take Luis Castillo, a 23-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker, who was detained at the border and later sent to Guantánamo simply because he had a Michael Jordan tattoo.

Let that sink in.

A Michael Jordan tattoo. Never mind that millions worldwide have the same logo inked on their skin or that it appears on bumper stickers, billboards, and sneakers everywhere. By this logic, half the country should be under surveillance. But when it comes to migrants, suddenly, a tattoo is a ticket to indefinite imprisonment.

Luis was detained, then abruptly sent to Guantánamo Bay on February 4, cut off from his family and legal representation. His sister, Yajaira Castillo, had been desperately trying to find out where he was, telling reporters, “He’s innocent. He just wanted a chance at life.”

Luis is not alone. Dozens of Venezuelans and other asylum-seekers have been flown to Guantánamo under vague security classifications, with no access to attorneys and no clear path to getting out of Guantanamo.

Why Guantánamo?

For decades, Guantánamo has been a legal black hole where the U.S. government detains people it does not want to acknowledge. It is a place built on stolen land, Cuban territory that the U.S. has occupied since 1903, against the will of the Cuban people and government.

Now, it is being repurposed yet again, this time to imprison desperate migrants, far from public scrutiny and without the legal protections guaranteed on U.S. soil.

A Dystopian Reality

Guantánamo is not just a prison; it’s a bizarre, dystopian military outpost where injustice coexists with American consumer culture. Just miles from where detainees are held indefinitely without trial, there is a McDonald’s, a Subway, a bowling alley, an escape room, and even a mini-golf course. The base has a recreation center, a movie theater, and a marina where troops and personnel can rent jet skis and go fishing! All within walking distance of a detention center infamous for torture.

And if that wasn’t surreal enough, the base also features a Starbucks, the only one on the island of Cuba, alongside a gift shop selling beer koozies, T-shirts, and shot glasses emblazoned with slogans like “Straight Outta GTMO” and “It Don’t GTMO Better Than This,” as if this were a quirky tourist attraction rather than a site dedicated to systemic human rights abuses.

By detaining migrants in Guantánamo, the U.S. government sidesteps legal obligations and publicity to create a system where people can be held indefinitely without due process.

The Cuban people have long demanded the closure of Guantánamo and the return of their land. Still, instead, the U.S. government continues to use it as a dumping ground for those it refuses to recognize as human beings. And in an absurd display of imperial arrogance, the U.S. still sends Cuba a check every year as “rent” for the base, money that the Cuban government refuses to cash, rejecting the illegal occupation.

Guantánamo should have been shut down long ago. Instead, it’s expanding because the U.S. government never misses an opportunity when it comes to cruelty. Locking up migrants on stolen land while troops sip Starbucks and grab a Big Mac isn’t security for the “homeland,” it’s a grotesque spectacle of unchecked power and horrific violation of human rights.

The Bigger Picture

The expansion of Guantánamo Bay as a migrant detention center marks a dangerous escalation in U.S. immigration policy. Instead of addressing the root causes of migration, many driven by U.S. economic and foreign policies, the government is doubling down on militarized enforcement, turning a site infamous for human rights abuses into a holding cell for asylum-seekers.

By detaining migrants in Guantánamo, the U.S. government sidesteps legal obligations and publicity to create a system where people can be held indefinitely without due process.

Guantánamo is more than a prison. It’s a symbol of unchecked power. Today, it holds Venezuelan migrants, but tomorrow, it could hold anyone the government deems inconvenient.

The aging leader wanted to shake up his country, so he launched a second revolution with the help of a cadre of young people. Drunk with power, the leader targeted his enemies, remade his political party, and turned his own government into a self-destructing circus. Anyone with real expertise was sent far away from the political center. Intellectuals of all kinds came under suspicion. And the young people who rose up in support of the aging leader ran roughshod through society.

They might not seem to have a lot in common, Mao Zedong and Donald Trump. The Communist leader, having come to power through a revolutionary war, harbored a visceral hatred for capitalism. The American businessman shirked military service, won the presidency (twice) through democratic elections, and harbors a visceral hatred for communism.

And yet, Trump is currently involved in a cultural revolution as thoroughgoing in its ambitions and potential destructiveness as what Mao unleashed in China in the mid-1960s.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

At one level, what Donald Trump and his minions are doing is regime change, as Anne Applebaum has argued. They aren’t reforming U.S. government. They are transforming its operating system, courtesy of Elon Musk and his inaptly named Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Regime change is certainly part of the Trump game plan. He has borrowed this strategy from Viktor Orban, who turned Hungary’s political system based on liberal principles into a patronage system run along illiberal lines. The Orban transformation relied on a compliant legislature that allowed him to concentrate power in the executive. Once a leading liberal, the Hungarian leader knew how to deconstruct the Hungarian political system from the inside by stacking the courts, suppressing civil society, and controlling a right-wing media.

You’d think that regime change would be enough for Trump. He is a man of unpredictable utterances but rather constrained ambitions. He wants to punish his enemies, reward his friends, stay out of jail, and secure his financial and political legacy. Those around Trump, however, are pushing for something more extreme. They have cast him in the role of the Great Helmsman—Mao’s favorite moniker—who steers American society into turbulent, uncharted waters.

Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.

Team MAGA wants a “second American Revolution” that roots out all vestiges of progressivism, liberalism, and secularism and that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” according to Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. By “left,” Roberts means anyone who follows the Constitution, acknowledges the importance of international law, and has a moral conscience.

This more revolutionary program owes much to Chairman Mao who, in 1966, decided that Chinese society was so infected with various strains of reformism (capitalism, liberalism, traditionalism) that it, too, needed another revolution. On top of that, Mao unleashed the power of populism—the “masses” in the vernacular of that time and place—to eliminate his political enemies. “It was a power struggle waged… behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement,” writes Belgian scholar Pierre Ryckmans.

In the 1950s, after the country’s first revolution, Chinese society remained fundamentally conservative. The economy was primarily agrarian and Confucianism was still strong, particularly in the countryside. China was also elitist, with a Communist leader like Zhou Enlai born into the mandarin class and Mao himself coming from wealthy landowning stock. The Communists didn’t just aspire to change China’s governance. They wanted to turn Chinese society into something considerably more urban, industrial, secular, literate, and egalitarian. The change would be violent, if necessary, because Mao believed that “revolution was not a dinner party” (one wonders if Kevin Roberts has a copy of the Little Red Book on his bedside table).

At first, Mao relied on the party and its repressive institutions to effect change. By the mid-1950s, he launched an effort at reform, the Thousand Flowers Campaign, that spiraled out of the party’s control, which generated the backlash of the Anti-Rightist Campaign. That was, in turn, followed by the disastrous economic experiments of the Great Leap Forward. These whiplash changes in policy created considerable anxiety among the Chinese leadership that the party, and the revolution more generally, was losing its hold over the population, which understandably didn’t know where to turn. Mao ultimately decided that only another revolution could break the country’s ties with its past.

The agents of Mao’s Cultural Revolution were the Red Guards, teenagers who heeded Mao’s call for transformation by taking the law into their own hands. They attacked capitalist-roaders, “bourgeois” teachers, and ultimately each other. Chinese society descended into such chaos that some people even fled over the border into North Korea, which was seen as a place of relative sanity. That’s how violent, unpredictable, and apocalyptic China was during the Cultural Revolution, which lasted nearly a decade until Mao’s death in 1976.

Trumpists have their counterpart to Mao’s desire for revolutionary transformation: a plan to destroy everything in the federal government except the royal presidency and the Pentagon, and privatize everything in the country that has a tinge of the public to it.

The Trumpian equivalents of the Red Guards are a motley crew. There’s “Big Balls,” 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a DOGE-employed hacker who, among other questionable ventures, administers “an AI-powered Discord bot operating in Russia.” Then there’s 25-year-old Marco Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after the revelation of his racist tweets (but whom Musk has promised to rehire). The parallel with China is not precise, since there are plenty of non-teenagers who are involved in this insurrection, including the middle-aged January 6 rioter Peter Marocco, who is slated to head up USAID. Whatever their age, however, these Trumpists are true believers, enthusiastically feeding democracy into the woodchipper.

Mao, of course, wanted to pull China into a modern future. Trump and company promise something more high-tech, but they are really more interested in dragging the United States back to an imagined past.

Why Trumpians Take Culture Seriously

The Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not just a response to some recent fad. They are, as in China, an effort to radically revamp the very culture.

Since the 1960s, the United States has become a more inclusive country, which has necessarily meant that white men have lost some part of their privileged positions in education, employment, and entertainment. By the 2000s, the United States still had a long way to go, but in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-racism books were on the best-seller list, major corporations were examining their hiring and promoting policies, and educational institutions were finally beginning to address structural racism.

Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.

Cultural transformations always move two steps forward and one step backward. In this case, the backlash has been much more intense, with Trump and company eager to rewind the clock to before the various civil rights movements, back even before the 14th Amendment that added birthright citizenship to the Constitution in 1868. The Trump administration has tried to impose gender categories that define the trans community out of existence. It is restricting abortion access at home and abroad, fulfilling the candidate’s promise to help women “whether they like it or not.”

In the same way that Mao tried to make everything in China public—business, meals, child-rearing—Trump wants to privatize everything from schools to the post office. He is opening up government to conservative Christians, and religious institutions are poised to claw back as much public power as they can get.

Mao thought that he was pushing with history’s tide. China’s current capitalist trajectory suggests otherwise, even though the regime change implemented by the Communist Party has remained more or less intact. The party remains in charge, but the culture shows few enduring influences of the Cultural Revolution.

With far-right politicians on the rise around the world, Trump and Musk similarly believe that they are on the cutting edge of change. But mass deportations and boosted birthrates among “tradwives” won’t prevent America from losing its white-majority status in about 20 years. DEI is no fad. It is an accurate reflection of demographics. And short of imposing totalitarian control and setting up concentration camps, the MAGA crowd won’t be able to alter this trajectory.

Welcome Back to 2025

This is not the first time I’ve written about the parallels between Trump and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. In 2022, safely ensconced in the Biden era but plagued by nightmares of the future, I wrote an article entitled “The Terrifying World of 2025” for TomDispatch. It was and is a world of mass deportations, where “Social Security checks and Medicare benefits have been delayed because the federal bureaucracy has shrunk to near invisibility.” Here was my look into the future, which is now our present:

On his first day in office, the president signaled his new policy by authorizing a memorial on the Capitol grounds to the “patriots” of January 6 and commissioning a statue of the QAnon shaman for the Rotunda. He then appointed people to his cabinet who not only lacked the expertise to manage their departments but were singularly devoted to destroying the bureaucracies beneath them, not to speak of the country itself. He put militia leaders in key Defense Department roles and similarly filled the courts with extremists more suited to playing reality-show judges than real life ones. In all of this, the president has been aided by a new crop of his very own legislators, men and women who know nothing about Congress and actively flouted its rules and traditions even as they made the MAGA caucus the dominant voting bloc.

My piece focused on one part of this nightmare scenario—the dispatch of all newly unemployed federal employees, academics, and journalists to take the jobs vacated by deported immigrants. That has yet to take place, but Musk’s acquisition of all federal data could serve as the basis for a MAGA Corps of workers that fill the gaps in the private sector.

The Trump team is currently stress-testing U.S. democracy to see where and how it breaks. Perhaps if we can hold the line here, in these opening months of the Trump-Musk cultural revolution, we can avoid all the mayhem and destruction that China experienced in the 1960s.

Back in 2022, I was not optimistic in my crystal-ball-gazing:

I know this nightmare won’t end overnight. China’s Cultural Revolution stretched on for nearly a decade and resulted in as many as 2 million dead. Our now-captive media doesn’t report on the growing violence in this country, but we’ve heard rumors about mobs attacking a courageous podcaster in Georgia and vigilantes targeting a lone abortion provider in Texas. Things might get a lot worse before they get better.

Things could indeed get a lot worse. The mass deportations haven’t begun in earnest. The courts have hit pause on a number of Trump’s more egregious moves. The worst of the new Cabinet members—Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have yet to make their marks.

But I’d like to believe that Trump and Musk, for all the power they currently deploy, are basically spitting into the wind. But it’s up to us, with every breath we take, to make sure that all that ugly spittle ends up back on the face of MAGA.

After weeks of following the news about the systematic dismantling of the federal government by U.S. President Donald Trump and his appointed and ad hoc acolytes, I have been driven to outrage and the realization of the need for a clarion call to action. However, this week, after listening to an hour-long interview with a leading researcher and journalist who studies the manifestations and damage wrought by plutocrats and authoritarians, for the first time I felt fear.

Not specifically fear of what is happening to our great nation per se, but fear that this well-respected expert repeated several times during the interview that what we are observing is unprecedented in our nation’s history and that they had few if any recommendations on what can be done to wrestle back this beast.

To that end, action is what I put forward in this letter. Steve Bannon coined the now much used phrase “flood the zone,“ for the strategy that the Trump administration is employing with their phalanx of executive orders and invasions of executive agencies and secure databases by individuals without requisite security clearances. While many of these actions are apparently unenforceable and unconstitutional, the intent of the strategy is to overwhelm the opposition with far too much to act upon—akin to encouraging the proverbial cat to chase a laser light.

Unlike the early days of the American union, where citizen soldiers were freezing in the winter woods without boots and bullets, those opposed to the current takeover of our government and democratic institutions have many arrows in their quivers.

I suggest, as a countervailing strategy, that we employ the same technique against them. Truly patriotic Democrats and Republicans must now borrow Steve Bannon’s “flooding of the zone” in a different context. Generate so many lawsuits to in effect flood the Supreme Court docket. As a result, most cases brought against Trump administration actions will be forced to stay within the purview of the lower courts where some semblance of democracy and due process still remains.

While I certainly understand that the Supreme Court has the power to stay the decisions of lower courts and place cases on their docket that are consolidations of multiple lower-court decisions on cases with similarly limited legal questions; nonetheless, the strategy will indeed keep them jumping.

It is also important to note that this barrage of legal actions must be based on solid legal grounds. Any hint at frivolity in any of these lawsuits will rapidly reinforce right-wing outcry against such actions. I am particularly sensitized to this risk after watching a video of federal employee protesters decrying Elon Musk’s dismantling of the federal government. The protesters were challenging Musk’s actions while counterprotesters were asserting that their protests were misguided as they were opposing Musk’s so-called efforts toward “transparency and government efficiency.”

At the outset of the American Revolution, many considered it absurd that a ragtag bunch of colonists could actually weave together a nation while at the same time fighting a war against one of the most powerful nations on Earth. But that is exactly what America succeeded in doing. This was the result of vision, commitment, innovative strategies, and the juxtaposition of global events beyond the scope of the American Revolution that served to distract Britain from their intention to quell this colonial discontent.

However, unlike the early days of the American union, where citizen soldiers were freezing in the winter woods without boots and bullets, those opposed to the current takeover of our government and democratic institutions have many arrows in their quivers. We have legal scholars, state attorneys general, engaged NGOs, skilled lawyers who can crank out 200 page legal briefs overnight, the majority of the American public who have some understanding of civics and the critical importance of the American experiment, and many powerful corporations who understand that their business interests lie in producing products and services that not only create profitability, but also benefit people and the natural world. This capacity, effectively marshaled, without qualification cannot be stopped.

On Inauguration Day, I was flying home from India, where I had attended Gandhi 3.0, a retreat that brought together 40 people from around the world to explore how Gandhian principles can be meaningful in today's world. I returned to the U.S. just as my country was erupting in turmoil.

My emotions were all over the place. Having just experienced the most heart-expanding nine days of my life, where I witnessed the most extraordinary acts of generosity and heard some of the wisest of voices, I felt strangely grounded with a deep sense of love for, well, everyone. But I was also aghast, frightened for so many, and startled by those who were delighted by the sledgehammer upheavals, the head-spinning international proclamations, and the unconstitutional decrees.

I certainly understand the desire to upend “the system”—something I’ve been trying to do with multiple unjust, unsustainable, and inhumane systems my entire adult life—but what was unfolding was inchoate, cruel, and chaotic destruction rather than carefully considered interventions that would reduce waste and corruption.

What could Gandhi teach me and us?

Like Gandhi, ask yourself how you can tend your time carefully knowing that ineffective—and potentially destructive—efforts will waste your precious energy and could also backfire.

Studying Gandhi helps me put my country into perspective. Gandhi spent decades endeavoring to free his country from British rule using only nonviolent methods. He worked to end the evil of untouchability embedded in India’s caste system. He led a movement toward Indian self-reliance. And all along the way he made inner work—the cultivation of love and wisdom; inquiry, introspection, and integrity; and meditation—foundational to everything he did.

Gandhi once said:

I hold myself incapable of hating any being on Earth. By a long course of prayerful discipline, I have ceased for over 40 years to hate anybody. I know this is a big claim. Nevertheless, I make it in all humility. But I can and do hate evil wherever it exists. I hate the systems of government that the British people have set up in India. I hate the ruthless exploitation of India even as I hate from the bottom of my heart the hideous system of untouchability for which millions of Hindus have made themselves responsible. But I do not hate the domineering Englishmen as I refuse to hate the domineering Hindus. I seek to reform them in all the loving ways that are open to me. My noncooperation has its roots not in hatred, but in love.

I posted this quote shortly after my return to the U.S., and a friend commented: “Waiting for your solution? Do we just be still without any action to what is happening in this country?”

Gandhi would hardly want us to keep still. After all, he worked tirelessly. He also worked strategically, wisely, and forcefully, with force embedded in his guiding principle of satyagraha, often translated as “nonviolent resistance.” But satyagraha means so much more than this. The word combines satya, meaning truth, and agraha, meaning insistence, firmness, and adherence. In other words, Gandhi’s force for change was an unshakeable commitment to opposing injustice with truth. And truth for Gandhi meant never doing evil to combat evil; never using violence to oppose violence; and never succumbing to hate to resist hate. It meant no less than living, acting, and teaching with an abiding core of love.

Gandhi is famous for responding to a reporter’s question about his message by jotting down, “My life is my message.” Those five words aren’t just one man’s story. They represent a universal truth. Each of our lives is our message. The question thus becomes: Am I modeling the message I most want to convey?

None of us is or will be Gandhi. Nor will we have the megaphone to the world that he came to have through the power of his character, his resolve, and his at the time unique nonviolent approach to resistance. If you or I declared, as Gandhi did on several occasions, that we were fasting until and unless violence among our citizenry ended, we would surely die of starvation, and that violence would persist after we were gone. But that doesn’t mean that Gandhian principles have nothing to teach us today. They absolutely do.

Here are Gandhian teachings I am taking to heart right now:

1. Avoid rash acts and angry outbursts; these will not bring about any positive change.
2. Learn from the changemakers who have brought about greater peace and justice and built more compassionate, sustainable systems against all odds.
3. Embrace satyagraha, recognizing that this requires cultivating the inner resolve to continually pursue justice through nonviolent, loving means.
4. Work toward systemic change, understanding that this takes profound dedication, deep thinking, careful strategizing, and patience.
5. Do the inner work as tirelessly as the outer work to achieve all of the above.

If you were hoping for more specific strategies to address your current concerns, this may be a disappointing list, but let’s not forget that most people across the political spectrum care about others and want a future where their fellow citizens can thrive. Rather than consider those with different political views one’s enemies, we can perceive them as fellow participants and even potential friends with whom we can communicate, and maybe collaborate, as we identify better ways forward upon which we can agree.

Gandhi devoted years to readying himself and his followers for nonviolent resistance. He spent nearly two decades in preparation for the Salt March that led to India’s independence. Just ponder that as you consider the role you will play in achieving your vision for a sustainable, peaceful, just world.

Please don’t interpret this as meaning that we should only cultivate inner strength and love, or that we should do nothing now other than plan and strategize for an indefinite future. Rather, like Gandhi, ask yourself how you can tend your time carefully knowing that ineffective—and potentially destructive—efforts will waste your precious energy and could also backfire.

Whatever injustices, cruelties, and evils you seek to end, Gandhi’s life and message are worth studying and emulating. He demonstrated that satyagraha is not only a profound strategy; it is fueled by the most powerful of human capacities: love. Given that Gandhi was perhaps the greatest changemaker in history, it’s worth deeply considering his approach as a model for today’s world. And lest we think we somehow need to dispense with our anger to follow in Gandhi’s footsteps, he also said this:

“I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”

Good followers of U.S. President Donald Trump have to believe an increasingly large collection of ridiculous lies. First and foremost, they have to believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Then they have the corollary, that January 6 was an inside job pulled off for some reason by the FBI. Of course, they have to believe global warming isn’t happening and apparently now that that Ukraine started its war with Russia.

However, this week Elon Musk and Donald Trump added another big lie to the list: There are tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security. As with all Trump lies it is hard to know what the guy really believes and what is being thrown out to advance a larger goal, but this lie definitely ranks alongside the others for both its craziness and potential importance.

It seems the origins of the Social Security zombie story is Elon Musk’s misunderstanding of a Social Security file on the ages of people getting Social Security. He immediately began tweeting to his hundreds of millions of followers that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security. This line was quickly picked up by various right-wing influencers as yet another example of government incompetence and corruption.

It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.

Then Donald Trump made the claim about millions of dead people getting Social Security himself. And under MAGA rules, once the “king” makes a pronouncement, everyone has to say it’s true no matter how utterly absurd it might be. This means all good Republicans have to insist that tens of millions of dead people are getting Social Security, or at least millions.

This claim is absurd on its face. Social Security actually keeps very good track of who is getting benefits, as numerous audits over the years have found. Yes, Social Security is in fact regularly audited by its inspector general and also the Government Accountability Office. It might have been helpful to Elon Musk’s “super-high IQ” DOGE boys if they had taken a few minutes to review some of these audits to understand how Social Security works and the problems it faces.

And the system does have problems, most of which are widely known to those familiar with the program. The two most obvious ones are the country’s method of tracking deaths and the age of the Social Security computer system.

The first problem is that there is no national death registry. We could compile this nationally, but this has been a big states’ rights issue, with many people, mostly Republicans, complaining that a national system of registering deaths would be a dangerous step toward totalitarianism. Therefore, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has to rely on getting data on deaths from states.

The other problem is that SSA is relying on an antiquated computer system that is using a computer language from the sixties. Musk and the DOGE boys may well want to ridicule SSA for using a computer system that is 50 or even 60 years old, but an analysis of the problem would again require looking in the mirror.

It would cost billions of dollars to put in place a new system, while maintaining the operation of the current system and ensuring that the privacy of workers’ earnings and benefit records are not compromised. Cost-conscious Republicans in Congress, along with many Democrats, have not wanted to fork over the money. If Elon Musk and the DOGE boys can arrange for the funding for modernizing the system, they would be widely applauded by supporters of Social Security, but that doesn’t seem the direction they are taking.

In fact, SSA has been pretty ingenuous in working around these obstacles to ensure that the overwhelming majority of its payments are accurate. And when overpayments are made, such as when benefits go to a dead person for a couple of months after death, they often are able to get the money back.

Mr. Arithmetic Exposes the Lie

Anyhow, when it comes to the claim that the zombie hordes are getting Social Security, a quick visit with Mr. Arithmetic should put this nonsense to rest. Social Security gives us very good data (it’s even available to Elon Musk and the DOGE boys) on payments to beneficiaries by age.

We can add this up and calculate the total amount of payments that SSA can identify. That came to $1,227 billion at the end of 2024. We can also go to the Social Security Trustees Report and find out the total amount the program paid out in retiree benefits last year. Interestingly, that also came out to $1,227 billion. So where is the money that is going to the millions of Musk-Trump Social Security beneficiary zombies?

Okay, but maybe these are fake numbers that the geniuses at SSA have put together to trick real tax-paying Americans. But which numbers would be fake?

It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong.

We know the total amount Social Security pays out in benefits each year. There are dozens of records kept on this that are regularly published. Even Elon Musk and the “super-high IQ” DOGE boys can find this out.

Furthermore, if we want to venture into the Twilight Zone and imagine that there are actually hundreds of billions of dollars secretly being paid out to the Musk-Trump zombies every year, we wouldn’t have to worry about this money contributing to the deficit. If the zombie payments are never recorded anywhere, they can’t be a factor in the official deficit that we all know and love.

Maybe the SSA tricksters did it on the other side. They are hugely exaggerating what we are paying as benefits to real working people. All those numbers on people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s are hugely inflated so that they have extra money to pay to the Musk-Trump zombies.

While that would be a very clever trick by the SSA fraudsters, it would also be pretty hard to pull off. We do have very good data on births. We know how many people were born in 1940, 1950, 1960, and every other year. We also know roughly how many of these people are dying. Anyone interested could examine whether, for example, the number of 90-year-olds SSA says are getting benefits makes sense.

The same applies on the benefit side. Social Security has a very well-defined benefit formula, which is readily available to anyone who wants to look. We have good data from a wide variety of sources on the wages people earned during their working years, so we can know roughly what they should be getting in Social Security benefits. We also have data from both public and private sources on what Social Security beneficiaries are actually getting from the program.

If the SSA bureaucrats are able to find ways to exaggerate their proper payments to living people, to hide hundreds of billions of dollars being paid out to dead people each year, they are way more clever than anyone gives them credit for. I’m not sure that fits the story that Elon Musk and the DOGE boys want to tell.

Is There Method to the Madness?

It is always dangerous to try to get into the head of someone who is not making any sense, but it is worth asking if there can be any purpose served by Musk-Trump spewing nonsense about tens of millions of dead people getting Social Security benefits. This could just be another absurd Trump power play where he forces his MAGA followers to accept an absurd lie just to show he can. He did this when he released a huge volume of water in California, ostensibly to help contain the Los Angeles fires, even though the areas getting the water were nowhere near LA.

There is another more pernicious possibility. Musk-Trump may want to foster the belief that there are large numbers of dead people getting Social Security benefit so that they can justify a purge of the rolls. The purge will not be directed at the dead people who are not there, but at their political opponents. This is obviously completely illegal, but if Trump gets decide the law, as he insists, it’s all fine.

It could be paranoid to imagine that Trump will take away the Social Security benefits that people worked for over many decades, but those who think the worst about Donald Trump are rarely wrong. I guess we will eventually find out his intentions with this idiocy. We have to hope that it’s just Trump’s dementia.

If you are experiencing rage and despair about what is happening in America and the world right now because of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, you are hardly alone. A groundswell of opposition is growing—not as loud and boisterous as the resistance to Tump 1.0, but just as, if not more, committed to ending the scourge.

Here’s a partial summary—10 reasons for modest optimism.

1. Boycotts Are Taking Hold

Americans are changing shopping habits in a backlash against corporations that have shifted their public policies to align with Trump.

Millions are pledging to halt discretionary spending for 24 hours on February 28 in protest against major retailers—chiefly Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy—for scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in response to President Donald Trump.

Four out of 10 Americans have already shifted their spending over the last few months to be more consistent with their moral views, according to the Harris poll. (Far more Democrats—50%—are changing their spending habits compared with Republicans—41%.)

We will prevail because we are relearning the basic truth—that we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

Calls to boycott Tesla apparently are having an effect. After a disappointing 2024, Tesla sales declined further in January. In California, a key market for Tesla, nearly 12% fewer Teslas were registered in January 2025 than in January 2024. An analysis by Electrek points to even more trouble for Tesla in Europe, where Tesla sales have dropped in every market.

X users are shifting over to Bluesky at a rapid rate, even as Musk adds more advertisers to his ongoing lawsuit against those that have justifiably boycotted X after he turned it into a cesspool of lies and hate (this week, he added Lego, Nestle, Tyson Foods, and Shell).

2. International Resistance Is Rising

Canada has helped lead the way: A grassroots boycott of American products and tourism is underway there. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has in effect become a “wartime prime minister” as he stands up to Trump’s bullying.

Jean Chrétien, who served as prime minister of Canada from 1993 to 2003, is urging Canada to join with leaders in Denmark, Panama, and Mexico, as well as with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to fight back against Trump’s threats.

Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum is standing up to Trump. She has defended not just Mexico but also the sovereignty of Latin American countries Trump has threatened and insulted.

In the wake of JD Vance’s offensive speech at the Munich security conference last week, European democracies are standing together—condemning his speech and making it clear they will support Ukraine and never capitulate to Russian President Vladimir Putin, as Trump has done.

3. Independent and Alternative Media Are Growing

Trump and Elon Musk’s “shock and awe” strategy was premised on their control of all major information outlets—not just Fox News and its right-wing imitators but the mainstream corporate media as well.

It hasn’t worked. The New York Times has done sharp and accurate reporting on what’s happening. Even the non-editorial side of The Wall Street Journal has shown some gumption.

The biggest news, though, is the increasing role now being played by independent and alternative media. Subscriptions have surged at Democracy Now, The American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, Economic Policy Institute, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, The Guardian, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this and other Substacks.

As a result, although Trump and Musk continue to flood the zone with lies, Americans aren’t as readily falling for their scams.

4. Musk’s Popularity Is Plunging

Elon Musk is underwater in public opinion, according to polls published Wednesday.

Surveys by Quinnipiac University and Pew Research Center—coming just after Trump and Musk were interviewed together by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, with Trump calling Musk a “great guy” who “really cares for the country”—show a growing majority of Americans holding an unfavorable view of Musk.

In Pew’s findings, 54% report disliking Musk compared to 42% with a positive view; 36% report a very unfavorable view of Musk. Quinnipiac’s results show 55% believe Musk has too big a role in the government.

5. Musk’s Doge Is Losing Credibility

On Monday, DOGE listed government contracts it has canceled, claiming that they amount to some $16 billion in savings—itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.

Almost half were attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—but that contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.

In addition, Musk and Trump say tens of millions of “dead people” may be receiving fraudulent Social Security payments from the government. The table Musk shared on social media over the weekend showed about 20 million people in the Social Security Administration’s database over the age of 100 and with no known death.

But as the agency’s inspector general found in 2023, “almost none” of them were receiving payments; most had died before the advent of electronic records.

These kinds of rudimentary errors are destroying DOGE’s credibility and causing even more to question allowing Musk’s muskrats unfettered access to personal data on Americans.

6. The Federal Courts Are Hitting Back

So far, at least 74 lawsuits have been filed by state attorneys general, nonprofits, and unions against the Trump regime. And at least 17 judges—including several appointed by Republicans—already have issued orders blocking or temporarily halting actions by the Trump regime.

The blocking orders include Trump initiatives to restrict birthright citizenship, suspend or cut off domestic and foreign U.S. spending, shrink the federal workforce, oust independent agency heads, and roll back legal protections and medical care for transgender adults and youths.

In other cases, the Trump regime has agreed to a pause to give judges time to rule, another way that legal fights are forcing a slowdown.

7. Demonstrations Are on the Rise

We haven’t seen anything like the January 2017 Women’s March, the day after Trump 1.0 began, but over the past weeks, demonstrations have been increasing across the country. Last Monday, on Presidents Day, demonstrators descended upon state capitol buildings.

In Washington, D.C., thousands gathered at the Capitol Reflecting Pool, chanting “Where is Congress?” and urging members of Congress to “Do your job!” despite nearly 40°F temperatures and 20-mile-per-hour wind gusts.

The nationwide protests are part of the 50501 Movement, which stands for “50 protests. 50 states. 1 movement.” One of its leaders, Potus Black, urged the crowd of protesters in Washington to stand united in order to “uphold the Constitution.”

To oppose tyranny is to stand behind democracy and remind our elected officials that we, the people, are who they’re elected to serve, not themselves. The events over the past month have been built to exhaust us, to break our wills. But we are the American people. We will not break.

I expect that in the coming weeks and months protests will grow larger and louder—and by summer perhaps a “Summer of Democracy” will sweep the nation.

Acts of civil disobedience are also on the rise, as are resignations in protest against the regime. This week, former NFL punter Chris Kluwe was hauled out of a Huntington Beach City Council meeting after speaking out against Trump during public comments against plans to include a MAGA reference in the design of a library plaque.

As cheers erupted from the audience, Kluwe told the council, in words that should be repeated across the land:

MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.

When he was done speaking, Kluwe said he would “engage in the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience.”

8. Stock and Bond Markets Are Trembling

Trump has not lowered prices; in fact, inflation is rising under his control.

Trump’s wild talk of 25% tariffs is spooking the market. Yesterday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which measures the performance of 30 large-cap U.S. stocks, dropped by more than 1.40%.

Treasury bonds also dropped after a report showed more U.S. workers applied for unemployment benefits last week than economists expected—an indication the pace of layoffs could be worsening.

Transcripts of the last Fed meeting showed that officials discussed how Trump's proposed tariffs and mass deportations of migrants, as well as strong consumer spending, could push inflation higher this year.

Economic storm clouds like these should be troubling for everyone but especially for a regime that measures its success by stock and bond markets.

9. Trump Is Overreaching—Pretending to Be “King” and Abandoning Ukraine for Putin

Trump’s threats of annexation, conquest, and “unleashing hell” have been exposed as farcical bluffs—and his displays this week of being “king” and siding with Putin have unleashed a new level of public ridicule.

On Wednesday, following his attempt to kill a new congestion pricing program for Manhattan, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” The White House shared the quote accompanied by a computer-generated image of Trump grinning on a fake Time magazine cover while donning a golden crown.

Negative reaction was swift and overwhelming. Social media has exploded with derision. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said, “We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king.” Illinois’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, said, “My oath is to the Constitution of our state and our nation. We don’t have kings in America, and I won’t bend the knee to one.”

The reaction to Trump’s abandoning Ukraine and siding with Putin has been more devastating, putting congressional Republicans on the defensive. Prominent Republican Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and John Kennedy of Louisiana criticized Putin. Bill Kristol, a former official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, noted that “Nato and the U.S. commitment to Europe has kept the European peace for 80 years. It’s foolish and reckless to put that at risk. And for what? To get along with Putin?”

10. The Trump-Vance-Musk “Shock and Awe” Plan Is Faltering

In all these ways and for all of these reasons, the regime’s efforts to overwhelm us are failing.

Make no mistake: Trump, Vance, and Musk continue to be an indiscriminate wrecking ball that has already caused major destruction and will continue to weaken and isolate America. But their takeover has been slowed.

Their plan was based on doing so much, so fast that the rest of us would give in to negativity and despair. They want a dictatorship built on hopelessness and fear.

That may have been the case initially, but we can take courage from the green shoots of rebellion now appearing across America and the world.

As several of you have pointed out, successful resistance movements maintain hope and a positive vision of the future, no matter how dark the present.

More than 55 years ago, I participated in the resistance to the Vietnam War—a resistance that ultimately ended the war and caused a once powerful president to resign. That resistance gave us courage we didn’t even know we had. It changed American culture, inspiring songs such as “The Times They Are A Changing,” and “Blowin’ In The Wind.”

No one person led that anti-war movement. It was an amalgam of groups and leaders spanning more than six years of mobilization and organization, at all levels of society.

The civil rights movement that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required over 18 years of organizing, demonstrating, and mobilizing.

The current coup is less than five weeks old, and resistance has only begun. The Trump-Vance-Musk regime will fail. Even so, the Democracy Movement now emerging will require at least a decade, if not a generation, to rebuild and strengthen what has been destroyed, and to fix the raging inequalities, injustices, and corruption that led so many to vote for Trump for a second time.

Those of you who want the leaders of the Democratic Party to step up and be heard are right, of course. But political parties do not lead. The anti-war movement and the Civil Rights Movement didn’t depend on the Democratic Party for their successes. They depended on a mass mobilization of all of us who accepted the responsibilities of being American.

We will prevail because we are relearning the basic truth—that we are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.

As the mass murder that took the lives of 10 innocent people in Sweden disappears from the international news map, there remains a debt to the dead that will likely go unpaid.

The majority of those who died were immigrants to Sweden, and the debt is simple: telling their stories and placing their lives in a context that pushes back against the common stereotypes about immigrants and refugees in Sweden, and across Europe.

Details are now beginning to emerge about the victims in Örebro. Of the 10 who died in Örebro, seven were women and three were men. Eight were born outside the country. But there is so much more. There are details that speak to the mundane, everyday lives of immigrants and refugees—stories that are largely ignored by the media in favor of more sensational topics such as crime, terrorism, and failed integration. Topics that do not reflect the overwhelming majority of people who have immigrated to Sweden and Europe. People who have often fled violence and persecution in search of a quiet, ordinary, and anonymous life.

To not recognize their everyday lives or to refuse to acknowledge their efforts to integrate into their new societies is to subject them to a second form of violence: the symbolic murder of their humanity.

Let’s be honest. The decision to present immigrants and refugees in one way rather than another is both deliberate and conscious. And let’s not deny the cruel irony that immigrants, routinely smeared as “lazy,” “violent,” and “incapable of integrating,” were murdered by an "ethnic Swede" who himself lived an unintegrated life as a “loner.”

Immigrants like Bassam, a father of two who came to Sweden from Syria. He worked making bread and preparing food, and on days when he had Swedish language classes, he would start work at 4:00 or 5:00 am, attend his language class, then return to work and stay late.

Immigrants like Salim, a refugee from Syria who had become a Swedish citizen and was studying to become a healthcare worker. He was engaged and had just bought a house. His last act, as he lay dying after being shot, was to call his mother and ask her to take care of his fiancée.

Immigrants like Elsa, who arrived in Sweden in 2015 from Eritrea and was also studying to become an assistant nurse. She was already employed at a nursing home and worked as a contact person for disabled residents in the municipality. She wanted to have two jobs to earn enough money for her husband to get a residence permit. They had four children.

These were victims of an act of violence that ended their physical presence in this world. To not recognize their everyday lives or to refuse to acknowledge their efforts to integrate into their new societies is to subject them to a second form of violence: the symbolic murder of their humanity. We are regularly told that immigrants to Europe from “other” parts of the world do not share our “values.” Yet, in the case of the mass murder in Sweden, we see victims who worked—often with multiple jobs—to integrate and create a better life. In short, they shattered the stereotype of the isolated, lazy immigrant unwilling to engage with Swedish society.

In the days (and now weeks) after the mass murder in Örebro, media in Sweden have been telling the stories of some of these immigrants and their families. About their lives and their losses. This is important progress in Sweden… while media outside of the country have overwhelmingly ignored the dead. But it also raises the question: Should it really take being killed in a mass murder to have your story told?

There are parts of the world that receive media coverage in Europe and the U.S. almost exclusively when there is war, famine, or natural disasters. This links these regions with crisis in the minds of news consumers, and it is a connection that is hard to break. The very idea that people in these regions have everyday concerns, worries, and joys like we do at home is very rarely addressed. Similarly, in domestic media, there are segments of society that are covered primarily when something negative or terrible happens. This creates a similar mental map for news consumers, overshadowing all other perspectives.

In journalism and media research, the concept of “framing” suggests that how an issue or group is presented (rhetorically or visually) in news affects how that issue or group is perceived and understood. But what is not shown is also part of “framing.” What is omitted in the presentation and analysis of society is also an editorial decision.

This should also be seen as part of the debt owed to many of those killed in Örebro. To recognize the power of media to shape not only what people think about but also how they think about it, and to present the everyday lives of those who come to Sweden and Europe not only when linked to tragedy and violence.

Imagine a world without effective nonprofit advocacy. When a corporation exploits a local community, no one speaks up or resists. Everyone is too afraid of the weaponized legal system, too vulnerable to liability. The ultra-wealthy take whatever they want and leave others to pick up the pieces. Opposition and resistance have been extinguished.

Those are the risks of a lawsuit against Greenpeace, now going to trial in North Dakota after a seven-year legal battle. Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, is seeking $300 million for tort damages, including defamation. Energy Transfer’s previous attempt to sue Greenpeace under federal anti-racketeering laws was blocked by the courts. But the state charges have been upheld, with a trial beginning on February 24, and free-speech advocates are raising alarms about the dangerous precedent that would follow a loss for Greenpeace, or even from the trial proceeding at all.

I recently spoke with Scott W. Badenoch, Jr., a visiting attorney at the Environmental Law Institute. He’s part of a team of distinguished international legal scholars, including Steven Donziger and Jeanne Mirer, who have launched a Trial Monitoring Committee to ensure the case against Greenpeace proceeds fairly and transparently.

While the Trial Monitors and some activists will be on the ground in North Dakota, we need to make noise online and in the media, ensuring that as many people as possible know what’s at stake.

As Badenoch described it, the court is trying to maintain “as much of a black box as you could possibly create in the U.S. court system.” Judge James Gion recently denied a motion to allow live streaming of the trial proceedings.

Instead, Badenoch said the case should be dismissed immediately. The allegations attempt to hold Greenpeace responsible for the actions of activists and volunteers unaffiliated with the group. Legal advocates and climate organizers have called it an unconstitutional SLAPP suit, intended to burden Greenpeace with costly legal fees, shut them down, and restrict the free speech of nonprofits more broadly. “There is absolutely no justification for this trial happening in this court, at this time, with this judge,” Badenoch said. “Just none.”

In a press release from the Trial Monitoring Committee, Steven Donziger pointed to recent trends, writing that “this appears to be part of a broader strategy by the fossil fuel industry to weaponize the courts against activists and weaken organizations like Greenpeace in retaliation for their advocacy.”

While the trial itself presents dangers, the recent actions of Energy Transfer have also brought accusations of jury-tampering. In October, residents of rural Morton County, North Dakota, where the trial will be set, received what appeared to be a legitimate newspaper. However, it contained almost exclusively critical attacks on Greenpeace and the pipeline protests, while praising Energy Transfer. The “newspaper” was actually a political mailer from a company called Metric Media, with links to electioneering and fossil fuel companies, as reported in the North Dakota News Cooperative. Even more concerning, financial records link the CEO of Energy Transfer, Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren, to the creation of the fake newspaper. It looks a like blatant attempt to taint the jury pool. Despite this, Judge Gion refused to allow Greenpeace to investigate the origins of the biased mailer.

The crucial role of the Trial Monitoring Committee is to bring attention to these abuses of due process. “We are going to monitor this case one way or the other,” Badenoch told me. “But the more that [Judge Gion] withholds transparency and access from us, the more obvious it is that something is going on that they don’t want people to see.”

Meanwhile, the stakes of the case extend far beyond Greenpeace. If Energy Transfer is successful, Badenoch said, the precedent would be cataclysmic for nonprofit advocacy. An organization could be held liable for any actions by any activists, however tenuously affiliated. “Literally every social justice, climate justice, civil rights, human rights organization across the country—and maybe the planet—is at risk of legal murder in a courtroom, where an organization is put to death by a SLAPP suit.”

As members of the public, that means we all have a responsibility to advocate for transparency, fairness, and ideally dismissal of Energy Transfer’s lawsuit. While the Trial Monitors and some activists will be on the ground in North Dakota, we need to make noise online and in the media, ensuring that as many people as possible know what’s at stake. Badenoch was emphatic about this: “The number one thing is to bring attention to the case. Don’t let Greenpeace die with a whimper.”

In a time of chaos and distraction, it’s all too easy to let cases like this one go unnoticed. But the risks are simply too dire to ignore. “It’s absolutely terrifying for advocacy in this country and beyond. The risks are really hard to overstate,” Badenoch told me. “If Greenpeace is allowed to die in this field in North Dakota, then every single nonprofit is next in line.”