Some right-wingers, centrist Democrats, and independents defend the Iran War by citing the Iranian regime’s mass killing of protesters in late 2025 and early 2026. But it doesn’t add up.

The most reliable numbers from the Human Rights Activists News Agency stand around 7,000 people killed, of which over 200 were security forces. The Western media salivated over these numbers, in contrast to the well-documented genocide in Gaza, with some claiming the death toll at 30,000. President Donald Trump has offered no evidence whatsoever to claim 45,000 people were killed. However, the media correctly note that this latest government clampdown was indeed the largest number of protesters killed in the history of the Islamic Republic.

Trump warned that if the Iranian government didn’t stop violence against the protesters, the US would attack Iran. Not too long after, when protests had somewhat died down, the United States launched a second war against Iran during peace negotiations. The stated reasons were all over the place but they can be summed up as follows:

a) Israel was going to attack Iran, Iran would therefore attack US positions, so US attacked first.

b) To diminish Iran nuclear and missile capabilities.

c) To protect Israel from future Iranian attacks.

Last, but not least, this one seemed to stick in people’s minds:

d) Protecting Iranians from their own government.

In the past few weeks, reports confirmed what many had already surmised, completely throwing the “saving Iranians” argument for war out the window. The US was involved in fueling the violence by sending weapons through Kurdish intermediaries to arm Iranian protesters.

The results bore fruit, as intended. The Iranian expert Trita Parsi explained on Democracy Now! that the organized armed elements within the protests attacked civilian infrastructure, mosques, and government forces. This resulted in hundreds of government forces being killed. In response, a far larger number of protesters were killed than in past Iranian protests. The Iranian government is repressive, but this level of violence against protesters indicated something else was at work.

It was the CIA with a tried-and-true method of overthrow and internal political machinations. It called to mind 1953, when Iran was a democracy under Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Due to his attempts to nationalize the country’s oil, the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt hatched a plan for a successful coup d’etat after failing a first attempt days earlier.

The CIA paid Iranians to topple statues of the Shah. Pro-democratic Iranians joined in, creating a sense of anarchy. Mossadegh chose not to act against these actions for a day and pro-Shah elements, supported by the US, came into the street shouting “Death to Mossadegh!” Under this contrived sense of disorder, Iranian Colonel Nasiri placed Mossadegh under arrest and the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, took power. During the 1970s the Shah became increasingly oppressive (and staunchly backed by the US), leading to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It was a revolt against historic outside intervention in Iranian politics by the US and Great Britain.

In 1953, the CIA deposed a nationalist democratically elected leader that the US and Great Britain didn’t approve of to get the more pliable ruler. This winter, the US attempted to create a real-life stage play that depicted a fairly oppressive regime that suddenly appeared unrestrained in its use of mass violence against its citizens. The script showed this regime going off the deep end in killing protesters in the thousands within a relatively short period of time. But within this legitimate protest movement, the Kurds (at the behest of the US) distributed weapons that were used to shoot and kill government forces. Imagine, for a second, China arming a US protest movement and hundreds of US police, national guard officers, or ICE members were killed. How would the government respond? With smile emojis?

Last week, the rich, historic Iranian civilization that Donald Trump was supposedly at war to protect, he threatened to annihilate. Well before threatening war crimes against Iran, for Americans to believe that a brutal, unjust war was for the wellbeing of the Iranian people was wildly naïve. As if conducting mass violence and indiscriminate attacks against a people and their society would save them. The Secretary of War said as much, stating clearly that the US would not be concerned about “stupid rules of engagement,” which is pretty much a direct admission to war crimes subsequently committed.

The US and Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of schools, hospitals, universities, a synagogue shows the truth of the war’s aims: to crush any opposition to US empire and Israeli regional hegemony, regardless of civilian mass deaths and infrastructure damage incurred. Just as the 1953 coup of Mossadegh put perceived US imperial interests front and center, so did the fueling of violence in the Iranian protests to paint a picture of an Iranian regime gone mad in its violence towards civilians.

So, to the naïve among us, when your government tells you it is killing people to help them, maybe this time think twice.

In the aftermath of last week’s big meeting of the Democratic National Committee in New Orleans, supporters of the US-Israel alliance have been quite content. “We’re pleased that the DNC Resolutions Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” the president of Democratic Majority for Israel said. The CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, a former national security advisor to Kamala Harris, expressed gratitude to the DNC’s leadership.

Why did pro-Israel groups voice so much pleasure and praise—not only for the sidelining of pro-human-rights resolutions but also for the process that sidelined them? The answer has to do with the DNC’s mechanism that thwarted changes in positions on Israel. A panel named the Middle East Working Group gummed up all efforts to align the DNC with the views of most Democratic voters, even while supposedly hard at work.

Last Friday, the transparent thinness of the pretense caused Politico to headline an article this way: “Inside the DNC’s Middle East (Not) Working Group.” But the not-working group had been functioning quite well—as a charade for delay and obfuscation.

The day before the derisive headline appeared, the DNC Resolutions Committee dispensed with a resolution about events in Gaza and the West Bank. Its provisions included a declaration that the DNC “supports pausing or conditioning US weapons transfers to any military units credibly implicated in violations of international humanitarian law or obstruction of humanitarian assistance.”

Given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time.

That resolution critical of Israel went nowhere, which is to say it went to the so-called working group, also known as a “task force.”

Assisting the diversion as chair of the Resolutions Committee was political strategist Ron Harris, described in his home state of Minnesota as a “longtime Democratic Party insider.” He made false claims during the meeting: “I know that the task force has met once a month since it was created…. I have the confidence that work is happening…. These are people working really really hard over a very thorny issue…. They are doing their work…. They’re hearing from experts and all sorts of things.”

The falsehood that the task force had met “once a month,” when actually it had scarcely met, was enough reason for me to contact Harris and ask where he’d gotten that (mis)information. He replied that it was “according to the DNC staffer coordinating the process.”

The basic problem with the working group is not only that it hasn’t done much of anything in the nearly eight months since DNC Chair Ken Martin announced it with great fanfare. The underlying hoax is that it was set up not to reflect the views of registered Democrats nationwide.

Polling is clear. Three-quarters of Democrats agree that “Israel is committing genocide,” and a large majority are more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israelis by a 4-to-1 margin. But only a minority of the Middle East Working Group’s eight members has a record of supporting Palestinian rights, while several are firm supporters of Israel. The oil-and-water mix seems destined for stalemate or mere platitudes. But stalemate and platitudes appear to be just fine from here to the horizon for DNC leadership.

Such stalling mechanisms and scant real representation are as old as the political hills. In this case, an unfortunate boost has come from James Zogby, who for decades bravely worked inside the Democratic Party and elsewhere to advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, in sharp contrast to US foreign policy.

As the most prominent person in the Middle East Working Group, Zogby has hailed it as an important step forward. Aligning himself with Martin’s approach from the outset, he said that the new chair’s move to set it up was “politically thoughtful.”

Zogby can remember when, in the 1980s, party leaders did not want to hear the “p-word”—Palestinians. He has portrayed the current sparse intra-party discussion related to Israel as major progress. “Don’t count me among those who left New Orleans complaining of defeat,” Zogby wrote in an April 14 piece for The Nation.

After that article appeared, I spoke with Zogby, and he summarized his approach this way: “I have a tendency to feel like sometimes there are little victories, and I latch onto them. Moving to catch up to where Democrats are.”

Compare that approach to this assessment days ago from Mike Merryman-Lotze, the American Friends Service Committee’s director of Just Peace Global Policy: “The failure of the DNC to take even minimal action in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide is shameful.”

When my RootsAction colleague India Walton loudly interrupted the DNC’s business as usual during its general session a week ago, she was challenging a political culture of conformity that has ongoing deadly consequences. The context involves a simple and crucial choice—between excessive patience or urgency that’s grounded in life-and-death human realities. Those realities exist very far away from the transactional atmosphere of entrenched political institutions.

All this matters for at least two profound reasons: One is that, on the merits, silent or euphemistic complicity with Israel’s methodical policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide is abhorrent.

And given the crystal-clear polling, the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to oppose military aid to Israel threatens to seriously damage the turnout needed to defeat Republicans at election time (as polls have shown was the case with Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign for president). “Eight-in-10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents currently have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69 percent last year and 53 percent in 2022,” the Pew Research Center reported last week.

In these exceedingly dystopian times, when realism is more important than ever, it’s a grave mistake to let rose-colored glasses distort vision and substitute undue patience for vital urgency.

On Sunday night, the streets of Budapest were filled. Tens of thousands of Hungarians poured into the streets along the Danube River, singing folk songs and waving flags celebrating the end of Viktor Orbán’s rule. A young man named Mark Szekeres, his face painted with the colors of the Hungarian flag, told CBC News: “This election was about a clash of civilizations. Either you belong in a Western-type democracy or an Eastern-type dictatorship.”

For 16 years, Orbán controlled the country as the classic strongman. Orbán’s electoral defeat was sound—so much so that he conceded defeat before all the votes were counted. Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party captured more than 53% of the vote and approximately 136 of 199 parliamentary seats, a supermajority decisive enough to undo the constitution and other laws that Orbán rewrote. The turnout alone was a verdict: nearly 80% of all eligible voters.

For us fighting democratic backsliding, this is exceedingly consequential. Orbán wrote the authoritarian playbook now being used by Donald Trump and actively exported his approach, even giving Hungarian tax dollars to fund the Conservative Political Action Conference. The people’s playbook used to oust him is a critical case study to learn from—from how the opposition party organized in Orbán’s strongholds, to how they made repression backfire when he overreached, and more.

Informed by talking with people on the ground, I’m writing an outside take of lessons gleaned knowing we’ll need more analyses to make the most of our learning. Already D-HUB, a network of international anti-authoritarian activists, has vowed a more thorough case study after more study and reflection.

Authoritarians create four times as many economic crises—a threat very much in our sightlines in the US.

Orbán’s loss raises a question we all should learn from: How do you beat someone who has spent 16 years rigging the game?

Understand the Bad

To appreciate what happened Sunday, you have to understand just how thoroughly Orbán had slanted Hungarian political life toward authoritarian rule.

Within months of taking power in 2010, Orbán began systematically dismantling independent journalism. He encouraged his oligarch friends to buy media. He created a new state broadcaster, called MTVA, as a government mouthpiece. And his party created a Media Council—staffed by party loyalists—that issued crushing fines for “unbalanced” news that didn’t toe the party line.

By 2018, more than 470 pro-government outlets had been merged into a single conglomerate called KESMA—the Central European Press and Media Foundation—making the concentration of power official. Orbán’s party and friends eventually controlled roughly 80% of Hungary’s media landscape. “You can’t write anything bad about the government,” one anonymous Hungarian journalist told Al Jazeera.

Then the courts. Orbán passed a new constitution and forced 274 judges and prosecutors into early retirement in the first year alone. The judiciary became almost entirely a political instrument.

Then, most consequentially, he moved to rig elections: The maps were redrawn, and he gained control of independent institutions overseeing elections. Orbán shaped Hungary’s 106 electoral districts with no input from the opposition, concentrating urban voters into large districts while spreading out his rural voters into more districts. The results were staggering: In 2014, Orbán’s ruling party captured 45% of the vote—but 91% of the districts. “Free but not fair,” as the ever insightful John Oliver put it in his review of Orbán’s rule just ahead of the elections. “You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.”

Universities are often the birthplace of pro-democracy movements, and grinding them down was essential. The most famous casualty was Central European University, founded by George Soros, which was slandered and pushed out of the country. This was in line with right-wing and antisemitic attacks on anything Soros-related (even though Orbán had once received a Soros-funded scholarship).

And finally, he created imagined enemies of the state. Like every authoritarian, Orbán used divide-and-rule to create people to fear and keep his own growing scandals and corruption off the front page. Like most authoritarians of late, he chose LGBTQ people and immigrants as his primary scapegoats. George Soros, the EU, and Ukrainians were added to the roster of villains.

When President Trump sent Vice President JD Vance to campaign for Orbán, Vance followed Orbán’s escalating attacks on EU bureaucrats, who had voiced concerns about how Orbán’s re-election would affect the future of the EU. With no sense of irony, at his campaign stop Vance called the EU bureaucrats “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I have ever seen or ever even read about.”

So with that much control, how did Orbán lose? And so badly?

Tyranny Is Unstable

One reason dictatorships can be appealing, at least to some, is that they appear effective. To his supporters, Trump gets things done. While the democratic process is slow and grinding, the dictatorial one is about action. It breaks through red tape and fixes problems.

There’s truth in this, so far as democracy can be messy and dictatorships simple to understand. But it’s also mythical. Because a dictator doesn’t run a country—they order others to run a country.

Whereas power is traditionally seen as flowing downwards, in fact many pillars are required to hold it upright. These are groups and institutions—like media, religious institutions, the business community, civil servants, and security forces—that prop up the regime. In Thailand, where I first learned about this model of the “pillars of support,” it was drawn as an upside-down triangle.

A dictatorship is no exception. By keeping society functioning, these pillars support the regime, even if they may disagree with it in private.

It’s important to recognize that power is never as stable as it seems. It is not the natural state of humans to be dictated to.

As a parent of a 7-year-old, I can attest: Go to any playground and you will see a bunch of kids experimenting with ordering each other around. Kids don’t like being bossed around. So the wise ones learn how to ask, entice, convince. The bullies learn to just use fear.

The problem with ruling with fear is that it requires constant and ongoing pressure. It creates frustration from those who have been slighted, grudges get nursed and a level of control needs to be constantly applied.

Ahead of the election, many (but not all!) of the pillars propping up Orbán began to crack. The economy, the media stranglehold, and the manufactured fear—all began to crumble.

The Economy Was the Biggest Crack

Most activists I talked with described the Hungarian economy as Orbán’s primary vulnerability. Hungary has suffered the worst inflation of any EU country over the past 25 years. Prices rose 57% over that period—nearly double the EU average of 28%. The healthcare system deteriorated badly, with hospitals crumbling and doctors fleeing for better jobs. Hungary ranked last in the EU on household wealth in 2025.

This is common for authoritarians. We know instinctively that authoritarians do not take orders from polls or the number of people in the streets. As Rebecca Solnit beautifully put it, authoritarians view power as a “conquering army that would terrorize and intimidate the populace into subjugation”—as opposed to that of a flower, where “when you treat others well, when you meet their needs, you can enter into relationships that serve you as well as them.”

The outcome is that authoritarians ignore the pleas of the people. According to research from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, authoritarians create four times as many economic crises—a threat very much in our sightlines in the US. They spend 50% less on social protections like healthcare. Unresponsive to the needs of the people, they spend less on education, with students in school for fewer years, receiving lower quality instruction. All this adds up to life expectancies that are 12 years lower and infant mortality rates that are 62.5% higher. And, of course, corruption becomes the standard way of life.

As Hungarians struggled in all of these ways, Orbán’s friends grew rich. Video footage circulated of an estate owned by Orbán’s father with zebras grazing near it. It turned out that the zebras were from a nearby estate owned by Hungary’s richest man, who is also a close friend of Orbán—so they became a potent symbol of elite excess.

Stefania Kapronczay, a Hungarian human rights strategist, identified the core problem Fidesz faced: It thought it had a sales problem when it really had a problem with the product. “Instead of addressing [voters’] demands they resorted to creating enemies and being louder,” she explained. “The economy stalled in the past 4 years. The explanation that it’s somehow Brussels’ fault and soon there will be never-seen-before success rang empty. They also miscalculated how pro-European Hungarians are.”

Unable to campaign on any positive accomplishments, Orbán defaulted to fearmongering. As an analyst wrote in Foreign Policy, Orbán’s campaign was centered on “fantastical claims about Ukraine planning military actions against Hungary,” substituting conspiracy for governance. “After a while voters, especially moderates, become exhausted by constant messages of fear, hatred, and vituperation.”

But conditions alone do not dictate election outcomes. I’ve been running around the US telling the story of Zimbabwe. In the 2002 elections, President Robert Mugabe abducted activists and controlled elections. By the time the 2005 parliamentary election rolled around, a Zimbabwean colleague told me, “We’re already living in hell; it can’t get any worse.” The inflation rate had exceeded 100%. But Mugabe managed to buy and steal the election for his party again. By 2008 the economy had completely bottomed out with an unbelievable inflation rate: over 200 million percent. The colleague told me the same thing, “This time it can’t get any worse.” Still, Mugabe won—this time by attacking and torturing people so extensively that opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai withdrew from the race.

My point here is this: It can get a lot worse and that alone won’t change the electoral outcomes. Organizing, not conditions, is most important.

A Talented Candidate

The opposition party candidate who won the campaign, Péter Magyar, is not a left-wing hero. He was a loyal insider until 2024—an Orbán man through and through. He married a government minister.

His break came after a corruption scandal where—you guessed it—Orbán’s party pardoned a convicted accomplice in child sexual abuse.

Magyar went public on Partizán, an independent YouTube channel, revealing the rot at the center of Orbán’s “Christian nationalist” project. “For a long time I believed in an idea, the national, sovereign, civil Hungary,” he wrote. “Today, I had to realize that all of this is really just a political product, a frosting that serves only two purposes, covering up the operation of the power factory and acquiring enormous amounts of wealth.”

The lesson for Democrats—and for any opposition movement—is painfully direct: Running against the other side’s failures, without a clear and compelling alternative vision, leaves persuadable voters with nothing to vote toward.

His credibility as a defector—someone who had seen it from the inside—gave him a voice that no outside opposition figure could replicate.

He was also a masterful communicator. Unlike traditional politicians who attempt to govern at a distance, he regularly walked the country and held rallies in small towns that the opposition party had “sewn up.” For years, he went directly and repeatedly to Orbán strongholds. In the final weeks before the election, he was visiting up to six towns per day.

As Kapronczay observed: “Tisza won because they went all-in: did not stop campaigning, went around the country to meet people and with an amazing political talent reacted to all the mistakes of Fidesz.”

Magyar did not rely on an anti-Orbánism message. He talked regularly about corruption, healthcare, and everyday affordability—things people actually care about. Political analyst Zsuzsanna Végh of the German Marshall Fund described him as “focusing on policy responses, hitting a moderate tone, and giving back agency to voters to decide about their and their country’s future.” A regular campaign slogan was a call for a “humane Hungary.”

And while a bad dictator versus a strong candidate is a good combo, that alone would not suffice to win. Civil society had to play its role.

Tisza Islands: Organizing That Reached Everywhere

One of the most important tactical decisions of the opposition party, Tisza, was the creation of Tisza Szigetek, or “Tisza Islands.”

Beginning in mid-2024 after Magyar’s strong showing in European Parliament elections, the party began systematically building local chapters across the country—not just in Budapest’s liberal districts, but in the small towns and rural constituencies where Orbán’s party had historically been uncontested. By January 2025, social media analysis suggested there were 208 “islands” with over 20,000 members.

Inside the new chapters were a mix of brand new activists and experienced civic and political activists who had been working to reform Hungary for years. New and old, all were active supporters. They staffed campaign stalls. They distributed a volunteer-delivered newspaper called Tiszta Hang, or Clear Voice, launched in July 2025, specifically designed to reach rural voters who were only exposed to pro-Orbán media.

That last point matters. The Tisza Islands were not top-down campaign field offices. They functioned with genuine local autonomy. The party even held closed primaries for all 106 of its constituency candidates—an internal democratic process designed to give local members real ownership of who represented them.

Crucially, this meant that by election day, Tisza was able to deploy a breath-taking 50,000 activists as election monitors across the country’s polling stations. I’m hoping Hungarians will write more about this polling operation, to relay both how it was set up and its effectiveness in assuring a wary public that elections would hold. This was an historic, organized, and scaled effort of election protection.

Investigative Journalism Did What No Campaign Ad Could

One other piece multiple Hungarian activists have raised with me was the critical role of journalists.

Remember that Orbán controlled 80% of the country’s media. And yet, a handful of outlets—Partizán, Direkt36, Telex, 444, Magyar Hang—managed not only to survive but to land body blows in the final months of the campaign.

Partizán gave Magyar the interview that broke open the sexual abuse pardon scandal. Direkt36 broke the story of attempts by government-connected operatives to infiltrate Tisza’s digital infrastructure. Telex published an interview with a police whistleblower about the government’s attempt to send Hungarian troops to Chad. As Martón Kárpáti, the president of the board of Telex, described it: “This campaign showed the importance of the free media.”

A few people acting courageously opens the doors for more.

A key documentary—A Szavazat Ára, or The Price of the Vote—was released on March 26 by the investigative team at DE! Akcióközösség. Based on a six-month investigation, the film documented Orbán’s party’s systematic operation of vote buying and voter intimidation and coercion in impoverished rural communities. It showed that Orbán’s mayors controlled who got food, housing, and even drugs. Within days, the documentary had been watched 1.3 million times.

This weakened the intimidation network. For the first time, government loyalists felt that they might be exposed. As political scientist Gábor Toka noted, “Intermediaries are [now] far less confident that illegal activities won’t be investigated and punished.”

Ahead of the election, this led Euractic to conclude in a headline: “Hungary’s Independent Media Has Already Won the Election.”

The Public Shakes Off Fear

The June 2025 Budapest Pride parade was a classic backfire moment. Orbán had been escalating his war against LGBTQ folks for sometime. LGBTQ rights activists had been pushing back for years. But last summer his party took an extreme step and all but banned the Budapest Pride parade. His party enacted extremely tight rules on when and where and how the parade could proceed, wild police oversight, further restrictions under the pretense of “child protection,” and encouraged local authorities to deny event approvals entirely. It was an overreach, and the Pride parade swelled to massive numbers, with people clearly having fun and boldly proclaiming they would not let the government scare them off.

“The unsuccessful ban on the Pride parade was a clear sign of Fidesz’s inability to regain the political initiative,” wrote Hungarian journalist Pal Daniel Rényi. Ahead of the elections, the people had signaled that they were not going to be cowed. The massive parades exposed the government as out of ideas and increasingly disconnected from the public mood.

This kind of moment has been described by Turkish-American economist and political scientist Timur Kuran as an “unanticipated revolution”—a moment when an otherwise powerful political leader who seems to have full support suddenly has it evaporate.

Backfire happens when the public shakes off its fear, and the rift between the people and the authoritarian is revealed.

What Activists Should Take From This

Here, then, are eight points about what the defeat of Viktor Orbán offers to people doing the long, unglamorous, essential work of democracy defense.

1. You have to meet people where they actually live. The Tisza Islands model is a direct rebuke to opposition campaigns that organize from the cities outward or from the top downwards. Magyar’s team built physical, relational infrastructure in communities that had been written off—not because they expected to win every seat, but because showing up is the message. The act of going to rural Hungary, of knocking on doors in Fidesz strongholds, communicated something no television ad could: that people in those communities were worth fighting for. Any opposition movement that limits itself to mobilizing its existing base is already half-defeated.

2. Anti is not enough—you need a proposition. Magyar ran on corruption, yes, but he ran for something: affordability, public healthcare, housing, a “humane Hungary.” He hammered relentlessly on what Orbán’s rule had cost ordinary people in their daily lives. The lesson for Democrats—and for any opposition movement—is painfully direct: Running against the other side’s failures, without a clear and compelling alternative vision, leaves persuadable voters with nothing to vote toward.

3. Build for the long game, but deploy at election time. The underground LGBTQ organizing work and the Tisza Islands didn’t spring up in campaign season. They were built over many years, quietly, in communities across the country. Civil society organizations spent that same period building nonpartisan mobilization infrastructure, producing online videos, and recruiting election monitors. The 50,000 activists who showed up as poll watchers on election day didn’t materialize from nowhere—they were organized, trained, and ready. Democracy defense isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon that occasionally demands a sprint.

4. Investigative journalism is infrastructure. This is perhaps the most striking lesson for movements in countries where independent media has been similarly squeezed. In a media environment where 80% of outlets are government-aligned, a handful of scrappy independent outlets broke stories that changed the trajectory of an election. The lesson isn’t just to support independent journalism (though that matters). It’s that, when coordinated with civil society organizing and election protection, investigative journalism creates a kind of immune system for democracy. When those functions work together, they become more than the sum of their parts.

5. Election protection is a form of power. Hungary’s activists understood something that is increasingly essential in systems where the electoral rules are rigged: You cannot simply outperform the fraud margin and hope for the best. You have to actively contest it. The 50,000 election monitors Tisza deployed were not passive observers—they reduced fear and combated intimidation. The documentary released weeks before the election served a similar function, activating public consciousness about what was happening in those rural constituencies. This combination—exposing the system, then flooding it with watchers—helped neutralize what had historically been a decisive advantage for Fidesz.

6. Plan for backfire. Yes, some moments just arise—in Hungary, wearing zebra costumes; in the US, frog costumes. But other moments are organized, such as the surge of people at the Budapest Pride parade. The folks at HOPE have created a curriculum to learn more about the dynamics of backfire. A key insight: Backfire isn’t automatic. Repression only sparks outrage when it’s seen, understood, and emotionally felt, which means movements have to actively expose injustice, frame it clearly, and help people connect the dots so what power tries to hide becomes impossible to ignore.

7. If you can only do one thing: Act courageously. Much of Orbán’s rule was marked by people publicly kowtowing. Timothy Kuran wrote a book called Private Truths, Public Lies about “preference falsification”—the idea that people fabricate their public preferences to match social pressure. When there’s enough social pressure, people conform—even if privately they disagree. This can generate a collective illusion that the authoritarian has broad support even when he doesn’t—until a sudden tipping point is reached and the whole facade collapses rapidly. Before that tipping point is reached, however, some individuals have to be very brave: acting noncooperatively, voicing dissent, organizing marches and protests, taking public stances, and going into strongholds to convince people they are being cheated. A few people acting courageously opens the doors for more.

8. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the winnable. Magyar is not a folk hero. He’s a politician who is, for now, best suited to dismantle Orbán’s authoritarian state. Magyar’s party does promote greater inclusion of women and Romani people in its platform. However, he remains socially conservative, and his history as an Orbán loyalist is more than cause for concern. But after left-wing parties failed to meet the moment, the people saw him as their best chance to defeat Orbán. Movements fighting authoritarianism will always face the tension between holding out for the ideal candidate and unifying behind the one who can actually win.

The Work Continues

As with any electoral win, the work is only started. Orbán still controls Hungary’s media. He packed the Constitutional Court. He built an economy of patronage and dependency that reaches into every village. Magyar’s supermajority gives them the constitutional power to undo much of what was done—but the institutions, the oligarchic networks, the culture of intimidation, will not dissolve the day Magyar is inaugurated.

For organizers, this is the sobering coda: Electoral victory is a door, not a destination. But on a Sunday night in Budapest, they earned a moment to celebrate. And we should take a lot of hope from that, too. As US organizer Ash-Lee Henderson noted in her response to Orbán’s loss: “I’m not trying to tell you that Hungary is America. It’s not. I’m telling you, though, that the math is similar everywhere. There are always more of us than there are of them. The question is never whether the people have the power. The question is whether we build something worth moving for.”

Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, spoke candidly years ago about why Republicans like tax cuts so much. In his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, he confided that tax cuts served the purpose of creating budget deficits that could then be used to justify spending cuts on government programs. Typically, administrations only cut spending for a program if it’s no longer necessary, and the resultant surplus may then be used as a tax cut to stimulate the economy. However, Stockman turned this on its head by using the tax cuts to create a budgetary crisis that would then require cuts in spending regardless of whether the programs were necessary or not.

In other words, Stockman used tax cuts to create a revenue problem that the Reagan administration could then mask as a spending problem. This is known as “starving the beast.” The administration starves the beast—important government services—of important tax revenues in order to slash government spending.

Stockman himself admitted the failure of this strategy since budget deficits during the Reagan administration did not bring down public spending in a meaningful way. This failure, however, didn’t stop the next generation of conservatives from making it a key part of their larger political project. In 2001 and 2003, for instance, George W. Bush pushed through massive tax cuts meant to impose a “fiscal straitjacket” on Congress. This then prompted Bush’s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 to gut government programs.

Republican lawmakers attempted this again after they took control of the House of Representatives during the Obama administration in 2010. At the time, the US economy was struggling through the Great Recession, which congressional Republicans blamed on government profligacy and “out of control spending.” Not only did they hold the debt ceiling hostage to prevent future spending, but they urged more tax cuts to stimulate the economy. In general, starving the beast has become a more common, and outright underhanded, stratagem by which lawmakers have gone about cutting federal spending.

What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs?

This strategy has also functioned as a form of class politics: Wealthy elites are often the main beneficiaries of the tax cuts financed by cuts in social services on which the average American is more likely to depend. For instance, Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act slashed top marginal tax rates from 70% to 50%, a rate that only the top 2% of Americans paid (those rates dropped even further to 28% in 1986). This cut was largely paid for with reductions in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid funding, student loans, and other social services. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 served the same agenda. According to research by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 20% received 65% of the benefits of those tax cuts, while the top 5% received 38%. Spending was then cut under the Deficit Reduction Act by targeting Medicaid, Medicare, the Migrant and Season Farmworkers Program, literacy programs, and others.

The American public is now far more aware of who has, and who has not, benefited from cuts in taxes and spending, and public opinion makes it harder for lawmakers to starve the beast. New polling shows that only 19% of Americans support the idea of cutting taxes on the wealthy, while 58% say the wealthy should be paying more (this number rises to 63% when asked about large businesses and corporations). At the same time, the majority of Americans want the government to maintain spending on the kinds of programs that are usually targeted, such as Medicaid and food stamps, medical and cancer research, federal childcare programs, or the arts in public schools. In other words, Republican lawmakers are going to have a harder time gutting these programs by further cutting top marginal tax rates.

That is why they are finding new ways to starve the beast. The latest strategy has been to leverage the heavy cost of national security issues.

Nowhere is this more evident than through the US and Israel’s joint war with Iran. The bombing of Iran has proven to be even more expensive than the initial stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the daily burn rate averaging around $1-2 billion a day. Shortly after launching the war in late February, President Donald Trump sought an additional $200 billion from Congress to fund it. The GOP is now using that price tag to plan massive cuts to important government programs.

In early April, for instance, Republicans proposed a reconciliation bill they claim would save $30 billion but would also drive up the out-of-pocket premium costs and increase the number of people without health insurance. Later that week, Trump candidly spoke of his intentions to slash government spending against the backdrop of a budgetary crisis caused by the war:

We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars […] Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection—we have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.

Trump’s claim that the United States can’t afford these programs are patently false. Programs like Medicare and Medicaid are planned spending that are not responsible for budget deficits.

However, the president’s comments make sense when contextualized against his longer-term plans to rein in federal spending. Through the creation of DOGE, Trump attempted to usher in an era of “government efficiency,” which included sharp reductions in several programs including Medicare and Medicaid. Although technically still operational, DOGE is largely seen as a failure as it never achieved its goal of major spending cuts (in fact, government spending increased 6% in 2025).

The Iran war can complete the job that DOGE couldn’t. Trump is currently asking for a $1.5 trillion military budget—a 64% increase in military spending since last year—which provides the budgetary pressure needed to justify gutting necessary programs that have been on the books for decades. In doing so, Trump is essentially reviving the starve-the-beast strategy by fitting it into a large military project.

Although the strategy to starve the beast has changed, the class politics remains the same. Those affected will be those most reliant on programs designed to provide healthcare, education, and food. However, in this case the consequence are no longer restricted to the American taxpayer. The increase in military expenditures will be used to inflict harm upon vulnerable populations abroad. The strikes in Iran have already killed thousands of people and displaced over a million civilians.

The horrifying reality is that this carries the very real danger of becoming a common finance strategy. What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs? Trump’s war in Iran establishes just such a dangerous precedent. For this reason, the American people must realize that their livelihood at home requires placing greater controls on what a president can do abroad.

I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” (as the final stanza of the national anthem puts it). Francis Scott Key wrote those words in 1814. However, they were not true then, or in 1942, or today in Donald Trump’s all too reactionary America. My Blackness consigned obstacles to me (as it would have in 1814 and 1942) that white people simply don’t have.

Let me explain.

Life Under Racism

Throughout the 1950s, living in a segregated project in Kinston, North Carolina, there were several odd characters who (I now understand) were mentally ill. One was Snap—or that was what we called him anyway—a man of medium height and brown complexion with a fuzzy beard. Rain or shine, he walked around in the same grey overcoat, spring, summer, and winter, too. Frequently, he sat in a chair under the shade of an oak tree with his eyes closed while smoking a corncob pipe. I never heard him utter a single word, not one, so I didn’t even know if he could speak.

As a kid, I thought he might have been named Snap because his brain had been fractured or broken somehow. When we neighborhood kids were involved in games, he would walk right through the middle of them (as if we didn’t exist). If we were playing football and one of us was running out for a pass, Snap would walk between the ball in the air and the receiver, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. So, we would just continue to play as if he didn’t exist.

Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches.

I once asked my mother what was wrong with Snap and she responded with a degree of certainty: “He’s not right in the head because a bullet was lodged in his brain.” But she explained nothing more. So that left me wondering how he could walk around with a bullet in his head.

I never learned what actually happened to him (though I hate to imagine it today). He was taken care of by relatives who lived a few doors away from us in the project. We children weren’t afraid of him, though he was different from any other adult we knew. Instead, I remember feeling sadness whenever I saw him. He seemed so lonely, being unable to communicate with anyone.

Another character in our community was Preacher. He pushed a wooden cart all over town, making noises with his mouth like a motor car in motion. In the cart were pots, pans, and old clothes. I heard that he had been a Jackleg Preacher, which in my community meant that he had been untrained as a minister, but that he had been spoken to by God and told to preach and carry his message. As with Snap, I never heard Preacher say a word, but I recognized that he was crazy and so got out of his way.

The project where we lived was a community in which the “different” and “damaged” existed next to the normal. In better-off communities across the country, both Snap and Preacher would have been sent to mental institutions, but not in our segregated community. I often wonder if they were living examples of what can happen to Black people when racism joins with other forces, including poverty, personal trauma, and abuse, to break the mind. I later came to wonder whether the trauma of racism was in part responsible for their inability to function in a normal way.

The Psychological Effects of Racism

Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches. In his classic book Black Skin, White Masks, Black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon developed accounts of the psychological effects of racism based, in part, on his own experiences in the French Caribbean. Some of the psychological conditions in the Black community can certainly be attributed to present-day racism, as well as to the multigenerational trauma inflicted on the descendants of American slavery. (Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University are now examining the links between racism and mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis.)

Mental illness certainly found its way into my family. My sister Sherrill held a special place among us because she was the youngest of us and a girl. She was a very good student and a pious Catholic attending the Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic school in her early years. Intelligent and attractive, with the distinctively large eyes of my mother’s family, during her teenage years, she became politically engaged, actively participating in sit-ins, as well as civil rights demonstrations led by our brother Simeon. We had many conversations in our family about civil rights in this country, as well as about how African nations had overcome colonialism by declaring independence and about what all of that meant for our own futures. During that period, Sherrill was active in every aspect of our family life, had good friends, and (although she was moody and could be unusually withdrawn at times) didn’t appear to have the sort of psychological issues that would destroy her promising future.

In 1960, the nuns (all of whom were white) at her Catholic school suggested Sherrill would be a good candidate for the Order’s high school, Saint Joseph’s Academy, in Pennsylvania. The Order of the Most Precious Blood had been founded in Switzerland in 1834 as an active apostolic congregation devoted to Eucharistic prayer and ministry. The Order believed in positive change in the world, was strongly against injustice, and emphasized the value of education, enhancing its appeal to my family.

Isolation in the White World

Nonetheless, in those years, Saint Joseph’s Academy, a boarding school, was a typically white institution with only three or four Black women students attending. Until then, in the still largely segregated South, Sherrill had never been to a school with white students, nor lived among white people. She had been educated in a segregated Catholic elementary school in Kinston. In the new environment, I suspect, my sister was afraid, since she had to deal daily with verbal abuse by white nuns and students who all too often communicated hostile messages toward Blacks. Nor did the school provide any counseling services to help Black students deal with such a grim ongoing reality.

The Doll Test

Religion was at the center of life at St. Joseph’s, but that didn’t prevent Sherrill from experiencing racist aggressions. Many years later, Sarah, a friend of Sherill’s who attended the academy two years before my sister, told me of the hurt she felt when she was excluded from a social gathering at the home of another student because only whites were invited. The racist views of so many of the students, as well as the nuns themselves, were deeply rooted in their psyches, as was then (and remains) true for so much of white America. Did the nuns feel that Black girls weren’t as smart as white girls? Nor as attractive? Nor as spiritual? Undoubtedly. As we know from the famous study of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in what is called “the Doll Test,” the effects of segregation were devastating. The study was cited in the Supreme Court’s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. The history of racism from the 1960s to the present moment suggests just what my sister must have experienced.

I believe she must have felt conflicted about leaving home and going to a school in a white community far away. In her frequent letters home, which I only recently reread, she expressed a great deal of loneliness. But she never said she wanted to leave the academy, holding onto her belief in the advantages such an education would provide. Many in the Black Catholic community in Kinston also believed the education provided to the young women at Saint Joseph’s was superior to that of the local segregated public school (and the Catholic school in Kinston did not go beyond eighth grade).

I knew at least five girls from Kinston who had preceded Sherrill to the Academy and for the most part believed the education was better. But today, looking back, I’ve reached a different conclusion. Education at the Academy for a Black young woman must be seen in the context of racism.

But Sherrill’s experiences as a Black girl in an almost completely white institution were not over with that school. She graduated from the academy in four years and matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then, the women’s college of the University of North Carolina, which had only recently been integrated by a few Black students). Thus, my sister’s education after eighth grade was in white institutions that inevitably were at best deeply insensitive and at worst openly hostile to the needs of Black students.

Black Community Support

My brothers and I had a different experience. We all remained in Kinston, attending the segregated Adkin high school. After that, we went to North Carolina College, as the historically Black College in Durham was then called. (Now, it’s North Carolina Central University.) My extended family, friends, and teachers at such Black institutions provided me with the emotional and intellectual grounding I needed to navigate the Jim Crow segregationist world.

But my sister’s experiences—being Black and very alone—must have been a terrible shock for her, since she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness while attending college. According to my mother, she started to hear voices, as well as imagine unreal events and presences. I now see clearly that racism, among other forces and factors, had a profound effect on her mental health and that it was a mistake for her to live in purely white environments at a critical time in her life, far from her family and the support of the Black community.

Worse yet, there was no help to be had then at St. Joseph’s or at the University of North Carolina. I wonder now whether she even realized what was happening to her. Her condition made it difficult at times for her to pay attention or make plans, although she still graduated with excellent grades. Did she believe that her psychological situation was due to her own weakness? Was she afraid? Ashamed? Did she see any connection between her increasing problems and the racism that affected all our lives? I suspect that she did as she aged and her condition worsened.

I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies.

There was another deep belief in our family, reflected in much of the Black community—that you must be stoic to overcome such grim external circumstances. The value of such stoicism and the adaptive capacity for resilience and resistance that goes with it has been deeply ingrained in the Black experience. Given slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, it was nothing less than an intuitive strategy for survival.

I don’t remember our mother’s response when Sherrill told her she was hearing voices, but I suspect she initially thought Sherrill was exaggerating, since she was doing well in college and that boded well for her future. At the time, our mother was still sensitive about having dropped out of high school at 16 to give birth to my brother Ricky, so she might have been reluctant to ask questions. I suspect she told Sherrill that it would all pass, that she would get through it—and Sherrill must have trusted those words because our mother had herself frequently exhibited an ability to rebound from severe pain and chronic discomfort.

And indeed, Sherrill persisted, graduated, and became a case worker for New York City’s Department of Welfare, working there for several years, maintaining social and family relationships, and even traveling to Europe with a friend. During that time, she must have also endured the pain of mental illness without complaint.

The break came in 1973. When Sherrill was 27 years old, our father, then only 51, died of a heart attack. Sherrill had been especially close to him and his death brought on full-blown psychotic symptoms. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia but refused to take medication for that dreaded disease. Over time, she became unable to deal with daily life, was evicted from her apartment and, homeless, began living in shelters or on the streets of New York City.

We searched for her, but with no luck. Then, one day, while walking in Central Park, I suddenly saw her sitting under a large spruce tree with a small suitcase, eating a sandwich. She was wearing a sundress and brown sandals and had inserted wildflowers in her hair. She appeared strangely calm and content as I approached her and carefully inquired how was she managing, asking where lived. At first, she looked away as if she didn’t even recognize me. Then, she slowly turned in a regal fashion and said, “I live here.”

I responded, “You can’t live in Central Park,” and I tried to warn her about the dangers of doing so. She insisted, “Yes I can—others do it.” I attempted to encourage her to take medication, but she simply smiled and looked away. The more I tried to get her to come with me, the more agitated and resistant she became. Finally, hoping against hope that she would remain where I had left her, I walked the few blocks to my mother’s apartment to tell her where Sherrill was and what had happened, but when my mother and I returned, she was gone.

After that, we kept trying to find her and each time we were successful, Mama would tell my sister that she could live with her if she agreed to take medication for schizophrenia. But Sherrill refused, always walking away from us angrily, insisting that she was fine and that we were the ignorant ones, that she was “high born and high class” and we were “common nigras.”

How sad that was. After all her lack of intimacy with and connection to white people and all the support she had received from Blacks, Sherrill came to believe that Prince Charles of England was coming to save her, that he would be her knight in shining armor.

Interventions

Over a six-year period, family members and friends tried to intervene a number of times and we finally did convince Sherrill to live with our brother, Simeon, in San Francisco. He thought he would be able to get through to her, but after six months he couldn’t deal with her mental state anymore.

Then, Sherrill went to live with the nuns at Saint Joseph’s Academy in Pennsylvania at the invitation of Sister Barbara, a Black woman who grew up in Kinston, who was like family and the only Black nun at the Academy. But after a few months living there, Sherrill grew so difficult that the nuns couldn’t cope and she became homeless again.

Finally, after a few years of various attempts to house her with relatives or in shelters, my mother and Sister Barbara went to court in Pennsylvania, convincing a Judge that Sherrill was a “danger to herself and others.” I joined them near a medical facility where she was being held and, while there, she finally and reluctantly accepted medication for her psychosis. After the medication took effect, we were all shocked by how cogent Sherrill became and how willing—finally!—to accept our help. She was cared for by our mother in her home for the next 40 years of her life.

During many of those years, I took her to regular medical appointments, including visits to a psychiatrist. Once I was present while the psychiatrist spoke with her about her medications. Sherrill was largely unresponsive, answering in single words. I had sympathy for the psychiatrist because Sherrill was often unresponsive even to me. Clearly, she didn’t wish to engage in discussions regarding her illness and, as she grew older, she became more remote from family and friends, as well as from her doctors. Episodes of psychotic delusions were often followed by periods of seeming calm when she could appear to be nearly normal, even if she was shy and began to retreat from family gatherings.

However, on that occasion, the psychiatrist’s question to Sherrill evoked deep emotion in her and my sister’s response reopened in me a profound love and affection for her. The psychiatrist asked her: “How do you feel—it must be difficult to live with this difficult illness?” Sherrill looked glassy-eyed, said nothing for a moment, and then started to sob and continued to do so for a full five minutes. Her weeping revealed the depth of her despair, the loss and tragedy of her life. I cried with her, for her pain, for the loss of all she could have become, and the closeness to me and to our family that schizophrenia prevented.

For her remaining years, Sherrill retreated from much of life, cared for by my mother, brother, and me. Her last three years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and another psychotic episode, were spent in a nursing home. She died on April 1, 2020, at 75, on the very day on which she had been born, in the nursing home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one could even visit her body. Hers was a sad and tragic life.

Aftermath

I can’t be sure why my sister became mentally ill, but I do know that she didn’t receive the help of mental professionals in the early moments when she needed it. The reason? It wasn’t available to her because she was Black, without the necessary resources, and came to adulthood in high school and college in communities that did not understand the needs of a young Black woman. In its most profound sense, racism blinded those who were supposed to be her caretakers.

Thirteen generations of Black people were born into slavery in America. Four generations lived through American Jim Crow. These were systems built on the supposed inferiority of Black people. The legacy is a long one. I lived in American segregation—a virulent, racist Apartheid system—for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls. I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies. And all of that represented and still represents a severe, multigenerational assault on the psychological well-being of Black people. We all have had to face these assaults; some overcame them, some, like my sister, succumbed, but at the deepest level none of us could ignore them, not for a moment.

As Prime Minister of Hungary for 16 years, Viktor Orbán became a beacon for the right and one of President Donald Trump’s favorite authoritarian role models. A self-described populist, Orbán’s conquest of democracy’s three pillars—the media, institutions of higher education, and the justice system—became Trump’s template.

Another Orbán characteristic attracted Trump: His regime consistently ranked No. 1 as the most corrupt country in the European Union. He abused political power for self-enrichment. He installed friends and family members in positions of influence and power that made him (and them) wealthy. He used his majority in the legislature to enhance his power. A persistent critic of Ukraine, Orbán also enjoyed the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sound familiar?

Trump embraced and praised Orbán, which meant that his Vice President JD Vance embraced and praised him too.

Vance Surrendered to Ambition

In 2016, Vance had called himself a “Never Trump Guy” and wrote a New York Times op-ed titled, “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation's Highest Office." But he reversed course in 2021 when he ran for the US. Senate and sought successfully to gain Trump’s endorsement.

As a junior senator, Vance could have refrained from voicing an opinion about Orbán. But ambition required otherwise. In a February 2024 interview with European Conservative, Vance was well aware of Trump’s views as he lobbied to become the vice-presidential pick on the Republican ticket. He held out Trump’s Hungarian idol as an example to emulate:

The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.

Of course, Vance—a Yale Law School graduate—knew that Orbán did not offer a “much less biased approach to teaching.” He demanded instruction centered on his view of history and the world.

In the same 2024 interview, Vance previewed what would also become some of Trump’s tactics:

And whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made, and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture. And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.

In a July 2024 interview on Face the Nation, Vance reaffirmed his praise for Orbán’s approach:

What I do think is on the university—on the university principle, the idea that taxpayers should have some influence in how their money is spent at these universities. It’s a totally reasonable thing. And I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.

It was only the beginning of Vance’s “awakening.”

Vance Carried Trump’s Message and Now Bears His Baggage

As vice president, Vance used his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 to attack many of Europe’s democracies by name—but not Hungary. He said that actors from within posed a greater threat than China or Russia: “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

To a stone-faced audience of European leaders, Vance complained about “old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion…”

In fact, what responsible leaders don’t like is misinformation and disinformation pervading the political landscape. Orbán relied on both, as have Trump and Vance.

And Vance declared that mass immigration was Europe's most significant problem, noting record levels of foreign-born residents in Germany and increased EU immigration from non-EU countries caused by “conscious decisions” from certain European leaders.

For Trump and Vance, leaders like Orbán were the antidote to the decline of Western civilization. But heading into the April 2026 election in Hungary, Orbán was down by double digits in the polls.

On April 8, Trump dispatched Vance to Budapest where he held a rally for the embattled leader. Vance portrayed Orbán as a hero:

I’m here because of the moral cooperation between our two countries. Because what the United States and Hungary together represent under Viktor’s leadership and under President Trump’s is the defense of Western civilization… The defense of the idea that we are founded on a certain Christian civilization and Christian values that animate everything from freedom of speech to rule of law to respect for minority rights and protection of the vulnerable.

Vance continued:

Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy? Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers? Then my friends, go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán because he stands for you and he stands for all these things.

In fact, Orbán stood for none of those things.

The closest Trump got to the rally was a speakerphone call via Vance’s cellphone through which he said, “I love Hungary and I love that Viktor.”

Vance’s Reckoning Has Only Begun

On April 12, 2026, three days after Vance’s rally for Orbán, a reckoning arrived for all three men—Orbán, Trump, and Vance. In a landslide, Hungarian voters threw Orbán out of office. The populist had become unpopular, and Hungary’s citizens reclaimed their country.

Vance had followed Trump into Orbán’s abyss, and now Trump is taking him on another losing journey. Vance is the highest-ranking Catholic in the Trump administration, and he has joined Trump in attacking the Pope.

Sometimes ambition makes a person not only blind, but also deaf and dumb.

Here are some things to know about large corporations:

• Corporations in America are free to shut down facilities, whether profitable or unprofitable, with devastating effects on workers, their families, and their communities.
• Corporations are also free to use their cash to repurchase their own stock shares, driving up their price without increasing the company’s value—a pure and simple case of stock manipulation that enriches top corporate executives and Wall Street investors.
• And corporations in the US enjoy the benefits that come from receiving taxpayer-funded government contracts, while retaining the right to destroy the jobs of taxpayers, if they see fit.

Dan Osborn, the Nebraska independent senatorial candidate, knows all this. It’s a good part of the reason he’s running for office, and he needs a plan. He knows this is a travesty, a disaster, a case of the rich and powerful trashing working people. As he puts it, “This isn’t left and right anymore, this is big versus little,” and he wants to do all he can to stop Tyson from killing 3,200 jobs in Lexington, Nebraska.

Osborn has called for the enforcement of the 1921 federal Packers and Stockyards Act, which was designed to promote competitiveness in the livestock, meat, and poultry industries and prohibit deception and fraud. He claims Tyson broke the law by closing its Lexington, Nebraska, plant instead of selling the facility to a competitor. The closure was “destroying 5 percent of America’s beef processing capacity,” Osborn argued, which will drive up prices instead of maintaining a competitive market.

In just the last quarter of 2025, Tyson conducted more than $200 million in stock repurchases which did nothing to improve production and nothing at all to protect the workers.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined the fight by demanding that Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollings use the authority she has under the Act to block the Lexington closure. But, on January 21, 2026, the plant shut down anyway. In fact, no plant closing has ever been stopped by this act.

If the law is not enough to protect these devastated workers and communities, where can Osborn find leverage to help them?

It is really hard to stop a plant closing in the United States of America. Of the millions of mass layoffs over the past three decades, I’m having trouble finding any that have been reversed (although my friends at the Teamsters Union say they have been successful on occasion.) There have been at least a handful of worker buyouts of facilities scheduled for shutdowns that kept them open for a time, but all I know about soon went under.

There is one point of leverage, however, that has yet to be used—federal contracts.

Large corporations love to dine at the federal trough, gobbling up as much taxpayer money as they can through federal grants and contracts. Tyson is no exception. It’s got its hands all over our tax dollars. In 2025, it received 170 federal awards for a total of $234 million. It also received, from 2018 to 2020, $727 million from the Pentagon to supply beef to the military. And those contracts have been renewed through today.

Mass layoffs are a heartless tool that ignores how critical stable employment is to families and communities.

What if Osborn promised that as senator, he would fight for a new federal regulation like this:

All corporations of 500 or more employees that receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts shall not be permitted to conduct compulsory layoffs of taxpayers. All layoffs must be voluntary based on financial incentives.

Wouldn’t that be fair and just? After all, voluntary financial incentives to leave a job are commonplace for executives. And it’s not just severance. The idea is that no one should be forced to leave. The financial incentive would need to be high enough to attract voluntary departures.

Is this proposal too radical for Nebraska?

No doubt, corporations and their political handmaidens would vigorously attack the proposal. Isn’t the key to a free society the right of business owners, large and small, to manage their own enterprises as they see fit? When the government intervenes to control hiring and firing, isn’t it stepping towards socialism, which history has shown is both a failure economically and a path towards totalitarianism? Wouldn’t such a proposal harm jobs, our economy, and democracy?

Osborn’s response could be simple: Corporations would be totally free to hire and fire at will—but not if they are taking taxpayer money. If they want our money, then they can’t force us out against our will. No compulsory layoffs!

We tested this idea and the corporate attacks in our survey of 3,000 Midwestern voters across Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. About half of those voters supported the idea, with very low percentages opposed, even after being introduced to corporate attacks against the policy.

If they want our money, then they can’t force us out against our will. No compulsory layoffs!

Where would the money come from?

That’s where stock buybacks come in. In just the last quarter of 2025, Tyson conducted more than $200 million in stock repurchases which did nothing to improve production and nothing at all to protect the workers. They chose to pad the bonuses of Tyson executives and the portfolios of large Wall Street shareholders. It might have made instead a nice start on a worker buyout fund.

The proposal may sound radical, but nothing about this is pie in the sky. The Siemens Corporation in Germany agreed to a no-compulsory layoff proposal with its union, IG Metall, after it announced the layoff of 3,000 workers. As the result of negotiated settlement with the union, the workers could take voluntary financial buyout packages. But, none of the workers were forced to leave. And instead of the scheduled shutdown of five facilities, the company agreed to put in new products to keep the plants open.

Large corporations like Siemens and Tyson have enormous flexibility. They can rearrange production in countless ways. Unless pressured by the workers through their labor unions, they serve corporate needs first and subordinate those of workers. Mass layoffs are a heartless tool that ignores how critical stable employment is to families and communities. These companies have the financial power to fulfill the needs and interests of their employees, but they choose not to. But for Tyson, and so many companies today, all that matters is shoveling as much money as possible into the pockets of their wealthy executives and Wall Street investors. The workers be damned!

At this point, the Tyson workers and Dan Osborn know that the plant is not going to be reopened. But Osborn’s campaign could commemorate those workers by becoming the first politician in the nation to offer a realistic and potentially popular solution to this recurring nightmare:

No Compulsory Layoffs at Corporations That Receive Taxpayer Money!

Each spring our nation funds our national budget on tax day, April 15. Just as the season itself is a time of renewal, this is a time to reflect on our priorities and who we are as a nation. Each of us can identify funding priorities in our collective daily experience and must ask ourselves if these are being addressed. From childcare and education to healthcare, national defense, and even nuclear weapons, we must set our priorities. With finite dollars and a myriad of national and international needs, we must be informed as to how these funds are being allocated.

Promises of affordability, reduced cost of living, and avoidance of costly wars have not coincided with reality.

Our planet continues to warm with progressive climate change, the last decade being the hottest decade in recorded history, causing increasing scarcity of natural resources further promoting conflict around the planet. Coupled with the potential for future global pandemics, this is a time when global cooperation and collaboration is more important than ever.

Unfortunately, we are pursuing policies of increased isolationism, feigning international cooperation with disdain for the international rule of law. We are pursuing wars, interventions and conflicts of choice, while walking away from international treaties, such as New START and the previous Iran nuclear deal, while bullying nations, thus empowering other nations to follow suit as international law and norms are shunned. We have seen 5 of the 9 nuclear-armed nations at war this past year with China increasing rhetorical threats against Taiwan. The twin interconnected existential threats of climate change and nuclear war seem ever closer. Recognizing this threat, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight this past January, the closest it has been in its 79 year existence. This is a grim reminder of our increased reliance on luck to prevent a nuclear catastrophe, either by intent, miscalculation, or disruptive technology.

These expenditures rob our communities of precious resources that could be redirected to the actual needs of our citizens providing true security in meeting basic human needs and providing opportunity.

The very existence of nuclear weapons threatens all of us, and everything we hold near and dear, every moment of every day. These are weapons that can never be used. With a perverse logic, as if in a trance to the end, we have chosen as a nation to increase our nuclear weapons program expenditures year over year, further proving the fallacy of deterrence as each of our adversaries do likewise so as not to be outdone.

According to the US Nuclear Weapons Community Cost Project, now in its 37th year, this Fiscal Year 2026 finds the US spending over $137 billion dollars on all nuclear weapons programs. That equates to an average of $401.51 for every man, woman, and child based on an average income of $44,673. These costs affect every community across our nation, from New York City, our richest city, spending over $3.95 Billion; to Flint Michigan, our poorest city, spending over $15.565 million; to the Navajo Nation spending over $28.491 Million. An average American family of four will spend $1,606 dollars on nuclear weapons programs this year, and as a nation we are spending $261,092 every minute on weapons that cannot and must not ever be used without threatening all of humanity.

Where does this fit into your priorities as you think about your family and the future you envision? These expenditures rob our communities of precious resources that could be redirected to the actual needs of our citizens providing true security in meeting basic human needs and providing opportunity.

This is a situation that does not have to be, but one that will not change without public support and outcry. There is a growing national grassroots campaign called Back From the Brink bringing communities together to prevent nuclear war. The movement calls for the US to take a leadership role as follows:

• Actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals;
• Renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first;
• Ending the sole, unchecked authority of any US president to launch a nuclear attack;
• Taking US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
• Cancelling the plan to replace the entire US nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.

With over 504 national organizations, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 592 municipal and state official, and 68 members of Congress endorsing, support is growing. Each of us can endorse the campaign, join a local hub, and call on our elected officials to add their name to the growing list of local and federal officials who endorse and support this effort.

We all have a role to play in pursuing a future for our children and future generations. That role is unique to us and not necessarily a large role or a small role, it is our role. If our luck holds out, when our children’s children ask, what did you do when the planet was threatened, how will you respond? Working together we can make nuclear weapons a threat of the past.

On April 6, the Trump administration announced it will increase payments to privately-run Medicare Advantage, or MA, plans by 2.48% in 2027—this will result in more than $13 billion in additional payments to companies like UnitedHealth, CVS Health, and Humana. Unsurprisingly, following this announcement, shares of those companies rose by more than 9%.

MA plans have been a significant source of growth and profit for insurance companies. As the Medicare Rights Center reports, this profitability is driven by enormous overpayments, including from fraudulent billing practices such as “upcoding.” This involves submitting billing codes that make patients appear sicker than they really are to secure higher government payments than are warranted. Despite this, the Trump administration is currently considering a policy that would automatically enroll seniors into MA plans as the “default enrollment option”—a proposal outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s extremist Project 2025.

The Center for American Progress estimates that making MA the default option would generate nearly $2 trillion in overpayments over 10 years, while significantly jeopardizing traditional Medicare’s financial stability. It would give for-profit corporations more control to restrict patient choices and deny doctor-recommended care.

Instead of more privatization that puts profits over people, we should embrace Medicare For All (M4A). Yet, President Donald Trump contends that paying for our current safety nets is already too much for the wealthiest nation on Earth. He remarks: “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

Sheinbaum’s embrace of universal healthcare—as well as her support of Cuba—shows us what is possible when the well-being of people is championed unconditionally.

For Trump, spending billions in an illegal war takes precedence over providing healthcare for Americans. His 2027 budget calls for a 10% reduction in all nondefense spending, including reducing funding to the Department of Health and Human Services by $15.8 billion. This, at the same time, that a measles outbreak sweeps the nation, uninsured rates continue to climb, and the prevalence of children with chronic conditions grows to unprecedented levels.

While Trump prioritizes death and destruction, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum offers a different vision. On April 7, she issued a presidential decree establishing the Universal Health Service (Servicio Universal de Salud), which will allow patients from across Mexico to seek free care at any public health institution. Universal access will be rolled out in phases starting with emergency care and continuity of care in early 2027. Radiotherapy, laboratory tests, imaging studies, and other specialized services will be added later that year. Finally, in 2028, universal prescription fulfillment and hospitalization will be consolidated. For Sheinbaum, “The goal is that when we leave the government [in 2030], any Mexican man or woman can go to any health institution for treatment for any ailment and be received.”

The transition to universal healthcare began on April 13 when Mexicans aged 85 and older were eligible to register for their new Universal Health Credential. As Deputy Health Minister Eduardo Clark notes, these new credentials are “the guarantee of the right to healthcare” for Mexican citizens and eligible foreign residents.

This is the fundamental difference. In Mexico, healthcare is recognized as a human right enshrined in their Constitution. In 2023, then-Secretary of Foreign Affairs Alicia Bárcena said before the United Nations General Assembly, “In Mexico, we believe that coverage must be universal, public and free, starting with the most marginalized areas and prioritizing, as always, the poorest.” She continued: “It is unacceptable to profit from illness. In Mexico, we know that public health is not for sale. It is a public and universal good, and we defend it."

By contrast, for Trump, healthcare is a privilege meant solely for those who deserve it. During his first presidential campaign, he remarked: “Where I come from, you have to prove your worth. You have some guy with no college degree working a minimum wage job; no ambition, no goals, nothing to show for it. Yet for some reason, the current [Obama] administration believes he—and millions of people like him, should have access to health insurance. It’s outrageous.” While Mexico starts with “the poorest,” Trump finds it “outrageous” to provide healthcare to minimum wage workers.

Trump’s position is immoral and vile. Healthcare is neither a commodity nor the exclusive privilege of the wealthy—it is a human right. Far from “outrageous,” guaranteeing healthcare to all is about ensuring that everyone can live a rich and fulfilling life.

For most (if not everyone), lacking healthcare will prevent them from living the kind of life they desire. Those suffering from untreated illness may struggle to spend time with their loved ones, pursue the opportunities they desire, and exercise their political rights. Since, at some point, everyone will eventually get sick, healthcare is a universal good that benefits each of us. Moreover, as the Covid-19 pandemic made clear, our individual health is not solely a personal issue. My health impacts the lives of others around me just as their health impacts mine. Healthcare is thus a collective and communal good.

Still, one might object that even if healthcare is not a commodity, the market is still the best mechanism to allocate scarce resources; Trump’s push toward privatization will be better than Sheinbaum’s universal care.

Such blind faith in the market is misguided. Despite spending far more than other countries with universal coverage, more than a quarter of Americans report skipping consultations, tests, treatments and follow-ups because of costs. Roughly 21% report skipping medication for the same reason. Studies consistently find that universal care provides more access, better quality, and lower costs than privatized healthcare.

Ironically, Trump once understood this. In his 2000 The America We Deserve, he writes, “We must have universal healthcare. Just imagine the improved quality of life for our society as a whole if the issue of access to healthcare were dealt with imaginatively. With more than 40 million Americans living day to day in the fear that an illness or injury will wipe out their savings or drag them into bankruptcy, how can we truly engage in the ‘pursuit of happiness’ as our Founders intended?”

Trump was right. What we need is not more privatization that exploits the sick and dying, but rather a politic that works to radically defend life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. What is needed is the imagination to rethink how we use (and misuse) our country’s wealth and resources. Sheinbaum’s embrace of universal healthcare—as well as her support of Cuba—shows us what is possible when the well-being of people is championed unconditionally.

A better future is possible—already, in the US, support for M4A continues to grow, and several 2026 midterm candidates have made it an explicit part of their platforms. Together, by embracing life and rejecting capitalism, we can make America great.

On April 7, the United States, Israel, and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire. By the afternoon of the same day, it was already unraveling.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who mediated the deal, announced it would cover "everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere—effective immediately." Within hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office contradicted him: The ceasefire "does not include Lebanon." Israel's military said it "continues fighting and ground operations" against Hezbollah. Missile alerts sounded across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Kuwait. A gas facility in Abu Dhabi was ablaze. Iran and Israel each accused the other of violating a truce that neither had fully agreed to in the first place.

This is not a diplomatic miscommunication. This is a structural diagnosis. A ceasefire that each party defines differently, that excludes Lebanon while Lebanon burns, that leaves unresolved the nuclear question, the proxies, the sanctions, and the fate of millions of displaced people—is not a ceasefire. It is a pause in a war that has no agreed-upon end. And it proves, more vividly than any argument could, the central claim of this piece: There is no lasting peace to be found in bilateral arrangements, back-channel deals, or sequenced diplomacy that takes each front separately. Everything must be on the table, simultaneously, in the open. The region will not be stabilized by threading one crisis at a time. It will only be stabilized by a framework comprehensive enough to hold all of them at once.

For years, the pogroms in the West Bank grew more violent in the dark, largely ignored by media and public attention. The lawlessness of those carrying them out was enabled—sometimes actively, sometimes through willful inaction—by those whose job was to enforce the law. This ongoing catastrophe, beyond being war crimes and perhaps crimes against humanity, has already fueled new waves of antisemitic violence worldwide.

What is needed is not just pressure, but a credible vision—something to organize toward, not only against.

Now the world is paying attention. But attention, it turns out, is not the same as action.

Two and a half years of genocide in Gaza. Bombing campaigns across half a dozen countries. The Israeli Knesset's passage of a death penalty law for Arabs—62 in favor, 48 against, 1 abstained—while Germany, Britain, France, and Italy issued a statement fretting over the law "undermining Israel's commitments with regards to democratic principles." It would be funny if it weren't so revealing. The shrewdest member of the Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, used to say that Israel is Jewish and democratic—Jewish for the Arabs, democratic for the Jews. Now even that uneasy equation has collapsed. Anti-government protesters are being violently suppressed. Activists are being arrested.

What, exactly, are we waiting for? Another October 7 to green-light a massive genocide in the West Bank?

In the 1980s, the world still maintained a façade of respecting international law, human rights, sovereignty, and human dignity. Today those principles are treated as virtue signaling, carrying zero weight in global politics. The massacre at Sabra and Shatila produced one of the largest anti-war protests in Israeli history, the removal of a defense minister, the resignation of a prime minister. Today, the same events would merit a public yawn. Israelis would say there was no choice; in war, civilians die; terrorists hide among civilians.

The campaign against apartheid South Africa helped end that regime—sanctions were part of it, though not the whole story. Today the world is reluctant to act similarly, and Israel's stocks are rising. Military and technology exports have grown. The Israeli economy remains stable, the shekel as strong as it has been in years.

So what is the world to do? What are the Palestinians to do?

Here is the honest assessment: Pressure alone will not work. The Israeli public's mental condition now requires constant war to manage its anxieties, and the government has mastered the manipulation of fear to sustain itself. Geopolitical realities ensure Israel will always have trade partners—including countries that position themselves as critics, including in the Arab Middle East. And if isolation were somehow achieved comprehensively, the best-case scenario is Israel becoming a North Korea: The boycott succeeds, and we are not one inch closer to Palestinian liberation or regional normalcy. What is needed is not just pressure, but a credible vision—something to organize toward, not only against.

Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that "those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war." That is the question before us.

As today's unraveling ceasefire makes clear, there is no safe region without a framework that addresses everyone's security simultaneously.

There are credible levers that have worked before. President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced Israel's hand in 1956. President George H.W. Bush did it again in Madrid. Real leverage—the kind that changes calculations—is possible. The platform already exists: the Arab League Peace Initiative of March 2002. The Middle East is different now, but the architecture of that initiative remains usable. When Israeli leadership presented peace prospects with Egypt, Jordan, and even in the Oslo Accords, the Israeli public responded favorably. Public opinion in this region can shift quickly when circumstances change.

And this framework could do something even more ambitious: help resolve the conflict with Iran—comprehensively, not bilaterally. The ceasefire announced last week, already disputed and already violated, shows exactly why. Iran has insisted Lebanon must be part of any deal. Israel says it won't be. The US sits somewhere between the two, unable to enforce its own mediated agreement. This is the logic of piecemeal diplomacy: It produces temporary pauses, not durable peace. On multiple occasions, Iran reaffirmed the Arab League Peace Initiative and suggested that if Palestinians reach an agreement that earns the approval of a Palestinian majority, Iran would not carry the banner of the Palestinian struggle. Iran can become part of the solution. Imagine a Middle East in which the genuine security concerns of Palestine, Israel, Iran, and Lebanon are all taken into account—together, not sequentially—and prove compatible. Such a deal could include a final resolution to the nuclear question (dare we dream of dismantling both Iran's and Israel's programs?), the disbanding of proxy forces, and enforceable benchmarks for human and civil rights across all parties. After years of genocide, wars, and hundreds of thousands of victims, none of this would come easily. The international community would have to deploy every tool at its disposal, every credible threat.

Today, no leadership anywhere is offering a viable future. Here is the vision nobody in the entire Zionist political spectrum is proposing: a grand bargain. Israel accepts the Arab League Peace Initiative. A Palestinian state is established in all the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—with real elections—before the end of 2027. This is a first stage enabling the self-determination of both national collectives, which could develop over time into various arrangements: a two-state solution, a confederation, a single democratic state, or something in-between. The international community guarantees security for all sides during the transition. And the pressure must be real: If Israel refuses, it is immediately removed from EU treaties, the OECD, and every international institution it depends on.

And then there is the bonus—the kind of audacious proposal that makes a vision legible to ordinary people. The 2026 World Cup will be hosted in the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The 2030 tournament goes to Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. The 2034 tournament is slated for Saudi Arabia—the country that originally proposed the 2002 Peace Initiative. What if the 2034 World Cup became a Peace World Cup, hosted jointly by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Palestine? Imagine the region's countries spending the coming years building sports infrastructure. Imagine the tourism economy it would generate—not only in those three countries, but in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Absurd? Maybe. But the question MLK poses is whether peace-loving people can organize as effectively as those who love war. A concrete, imaginable future is part of that organizing.

I have always argued that the only genuinely pro-Israel position is also a pro-Palestine position. There is no safe Israel without a free and safe Palestine—and, as today's unraveling ceasefire makes clear, there is no safe region without a framework that addresses everyone's security simultaneously. To be pro-Israel means ensuring Israel's ability to become a nation among nations—secure, recognized, legitimate. That cannot happen while Israel is an occupying power. It cannot happen alongside an apartheid regime. It cannot happen while Palestinian citizens of Israel face systematic discrimination and neglect. And it cannot happen while a two-week truce substitutes for the comprehensive, just, and durable peace that the entire region is owed.

We cannot wait any longer. The question is whether we are willing to organize for a vision, or only against an atrocity.

This week, autocrat Viktor Orbán conceded defeat in Hungary’s general election. It was a landslide victory for Péter Magyar—and for democracy worldwide.

Over the course of 16 years, Orbán worked to dismantle and undermine democratic institutions. He took control of most news outlets. He rewrote election rules. He replaced judges with loyalists. His government faced numerous corruption scandals, including one surrounding a presidential pardon. He was also a fan favorite of the Trump administration. Our vice president campaigned for him.

What are the implications of his defeat for democracy in the United States? To be sure, midterm elections often rebuke the party in power, and it’s hard to predict whether this election augurs any November results. But just as Brexit presaged Trump in 2016, worldwide trends are at play. Amid Orbán’s takeover of elections, the media, and democratic institutions, the forces of democracy found a way to persevere through public organization and mass outrage.

In Hungary, one backstop against authoritarian rule has been the European Union. In the United States, perhaps it is the fact that states control elections, largely through a steadfast network of officials across the country who ensure elections are free and fair.

Between now and November, all of us can help make sure election officials know we have their backs.

Today, that network is under immense strain. This week, the Brennan Center released our sixth annual survey of local election officials. It confirmed an alarming pattern: They are worried about the safety and security of the elections they supervise. Half worry about political leaders interfering with how they do their job. Seventy-one percent are actively planning or preparing for potential disruptions. Eighty percent are calling for more funds and support to keep up with election security needs.

These are Republican and Democratic public servants, trying to do their jobs far from the partisan fracas in Washington.

Between FBI raids seizing 2020 election ballots, efforts by the administration to meddle with voting equipment, and federal funding cuts to election security, election officials have many reasons to be alarmed. At the same time, organizations across the country have been working to give election officials the support they need to defend our elections in November.

After the Trump administration gutted the principal federal agency for training election officials and bolstering security, many organizations have jumped in to fill the gap in expertise. The Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a coalition of current and former election officials and law enforcement, has been offering trainings and tabletop exercises to state and local leaders across the country so they can be prepared for high-stress, legally complex Election Day scenarios and establish lines of communication in case of potential interference.

The Brennan Center has also been working to keep officials informed. We are drafting handbooks for each state that outline relevant laws, suggest scenarios, and help election officials, their counsel, and others who support them to appropriately respond to federal interference

We have also organized a series of courses for hundreds of attorneys who represent election officials to inform them about their rights and responsibilities and to give guidance on how to respond to requests for election data and access to equipment.

There is much more to do. States must step in to fill funding gaps left by the federal government. In the survey, 75% of local election officials said their state or local government has not provided additional resources or funding to address federal cuts. The use of artificial intelligence in elections is also a growing concern that election officials should be informed about.

Between now and November, all of us can help make sure election officials know we have their backs. We can have free and fair, even uneventful, elections this year. We can ensure the perseverance of our democratic institutions. As in Hungary, it will take organization, preparedness, and collaboration.

When it comes to protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation, Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller is an odd choice for the job. The downstate Republican was first elected in 2020. During her 2022 reelection campaign, one of her employees was a man named Bradley Graven. The conservative Washington Examiner reported that Graven “was convicted of soliciting sex with a minor,” but this conviction did not stop him from fundraising for Miller, collecting signatures on her behalf, and chauffeuring the candidate around.

Shortly into her first term, Miller gave a shout out to Adolf Hitler in a speech before right-wing group Moms for America. Miller told the group “Hitler was right on one thing: he said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'” Miller later apologized for her compliment to der Fuhrer, saying she was referring to the efforts of “left wing radicals” to “re-educate young people.” Miller, unsurprisingly, does not see anything wrong with the efforts of right wing radicals like herself to re-educate young people.

And Miller is, to be clear, a right-wing radical. Often described as a “Christian nationalist,” she proclaimed that the United States was “founded as a Christian nation” when she opposed a Sikh leading a prayer at the capitol after misidentifying him as Muslim. She is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, and in return that caucuses political action committee is her largest campaign donor.

These seeming handicaps aside, Miller introduced House Resolution 7661, the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” on February 24th of this year, a misleadingly titled bill that restricts federal funding for schools unless they take action to ban “sexually oriented” books from classrooms and school libraries. For the purposes of the legislation, “gender dysphoria” as well as "transgenderism" [sic] considered sexually oriented. Schools could lose federal funding merely for having a title that features a trans person or fictional transgender character. On March 17th, the bill advanced from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to the House floor.

Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it.

Congressional supporters of HR 7661 are notable for their anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Miller claimed the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act “attacks the traditional family.” Committee Chair Tim Walberg, who released a statement saying the bill will “safeguard children from inappropriate content in the classroom” went on a jaunt to Uganda in 2023 to urge their government to “stand firm” on maintaining their “Kill the Gays” law. Randy Fine, one of the most notorious anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots in the House, has also made statements calling for the eradication of the LGBTQ+ community. One could continue down the list but the point is made.

Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it. Children, though, are complex beings with a variety of influences acting on them, social, biological, and familial. If educators were capable of influencing children to such a degree that Miller believes, they would focus on ensuring students complete schoolwork on time, study for tests, and bring classroom materials, not on changing their gender identity or sexual orientation. As gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk said during the campaign to defeat the homophobic Briggs Initiative: “If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you’d sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around.”

One is reminded of the US Senate testimony of comic book publisher William Gaines (Tales from the Crypt, Mad Magazine).In the 1950s, a moral panic asserted that crime and horror comics were making criminals out of helpless children, who, like automatons, followed the examples of comic book characters.“What are we afraid of?” Gaines asked. “Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do?” The anti-comics crusade was popularized by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who worried about the “homosexual” influence Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman were having on their young readers in his sloppily researched tract Seduction of the Innocent. The current censorship efforts are an unfortunate repetition of Wertham’s pseudoscientific arguments.

As expected, HR 7661 has been opposed by the American Library Association, the National Education Association, Authors Against Book Bans, PEN America, among many others. The advocacy group 5 Calls has created a simple script for contacting Members of Congress and Senators to ask them to oppose this bill.

This horrific bill, HR 7661, represents the first attack on children’s freedom to read at the federal level seen in the United States. It creates a national censor deciding what every child in the United States can read. Under the guise of protecting children, Mary Miller—a woman who hired a convicted sexual predator and who once praised the Nazi dictator—has set herself up as the face of censorship and thought control in the United States. Would you let this woman decide for you what to read?

Prager U—a producer of right-wing “educational videos” founded by conservative radio host and edutainment entrepreneur Dennis Prager—has recently been in the news regarding its “America at 250” initiative, a collaboration with the Trump White House well described by The New Yorker as “Serving AI Slop for America’s Birthday.” The initiative is one of many administration efforts to conscript this year’s July 4 celebration in its culture war against the left, a war, announced by President Donald Trump back in March 2025 with his Executive Order 14253, cynically named “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

It seems particularly appropriate to reflect on the MAGA effort to promote historical misunderstanding today, the 150th anniversary of one of Frederick Douglass’ most important speeches, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln.” For Prager U first made headlines back in September 2021, with the posting of an animated video entitled “Leo & Layla’s History Adventure with Frederick Douglass.” While Prager is a stridently anti-“woke” enterprise, purveying a manifestly whitewashed historical narrative, this video was particularly notable, and outrageous, because it featured Douglass, the ardent Black abolitionist and radical Republican, as a self-righteous extoller of caution and celebrant of American Greatness. Like Trump’s “1776 Commission Report,” published that same year within weeks of the January 6 insurrection, Prager sought to co-opt Douglass (and also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr.) rather than to ignore him, all the better to promote its right-wing conception of “patriotic history.” Prager did this in a particularly insidious way.

“Leo” and “Layla” are two white kids innocently watching TV when a newscaster reports on “angry” (obviously BLM) protesters demanding the abolition of the police. Leo, put off by a math teacher who strangely teaches about “systemic injustice,” then asks his older sister: “Why is everyone so angry? Are they burning a car? What does abolish even mean?” Seeking to understand, the siblings enter a time machine, where they are immediately greeted—“welcome to 1852!”—by a dapper Frederick Douglass eager to school the innocent children and restore their abiding reverence for all things American.

Douglass proceeds to explain “abolition” by informing the kids that he was himself once a slave, and when they ask him how he dealt with his unenviable situation, he replies: “It was very hard, and I was often sad. I taught myself to read and write... knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom... [and] today I am a free American, fighting for all to be free.” When the children express confusion about how the “founding fathers” could have reconciled slavery with the idea that “all men are created equal,” Douglass reassures them: “Children, our founding fathers knew that slavery was evil and wrong... They wanted it to end, but... made a compromise to achieve something great: the making of the United States.” Noting that abolition would have alienated the Southern plantocracy, he explains that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.”

Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence.

When the naïve students fret about hypocrisy, Douglass explains further: “Sometimes things are more complicated than they might seem, and complicated problems take time to solve... big problems need to be approached very carefully.” He then delivers the coup de gras: “Have you kids heard of William Lloyd Garrison? He’s an abolitionist like me, and he and I used to be friends, but we aren’t any longer... William refuses all compromises, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire.” He then explains that he is “trying to work for change inside the American system, and that “our system is wonderful, and the Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it.” Douglass then warns the kids to avoid people like Garrison, radicals who “don’t just want slavery abolished, but the whole American system.”

The video obviously centers on a tendentious reading of Douglass’ famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” that completely ignores the way Douglass brilliantly shifted back and forth in that speech between identification with his white audience and harsh challenge to it:

But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.

In his speech Douglass embraced the revolutionary rhetoric of 1776. But he did not say that the American system was “wonderful,” and indeed he committed himself to working with other abolitionists to radically change the system. And while he did break with Garrison, his former mentor, believing that the Constitution—if properly interpreted to support radical abolition, a big “if”—was a “glorious liberty document,” he also clearly believed that its promise had yet to be redeemed, and could only be redeemed through a broad-based and uncompromising abolitionist movement. Far from disparaging Garrison’s radicalism, Douglass actually literally extols it in his closing words: “In the fervent aspirations of William Lloyd Garrison, I say, and let every heart join in saying it:

God speed the year of jubilee
The wide world o’er
When from their galling chains set free,
Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,
And wear the yoke of tyranny
Like brutes no more.
That year will come, and freedom’s reign,
To man his plundered rights again
Restore...

Douglass’ 1852 speech, a brilliant reclaiming of the “spirit of ’76,” was no kind of celebration. It was a subtle but nonetheless powerful disruption of celebration, and an invitation and incitement to radical action. And what Douglass says in it was perfectly consistent with the equally famous and more radical words that he would utter a few years later, in his 1857 speech “On West India Emancipation”:

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

These are not the words of a man who believed that “our founders created a system that would have slavery end gradually.” They are the words of a man who believed, to the contrary, that slavery would not end until it was politically and militarily defeated.

Douglass, like his Radical Republican allies, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens, vigorously supported the Union in the Civil War precipitated by Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election and the wave of secessions that followed it. But he did this not to vindicate the greatness of the Constitution or to preserve the existing American system, but to effectuate a radical democratic and in some ways revolutionary transformation of the American system. And the policy of Reconstruction he supported involved nothing less than such a transformation, upending the Southern plantocracy, redistributing property and opportunity to emancipated former slaves, and enforcing Black civil and political rights. He made this clear during the war in a July 4, 1862 speech entitled “The Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” and he made it even clearer in the substantial essay he published after the war, in the December 1866 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Reconstruction.”

But perhaps the clearest statement of this theme is to be found in Douglass’ “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” delivered, at the dedication of the much-heralded Freedmen’s Memorial, on April 14, 1876, the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. Historian David Blight opens his magisterial Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 biography, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, with Douglass’s delivery of this speech, pointing out that the dedication had been declared a national holiday; that the event was attended by “a distinguished array of guests” that included President Ulysses S. Grant and many members of Congress and the Supreme Court; and that the entire event held a special meaning for the “huge crowd, largely African-American,” who were present not simply to commemorate Lincoln’s role in Emancipation, but to celebrate a Black-financed and produced monument whose dedication featured the most prominent Black man in the country.

As in his more famous 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” delivered as abolitionist sentiment was picking up steam, Douglass begins this speech in a spirit of civic communion. Invoking “the sentiment of gratitude and appreciation,” he reminds his audience of the history that made the Freedmen’s Memorial possible:

I refer to the past not in malice, for this is no day for malice; but simply to place more distinctly in front the gratifying and glorious change which has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves, and to congratulate all upon the contrast between now and then; the new dispensation of freedom with its thousand blessings to both races, and the old dispensation of slavery with its ten thousand evils to both races—white and black.

Yet he then proceeds to note that “truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.”

In a speech whose overall purpose is the celebration of a vision of multiracial and universal citizenship, a vision that still remained far from realization, Douglass—the fugitive slave who had become both symbol and tribune of liberation—refuses to erase the very divisive question of race and racial identity. He insists that Lincoln “was preëminently the white man’s President,” and proceeds to outline the many ways, over time, that Lincoln had prioritized the Constitution, and the Union, over abolition, and the emancipation of Black Americans:

The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a preëminence in this worship at once full and supreme... You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect; let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But... in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion... we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

In his speech, Douglass recounts the many ways that Lincoln was despised, both by defenders of slavery who thought him an abolitionist, and by abolitionists who thought him too willing to compromise with the defenders of slavery. He describes Lincoln’s assassination as an awful crime against a great man and against the freedom that Lincoln’s presidency ultimately symbolized.

And while refusing to ignore Lincoln’s flaws, Douglass insists that “we”—he is referring here to Black Americans like himself—“We were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him... by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”

Recalling his joy upon learning of Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation,” his pride at the masses of Black soldiers that Lincoln had eventually mobilized to serve in the Union Army, and his determination to continue the struggle for freedom that Lincoln had advanced through his leadership in the Civil War, Douglass closed his oration with a sober appreciation of the fact that Lincoln’s very limits had perhaps been the very source of his strength. Noting that Lincoln “shared the prejudices common to his countrymen towards the colored race,” and that this had long made him an uncertain ally and sometimes even an opponent, Douglass concludes:

Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and, second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful coöperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen... The honest and comprehensive statesman, clearly discerning the needs of his country, and earnestly endeavoring to do his whole duty, though covered and blistered with reproaches, may safely leave his course to the silent judgment of time...But now behold the change: the judgment of the present hour is, that taking him for all in all, measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.

As Blight observes: “Douglass employed a stunning level of directness for such a ceremony... In the rhetorical twists and turns of this complex speech, Douglass had one overriding target—the declension and betrayal of Reconstruction in the South by the federal government.” Speaking only months before the Declaration’s July 4 centennial anniversary, Douglass well understood how vulnerable was the halting progress achieved by Reconstruction. Indeed, within a year, the infamous Compromise of 1877 was effected, Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated president, and federal troops were finally withdrawn from formerly Confederate states, sealing the death of Reconstruction, a wave of racist violence and intimidation, and the resumption of white supremacy.

And so Douglass, on April 16, 1888—almost 12 years to the day of his Freedmen’s Monument speech—delivered another speech in the nation’s capital, describing the indignities and oppressions of the Jim Crow system as a betrayal of the promise of Reconstruction, and declaring that “I Denounce This Emancipation as a Tremendous Fraud.”

We are now living through another tremendous fraud—a Trump administration intent on destroying the rule of law, an independent civil society, and the safeguards that protect free and fair democratic elections, all in the name of an increasingly hollow vision of “American Greatness” resting on what David Blight and James Grossman have rightly called a “brutish assault on history.”

Today’s anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s dedication of the Freedmen’s Monument is an occasion to remember that our history is not so easily conscripted; that the struggle for a truly multiracial and egalitarian democracy requires reckoning with racism and not denying its existence; and that if American greatness means anything, it means the example of figures like Douglass, who persistently fought against both injustice and the celebratory cant typically invoked to reinforce it. And as we prepare ourselves for the ostentatious displays of patriotism that Trump has planned for us this coming July, we can do no better than to recall what Douglass said about an earlier July 4: “To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”

Thanks to Bob Ivie for his helpful comments on this essay.

An earlier version of this piece referred to "William Sumner" as an ally of Frederick Douglas. This has been corrected to Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Massachusetts senator.

Every once in a while I have to snap out of the hypnotic grip of the bizarre news cycle and remind myself—and you—that there’s something even more important underway than the obvious mental and moral decline of the president: the relentless rise in the temperature of the planet. So here’s my latest occasional update from the physical world, and I fear the news is not good.

Let’s begin with the immediate past, and stay close to home, because the US has been the center of some of the most extreme meteorological action on planet Earth recently. Consider our winter: Though it was chilly in the Northeast, if you averaged the temperature across the lower 48 it was the second-hottest winter on record. That's because nine states had their hottest winter ever and five their second hottest. As Andrea Thompson pointed out in Scientific American: “Nowhere in the US had a record cold winter this year. Nowhere even came close.”

That winter, by the way, was December, January, and February—what we call “meteorological winter” because it coincides with the coldest quarter of the year. It was outrageously hot and very dry, with severely shrunken snowpacks across the mountains of the West, which made Westerners nervous about the chances for wildfire as the summer wore on.

And then came March.

The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by President Donald Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels.

March was the single craziest month in US weather history. Here’s how Seth Borenstein put it in the lede of his account for The Associated Press:

March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data.

The federal government is still collecting weather data (though far less than it used to), and so we know the following remarkable fact according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

The average maximum temperature for March was especially high at 11.4°F (6.3°C) above the 20th century average and was almost a degree warmer than the average daytime high for April.

As Bob Henson points out in the Yale-based blog Eye of the Storm:

In 35 of the 48 contiguous states, the statewide average reading was among the top-10 warmest for any March. Not a single contiguous state was cooler than average.

Henson also points out that a lack of rainfall meant it’s so far been the driest year in American history:

The nationally averaged precipitation total for 2026 to date is an ominous one: a mere 4.79 inches. That’s the lowest value on record for any January-to-March interval, including such notoriously dry periods as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The previous record low was 5.27 inches, set in Jan.-Mar. 1910.

As Henson’s colleague Jeff Masters succinctly told the AP:

Climate change is kicking our butts

And I fear it’s barely begun the beating. Because over the last two weeks, even as the world has fixed its gaze on the Middle East, meteorologists have been staring in some awe and terror at what appears to be a rapidly building El Niño. I’ve been telling you this is on the way for some months, but it’s coming into ever-clearer focus. NOAA again, in its April forecast, put the odds of a El Niño beginning this summer at better than 60%. More to the point, the wide array of computer models around the planet are beginning to predict a so-called “super El Niño,” when temperatures in the critical region of the Pacific shoot up far far far higher than in the past. Henson and Masters again:

For October, roughly half of the ECMWF ensemble is calling for sea surface temperatures in the main El Niño region (Niño3.4) to exceed 2.5°C above the seasonal average. Such values would correspond to what’s loosely referred to as a “super El Niño.” Though there’s no official definition for a “super” event, the term is often attached to El Niño when its peak anomalies reach at least +2.0°C. Since 1950, the only El Niño events that have hit this threshold for at least one three-month interval were in 1972-73, 1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16, and 2023-24. Only one of those events, in 2015-16, pushed all the way past +2.5°C.

Here’s a useful graph of the various estimates from the computer modelling, courtesy of Zeke Hausfather:

Basically it reads: a world we haven’t seen before. Because remember, El Niño comes on top of the steadily rising temperature of the Earth. If these forecasts bear out, then possibly 2026 and certainly 2027 will be the hottest years ever recorded on this Earth. As the atmospheric scientist Paul Roundy put it, there’s a “real potential for the strongest El Niño event in 140 years.” We don’t know, of course, exactly how this will manifest, but as Gabrielle Cannon wrote Monday in The Guardian

A super El Niño that occurred in 2015 brought severe drought in Ethiopia, water supply shortages in Puerto Rico, and smashed records after unleashing a vicious hurricane season in the central North Pacific, according to an analysis by US federal scientists.

The cycle tends to create drought and heat across Australia, around southern and central Africa, in India and in parts of South America, including in the Amazon rainforest. Heavy precipitation, meanwhile, could hit the southern tier of the US, parts of the Middle East, and south-central Asia.

I think it’s safe to say that we can expect more weather chaos than we’ve ever seen before (the good folks at Covering Climate Now put together a useful briefing for reporters last week). Here’s my prediction, since my job is to figure out how the physical and political worlds intersect:

The havoc unleashed by a super El Niño will coincide with the havoc unleashed by President Donald Trump in the Gulf to produce a perfect storm of support for rapid action on getting off fossil fuels. Our brief vacation from thinking about climate change as a crucial fact of life on this planet will be over; the conjoined fears of the next months will combine to put us in a very new place politically.

My main fear is that this useful moment is coming very late in the game.

And by that I mean that the last few weeks have also produced a new round of research on the damage that human warming of the Earth is doing to its most basic systems. For simplicity’s sake let’s concentrate on one big system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current or AMOC, that system of currents (like the Gulf Stream) in the Atlantic that are the planet’s biggest heat distribution system.

The collapse of the AMOC has been a recurring nightmare in the climate literature—I first wrote about it in The End of Nature in the 1980s. But the prevailing theory was that it would take a good long while, probably more than a century. In recent years that consensus has been weakening, and the fears of a much more rapid failure of these currents—which keep Europe far warmer than it would otherwise be—have grown rapidly. We’re about a decade out from an ominous paper in Nature that warned that an anomaly in the north Atlantic—a “cold blob” in an otherwise rapidly warming global ocean—could signal that melting ice pouring off Greenland was fatally weakening the currents, by changing the salinity and hence the density of seawater. Research since them has not been comforting, with at least one prominent paper warning the collapse could come as early as the 2030s. Last year Iceland declared an AMOC collapse as a “national security risk,” since the disappearance of the current could turn the temperate country into what one of its foremost experts called “one giant glacier.” It would certainly be a civilizational event for all of Europe.

Anyway, a new paper last week in Science seemed to indicate, with data gathered from four mooring buoys along the western edge of these currents, that there is:

a meridionally consistent decline in deep western overturning transport across these latitudes over the past two decades. This decline, observed at the western boundary, may serve as an effective indicator of AMOC weakening

Here’s how Alec Luhn explained the significance in New Scientist:

The study’s analysis of the latest RAPID-MOCHA data shows that the flow of the AMOC is declining by about 90,000 cubic metres of water per second each year, a faster rate than what has previously been observed. That means between 2004 and 2023, the AMOC weakened by about 10%.

But the uncertainty range of this change in flow is almost as large as the change itself. For this reason, Xin’s study also analyses pressure changes at three mooring arrays that have been installed since 2004 in the western Atlantic off the West Indies, the US East Coast and Nova Scotia, Canada. There, it finds an even greater weakening of the AMOC, with much less uncertainty.

“It is the strongest direct observational evidence so far” that the AMOC is weakening, as models have long shown, says Stefan Rahmstorf at the University of Potsdam, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Meanwhile, another new and equally ominous paper in Nature late last month showed that a collapsing Atlantic current system would release prodigious amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, thus dramatically increasing overall global warming even as Europe froze. As William Hunter helpfully explained in (of all places) the Daily Mail:

The scientists’ computer simulations revealed that halting this key current will release vast stores of carbon currently trapped deep beneath the ocean.

This would increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere by 47 to 83 parts per million, triggering up to 0.27°C (0.5°F) of additional warming worldwide.

"Our study shows how an AMOC collapse could flip the Southern Ocean from a carbon sink into a carbon source, releasing vast amounts of CO2 and fuelling further global warming," said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, "The ocean has been our greatest ally, absorbing a quarter of human-made CO2 emissions."

The scariest piece of the puzzle in the new study may be the profound, and completely opposite, consequences for the two poles. As the authors put it:

regional temperature anomalies are pronounced: Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7°C (60°N-90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6°C (60°S-90°S).

A world in which the Arctic quickly cooled 12°F just as the Antarctic warmed by 10°F would be a very very different world indeed, one capable of violent change on a scale I don’t really want to imagine. In any event, as Potsdam Institute director Johan Rockstrom explained:

The more CO2 in our atmosphere at the stage of shutdown, the higher the likelihood of additional warming. Put simply, rising emissions today increase the risk of a stronger climate response down the line.

And that’s the one part of the equation we can do something about. We have one tool to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere: the substitution of clean energy for fossil fuel. Our weapons in this fight are solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. We need to crash them into place before these systems crash down upon us. That’s the job.

Editor's note: The following letter was sent to the bipartisan leadership of Congress on Monday, April 13, 2026 in regard to recent rhetoric and actions taken by US President Donald J. Trump.

Senator John Thune
Senate Majority Leader, US Senate

Senator Charles E. Schumer
Senate Minority Leader, US Senate

Representative Mike Johnson
Speaker of the House, USHouse of Representatives

Representative Hakeem Jeffries
House Minority Leader, US House of Representatives

Dear Senate Majority Leader Thune, Senate Minority Leader Schumer, Speaker Johnson, and House Minority Leader Jeffries:

We write to you today with a sense of urgency that we do not use lightly. The behavior and rhetoric of President Donald Trump have crossed a threshold that demands the immediate and bipartisan attention of Congress. This is not a partisan assessment. It is a judgment grounded in observable fact, consistent professional assessment, and the constitutional responsibilities that your offices carry.

President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the “Dark Triad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Rather than constituting a clinical diagnosis, this trait-based assessment is grounded in behavioral observation and is particularly useful for assessing the level of danger an individual poses in a political leadership position. We do not offer this as a clinical verdict. We offer it as the considered judgment of a substantial body of professional opinion, based on well-researched evidence that is consistent, accumulating, and impossible to dismiss.

What makes this more than an academic matter is what predictably happens when this personality structure collides with immovable obstacles. The clinical literature is clear: individuals with Dark Triad profiles, when confronted with situations they cannot control or escape, do not recalibrate. They escalate. The psychological imperative to relieve narcissistic collapse overrides strategic calculation, concern for consequences, and ordinary self-restraint. Rage surges to domination. Impulsivity overrides caution. The urgent need to extinguish psychological pain eclipses every other consideration.

We are watching this dynamic unfold in real time.

The President’s recent public communications have been, by any normal standard of political discourse, alarming. His posts demanding that Iran “open the fuckin’ strait, you crazy bastards” and his threat to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages,” adding that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” are not the rhetoric of calculated geopolitical pressure. They are the expressions of a man in profound psychological distress who is reaching for the most extreme retaliatory threats available to him. That these statements were addressed to an adversary in the context of an active military confrontation makes them not merely shocking but profoundly dangerous.

President Trump has now ordered a US naval blockade of Iran — an action that has sent world oil prices soaring and placed the United States in direct opposition to the international community. His ongoing actions carry the potential to trigger a global economic catastrophe, draw in regional and great powers, and ignite a wider conflict with consequences that no one can bound. These orders are being issued without adequate deliberation, without congressional authorization, and in a context in which the President’s judgment is, by every visible measure, severely compromised.

We urge three specific actions.

First, Congress must immediately retake its constitutional authority over war. The bombing of Iran and the initiation of a naval blockade — acts of war under both US and international law — cannot be authorized by presidential fiat. Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress the sole power to declare war and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The Framers intended Congress to deliberate upon and be accountable for precisely such consequential actions. Congress must assume its constitutional authority now, before further escalation renders the question moot.

Second, congressional leadership — on a bipartisan basis — must convene urgent consultations with senior administration officials, including the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of State, and the Director of National Intelligence. The purpose is not routine oversight. It is to create a circuit breaker capable of preventing escalation toward catastrophe, including the potential use of nuclear weapons. Those officials have their own constitutional and statutory obligations. Congress should insist on those obligations and provide a forum in which they can be exercised.

Third, Congress should formally initiate consultation with the Vice President and Cabinet regarding the President’s fitness for office under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. We do not prejudge the outcome. We are not calling for the President’s immediate removal. We are calling for the process that the Constitution itself provides for this contingency: when a President’s capacity to discharge the duties of office is in question and poses a potential imminent danger to the nation. The Amendment exists because those who drafted it recognized that the question of presidential incapacity would occasionally arise, and that it required a constitutional answer rather than a political improvisation.

He is a constitutional emergency. The mechanisms for addressing such an emergency exist. They were placed in the Constitution and its amendments for moments precisely like this one.

We recognize the gravity of what we are asking. We ask it because the gravity of the situation demands it.

A President who publicly threatens to destroy a foreign civilization, who launches a bombing campaign and then imposes a naval blockade without congressional authorization, and who shows every behavioral sign of a personality in acute crisis is not merely a political problem. He is a constitutional emergency. The mechanisms for addressing such an emergency exist. They were placed in the Constitution and its amendments for moments precisely like this one.

The war with Iran will not wait. The escalation dynamics of this active military confrontation will not wait. The psychological conditions driving the President’s decisions will not improve under pressure — they will worsen.

We urge you to act without delay. The Constitution gives you the tools. Your oath of office assigns you the responsibility.

Respectfully,

James Gilligan, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine
Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Former Faculty of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Former President, International Association of Forensic Psychotherapy

Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D.
Former President, American Psychoanalytic Association
Former Vice President, World Mental Health Coalition

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.
President, World Mental Health Coalition
Co-Founder, Preventing Violence Now
Former Faculty of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Former Faculty of Law and Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine

James R. Merikangas, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, George Washington University
Research Consultant, National Institute of Mental Health
Co-Founder, American Neuropsychiatric Association
Former President, American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ph.D.
University Professor, Columbia University

Well it’s tax season again. Do you know where your tax dollars actually go?

As federal budgeting experts, we get asked about this a lot—often, it’s something people simply have no idea about.

But if you’ve watched the Trump administration launch one war after another, flood the streets of American cities with Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents, and call the very idea of an affordability crisis a “hoax” by their political opponents, you might be getting the general idea.

Around half of Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities. But last year, instead of investing in programs that help people make ends meet, the president and his friends in Congress passed a Big Ugly Bill that cut taxes for the wealthy, slashed health insurance and food assistance for millions of Americans, and added billions in new spending for war and mass deportations.

You spent about 50 days working and paying taxes last year just to feed the war machine—and 23 days working to pay those Pentagon contractors and their millionaire CEOs.

Some of those changes, such as the deepest cuts to health insurance, won’t take effect until 2026 or later. Others are taking effect now and are visible in the war on Iran and the deployment of mass deportation forces in our cities.

These enormous sums for the Pentagon and militarism more broadly—now well over $1 trillion—come with enormous costs to ordinary people. That’s true not just in terms of the opportunity cost for other programs, but also for the drain on our wallets.

In a new report for the Institute for Policy Studies, we broke down last year’s typical tax bill and what each household actually spent, on average, for different programs and priorities in 2025.

We learned, for example, that the average taxpayer paid $4,049 for weapons and war last year—a huge sum in a time of rising costs of living and stagnant wages. That’s far, far more than any other program funded by income tax dollars. Medicaid, the next highest item on our income tax receipt, ran a little under $2,500—and that funds healthcare for 1 in 5 Americans. School lunches and other nutrition programs, by comparison, ran just $124. The Postal Service? $19. (Big programs like Social Security and Medicare have their own dedicated funding streams, and aren’t as significant for your income taxes.)

More than half of the Pentagon’s sum went to private, for-profit military contractors—the top CEOs of which now make over $25 million a year on average. Put another way, you spent about 50 days working and paying taxes last year just to feed the war machine—and 23 days working to pay those Pentagon contractors and their millionaire CEOs.

The war in Iran hadn’t started yet when you were paying taxes last year. But if we use last year’s tax data and set the cost for the war at $35 billion—a line we’re likely on the verge of crossing—the average taxpayer will have paid $130 for the war on Iran. And that becomes a double whammy when you count the many hundreds more at the gas pump, grocery store, or on other expenses made worse because of the conflict.

Polls show that Americans don’t want this war that’s causing so many deaths in Iran and elsewhere at the same time people here in the US are left to struggle. Unfortunately, nobody in this administration asked us.

Meanwhile, programs that actually help people trying to make ends meet—a growing population of us, unfortunately—are getting cut. As more of those cuts take effect—especially to Medicaid—the gap between what we spend on the Pentagon and everything else will only keep growing.

Worse still, Trump and his allies are planning a repeat of last year’s Big Ugly Bill. The president has requested $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon next year—a huge increase from the $1 trillion budget this year. That would make the numbers all the more lopsided.

Nobody loves paying taxes, but we all agree we should get our money’s worth. And in a democracy, our hard-earned tax dollars should go toward programs that actually keep us safe and healthy.

Before plowing more money into the war machine, we need to take a long, hard look at how policymakers are using our money. Americans want a government that supports them when times are tough—not one that shakes us down for endless wars.

Although the international community still knows very little about the highest-level peace talks between the US and Iran in 47 years, facilitated by Shehbaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, some obvious red flags appeared in the morning-after news reports—as JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner flew home less than 24 hours after their arrival in Islamabad.

As The New York Times reported: “Vice President JD Vance summed up the failure of 21 hours of negotiations with Iran in one sentence: ‘They have chosen not to accept our terms.’ To Iranian officials, that line reflected their biggest problem with the talks: The United States they argue, had not come to negotiate.” As Javid Zarif (who led the Iranian negotiating team on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, negotiated by the Obama administration to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, but later torn up by President Donald Trump) wrote on X, “No negotiations—at least with Iran—will succeed based on ‘our/your terms.’”

This highlights that, as expected, the talks took the form of a “hard-bargaining” (also called distributive bargaining) approach to negotiation where the parties seek to achieve a zero-sum (win-lose) outcome rather than a positive sum (win-win) outcome. Too often, however, they end up with a lose-lose outcome, as occurred in this situation. In hard bargaining, parties present their positions (i.e., their preferred solution to the issues) as demands—the Iranians offered a 10-point plan; the US, a 15-point plan—both exchanged before the talks began, a tactic that is not recommended by experienced peacemakers.

In the lead-up to the negotiations, it was initially reported that indirect “proximity talks” were planned—where the third-party mediator moves back and forth between the delegations, who are placed in close proximity to one another in nearby, but separate locations. This typically tends to be a much more productive means of negotiation than direct talks, as it represents each party talking to and negotiating with the impartial third-party mediator, rather than the other party, allowing each delegation to avoid the confrontation and aggravation of dealing directly with its adversary. Moreover, it allows the mediator to try out various possibilities for creative solutions by using a “one-text procedure” to develop a text that is controlled by the mediator and continuously adjusted to address each party’s concerns and allow the mediator, over time, to get ever closer to agreement.

Parties need a constructive process to help them engage in meaningful problem solving, especially where there is no trust and they have a long-term hostile relationship.

On the day, however, after brief separate meetings by US and Iranian delegations with the Pakistani prime minister, direct talks were convened. Unlike the common wisdom that it is good to have the parties talking to one another, this kind of negotiation is not helpful to constructive problem solving. Instead, it is likely to break down into confrontational exchanges, whereby each party simply reiterates its positions and demands—and typically issues threats and ultimatums and employs other pressure tactics to try to force the other to concede, causing each to become ever more entrenched in its positions and more resistant to new ideas.

Another problem was the totally unrealistic expectation that was created for the talks—the idea that an agreement settling decades of serious grievances between the US and Iran might be negotiated within a weekend. A much more realistic approach would have been to schedule talks to be held over a much longer time frame or to schedule additional rounds of talks.

The continuous, marathon nature of the talks are also not a good way to structure peacemaking negotiations. The talks began soon after both delegations arrived (the US delegation had traveled for 18 hours) and lasted all afternoon and most of the night. Indeed, such a schedule is not at all conducive to constructive outcomes, as the parties were tired upon arrival and became ever more exhausted and stressed as the talks continued, reducing their ability to listen to and understand the other party’s issues and concerns and to even to consider or create any new, innovative possibilities that could help bridge differences or create trade-offs.

Moreover, such a format offers no time for the delegations to engage in discussions with their own team or reflect on the exchanges that have occurred at the table between the parties. As confirmed by The New York Times, at the end of the talks, “Exhausted and frustrated after 21 hours on the ground, Mr. Vance provided few details, took three questions, and departed.” The Iranians, for their part, are actually known for their “long-winded, relentless approach to deal-making,” which the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, has called “market style,” meaning “continuous and tireless bargaining.” This is why it is important to have an experienced mediator who knows how to control the process and who will structure negotiation in a paced manner, over a number of days, with breaks during each day and time to sleep and rest overnight.

It also appeared that Mr. Vance was not plenipotentiary in having full authority to take independent action, since he reportedly broke off negotiations on multiple occasions to phone President Trump, perhaps because, over Easter, Trump said that: “If it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance... if it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”

The overriding issue that is often neglected by well-meaning, but unseasoned third parties, as well as by inexperienced delegations, is their total focus on the substance of a negotiation—to the neglect of the process. Although substance is, of course, important, the process of how negotiations are structured is crucial to finding an acceptable outcome that achieves agreement on substance. Parties need a constructive process to help them engage in meaningful problem solving, especially where there is no trust and they have a long-term hostile relationship.

Where the peace process goes from here is uncertain. Trump has already announced that the US will carry out a naval blockade of Iranian ports. It will, of course, help greatly if the ceasefire can be maintained and extended beyond the two weeks, since the longer a cessation of hostilities is in place, the more time there will be for additional meaningful talks to occur. One thing that is certain, however, is that all of those working to promote an end to the war in Iran (Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, and other regional partners, as well China, the United Nations, others) have a huge challenge ahead of them in crafting a process that will allow for an integrative approach that will have a chance of resolving this long-standing, intractable conflict.

Until three years ago, AW, who requested that only his initials be used for identification purposes, was an almond farmer. Now, he’s a grass farmer. AW farms in Tulare County, California, the heart of the San Joaquin Valley and California’s most productive agricultural region, the source of more than half of the produce the nation consumes. Five years ago, he was growing almonds across his 300 acres, a profitable crop that sold at a high value on the market. Now, he’s growing cover crop, a mix of various grasses intended to keep the soil on his land healthy, but that doesn’t bring in income anywhere close to what AW was making when he was growing almonds.

Why did AW make this switch? Not out of choice, but out of necessity. California agriculture is tied to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a bill passed in 2014 with the goal of reducing groundwater overdraft throughout the state, an agriculture-driven environmental hazard that is depleting aquifers and causing subsidence. The main tension behind SGMA is that the act is expected to cause between 500,000 to 1 million acres of San Joaquin Valley agricultural land to come out of production before 2040, and the act does not come with a built-in support system to help farmers figure out what to do with their land when agriculture is no longer an option. Neither SGMA nor the Valley farmers who it’s hurting the most are at fault—farmers are simply employing decades old agricultural practices to meet national food demand and SGMA is simply trying to preserve the state’s water resources.

AW is one of the first farmers to feel the impacts of SGMA fully realized on his land. SGMA, although passed more than a decade ago, is just now taking hold across the state, and farmers are now faced with the difficult choice of farming under restrictions and the potential of facing fines, or not farming at all. The state’s agricultural economy is at a major influx point—how farmers, communities, organizations, and the government react to the challenges that are about to descend onto this region will influence how the agricultural industry survives and takes shape for the coming decades.

In the media and in public conversation, farmers are often portrayed as anti-environmental, shortsighted, and profit driven. But through interviews I conducted with over 30 San Joaquin Valley farmers about their experiences with SGMA, I found something different: people confronting extreme change, often alone, trying to make difficult decisions for the good of their families, their business, land, and their futures. Almost every farmer I spoke to described feelings of isolation as neighbors compete for water and limited state funding, and as collaboration and trust erode. Outside of a handful of small pools of money and technical assistance that have been rolled out by the California state government, there has been lacking wide-scale institutional support for farmers seeking to change land uses.

If we give people like AW the tools and backing to make this shift, the San Joaquin Valley can move from a story of loss to a blueprint for how rural communities across the country can adapt to a hotter, drier future.

To fill this void, California requires the scaling up of solutions that will help farmers remain in the agricultural industry while taking advantage of this wide-scale shift in the agricultural landscape to increase sustainability and prioritize the environment in their decisions and actions. Organizations based in the region, such as The Nature Conservancy, River Partners, and Sequoia Riverlands Trust, are working on a small scale to do just that.

These organizations aim to protect and preserve both habitat and agriculture in the San Joaquin Valley region while helping farmers navigate the landscape of SGMA. They work on habitat restoration projects, assisting farmers with conservation easements, and are constantly innovating on how to make certain solutions more economically viable for farmers. Alongside academic research partners, these research organizations are also exploring how to make certain aspects of agriculture more viable, such as an expansion of regenerative agriculture in the region, which would offer a path forward that ties farmers’ livelihoods to rebuilding soil, recharging groundwater, and restoring habitat and turning today’s crisis into a long-term investment in a healthier, more resilient food system. This work serves as a model of the support systems that need to be wheeled out at a much larger scale in order for farmers, the economy, and the environment to thrive under this set of new regulations. Its spirit of collective undertaking is exactly what the San Joaquin Valley needs now as it navigates the upheaval of SGMA.

What AW needs to help him navigate his transition from farming almonds is what the Valley needs: enough support to turn a forced transition into a livable one, where farmers can afford to retire acres while still keeping a foothold in agriculture and in their communities. That will require sustained investment in on-the-ground organizations, dedicated funding for land transition and habitat restoration, and policies that treat farmers not as villains, but as partners in reshaping one of America’s most important food-producing regions. If we give people like AW the tools and backing to make this shift, the San Joaquin Valley can move from a story of loss to a blueprint for how rural communities across the country can adapt to a hotter, drier future, bringing with them the promise of sustainability.

At a time when the science is clear, and action is overdue, the Trump administration’s STOMP initiative—aimed at measuring and removing microplastics from the human body—is a convenient distraction that delays real action. We do not need more studies to understand microplastics in our bodies. We need policies that prevent them from getting there in the first place.

For years, scientists have warned that we are breathing, eating, and drinking plastic. Microplastics—which contain more than 4,200 chemicals known to be hazardous to human health—are in our blood, lungs, and unborn babies.

And while there’s something validating about the Trump administration finally acknowledging this problem, putting microplastics on a watch list is not protection. Instead, this declared "war on microplastics" is a gift in disguise to the industries driving the crisis.

MAHA Promised Safety, It Gave us Plastic Straws

“Make America Healthy Again” was a rallying cry: Take on the corporate polluters, clean up our food supply, eliminate toxic chemicals, and hold the chemical industry accountable. The MAHA Report acknowledged that microplastics are found in "the blood and urine of American children and pregnant women,” and promised action from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The problem is that the only real way to fix it is to stop it at the source. That means taking on the fossil fuel industry driving plastic production—an industry to which this administration has shown deep loyalty.

That was the promise. But instead, the Trump administration gave us plastic straws and put single-use plastics back in our National Parks. They slashed the EPA's budget nearly in half—the very agency responsible for the new microplastics plan—and fired more than 1,000 of its scientists. They dismantled the agencies that protect us from chemical disasters and exposure to harmful hazards, like lead. They ramped up glyphosate production and appointed chemical-industry lobbyists to leadership roles within the EPA. They’re also weakening the Toxic Substances Control Act and rolling back protections on PFAS in drinking water.

While EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claims the administration is holding itself “to the highest standards to protect the health of every American,” it continues to gut science, weaken laws, and hollow out the very institutions responsible for protecting public health—giving polluting industries a free pass to keep producing more.

Even MAHA advocates are beginning to see through the rhetoric. In a recent letter to the EPA, they urged:“The EPA must choose whether it will uphold a chemical status quo or honor the promise to make this country healthy again. The public is watching. Families are organizing. Scientists are sounding the alarm.”

$144 Million to Understand the Problem, $31 Billion to Fuel It

Microplastics don’t just randomly end up in our bodies. They come from a system designed to produce endless plastic at any cost. That system is fueled by oil, gas, and coal. Nearly 99% of plastics are made from fossil fuels. Committing $144 million to study microplastics while subsidizing fossil fuels by nearly $31 billion a year is like trying to clean up an oil spill with a spoon while the tanker is still spewing.

The Trump administration has put a spotlight on a serious health crisis. The problem is that the only real way to fix it is to stop it at the source. That means taking on the fossil fuel industry driving plastic production—an industry to which this administration has shown deep loyalty. As Secretary of the US DHHS, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., put it on Fox News: “A lesson we were all supposed to learn in kindergarten is that you clean up after yourself. You don't force the public to do it.”

The coming months will show whether this administration is serious about action or simply delivering lip service to a disillusioned MAHA ahead of the midterms. If the administration is really committed to making Americans healthy again, it must act where it matters: Set enforceable limits on microplastics in drinking water, restore strong chemical safety laws, halt new plastic production, rebuild the EPA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and revoke the red-carpet access it has granted industry within regulatory agencies.

Above all, it could truly end the war on microplastics by backing a global plastics treaty that limits production in the first place.

Because you cannot detox a body you are still poisoning.

Saturday’s back-to-back headlines on The Washington Post were: “‘They Have Chosen Not To Accept Our Terms,’ Vance Says” and “U.S. Intelligence Shows China Taking A More Active Role In Iran War.” They echo headlines from a century ago that reported on the early days of what quickly became World War I.

In 2021, China and Iran became military allies, signing a “broad strategic partnership encompassing economic, diplomatic, and security dimensions.” Russia signed a similar comprehensive military/security agreement with Iran in January of last year. The three countries are now military allies and formally assisting each other. Hold that thought.

Then, on Sunday morning, America’s resident madman Donald Trump announced on his Nazi-infested social media site that the United States Navy will illegally blockade the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow chokepoint through which twenty percent of the world’s oil used to flow every day—threatening to intercept “every vessel in International Waters” that’s paid a toll to Iran.

The US blockade of the Strait begins the hour that this article was published: 10 AM ET on Monday, April 13th.

What happens when a US destroyer orders a Chinese-flagged tanker to heave to in the Strait of Hormuz and a Chinese warship sails between them?

That means all the shipping of oil for China and drones for Russia will be intercepted by the US. We’re now blocking the war and energy supplies of nations that have nuclear weapons and whose military assets are already in the region. And it came just hours after the peace talks in Islamabad—led by three American grifters with absolutely no diplomatic experience—had predictably collapsed.

What happens next will depend entirely on whether anyone in this administration has ever seriously studied what happened the last time a similar cascade of great-power commitments, cornered leaders, and military miscalculations all converged at once.

A hundred and twelve years ago this summer, a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip fired two shots in Sarajevo, killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary.

What followed was a deadly catastrophe, because every major European power had spent the previous forty years putting together mutual defense treaties with other major European powers.

(In the 1908 Bosnian Crisis Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia, land that Serbia claimed; the Serbs were humiliated and furious. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 left Serbia stronger and more willing to reach out to the Slavic people still living under Austria-Hungarian rule, particularly those in Bosnia, further enraging the Austria-Hungarians.)

Everybody was armed to the teeth and, frankly, paranoid about everybody else. So, when Franz Ferdinand’s assassination gave Austria-Hungary an excuse to punish it’s longtime enemy Serbia, those treaties clicked into place like the tumblers of a massive combination lock and the doors of hell swung open onto the most catastrophic war the world had, at that time, ever seen.

Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia, bound by pan-Slavic solidarity and treaty, mobilized. Germany, allied with Austria-Hungary and seeing the Russian mobilization, declared war on Russia. The Franco-Russian alliance dragged France in.

Once the fighting started, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan required invading France through neutral Belgium, which triggered Britain’s 1839 treaty obligation to protect Belgian neutrality.

Within six weeks of two pistol shots in Sarajevo, virtually every major power in Europe was engaged in a brutal war that escalated with the inevitability and power of a landslide. The leaders who set the whole machine in motion genuinely believed they could control the escalation, but they were terribly and tragically wrong. The interlocking agreements and past hostilities simply took over, and seventeen million people died.

I’ve been thinking about Sarajevo a lot this week, because what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now follows the same terrifying script, except that this time, the European, Middle Eastern, and Asian powers that are being pulled toward what could easily become World War III all have nuclear weapons.

Here’s how we got here:

Benjamin Netanyahu made six trips to the White House in the year before the war began, each time pressing Trump and his old family friend Jared Kushner with the argument that Iran was ripe for regime change, that the mullahs were one good strike away from falling, and that history was calling.

What the New York Times’ reporting now makes clear—and what Trump’s own CIA director and secretary of state reportedly called “farcical” and “bullshit” in private—is that Netanyahu had an overwhelming personal reason to want this war: he’s been fighting a fraud, bribery, and breach-of-trust criminal trial that could put him in prison if he’s convicted.

Wars are good for embattled leaders: they can generate emergency status and even pause court proceedings. And when this war started on February 28th, Netanyahu’s trial did indeed grind to a halt under Israel’s wartime court emergency rules, which had to be repeatedly extended. The trial is only now, this week, resuming. (Trump, to help his fellow authoritarian, has been publicly pressuring Israel’s president to pardon Netanyahu, telling him to do it “today” and calling him a “disgrace” for hesitating.)

So Trump (himself facing a crisis from the Epstein documents and accusations of raping a 13-year-old girl) and “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth (who simply loves war) launched a bloody confrontation in which one of the key decision-makers’ primary motivation—at least on the Israeli side—was to keep himself out of prison.

And 44 days later, the man who should be in the defendant’s chair is instead flying into southern Lebanon to pose with troops (his popularity is now sky-high in Israel because of the war) while the United States Navy blockades one of the most consequential waterways on the planet.

Yesterday, Trump posted to his failing social media site a declaration that may end up being seen, in retrospect, much like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. He proclaimed that the Navy will begin “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz” and will “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.”

That last sentence is the one that could rock the planet, because, as the independent National Security Desk analysis makes clear, Trump’s phrase “every vessel in International Waters” is a global directive. It means the US Navy now officially claims the legal right to board, search, and seize foreign ships anywhere on the world’s oceans as well as the ships of any nation trying to pass through the Strait.

Under international maritime law, that’s called “piracy.” And here’s the other parallel to the tensions between Austria-Hungary and Serbia back in the day: roughly 80 percent of China’s oil imports that transit the Strait—that Trump just said he will “blockade”—are Chinese-owned or Chinese-connected vessels.

— China already has a Type 055 cruiser, a Type 052D destroyer, and a massive surveillance ship sitting right there in the region, in the Gulf of Oman.
— Chinese satellites have been providing real-time targeting intelligence to Iran throughout this war.
— Russia has been running electronic warfare systems that, according to pre-war assessments, degrade American radar and communications by as much as 80 percent.
— Iran’s military has been successful in killing over a dozen American troops and wounding hundreds — and downing multiple US military aircraft — because of targeting information Putin’s reportedly been giving them.

These are active military contributions to the Iranian war effort right now.

So what happens when a US destroyer orders a Chinese-flagged tanker to heave to in the Strait of Hormuz and a Chinese warship sails between them? Trump has to choose between backing down—and watching the blockade collapse—or firing on the naval vessel of a country with roughly 400 nuclear warheads.

And this isn’t a purely hypothetical scenario. China and its leader Xi Jinping have made it abundantly clear that maintaining an uninterrupted energy supply through the Strait is one of its core national interests; it won’t simply steam away.

On the Russian side, Vladimir Putin is also not a man who responds with moderation to being cornered. And he’s already in deep trouble in his own country, as well as on his back foot in Ukraine.

The Atlantic Council and RAND have both documented that Putin’s domestic position is more stressed than at any point since his brutal and criminal Ukraine invasion began. Russia today faces runaway military spending consuming eight percent of GDP, skyrocketing inflation, fuel shortages, and a society that polls show has grown deeply tired of the war in Ukraine.

Analysts at the Royal United Services Institute have concluded that Putin literally cannot afford to be seen accepting strategic defeat, because the entire justification of his authoritarian model rests on his promise to “restore Russian greatness” (Make Russia Great Again). If he fails, he may not survive. Not just politically, but physically; Russia has a long, ancient history of dealing harshly with failed leaders.

Thus, a cornered, domestically vulnerable Putin with 6,000 nuclear weapons who is already actively helping Iran kill Americans isn’t a guy who backs down gracefully. He’s a leader who escalates.

And to compound things, yesterday one of the most important parts of the worldwide autocratic network Putin’s been building for decades (including his support for Trump’s election and re-election) collapsed.

In Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has spent 16 years building the model of “illiberal democracy” that Trump, Vance, and the Heritage Foundation have openly cited as their template, voters turned out in the highest numbers since the fall of communism—a stunning 78 percent—and handed a decisive victory to opposition leader Péter Magyar and his Tisza party.

In 1914, it took six weeks until the dogs of all-out-war were fully unleashed. This time, we’re already 43 days in, and we have destroyers parked in a mined strait that China needs to stay alive economically and Russia would love to see humiliate the United States and Europe.

Vice President Vance was just there last week, rallying with Orbán, promising Trump’s “economic might” to help out Hungary (which is suffering under years of corruption and looting by Orbán’s oligarch buddies) if Fidesz held on. Today, that ally is soon to be gone (Magyar takes over in May). The worldwide autocrat network, which is now largely led by Putin, Trump, Orbán, and Netanyahu, is beginning to fracture at its European edge.

When great powers are simultaneously cornered along with a smaller ally, when their leaders face domestic crises that demand the appearance of strength, when interlocking military commitments are already active and drawing them toward conflict, that’s when the world has historically stumbled into catastrophes that nobody wanted and nobody planned.

In 1914, it took six weeks until the dogs of all-out-war were fully unleashed. This time, we’re already 43 days in, and we have destroyers parked in a mined strait that China needs to stay alive economically and Russia would love to see humiliate the United States and Europe.

Louise and I have traveled the world extensively; I’ve stood in the World War I cemeteries of France and Belgium, with row after row of white crosses stretching to the horizon, and been stunned by the fact that every one of those young men died in a war that the people who started it genuinely believed they could control.

The lesson of WWI is that leaders who think they can manage escalation usually can’t.

The time to speak up is right now, before the tumblers click into place. Call your senators and representative (you can reach them through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121) and tell them to support the Democrats’ War Powers Resolution that could stop Trump from going even farther down this treacherous, deadly, possibly-planet-destroying road.

Congress must reassert its constitutional war-making authority: under our Constitution, no president gets to blockade an international waterway with a social media post, and the American people didn’t vote for a nuclear confrontation with China and Russia over Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial. Trump must be impeached now.

And make sure you’re registered to vote and that everyone you know is registered, because the November 2026 midterms are the most direct democratic check we still have on where this is all heading. Check your registration at Vote.gov.