Today, like yesterday, I wake up and decide to make the world a better place.

I know, I know. There are over 8 billion people living on Earth. There are more places than any one of us will ever see, and more cultures than we will ever understand. How could a single person make an impact? How could a single person change the world for the better?

Many people would say it’s impossible. And at barely 5’2”, I’m glaringly aware of my literal smallness. As an astrophysicist, I know that I take up only about 10-83 times the volume of the observable Universe: a number so small I can’t wrap my head around it. The closest comparison I can muster is that I’m about the size of an atom in the scale of the solar system. And even then, I’d still be a bit smaller.

But none of that matters. My goal is still entirely within reach. That’s something that astrophysics has also taught me: small forces can make big changes.

The proof is under our feet. Today, Earth returns to the point in the solar system where it landed 365.24 days—almost, but not quite. Almost imperceptibly, it overshoots.

This cascade of small influences may, at first glance, go unnoticed. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the trajectory of the entire planet budges.

At first glance, the Earth’s motion may appear to be shaped entirely by a single source: its most powerful influence, the Sun. But the Earth-Sun system is not static. Instead, our planet is pulled in many directions by innumerable small forces.

Its motion is shaped by the other seven planets in our solar system, each hundreds of millions of miles away. Those massive planetary neighbors had their motion fundamentally shaped by the tugs of innumerable ancient asteroids in the early solar system. Those, in turn, were shaped by the influence of distant passing stars—whose own trajectories were altered by the collective impact of stars, gas, and dark matter across the Milky Way.

This cascade of small influences may, at first glance, go unnoticed. Nevertheless, slowly but surely, the trajectory of the entire planet budges. The direction of our world is determined by countless infinitesimal forces compounding to move not only mountains, but entire planets.

Just as the Earth’s motion is shaped by the sum of small forces, the direction of humanity is shaped by the sum of small choices that people make every day. We often think that making an impact looks like a single person conveying their idea to the public at large, proclaiming from a platform. Sometimes, yes, change does require a spark, the one person who says something. But the true power in these proclamations comes not from their splash, but from the ripples that they create. And a series of small ripples can create waves.

Every small decision, every conversation, launches another ripple. Rosa Parks helped ignite the Civil Rights movement by refusing to move from her seat on a bus. The #MeToo movement arose from a single conversation in which a woman was deeply affected by a young girl’s experience with abuse. The invention of MRI began as a scribble on the back of a napkin.

Every small decision, every conversation, launches another ripple.

It may sometimes seem as if the very strongest forces — or the very loudest voices — are the only ones that “matter.” Some forces, some voices, do have a disproportionate reach. In the enormity of the world, and of our Universe, we may feel small.

Yet the sum of small forces has, on Earth, made all the difference: subtly shifting the planet’s tilt and its path to produce Earth’s long-term climate cycles, dictate the timing of ice ages, and shape how life emerged and adapted on our planet. The modest tugs of the planets and of the moon, together with the cascading influence of the Milky Way environment, produce the conditions necessary for life as we know it on Earth.

Meaningful impact need not be bold and flashy. Our small, everyday choices seed change. Intentionally or not, in ways obvious or not, these decisions compound to budge the trajectory of our world.

So today I will treat the cashier at my grocery store with kindness. I will take the time to ask my neighbor about their day, and to listen with care. I will check in on friends and family members. I will tell the people I look up to how much I admire them, and why. In the flurry of headlines, apps, and work duties vying for my attention, I will choose compassion and intention.

None of us is helpless. Our actions—as well as the actions we don't take—make a real, tangible impact. So, ask yourself: in which direction will you push the world today?

These days, most of Havana’s streets are fairly empty of cars, but full of people walking or riding bicycles, electric bikes, electric “tricycles,” or scooters. Trash has piled up on most corners where regular pick-up has become impossible given that the garbage trucks have no gasoline. The average conversation starts off with comparing who’s gone the longest without electricity. The sympathy flows, as you exchange stories of what else you are going without: water, gas, food, medicine, transportation. People list the family members they haven’t been able to see and the medical appointments they’ve missed. Inevitably, someone will say better days are coming—“because they have to”—and to keep moving forward.

This week alone, the US Department of Justice indicted Raul Castro, the former head of state, who’s now 94 years old and largely out of public life. In addition, the Supreme Court gave a green light to Cuban-American-owned companies with property claims in Cuba from 67 years ago to sue tourist industry actors who “profited” from that land. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to grow more and more publicly agitated with Cuba’s refusal to bow to his demands, and Trump’s consistent incoherence shows an absolute lack of any clear policy position towards Cuba, aside from one that may economically benefit him and/or his family.

The indictment of Castro is a page taken from Trump’s playbook on Venezuela from earlier this year. There, the administration indicted a sitting head of state, Nicolas Maduro, as a legal pretext for a military intervention, which was labelled an “emergency” and thus not an act of war that would require Congressional approval. The administration staged a geopolitical coup d’état involving international kidnapping, acts of war in plain violation of international law and the U.N. Charter, and then imprisoned that leader as a message to the world of what happens to those who defy US interests. Such indictments serve as purportedly fixed legal fictions for shifting political pretexts. In Venezuela it was supposedly the state’s support for criminal enterprises and gangs, which was the justification for the Trump administration’s stated reason for the extrajudicial killing of nearly 200 civilians in piracy actions in the Caribbean. Once Maduro was kidnapped and jailed, the administration has stopped talking gangs and narcotrafficking rings.

In Cuba, the Justice Department’s indictment of Raul Castro is a clear response to the political forces that commanded it. As the island nation is not complying rapidly enough to the changes demanded by Washington, the administration has escalated its threats, military preparations, and legal actions, albeit largely symbolic in nature.

Rubio’s Escalation of Threats as Campaign Messaging

For decades, Marco Rubio has pushed for privately what the Cuban-American community in south Florida has not achieved in nearly 70 years: to run Cuba’s political and economic system remotely from Miami and Washington. These remote “owners” of Cuba have driven and financed Rubio’s political career, leading to this moment where he is adamantly (though unsuccessfully) trying to sell the American public that Cuba is a national security threat while simultaneously telling Cubans that their government is too weak to protect them. That inherent contradiction and incoherence, long the basis of US policy towards Cuba, have never been more dangerous than at this moment when Rubio’s rage and blind ambition to cause widespread destruction is bolstered by Trump’s monarchical goals.

The contradictory discourse is present in nearly every aspect of Cuba policy. Just this week, Rubio issued an Orwellian statement in response to the ICE arrest of Adys Lastres Morera, the sister of the head of GAESA, a Cuban entity that is connected to large swaths of the Cuban economy. Rubio was right to point out that “[f]or far too long, the family members of terrorist organizations, repressive anti-American regimes and other bad actors . . . have been given a free pass to enjoy the privileges of living in the United States,” but the United States also has a long tradition of granting sanctuary to terrorists, dictators, and war criminals. In particular, Latin American leaders, generals, and intelligence operatives that have long done the US bidding in propping up violent regimes have been granted refuge in south Florida, the home of Rubio and other elected officials who have promoted violence over diplomacy.

Yet what makes international cooperation, collaboration, and survival possible is not just insisting upon respect for international law and human rights by all governments, but strengthening their ability to do so through dialogue and diplomacy. The Trump-Rubio administration has clearly not been serious about using diplomacy to solve global conflicts, and that holds true in Cuba as well. The administration has tried to identify potential “opposition” I Cuba or political leaders it can “work with” like Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. Real US diplomacy looks quite different. Twelve years ago, it brought to Cuba a boom of economic activity, a thriving private sector, better financed public institutions, and riveting cultural exchanges for over a million US residents who found in Cuba a rich cultural, musical, artistic, and academic partner.

Trump and Rubio, though they might articulate the same goals, have different ulterior motives. Their goal is not, and has never been, economic opportunity for Cubans. Instead, they want an economic boon for Cuban-Americans aching to exert political and economic control over a land many have never even visited. Although Florida no longer plays a significant electoral role in US-Cuba policy, Rubio’s recent video talking to the Cuban people—and his messaging in general in escalating threats and aggression towards Cuba—is clearly intended to rally his base. What has caused widespread anxiety and fear among millions in Cuba has nevertheless excited his political base in south Florida.

Inside Cuba

These days in Havana, Cubans are experiencing a duality that has existed for generations who have lived under the threat of US military aggression and the daily reality of economic warfare. Cubans are exhausted. They are increasingly anxious and have reached the bottom of the well of hope. There is a saying that the last thing you lose is hope, meaning it is what you hold on to until the very end. Cubans are at the very end of their ability to see a hopeful future.

I get asked questions daily. Should I take my kids to a shelter? Will the United States bomb Havana? Where is it safe to go? Why don’t US citizens stop their government?

Cubans are experts at survival, and that’s exactly what they continue to do. As US Southern Command sends the aircraft carrier Nimitz into Caribbean waters, Cubans continue to carry on with daily life like they have done decade after decade. Most days, those around me look for an electric tricycle to take them to work or their child to school or have added a child seat to their bicycles. Cars that run on gasoline have become what one of my friends calls “garage adornments.”

Given the daily threat of military intervention and the four-month long oil blockade, activities like sleep have become a luxury. Many families cook or wash clothes at 3:00 a.m. when they get 1-2 hours of electricity. My friend sleeps on the floor with her son near the front door where air drafts can keep them cool in the sweltering heat and humidity. Most of us go without water for days at a time because lack of electricity makes pumping and distributing water impossible. Another dear friend went 35 days with no water while she, her mother, and her toddler spent weeks traveling from house to house bathing and washing clothes. Cooking and cleaning become infinitely more difficult with no water, gas, or electricity. Some daycare centers use coal to cook lunch for undernourished children.

While we live under the perpetual threat of US military aggression, children continue to play in the street with sticks and deflated balls, families continue to find ways to get to work and buy food, and the deep spiritual and religious traditions that sustain many Cubans are turned to over and over again. War has a name and a face. It’s not just a vague “government.” Here there are millions of people who owe the United States nothing and instead have only demanded to live in peace, in their homeland, however flawed it may be.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) kicked off a storm when she said in a podcast interview last week that a person cannot “earn” a billion dollars.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded by saying that the statement was “bizarrely foolish” and then pointed to the worst possible example he could think of to counter Ocasio-Cortez’s point: mega-billionaire Elon Musk.

In the eyes of the US government, and specifically the IRS, there’s no question about it. Elon Musk did not “earn” his wealth. Otherwise, he’d be paying a tax rate at least 17 times greater than he is—and generating a tax bill bigger than the GDP of Nevada.

Unless you’re immortal, Ocasio-Cortez is indeed correct that it’s impossible to earn a billion dollars.

The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.

But what if you are Elon Musk? How long would it you take then? A billion years to earn a billion dollars, and 800 billion years to earn $800 billion—so, 58 times longer than the existence of the known universe.

Now that’s bizarre.

The average US worker, earning $64,505 a year, would have to work over 15,500 years to “earn” a billion dollars. Want to be as rich as Elon Musk? You’d have to work 41 times longer than humans existed—over 12 million years.

Elon Musk—like Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Elison and many of the world’s other richest men—only “earns” $1 a year. He is what's known as a $1 CEO because he gets paid an annual salary of $1.

What most people don’t realize when we talk about wealth and wealth taxes is that we’re talking about two types of wealth. There’s earned wealth, which is when you get paid for you what you do (eg salaries, wages, etc). And then there’s collected wealth, which is when you get paid for what you own—eg dividends for owning stocks or rent money for owning real estate.

Most people primarily rely on earned wealth for a living. Billionaires on the other hand, their wealth is almost entirely collected wealth.

And that matters, because collected wealth tends to grow a lot faster than earned wealth, but more importantly, because governments tend to tax collected wealth a lot less than earned wealth.

In fact, billionaires very often deliberately reshuffle their wealth around into collected types of wealth specifically to underreport what they “earn” to the IRS and pay less income tax. It’s why Elon Musk can be the world’s richest man on an annual salary of $1. It’s why he and Jeff Bezos have been able to pay zero income taxes in some years while topping the Forbes richest people's list. It's also why Bezos was able to receive a family tax credit for families earning less than $100,000 a year.

But it gets even more bizarre.

Many billionaires aren’t just not earning much, they’re hopelessly in debt—apparently. Many of them are actually living off huge loans that they don’t expect to pay off in their lifetimes. It’s a scheme called “Buy, Borrow, Die.”

Taking their tax allergies to the extreme, rather than selling assets to get the money they need to actually pay for things, some billionaires take out loans against their assets instead. This way, they don’t have to pay the taxes that would have applied if they sold their assets, plus they get to hold on to the assets which can become worth even more over time. And because the money they get this way is technically loan money, it doesn’t count as earned income—and so they can continue to underreport their “earnings” to the IRS and underpay tax.

It might come as a shock to Sen Cruz, but many US billionaires, like his example Elon Musk, have done all they can to “earn” as little to none of their wealth, and some have even gone so far as to “indebt” their billions instead.

But why should we care about any of this?

Because it’s this two-tier tax system that gives special treatment to collected wealth over earned wealth that has allowed the extreme wealth of super-rich individuals to quadruple since the 1980s.

The rise of extreme wealth is directly linked to lower economic productivity, to more households going into debt, and to people living shorter lives. A G20 report co-authored by winner of the Nobel prize for economics Joseph Stiglitz warns that extreme wealth is a threat to democracy.

What makes wealth taxes so powerful—and so opposed by a vocal minority among the superrich—isn’t just the huge sums of public funds they can bring in. It’s that by specifically taxing collected wealth, wealth taxes directly challenge this two-tier tax system. It’s about protecting economies, people and planet from the harms of extreme wealth.

Whether you’re a wealth earner or a wealth collector, we all have an equal responsibility to pitch in our fair share.

Far-right leaders in the United States are fighting tooth and nail to eliminate rights for transgender people.

Many couch their claims in language like “protecting children” and “freedom of religion.” But buried beneath these rhetorical flourishes is another pernicious philosophy: that being transgender is a sin, and that the government should punish it.

Case in point: Conservative Christian organizations like the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) and the Liberty Council are pushing the Supreme Court to allow states to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports.

In a press release defending ERLC’s position, interim president Gary Hollingsworth proclaimed: “We serve an infallible God. The same God who made the universe made humanity in His image with intentionality and purpose. He gave humanity two immutable genders, man and woman, as gifts reflecting His own nature.”

There are conflicting, even incompatible interpretations of the Bible. But for us, the consistent messages of love, care, humility, and equity shine brightly.

Meanwhile, at the state level, far-right evangelicals in Colorado recently secured enough signatures to put anti-trans legislation on the ballot. And in Idaho, due to pressure from conservative legislators and organizations, the state is poised to implement one of the most extreme anti-trans bathroom laws in the nation.

If all one read were these stories, it would appear that the Bible is unequivocal in its condemnation of gender expansiveness and that all of Christendom is unflinching in its interpretation of that scripture.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As scholars who have studied the Bible for decades, we believe transgender people—just like all people—are our sacred, precious, divinely cherished neighbors. There’s no reason that one narrow religious interpretation should be able to dictate policy and structure our community.

The author of Genesis writes that “male and female [God] created them” (1.27). While some point to this scripture as confirmation of a gender binary, others identify it as a rhetorical device known as a merism, used frequently throughout the Bible to describe an expansive concept. For example, in Genesis 1:1, the Bible describes making “the heavens and Earth.” But this is widely understood to represent the entire cosmos—stars, comets, planets, and beyond—not just the heavens and Earth. Later in Genesis, the Bible uses both “evening and morning” and “night and day” to represent an entire day—including dawn and dusk. Similarly, male and female do not exhaust the diversity of gender identities and sexualities, all of which God blesses as good.

Moreover, the work of many Biblical scholars such as Dr. Esther Brownsmith, Dr. Joseph Marchal, and Dr. Linn Marie Tonstad has critically improved and expanded Christian theological studies by demonstrating that, as Brownsmith recently said, “We can’t do Biblical scholarship without [transgender people].”

Brownsmith’s scholarship on nonbinary readings of Hebrew Bible figure Mordechai, Marchal’s work on ancient conceptions of gender in Paul’s letters, and Tonstad’s formulation of the Holy Trinity as a framework for considering gender expansively—and vice versa—are just a handful of recent examples in a rapidly expanding discipline of thinkers helping us read scripture in more rigorous ways.

As Christians, we believe that, as the scripture tells us, humanity is created in God’s image. Our glorious variety and multitude is reflective of God’s own limitlessness. Indeed, transgender people’s embodiments and expressions mirror God’s intentional and enduring refutation of definition, binaries, and subjective stability. And they offer us a precious gift—the ability to look beyond strict structures and appreciate humanity in all its diversity and complexity. So, too, as theologian Virginia Mollenkott suggests, because God created humanity in God’s own image, we might well speak of God as gender nonconforming or “omnigender,” the God of all genders and of none.

For some, the Bible mandates a strict gender binary, and that belief guides their participation in public life. However, that interpretation is not the only one—and hardly the only one rooted in history and theological tradition.

As Jesus proposed in the parable of the Good Samaritan, the question we must ask is twofold. First: who is my neighbor, whose rights I am obligated to affirm and defend? Second: Who is the one who proves neighborly, the one who acts in loving, compassionate, and just ways?

There’s no question: There are conflicting, even incompatible interpretations of the Bible. But for us, the consistent messages of love, care, humility, and equity shine brightly. To love the neighbor—including our trans family members, friends, coworkers, and congregants—means to advocate for that neighbor’s right to be; to love and be loved; and to enjoy a healthy, fulfilling life in dignity and safety.

Less than three weeks after President Donald Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” on Truth Social, representatives of the United States—the only country to ever deploy nuclear weapons on another country—took the mic at the United Nations headquarters to lecture the rest of the world about nuclear-weapons safety. As the US-Israeli war on Iran actively unravels 50 years of progress toward nuclear nonproliferation, this moment perfectly captured the backwardness of international nuclear policy.

From April 27 to May 22, representatives of over 200 countries and diplomatic organizations convened at the UN headquarters in New York City for the 11th review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Signed in 1970, the NPT remains the pièce de résistance of international nuclear policy, and poses three main rules: States that do not have nuclear weapons will not seek to acquire them; states that do possess nuclear weapons will commit to disarmament instead of engaging in arms races; and all states have the right to utilize nuclear energy. These conferences are held by the UN roughly every five years to ensure the treaty’s tenets are upheld and encourage debate on any possible updates.

This year’s conference, if not the NPT itself, was a farce from the beginning thanks to the United States and Israel. Within the first three hours of the first meeting on April 27, the United States condemned Iran—a country it was actively attacking—for pursuing peaceful enrichment of uranium, the right to which it is guaranteed under the third tenet of the NPT.

From that point on, the contradictions only became more embarrassing. The United Kingdom and France, two other nuclear-armed states, immediately joined the United States in condemning the representative of non-nuclear Iran who had just been elected a vice president of the conference.

When the Africa Group—composed of 54 African nations—used the NPT conference as a platform to call for a new nuclear-free zone for the Middle East, that should be seen as perhaps the most promising proposal to come out of the conference.

When they attacked Iran in February, the United States and Israel sent a clear message to the world that utterly extinguishes any legitimacy of the NPT: The treaty-defined right to peaceful enrichment is a myth, and nuclear-armed states like the United States and Israel will wage wars of aggression and destruction to ensure the nuclear balance of power remains in their favor.

This message is just a reiteration of what the world has known since the beginning of the War on Terror, if not before: As long as the United States is involved, diplomacy is dead. Colin Powell killed it with his speech to the UN Security Council about fictitious WMDs in Iraq. Barack Obama killed it by bombing and seizing $30 billion from Libya, which had already abolished its nuclear weapons program and signed the NPT. And now Donald Trump has killed it again by attacking Iran’s civilian infrastructure, including nuclear facilities which are protected under the NPT.

With the United States as the presiding power, treaties and territorial sovereignty can be torn up at any time. These are the exact political conditions that led a country like North Korea to avoid signing the NPT altogether and develop nuclear weapons. If there is no incentive of safety for following the rules, then it becomes perfectly rational to not follow them.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the United States-based nuclear watchdog that hosts the famous “Doomsday Clock,” quickly responded to the fact that the legitimacy of the NPT was disintegrating in real time at the UN. Before the conference ended, they published the bluntly titled report Iran’s Positions at the NPT Review Conference Are Rational. Ignoring Them Would Weaken the Treaty. With this report, the international nuclear experts at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are practically begging on their knees for the United States to adopt a nuclear policy that isn’t hellbent on illegal wars, mass punishment of civilians, and nullifying of international treaties.

There was good news at the NPT conference too. Although the illegal, bloodthirsty US-Israeli war on Iran has threatened the survival of the nonproliferation policy pushed by the UN, some non-nuclear states used the conference to propose more modest nuclear treaties that may ultimately prove to be more reliable.

In addition to the NPT, there are international treaties establishing “nuclear free zones” in five regions: Latin America and the Caribbean, signed in 1967; the South Pacific, signed in 1985; Southeast Asia, signed in 1995; Africa, signed in 1996; and Central Asia, signed in 2006. The Treaty of Tlatelolco, covering Latin America and the Caribbean, even predates the NPT by three years. These nuclear-free zones have arguably outperformed the NPT in producing nuclear-free outcomes in their respective sections of the globe.

Simply put, these treaties are underrated. Over the past 50 years, the United States has spread its nuclear arsenal to NATO allies including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. And just earlier this spring, Japan’s prime minister floated the possibility of hosting nuclear weapons on behalf of the United States too. Likewise, Russia stations nuclear weapons in its neighbor Belarus. This form of proliferation, dubbed “nuclear sharing,” is essentially a violation of the NPT—it puts nuclear weapons in states that otherwise wouldn’t have them. But while nuclear powers have destroyed the legitimacy of the NPT by engaging in nuclear sharing arms races, non-nuclear countries have shown real leadership on nuclear policy by establishing these nuclear-free zones that effectively and reliably curtail proliferation.

So when the Africa Group—composed of 54 African nations—used the NPT conference as a platform to call for a new nuclear-free zone for the Middle East, that should be seen as perhaps the most promising proposal to come out of the conference. With this suggestion, the Africa Group is stating the obvious: The United States and Israel, with their land-theft operation in Lebanon and their war of terror on Iran, are starting and escalating conflicts in the Middle East faster than the rest of the world can keep up with. The international community might as well try to keep nuclear weapons out of these conflicts.

There’s one problem with this proposal, and it’s not Iran’s alleged nuclear program.

Israel is reported to possess at least 90 nuclear warheads. Unlike Iran, Israel is not a cooperating party to the NPT, so its nuclear arsenal is not monitored by international watchdogs like the International Atomic Energy Agency. To this day, the United States does not acknowledge that Israel’s weapons exist at all.

A nuclear free zone in the Middle East will not be actualized any time soon because Israel is already violating it. But with this proposal the Africa Group is forcing the hand of the US and allies regarding Israel’s nuclear arsenal. This isn’t an adversarial action at all; it’s a necessary, good-faith move toward nuclear policy that is honest and proven to work. That same week, 30 members of Congress signed a letter demanding the United States acknowledge Israel’s warheads.

Even as the United States falsely claims to be eliminating a nuclear threat in the Middle East, it is simultaneously creating a new nuclear threat by proposing to station warheads in Japan, escalating toward a new war with China. Every single one of these escalations brings the world closer not only to all-out nuclear war, but also to imperialist wars of aggression backed by nuclear arsenals, such as the imperialist wars on Iraq, Libya, and Iran.

In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu, then a member of the Zionist parliament for the Likud party, warned that Iran may develop a nuclear bomb within three to five years. The United States, its media, and its allies have believed and peddled these lies for over 30 years, but the rest of the world has caught up.

Remember wishing your toys could really talk? Well, now they can—and it’s not pretty. A slew of AI-driven toys are on the market today, designed to hold conversations with very young children. Dolls, plushies, and action figures—toys that traditionally encouraged creative play—now come as embodied chatbots marketed as safe and trustworthy companions for young children. Yet they are anything but.

AI toys intentionally attract and prolong children’s attention in order to collect intimate biometric data, either to hone a particular toy’s interactions or to sell to marketers, or both. They can also put children’s privacy at risk. Researchers recently found that audio recordings of tens of thousands of children’s conversations with the AI toy Miko were easily accessible to absolutely anyone.

It’s worrisome that AI toys marketed to young children use the same chatbot technology and persuasive design elements known to have harmed teens by encouraging dangerous behaviors, including self-harm and suicide. Young children are especially vulnerable to this type of manipulation. Toddlers and preschoolers are naturally more trusting than adolescents, and their capacity for judgment is less developed. In addition, they have a harder time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. Finally, because AI toys carry on conversations and simulate empathy, they encourage children to develop deep attachments to them. In doing so, they can undermine young children’s real-life relationships with caring adults, displace play with peers, and deprive children of the benefits of creative play.

The problems associated with encouraging children to rely on AI toys for companionship become increasingly evident as studies emerge that document how kids actually interact with them. Researchers at Cambridge University observed children ages 3-5 using Gabbo, a popular AI toy from Curio Interactive, Inc. When Joshua, age 3, repeatedly asks Gabbo, “Are you sad?” Gabbo eventually replies, “I’m feeling great. What’s on your mind?” When Joshua answers, “I’m sad.” Gabbo says, “Don’t worry! I’m a happy little bot. Let’s keep the fun going. What shall we talk about next?”

When, as kids, we wished our toys could talk, we were wishing for them to say what we imagined, not what toy companies programmed them to say.

It’s troubling that, despite Joshua’s repeated efforts to talk about sadness, first by attributing the feelings to the toy, then by expressing his own feelings, Gabbo shuts him down. In doing so, Gabbo deprives him of an opportunity to verbalize and explore his feelings and sends the message that feelings like sadness should not be discussed. In contrast, interactions with caring adults can offer nuanced validation and encouragement to talk about what children are feeling.

As their technology becomes more refined and sophisticated, AI toys will likely get better in simulating understanding and empathy. This is, however, likely to make them simultaneously more compelling and, therefore, more harmful. A more empathic AI toy is not the solution. As the toys become more adept at replicating human conversation, their potential to displace actual human interactions—both with adults and other children—will increase.

Ensuring that children have time and space to play with other children is also essential to healthy development. Play with AI toys doesn’t have the same benefits as play with peers. One problem is that, like most chatbots, these toys are designed to avoid and smooth over conflict and offer unconditional support to their users. Yet encountering and resolving conflict is a necessary component of how young children learn how to live in relationship with other people. The process of resolving a disagreement over a ball, for instance, helps kids develop life skills such as self-regulation, turn taking, sharing, and negotiation.

Not only do AI toys fail as companions, they also fail as playthings. Given the chance, children naturally use play to give voice to their deepest hopes, fears, and dreams, and to make sense of their life experiences. The true value of play with dolls, stuffed animals, and any inanimate creature is that their silence invites children to bring them to life; imbue them with distinct personalities; and transform them as needed into friends, adversaries, champions, and more. They encourage the kind of creative play that is crucial to healthy development.

When algorithms instead of children give voice to toys, kids lose the wide-ranging benefits of imaginative play. By controlling half of any conversation, AI toys deprive children of opportunities for the kind of play that nurtures creativity, enables self-expression, and encourages kids to act rather than merely react, all of which help kids learn to cope successfully with the inevitable challenges of being human.

Despite these potential harms, the manufacture and marketing of AI toys for young children continues to proliferate unregulated. According to Market Research Future, the global AI toy market—currently valued at almost $35 billion—is projected to reach $270 billion by 2035, especially as toy giants such as Mattel and Hasbro build out their product lines. Already, almost half of parents of children ages 0-8 have purchased, or are thinking about purchasing, AI toys.

When, as kids, we wished our toys could talk, we were wishing for them to say what we imagined, not what toy companies programmed them to say. Despite tech industry marketing, the reality is that children don’t need talking toys. What kids really need is for us to hold AI companies accountable. Children need pediatricians, early childhood educators, and anyone who cares about young children to take a strong stand for child-driven play and against AI toys for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. They need legislators to pass laws that regulate how and to whom AI products are marketed.

Working toward those kinds of systemic changes is essential, but making them happen takes time. There is, however, something we can do right now to send AI companies an important message while protecting children’s privacy, preserving their human relationships, and encouraging their creative play. Let’s just say no to AI toys for young children.

Three years behind schedule, the US House of Representatives passed a Farm Bill last month. Despite thousands of independent, humane farmers sounding the alarm that American livestock production is hurtling toward a breaking point, Congress chose to ignore those voices in favor of propping up corporate profits with more handouts to industrial agriculture.

America prides itself on supporting small and local businesses, yet decades of agricultural policy decisions signal nothing but disdain for our small and local farms. The overwhelming majority of taxpayer dollars in the House Farm Bill will funnel directly into the hands of the largest farms and agricultural corporations, while neglecting the needs of the small, independent producers who make up over 85% of all farms in our country. As a result, since the most recent Farm Bill in 2018, over 158,000 farms have had to close their gates, while shareholder value has skyrocketed for the few meatpacking monopolies that maintain a vertically-integrated vice grip on our nation’s meat supply.

Here’s the real kicker—even with access to the endless handouts industrial agriculture has received for decades, we have an increasingly fragile food system. Far from the safe, abundant, and affordable food supply their taglines promise, the factory farming of animals in confinement systems is responsible for major public health threats, the degradation of our soil and waterways, and the hollowing out of our rural communities. Cancer rates in industrial ag-heavy states are rising at alarming rates, and once-thriving small towns are falling victim to corporate capture.

The House Farm Bill includes a provision that independent farmers have made clear drives meat-packer consolidation and robs us of markets that voters in several states demanded: the “Save Our Bacon” (SOB) Act, which, far from saving any bacon, would further entrench a fragile system that profits from cruel confinement and extreme overcrowding of pigs. When our current food system faces extreme stressors like the pandemic or bird flu, these supply chains break down and supermarket shelves quickly empty of meat, eggs, and dairy products. Meanwhile smaller independent farmers like us who use more humane, resilient practices that prioritize the welfare of animals, people, and the environment are able to continue feeding our communities without disruptions.

The Senate now has the opportunity to right the House’s Farm Bill wrongs, restoring and expanding funding for local and regional food systems, and removing favors to industry lobby groups like the Save Our Bacon Act.

What we know is that consumers are fed up, and no longer buy the tired argument that more humane and healthy farming methods are unrealistic, or that smaller farms can’t feed America. Consumers know that pasture-raised animals are healthier for both themselves and the environment, and that resilient local farms are critical for their communities.

Government policy chooses what food gets to be accessible and which types of farms survive, and we must start making better choices. Expanding investment into independent, local meat processing; ensuring the regulation of dubious and misleading label claims; and increasing fair funding opportunities and access to capital for pasture-based farms are just a handful of commonsense reforms that would help level the playing field. The Senate now has the opportunity to right the House’s Farm Bill wrongs, restoring and expanding funding for local and regional food systems, and removing favors to industry lobby groups like the Save Our Bacon Act.

We already know how to raise healthy animals in more humane, pasture-based systems. That these farms are better for all involved than factory farms is clear to anyone on the ground in farming communities across America. And we believe it would be obvious to legislators in Congress if they took the time to come see them, which is why we have joined with other pasture-based farmers across the country to form the FACE Ag Network (Farmers for Animals, Communities, and the Environment).

We may not have the deep pockets of industrial agriculture interests, but we have power in the real stories of how our farms in Delaware County, Iowa, and St. Helena Parish, Louisiana are feeding our communities and revitalizing our local economies. In a recent letter to House and Senate leadership, we outlined a Farm Bill policy platform that would help uplift thousands of farmers, inviting lawmakers to visit our farms and witness firsthand how pasture-based farming systems are building a more resilient food system. And we have a message for the lawmakers about to decide our future in the Farm Bill:

Agribusiness interests have had their chance to design farm policy, and it isn’t working. It’s time to listen to independent farmers who know what their communities, animals, and land need. It’s time to rethink the way we invest federal dollars, and finally support farms producing the kind of food Americans want and deserve, rather than subsidizing products that actively harm our communities.

We invite you to come stand in our pastures and learn first-hand why backing the farms that produce the most humane, healthy, and high-quality food is the soundest investment you could make in our nation’s food system.

Early in my career as a primary care physician, I found myself steering my car through driving rain around downed power lines and fallen tree branches for a shift in urgent care. I was already nervous about my new role. Having a hurricane didn’t help. I remember feeling overwhelmed and inadequate when I had to refer a patient to the already overburdened ER. The deep wound a roof shingle had carved in their scalp was too much for me. Hurricane Bob was a Category 3 hurricane and it took 18 people’s lives and caused today’s equivalent of ~$3.5 billion in damages. The fear, the injuries, and the losses all fell on the local community.

That was decades ago. Nowadays—from Texas floods, to Western wildfires, to deadly heatwaves across the Midwest and Northeast—communities across the country are paying the price. Severe storms are more frequent because of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. Extreme weather events are causing traumatic injuries, post-traumatic stress disorders, medication shortages, and death. Heatwaves are more frequent and more dangerous, causing heart attacks, asthma attacks, kidney failure, and death. Floods are ravaging our towns, roads, bridges, and farms, overwhelming local businesses and thinly stretched municipal budgets. Public health and infrastructure costs from these crises are mounting. And fossil fuel air pollution—accounting for ~95% of total air pollution in the state—currently kills over 2,700 residents each year in Massachusetts through heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, and chronic lung illness.

Meanwhile, the petrochemical corporations—who’ve knowingly fueled the climate crisis and spent tens of millions of dollars to sow disinformation—got off scot-free.

As a doctor, I can treat people for asthma from air pollution and dehydration from heatwaves, but if the root cause is not addressed, countless more will suffer. The enormity of this threat to public health led me to retire from primary care and join with those fighting for clean energy. We urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels, but we must also invest in resilience and adaptation projects, to safeguard Massachusetts communities against the climate harms they are already experiencing—from the flooding and erosion threatening residents and businesses in Boston and along the coast, to the droughts facing farmers in Western Mass, to the record-shattering heatwaves hitting the entire state this month.

In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic.

Passing the state Climate Superfund Act is one step we must take, following in the footsteps of our Vermont and New York neighbors and coalition partners in the nationwide movement to hold big polluters accountable and keep our communities safe from climate harm. Passing a superfund in Massachusetts would allow us to build resiliency in our communities using funds from Big Oil’s checkbook. This act would require the biggest polluters to pay, based on their historical emissions, for projects across the Commonwealth—upgrading stormwater drains, protecting our coasts, installing energy-efficient cooling for seniors who swelter without AC, and offering preventive healthcare programs to treat those sickened by climate change. We desperately need these measures, and this gives us a fair way to pay for them. If you made a mess, you need to clean it up.

In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic. Big Oil has known for more than 60 years about the harms their products were causing, but instead of putting people over profits, they have spent tens of millions to cover it up and lie to the public about the damage they were creating.

We can no longer afford to be complacent. It’s time for the Massachusetts legislature to stop “studying” this problem and start protecting its people with this legislation that the majority of its residents support. It’s financially and morally imperative that we pass the Climate Superfund Act. It’s time to make polluters pay for the health of our Commonwealth.

If nothing else, Donald Trump pushes the nation’s—the world’s—thought process beyond anything that feels normal and comfortable. Consider the “MADness” of the last eight decades: You know, how “mutually assured destruction” has kept humanity from nuking itself into oblivion because... uh, mass murder could have consequences.

Thus, the planet’s nine nuclear powers have refrained (so far) from unleashing a nuclear assault on an enemy for fear of getting nuked back. Hey, what a solid foundation for building peace! Of course, the nuclear nine have spent billions of dollars over the years expanding and developing the nuclear arsenals they will allegedly never use. But they’ve also made it clear that no other nation on the planet is “authorized” to possess nukes.

This has been the foundation for the pseudo-peace—the avoidance of nuclear omnicide—that has existed throughout my lifetime, and also Donald Trump’s lifetime. (Little known fact: He’s two months older than me). Thus humanity, or at least its global leaders, haven’t had to take on the difficult task of envisioning “peace” beyond militarism. Nor has the media. Military-industrialism maintains its assumed dominance over Planet Earth: We’ll always have war, no matter how many people suffer horrifically from it, no matter how many devote their lives to ending it.

But then along comes Donald Trump, bringing something unique to his position as most powerful person on the planet: his own personal madness. I am not referring to “mutually assured destruction,” but the other kind of mad: He’s losing it mentally. Here’s how members of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War put it, in a statement entered into the US Congressional Record a month ago:

It is our professional opinion, based on previous and ongoing assessments, that Donald Trump’s mental state since our 2024 statement has deteriorated even further. In keeping with our professional ethics, and for those of us who are physicians, with the Declaration of Geneva—the successor to the Hippocratic Oath that binds us to the humanitarian principles of medicine since the Nuremberg trials—we are compelled to warn of a President of the United States who is increasingly a danger to the public.

Among his symptoms: rambling digressions and frequent confusion when he speaks; grandiose and delusional beliefs, including assertions of infallibility and unlimited authority (for instance, his release of AI-created pictures and videos, such as a video depicting himself as a combat pilot dropping feces on No Kings protesters); and his reckless threats of violence (such as his social media post to Iran last month: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back”).

The physicians conclude:

It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater. It is our professional opinion that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline. If we were called upon under the 25th Amendment to judge the President’s present ability to discharge the duties of his office, we would have to conclude that he lacks the capacity to do so.

For the reasons cited above, emphasizing that he presents a clear and present danger to our country and to the world, it is our expert opinion that Donald J. Trump is mentally unfit to be the President of the United States, and that steps to remove him from office must be undertaken with the greatest urgency, with vital responsibilities on the shoulders of those in positions of leadership

Psychotherapist John Gartner put it a bit more directly in a recent interview:

Trump’s going full Hitler... demonizing minorities, putting them in concentration camps, seizing control over elections, destroying free speech, using the government to go after his enemies, purging government of people who aren’t lackeys... He’s doing it at a manic pace, on all fronts, so we can’t even focus our outrage.

But Trump, in his unfitness for office, in his grandiosity and self-worship—though he may be a lost soul—is not wrong about the amount of power he has. This is what stuns me beyond comprehension: that the world we have created is open to him. It’s now his for the taking. Mutually Assured Destruction may have kept the world free of nuclear war for the last eight decades, but it hasn’t kept the world free of Donald Trump.

Has the world evolved to its own endpoint? I don’t know. But we have definitely evolved to a state of complex, unanticipated danger. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—whose Doomsday Clock is now set at 89 seconds to midnight—recently published a piece urging that the US pass a law taking the decision to use nukes away from the president alone, requiring the agreement of at least two people before it can be acted on.

How amazing that such a law doesn’t already exist. Even more amazing is that calls for nuclear disarmament are hardly in the news these days. If humanity wants to continue evolving, we have to envision a world beyond nuclear war... beyond all wars.

Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in white Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.

Still, it’s worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they’re doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it’s also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.

The Know-Nothings Meet the Know-It-Alls

As a start, we have the latter-day “Know Nothings,” a term borrowed from a 19th century political movement. It’s not that members of that group literally know nothing. Some of them are quite skilled in their given professions and astute at assessing certain kinds of situations. Some are intelligent but woefully misguided. Trump supporter and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, for example, is a brain surgeon.

Members of the anti-science crowd are also often very good at communicating their messages, however wrongheaded or offensive they may be. The problem isn’t that they can’t take in information; it’s that they are distinctly anti-knowledge when it comes to, among other things, separating compelling conspiracy theories from well-documented facts.

Rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality healthcare for all.

The results of their ingrained antagonism toward basic knowledge are profound, making them a threat to public health and democratic practices. After all, we now live in a country where millions of people are against vaccinating their children to prevent potentially deadly diseases and don’t believe that perhaps the gravest threat to continuing life on this planet—climate change—is caused, or even influenced, by human activity or perhaps is even happening at all.

The dangerous delusions of Trump Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now have the stamp of government approval and the power of the US government behind them. There is no way to estimate how many people have already fallen sick or even died unnecessarily due to the implementation of his crackpot theories, but the numbers will undoubtedly be significant. The American Public Health Association captured the grim mood of our moment perfectly in an April 2025 press release entitled “Secretary Kennedy and His Policies Are a Danger to the Public Health.”

On a different spiritual plane, tens of millions of Americans believe in the rapture—the notion that they and their kind will be called up to heaven in the end days, while the rest of us will be left behind, presumably to burn in hell (but not a climate-change version of the same). A 2022 Pew poll found that 39% of Americans believe “we are in the end times.” Already! And such a belief, of course, has an impact on how or even whether one wants to devote time and energy to fixing problems here on Earth.

Such an amalgam of opponents of science and skeptics about basic reality bears a distinct resemblance to the “Know Nothing” movement of the 19th century that thrived on anti-immigrant sentiments and half-baked conspiracy theories.

The anti-intellectual faction on the right has been propagandized for decades to believe that the biggest obstacle to a better life for them and their families isn’t the predatory corporations hollowing out our economy and manipulating our democracy, but a group of liberal intellectuals clustered on both coasts who allegedly want to replace this country’s bedrock beliefs with a set of “politically correct” prescriptions about how they should live their lives, especially when it comes to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion. In such a rendering of reality, that “new class” is seen as sapping the country’s strength and undermining the basic values that would make America great (again!).

The use of that “new class” as a political epithet emerged from the neoconservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andrew Hartman has explained at his blog on American intellectual history:

Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called "new class" of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this "new class," so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status.

However, the current Trumpian war on DEI should be considered an extension of a longstanding conservative effort to distract Americans from the real sources of their problems by promoting a politics of division and hatred. Mainstream accounts of the drive to eradicate concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion from public life rarely point out that fighting DEI can fairly be characterized as fighting to make racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination ever more acceptable in the sort of open, unapologetic fashion that prevailed before the modern-day civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements gained strength.

The crusade—and it’s nothing less than that—against DEI needs to be called out for what it is, not treated as some sort of skirmish over language. And rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality healthcare for all, regardless of race, gender, class status, or faith. Getting there will, however, require a flowering of faith of another kind—not religious faith, but faith that we can construct an accountable government that serves the public interest, rather than, as in the present age of Donald Trump, the interests of corporations and inhumane ideologues.

Silicon Valley Saviors

In contrast to the “know nothing” faction of the political right in America is the “know it all” faction—Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey. They view themselves not just as business executives cashing in on the latest trend, but as superior beings who should be running the planet. They promise better living through technology and, as new age militarists, see robotic weapons as the future of warfare. But the idea that such new technologies will inevitably change our lives for the better or protect us from the worst has, at best, a mixed record. It depends, of course, on just who is using such technologies and for what purpose.

In addition to owning companies that create new systems grounded in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the new age militarists are angling to shape our foreign policy, our federal budget, and the future of our democracy. They literally want to become masters of the universe by figuring out how to live forever and promote the colonization of space. They dream of video games in which, as Palmer Luckey put it, “If you die in the game, you die in real life.”

To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have a high opinion of themselves—and of the potential of the technology their companies produce—would distinctly be an understatement.

The political reach of the Silicon Valley crowd has grown dramatically in the age of Donald Trump. JD Vance, his vice president, was, of course, groomed and financed by Peter Thiel, the founder of the omnipresent firm Palantir, which provides technology to patrol the border, helps Immigration and Customs Enforcement identify suspects, and has provided software to Israel that its leaders have used to step up the pace of bombing in their genocidal war in Gaza. After a stint at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms, Vance won a Senate election in Ohio with major financial backing from him and his allies.

When Trump chose Vance as his running mate, champagne corks popped in Silicon Valley and the money started flowing to help Trump get elected, including up to a quarter of a billion dollars in dark money from Elon Musk. As a result, Silicon Valley now has its man in the executive branch.

Nor is Vance alone. Former employees of tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril are now embedded in key agencies of the federal government, and Secretary of—yes!—War Pete Hegseth has gone all in on integrating AI into US military planning and practice to the delight of the billionaire tech moguls and their hangers-on.

To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have a high opinion of themselves—and of the potential of the technology their companies produce—would distinctly be an understatement.

Kathryn Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, a self-appointed chief ideologist and cheerleader for the Silicon Valley tech takeover of America, gave a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in February 2025 that analyst Gil Duran described as an effort to “equate most government actions with communist dictatorships… while positioning tech bros as the ordained saviors of the traditional family.” Boyle’s bread and butter argument—call it a potentially fatal kind of narcissism—was that only the “founders” (yes, they call themselves that!) are serious enough, skilled enough, and endowed by their creator with enough persistence to solve and reverse America’s imperial decline. The rest of us should just get out of the way and let the new techno-gods do their work.

Will Trump’s Patchwork Quilt Come Apart at the Seams?

The Trump coalition is a strange kaleidoscope of confusing views and contradictory cover stories: the know-nothings; the know-it-alls; the false prophets of white Christian nationalism, the billionaires and millionaires, the people who (once upon a time) watched too many episodes of "The Apprentice" and think Trump is a good businessman; those who want yet another tax break; those men among us who want to control what women do with their bodies, and the (mostly) men who feel liberated because Trump openly and repeatedly makes racist, sexist, anti-gay, and anti-trans statements, legitimizing vocal expressions of prejudice in a way not seen in decades.

Yes, his is a motley crew, but so far they have rallied around the president, no matter the promises he breaks or the harmful policies he jams down all of our throats (policies that could ultimately hit many die-hard Trump supporters who aren’t billionaires as hard or harder than they will hit his opponents). Fortunately, there are at least signs that his ability to thrive politically (even as his policies drive America into a ditch) may be fading. His brutal, illogical, illegal, ill-defined war on Iran—complete with genocidal rhetoric about ending an entire civilization—may be the beginning of the end of his grasp of our politics and our psyche.

Unfortunately, he may be as much a symptom of what’s wrong with America as he is a producer of deep damage to the future prospects of democratic governance and human cooperation in this country and on this planet.

Which Way Out?

Any resistance to such know-nothingism and incipient technofascism must start on a human scale. If we are ever going to build a tolerant, welcoming nation that meets the basic needs of its residents, while leaving ample room for scientific inquiry and creative endeavors of all sorts, we need to get off our machines and start talking to—and crucially, listening to—each other.

This is already happening more widely than you might imagine if you’re a prisoner of your news feed. And it’s happening not just in large gatherings like the No Kings rallies, but in local organizing around schools and housing, voter registration and education efforts, and attempts to help communities survive the double-injury of runaway capitalism and the shredding of the social safety net thanks, at least in part, to Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which is the ugliest, most inhumane piece of legislation in living memory).

There are no guarantees in life, but in this disastrous Trumpian universe of ours, fighting the power should feel far more fulfilling than bending the knee.

We need to fight on at least three fronts—economically, politically, and culturally. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has shown just how a truly populist economic program could draw support even among diehard MAGA backers, and such a program is a necessity if we are ever to dig our way out of our current predicament.

But economics is hardly the only problem we have. There’s also the reality of racism to contend with, not to speak of a thriving anti-immigrant sensibility, and misogyny, as well as anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination—all deeply embedded in a nation that was founded as a colonial enterprise fueled by slavery and genocide. Such a history has to be transcended by embracing the values and elevating the leadership of the people most impacted by the legacy of America’s repressive past, while building a new culture based on tolerance, respect, and (yes!) love for our fellow human beings.

To be clear (as President Barack Obama would often say), by “transcend” I don’t mean ignore. We must fully acknowledge and seriously commit our society to repairing the crimes embedded in our development as a nation, not to speak of those being committed right now in Donald Trump’s America against so many of us and our planet as well.

And sadly, it’s all too obvious that coming together to save this planet and retain our basic humanity will not be easy. People are messy and, frankly, can be a pain to deal with (yours truly included). We are, however, all we have, and making the effort will matter.

I believe in the saying, attributed to leaders of the Wobblies (the radical union founded in 1905 and known formally as the Industrial Workers of the World), that we must sow the seeds of any new society in the shell of the old one. The way we treat each other in our homes, workplaces, schools, sites of worship, and other public and private spaces will determine whether we can build a better world or are fated to live in a never-endingly Trumpian one. In that context, it’s important not just to speak truth to power, but to begin trying to create alternative sources of power and good ideas aren’t enough for that. (If they were, we would already be living in a far better world.)

Building alternative power and charting a path to such a world will be a distinctly collective undertaking. A handful of charismatic leaders or courageous organizers can’t do it for us. We all need to be leaders since we are all experts (in the sense of knowing our communities and our bits of the world).

There are no guarantees in life, but in this disastrous Trumpian universe of ours, fighting the power should feel far more fulfilling than bending the knee, and if enough of us join that fight, we at least have a shot at building a society and a world worth sustaining for generations to come.

What are we waiting for?

The United States has indicted Cuba's former president Raúl Castro on murder charges, deployed a carrier strike group to the Caribbean, and issued explicit threats of military intervention. Is the US moving toward another regime change operation in the Western Hemisphere? The rhetoric coming out of Washington suggests very much so.

Cuba looks set to see a repeat of the Venezuelan playbook. President Donald Trump has said he will be "the one" to finally act on Cuba. The message from Washington is clear. Cuba is next.

Latin America is empire's favorite backyard, where the United States has consistently moved to remove governments that pursue independent foreign and economic policies not in line with American interests. From the ouster of Guatemala's Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to the CIA-backed overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973, the region bears a long scar map of US interference.

But Cuba is an interesting case. Since the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the island has managed to stave off the empire. Fidel Castro faced over 600 assassination attempts by the CIA. Despite that, the island survived, 90 miles from Florida, outlasting every American president who tried to bring it down.

Trump's ratings have fallen considerably due to the interventionism in Venezuela and Iran. Further adventurism is only going to dent them further.

So why the sudden push for military action now? The US under Trump is following a ruthless foreign policy where the rules-based order, in whatever form it existed, has been buried. Just like Venezuela and Iran, the US believes it has the right to subdue Cuba by continuing the momentum it has built, as Cuba has always been a symbol of resistance to American imperialism.

Anti-Cuba narratives have served American presidents well when it comes to securing political capital. For Trump, this is an opportunity to reassert US power and influence in the region, as he has stated himself: "Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years. It looks like I'll be the one that does it." And most importantly, the move speaks directly to his voter base in Florida, which has a large and politically powerful Cuban-American population.

More than Trump though is the role and influence of Marco Rubio. A Cuban-American born in Miami, Rubio has crafted his entire political identity around the promise of a free Cuba.

He opposed former President Barack Obama's 2014 decision to restore diplomatic relations with Havana more loudly than almost any other politician in Washington, swearing to do "everything possible" to obstruct and reverse that policy. He pushed successfully to reverse it under Trump's first term and has consistently lobbied for tighter sanctions, stricter travel restrictions, and maximum pressure on the island and in 2024 introduced legislation to ensure Cuba remained on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

On Cuba's Independence Day, Rubio delivered a video message to the Cuban people blaming their suffering entirely on a military conglomerate called GAESA without once mentioning the fuel blockade his own administration imposed. It was a telling omission.

That blockade is producing real humanitarian crisis. Blackouts last up to 22 hours a day. The health system carries a backlog of over 96,000 surgeries including 11,000 for children. United Nations human rights experts have described the situation as "energy starvation" and said it violates international human rights law. Prolonged sanctions and economic pressure are deepening this crisis while doing little to produce meaningful political change.

Mr. Rubio should be reminded that it is not for the US to deliver freedom to the Cuban people, just as it is not for the US to deliver freedom to the people of Venezuela or Iran. Changing regimes under the guise of freedom and democracy is the old playbook of empire. It has nothing to do with the interests of ordinary people and everything to do with American vested interests.

The Cuban socialist regime may have a thousand flaws, just like the regimes in Venezuela or Iran. But that does not give any state the right to intervene and impose regime change.

The US should also be wary of its ambitions and remember that Cuba is not Venezuela. While it may not possess the ability to retaliate like Iran or block strategic choke points, the Cuban nation has a fighting spirit that should not be underestimated. Cuba's defense doctrine envisions the entire civilian population mobilized for resistance; every Cuban citizen receives military training. The country's official motto says it all: "Patria o muerte, venceremos." Homeland or death, we will prevail.

At the same time, Trump's ratings have fallen considerably due to the interventionism in Venezuela and Iran. Further adventurism is only going to dent them further, particularly if an attack on Cuba triggers a refugee crisis on Florida's doorstep.

If Rubio is genuinely concerned about the Cuban people, lifting the fuel blockade would be a meaningful first step, one that would ease humanitarian suffering and open space for de-escalation. Another US-driven regime change in the hemisphere would not liberate Cubans. It would likely deepen instability across the Caribbean and Latin America at a moment when the region can least afford it.

On the surface, the affordability crisis that afflicts both tenants and prospective homebuyers in Hawai’i appears to resemble those of other housing-stressed states across the country. With a shortage of housing units accessible to working-class households, a high concentration of short-term rentals, and a strong demand from wealthy and out-of-state buyers, an increasing number of Hawai’i’s residents are priced out of paradise and forced to migrate outwards in search of cheaper housing.

But there is one element that makes Hawai’i’s housing market unique: the role of the US military. Our chapter in a new report finds that military presence in Hawai’i’s housing market puts an upward pressure on rental prices that freezes out locals. We estimate that troops in the private market raised housing prices by 7.1% in 2024.

Hawai’i is the most militarized state per capita in our nation. Not only does it have a high concentration of service members, but more than 230,000 acres of land out of the 4.1 million in the island chain are currently under military control.

A dense network of military bases is conspicuously scattered across the eight islands. And almost a quarter of the state’s most populous island, O’ahu—home to Honolulu and Kailua—is currently under what local activists and groups call a military occupation, contributing to land shortages and higher land prices that make real estate development even more expensive.

To help alleviate the inflationary impacts of military rental demand on the Hawai’i’s housing market, our report recommends that all active-duty service members be housed on base.

More than 98% of the 42,503 active-duty service members in Hawai’i were stationed in O’ahu in the summer of 2024. But not all of them lived on base. According to the Department of Defense, there were 14,700 active-duty service members who entered the private rental market. We estimate that they resided in 10.3% of the 142,130 renter-occupied units in Honolulu County.

Not only does the military have a significant presence in O’ahu’s rental market, but it also contributes to upward pressures on Hawai’i’s housing prices because of the tax-free stipends—known as Basic Allowance for Housing or BAH—that active-duty service members receive on a monthly basis.

Local residents have difficulty competing with compensation packages bolstered by BAH payments, making military renters more attractive to landlords.

An E5 Sergeant, a rank of enlisted personnel who have been promoted to lead a small team or section, with dependents and four years experience, had a base pay of $40,388 and a BAH of $39,852 in 2024 for a total of $80,240. This is $10,000 more than the average annual salary of an urban Honolulu worker, who earned $70,179 (a mean wage of $33.74) in the same year. This difference does not include food allowances and bonuses that military personnel also receive.

The graph below demonstrates that E5 non-commissioned officers with and without dependents can comfortably afford a one- or two-bedroom apartment while more than half of Hawai’i’s working-class residents are cost-burdened, i.e. they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. Other households struggle to afford to rent and are forced to leave Hawai’i altogether, particularly to Nevada, which is often jokingly referred to as Ninth Island.

It is clear that the BAH contributes to rental market tightness, and thereby higher prices. However, further analysis is stymied by a lack of data transparency from the Department of Defense. We know the DOD spent $27.9 billion to endow the BAH program in 2024, but we have no information on how those resources are distributed state-by-state nor how much BAH money enters the rental market.

Our report estimates that the DOD spent $1.1 billion on BAH just in O’ahu with more than half of that money—$648.9 million—entering the private rental market. The average BAH monthly payment per service member is $3,679, and we estimate this dynamic caused rents to increase by 7.1% in 2024. As a result, non-military tenants in O’ahu spent an estimated $234.8 million more in rent that year.

To help alleviate the inflationary impacts of military rental demand on the Hawai’i’s housing market, our report recommends that all active-duty service members be housed on base.

Vacancy rates at military installations should be 0%, and the number of service members in the private market should also be zero. The US military should disclose how many on-base housing units they own, operate, and monitor. And new, dense military housing should be built if necessary.

Critical tenant protections like rent control need to be implemented in order to provide immediate relief for renters. And the development of permanently affordable social housing is necessary to deliver high-quality and inexpensive housing. Sixty-five percent of all new units need to be set at 80% of area median income, and market-based solutions have proven incapable of delivering affordability to lower-income households.

Our findings demonstrate that the military plays a significant role in Hawai’i’s affordability crisis, but there are steps that can be taken to make Hawai’i affordable to the people of Hawai’i.

In his stumbling explanation of the muddled autopsy report on the 2024 election debacle, Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin uttered two pieces of wisdom that regrettably, neither he nor the party has heeded: “The Democratic brand is in trouble and needs repair,” and “I agree with folks who have said we have to learn from the past to win the future.” Had they followed that advice, they would have seen how history tells a neglected and important story.

It begins when Bill Clinton was handed the keys to the White House by a group of largely Southern officials who formed the New Democrats with the mission of putting a Southern, pro-business candidate in the White House. With its pointed references to Reagan speeches and policies, Clinton’s Second Inaugural signaled a devil’s bargain that ended a century of Democratic Party policies.

In 1896, William Jennings Bryan had articulated the level playing field principles that served as the Democrats’ North Star for much of the last century: “There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.” In the term following his inaugural rejection of those principles, Clinton repealed one of the crown jewels of the New Deal, the Glass-Steagall Act regulating banks, and handed social media the gift of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, exempting them from the rules governing print and broadcasting.

In the years since Bill Clinton left the White House for a comfortable retirement, the New Democrats asserted control of the party, courting big donors with the pro-Wall Street policies resembling those of his second term. Their strategy uncannily mirrored that of Donald Trump’s Republicans by offering positions on social issues that appeased elements of the base while supporting economic policies benefiting corporate America. In their fight for the soul of the party, the New Democrats pulled no punches, blocking Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2016 and primarying 2026 opponents with the zeal of Donald Trump.

One lesson history teaches us is that if inequalities are allowed to fester, things can get very ugly.

Their biggest failure may be that in abandoning the level playing field principle, the New Democrats offered no substitute, save triangulation. Today most of us would stumble over trying to define the Democratic Party in one sentence, but one can easily do that for the Republicans—less taxes, less government. With the midterms six months away, this lack of a unified message already has the faithful worried.

The historical data missing from the autopsy and Martin’s explanations tells the story of what the ascension of the Wall Street Democrats has cost their party and the country. Since 2000, the Democrats have controlled the House only 4 out of 15 terms and the Senate only 6 out of 15. For only four years have Democrats held a majority of state governerships. Democratic presidential victories were anomalies. Barack Obama benefited from a record turnout of BIPOC voters. Joe Biden won because of the mishandling of Covid-19. Even allowing for gerrymandering and voter suppression, it appears clear that the Democratic Party has been in decline for some time.

Given the pro-Wall Street leanings of both parties, we should not be surprised that we have essentially been governed by a minority. Since 2000, the winning presidential candidate has only averaged 30.18% of the voting-eligible population. Today, only 27% of voters identify with either party, while 45% identify as independents. That is the lowest total ever for Democrats.

The numbers in various data and reports tell how the tilt of the playing field continues to widen. Although real total wealth has tripled since 1989, the share of the top 10% has increased from 63% to 72%, but the bottom 50% saw their share decline from 4% to 2%. Meanwhile, labor’s share of production has declined ominously. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, it fell from 64% in 2001 to 56% in 2023. During most of the 1950s and 60s it hovered around 60%.

Business concentration recalls the trusts that sparked such widespread discontent during the late 19th century. The best figures come from a study by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Small Business that was mothballed after its release in December 2023—and goes unmentioned in the autopsy. Bristling with footnotes, the eye-opening Report on Competition in the Small Business Economy cites a Boston Federal Reserve study that shows the economy is 50% more concentrated today than in 2005. It goes on to state, “The dramatic increase in income and wealth inequality seen over the past four decades in the US can also be largely attributed to higher levels of concentration across industries.” Sounding like an outraged 1890 Farmers’ Alliance tract, the study paints a grim picture of today’s farmers: “From the seeds they plant, to the fertilizer in the soil to the machinery that allows them to make it all happen at scale, the price they pay at every step is at the whim of a handful of companies.”

Faced with similar conditions during the Gilded Age, discontented workers and farmers organized to press for the Sherman, Interstate Commerce, and Safety Appliance Acts; laid the groundwork for the 16th, 17th, and 19th amendments; initiated bureaus of labor statistics and factory inspections; and enhanced access to higher education. Because they feared both parties were the tools of tycoons, the discontented also formed new parties, of which the Greenbackers and Populists are the most notable. Most of all, in a flurry of civic engagement, they founded groups like the Grange, Knights of Labor, Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, and Farmers’ Alliance.

Whether today’s discontent will have a similar impact remains an open question. A good part of the answer will depend on whether people like Ken Martin continue to support the Wall Street wing of the party or realize what that support has cost in terms of lost elections and the increasing tilt of the playing field. What is clear is that the drastically tilted playing field has become extremely volatile. One lesson history teaches us is that if inequalities are allowed to fester, things can get very ugly. During the discontent of the Gilded Age, lynchings averaged 150 per year between 1881 and 1900, or one every 2.4 days. Another 1,400 people perished in riots, in the most violent three decades in our history. All of us can see and fear the growling, anvil-shaped clouds that threaten to darken our lives, as they did over a century ago.

Two thousand of us were standing on a frozen lake in the dark.

My mittened hand was gripping the mittened hand of a stranger; tears were freezing on my cheeks. It was not a particularly Minnesotan thing to hold hands with a stranger, especially while expressing emotion so openly. But we were not in normal times.

We were there to light ice lanterns, to spell out "ICE OUT" on the lake in the hopes that the planes flying above would see our message. After long days of school patrols, protests, grocery deliveries, and trying to figure out how to raise more money to help neighbors pay rent, we needed to be together in person. We needed to sing, we needed to move, we needed to feel. And so we did, led in a call-and-response by Brass Solidarity, a community brass band: "Hold on, change is coming!" It was powerful and beautiful and deeply connected to our culture, holding this community together. This is what a creative response looks like when artists are already woven into the fabric of a community before the crisis arrives.

This Sunday, May 31, the people of the Twin Cities will accept the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in Boston, an honor previously awarded to former Vice President Mike Pence and the September 11 first responders. The Kennedy Foundation cited the neighbors who risked their safety to protect their community from an unprecedented federal law enforcement operation: the 30,000 who trained as observers and rapid responders; the schools that organized patrols; the parent group chats, book clubs, and faith groups that became webs of mutual aid, delivering groceries, raising rent and legal funds for neighbors trapped in their homes.

It is not just what Minnesotans did in this crisis. It is what they had already built: a state that had spent decades recognizing artists not as a luxury or an afterthought, but as neighbors with something essential to contribute.

Journalists and historians have spent months trying to explain why Minnesota responded as it did. Was it the history of the cooperative movement that helped build a state where people looked out for one another? Or the recovery community and the Minnesota Model's belief that people heal together? Almost no one has asked why the artists were ready. That's what I want to share.

Minnesota's artists aren't that different from artists anywhere. But there are some unique parts of Minnesota's ecosystem that explain the breadth and depth of the creative response here.

Minnesota spends more on the arts per capita than any other state, $9.67 per person, backed by the Legacy Amendment, a 25-year constitutional commitment to the state's arts and cultural heritage, alongside other quality of life investments like clean water, parks, and trails. That's not a program. That's a value system encoded into law. A blend of public support and private philanthropy has built statewide artist fellowship programs, regional arts councils serving every county, and local governments that regularly hire artists to address community challenges. The nation's longest-running Guaranteed Income Pilot for Artists, launched in Minnesota with private funds, gives artists a monthly stipend with no strings attached. Participants have reported volunteering more, deepening their roots in their communities, and taking on creative work they never could have afforded before.

But money alone doesn't explain what happened here. Minnesota’s arts support is rooted within an ecosystem of support for organizers, activists, and community leaders, creating an arts community with a deep understanding of the skills, values, and ethics of effective community work. Artists in Minnesota view their artistry as integral to, not separate from, their identity as a neighbor and community member.

In 2013, when St. Paul installed a new light rail line, hundreds of artists were engaged alongside businesses and community groups on the construction corridor, turning disruption into connection. Those artists didn't just make murals. They staged performances, built installations, and animated storefronts. They learned who worked at City Hall. They built relationships with power structures. Because artists in Minnesota have had numerous opportunities like this to bring their creativity to critical community issues, and had spent years doing that work, they weren't strangers to this movement. They were already inside it.

Drive down any street in the Twin Cities today, and you will see house after house with signs: "ICE Out." "We Keep Us Safe." "We Love Our Immigrant Neighbors." Nearly all are artist designed, many of them handmade prints. This doesn’t only represent the beauty and creativity that artists bring to a movement, but also symbolizes a movement that has turned away from mass production and corporate extraction, and toward the handmade and the local. As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents photograph us and catalog our faces in AI databases built for harassment and intimidation, artists like Sean Lim, Marlena Myles, and D Guzman have worked through the night to generate human-made expressions of resistance.

This is what Minnesota's artists have been doing for months: showing up, leading, organizing, making the movement visible and felt. Thousands gathered in the cold with Singing Resistance to send a message to ICE agents that they could change their minds and join a loving community. Their tactics were rooted in Otpor, the student movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic's authoritarian regime in 1990s Serbia by spreading one simple message: "You might not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow." Singing Resistance is now sharing training tool kits with communities across the country.

Brass Solidarity, formed at George Floyd Square in 2020, has played at hundreds of gatherings, connecting this moment to the movement for Black lives and bringing joy and resolve to these spaces. Mixed Blood Theater has trained neighbors to speak clearly and confidently about their constitutional rights. Drummers have organized mass protests. Poets have told our story, including Renee Good, who was herself a poet. Art spaces and creative businesses have become food pantries, coat donation sites, and whistle distribution points. I've lost track of the sold-out cabarets, concerts, and pottery sales to benefit the immigrant legal aid and rental assistance, often appearing in hours, without marketing campaigns. Neighbors talk to neighbors.

The art being made for our community is happening outside the competition of grants, outside formal arts institutions, outside the commodification of collectors, outside the pressure for clicks. It is urgent and rooted in our community's needs. It feels sacred.

Many of Minnesota's artists put their lives on hold for months at great cost to their economic stability and at great risk to their safety. The thing I have said most when people outside Minnesota ask how I am: It is so much more terrifying than the media can show you. Every noise sounds like a whistle. Every unknown car could be bringing horror to our doorstep. The damage to our community's sense of safety will take years to repair.

But it is so much more beautiful than the media can show you, too.

There is a reason the Kennedy Foundation recognized the people of the Twin Cities with one of the most storied honors in American civic life. It is not just what Minnesotans did in this crisis. It is what they had already built: a state that had spent decades recognizing artists not as a luxury or an afterthought, but as neighbors with something essential to contribute, as vital to a community's health as any doctor, organizer, or teacher.

When the moment came, Minnesota's artists were ready, gathering us on frozen lakes, calling on us to hold hands with strangers, and spelling out in light for all the world to see what it means to take care of one another.

Will the Supreme Court’s evident desire to assist the GOP before the midterms override a decision by three Republican-appointed judges to spare Black-majority districts in Alabama from being gerrymandered out of existence?

This is the question posed by possible Supreme Court review of the finding by an Alabama judicial panel that Alabama could not use a congressional district map that deliberately discriminated against Black voters.

Two of the three judges on the panel, which found race-based discrimination, had been appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump; one, by President Ronald Reagan. The issue now is whether the conservative justices of the Supreme Court will upend the panel’s racial discrimination finding, notwithstanding that the Alabama judges had followed legal standards set in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais.

If they allow the Alabama decision stand, it will be a rare exception to the flood of Supreme Court-encouraged gerrymandering prompted by the Callais decision. Those Republican gerrymanders are likely to purge one-third of African-American representatives from Congress by destroying the Black-majority districts that elected them.

For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice.

Nonetheless, the six justices of the Supreme Court who caused this political bloodbath along racial lines claim that Republican gerrymandering does not violate the voting rights of African Americans. The purge is lawful under the Voting Rights Act, say the justices, because the GOP has partisan reasons to eliminate the Black districts that cannot be “disentangled” from racial motives.

Through a convoluted logic we explore below, and in the supposed interests of a “color-blind” Constitution, the right-winger justices have emasculated the Voting Rights Act. The majority insists we ignore the reality of race relations in America and ignore the link between Republican partisanship and Republican racial politics. But judicial ignorance cannot yield justice.

Partisanship and race have always been inextricably linked in Southern politics. Since party identification for white people in the South has, first and foremost, been driven by race, any “disentanglement” requirement makes it impossible for the Voting Rights Act to protect the voting rights of Black and other minority citizens.

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1870, recognized that the right to vote serves as the great protector of civil and human rights. The amendment prohibits states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race. But for nearly a century, the former Confederate states in effect suspended the 15th Amendment. Decade after decade, they prevented Black people from voting through legal chicanery, violence, and economic intimidation.

The long civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s against Jim Crow and for racial equality reached its culmination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act recalled the 15th Amendment to life by giving federal courts broad and flexible authority to protect African-American voting rights. Overwhelming majorities of both parties supported the act, with 80% of senators and 80% of congresspeople voting for it.

Among other protections, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits states from imposing any electoral “practice or procedure... in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” Notably, it does not require proving the racial intentions behind supposedly neutral voting requirements or election practices. The Voting Rights Act was passed precisely to protect the Black franchise even when those who oppose Black voting rights don’t say so out loud. Consequently Section 2 bars a practice if it “results in... abridgement” of voting rights.

In an effort to avoid any ambiguity, the act was amended in 1982 to specifically confirm that Section 2 is violated if a political processes gives racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate... to elect representatives of their choice.”

For decades federal courts applied this provision to protect African-American voters from racial gerrymandering. But in last month’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, the Supreme Court deleted those protections and turned the Voting Rights Act upside down. What was the supposed logic behind the decision?

Callais expanded on the court’s 2019 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which unleashed states to engage in unlimited gerrymandering. “Partisan” gerrymandering represents a majority party power grab. With gerrymandered districts, a slight majority of voters could elect a supermajority in a state legislature. Or, as President Trump hopes this year, multistate gerrymandering might give the GOP enough purloined congressional seats to retain their hold on Congress even if most voters, nationwide, vote against Republicans.

Gerrymandering defies the fundamental principles of America constitutional democracy; nonetheless the Rucho majority held that courts could not restrain the practice.

Bad enough. But in this anti-democracy decision, the conservative justices also found an excuse for gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Disempowering Democratic voters and disempowering African-American voters commonly go together, and the court’s right-wingers saw a danger: Disadvantaged voters might try to “evade” Rucho’s green-lighting of gerrymandering by “repackaging a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim.”

This stands reality on its head. The real danger is packaging (and therefore excusing) a racial gerrymander as a partisan one. Of the two “risks,” why did the right-wingers choose to privilege the one that de facto enhances white voting power, not the voting rights of citizens of color?

The “danger” in thwarting partisan gerrymandering is that a white majority won’t be allowed to unfairly magnify its power beyond its actual level of voter support. The danger in racial gerrymandering is that voters of color will, once again, be denied a meaningful voice in the political process because of race. In a multiracial democracy with a history of white racial oppression, it is obvious which concern should matter more. Except to white nationalists and their allies.

In order to put a state’s supposed “right” to gerrymander first, the conservative justices held that African-American voters who attack gerrymandering as racially discriminatory have a “‘special’ burden to overcome.”

“Courts must treat partisan advantage like any other race-neutral aim,” so an African-American plaintiff must “disentangle race from politics” and prove racial considerations drove a decision to eliminate Black majority districts.

“If either politics or race could explain a district’s contours, the plaintiff has not cleared its bar,” the Callais majority held, and the state is free to gerrymander away African-American congressional districts.

The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it.

The unexamined premise of disentanglement is that partisan advantage is a “race-neutral aim.” But how can partisan advantage be deemed “race neutral” when the very identity of the political party seeking advantage rests on racial ideology?

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.” So it is here.

Following the Civil War, white Southerners became the “Solid South” of the Democratic Party. The politics of the Democratic Party were grounded, before all else, on white supremacy. But in the 1960s, as the national Democratic Party became the party of civil rights, Southern support of Democrats eroded, then washed away.

White segregationist voters fled to the GOP, pushed by President John F. Kennedy’s and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for civil rights and pulled by Republican support for resistance to integration. The GOP’s Southern Strategy was employed by Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Reagan’s presidential campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, notorious as the site of the murder of three civil rights workers, made unmistakable that Reagan was making a racial appeal to anti-integration white Southerners.

The racially motivated movement of white voters transformed the South from Democratic stronghold to Republican bastion. The GOP’s stance on race also found a sympathetic audience among whites outside the South, who often fought to preserve de facto segregation and white advantages.

In short, the Republican Party of the last 56 years was constructed on white resistance to integration and opposition to African-American rights. When, consequently, Republican politicians attack African-American political participation, the attacks advance GOP partisan interests by invoking voter-perceived racial concerns.

There can be no disentangling of race and politics when the means of attaining partisan advantage is racial politics—any more than you can “disentangle” cream from coffee after you’d poured it in. The mixture of race and politics is the Republican flavor.

By imposing a “disentanglement burden” on those seeking the protection of the Voting Rights Act, conservative justices made it impossible for the act to ever provide a remedy for the denial or abridgement of minority voting rights. What is true of redistricting applies to any other electoral practice that impairs minority voting effectiveness: Its discriminatory impact must always confer partisan advantage on a political party whose underlying ideological appeal is white resentment and white supremacy.

Consider what this means for people of color in our multinational, multiracial society.

Discrimination, past and present, in housing, zoning, employment, education, policing, and community resources, along with inequalities in wealth and income, have contributed to concentrating African Americans and of other people of color in America’s inner cities.

Although racial minorities are inevitably vulnerable in a larger society that disdains them, the existence of population centers in which minorities are the majority should at least mean that those non-white majorities can elect representatives to the tables of power. In the language of the Voting Rights Act itself, they are entitled to equal “opportunity... to elect representatives of their choice.” Redistricting that is simultaneously racial and partisan denies that right.

Tennessee’s post-Callais redistricting divided Memphis, a city with a 63% African-American majority, into three pieces, which were then distributed to three majority white districts. What could be more obvious than that this is precisely the kind of political practice Congress intended to outlaw in passing the Voting Rights Act? But the court’s “disentanglement burden” likely makes this legal atrocity untouchable.

For the Supreme Court to say there is no remedy because the racial wrong is politically advantageous to a party whose politics rest on racial ideology is a travesty of reason and justice. The Republican Party’s entanglement of politics with race is no reason for the Supreme Court to deprive minorities of the opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

The right-wing justices have not interpreted the Voting Rights Act. They have interred it. Since their timely promotion of Republican political advantage cannot be disentangled from the GOP’s racial politics, we can fairly conclude that Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are intentionally advancing white supremacy.

Imagine if you will: President Donald Trump, having run out of countries who will take his deported migrants, fences off a strip of land on the Mexican boarder and starts dumping Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees there, behind a big beautiful wall. Some food and water is sent in—never enough—but the people behind the wall are largely left to their own devices. Of course there’s outrage, and litigation, but starvation is quiet and, as the litigation grinds on, the attention of the ADHD media turns to fresher fodder.

Then a group of activists hatch a plan to help the starving in what has become known as the Miller Strip, because Trump sometimes says White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller is in charge of it, and that it was his idea. They form a Convoy of cars that crosses the country, gathering food and volunteers—and hopefully fresh media attention—to bring to the strip. Trump mocks the convoy as a silly little effort, saying the food donations aren’t necessary, but sometimes he says that the convoy is actually filled with Tren de Aragua gang members.

As the Convoy grows, Stephen Miller fumes that claims of starvation in the Miller Strip are directed at him and are, therefore, antisemitic. He gloats that any protesters unlawfully gathering at the strip will be put in Alligator Alcatraz, which has been recently emptied, it’s prisoners sent to the strip. Department of Homeland Security insists that anyone truly concerned about conditions in the Miller Strip can make donations to an aid fund set up by the White House and administered by Barron Trump. His salary is undisclosed.

When the Convoy gets big enough that the media starts to pay attention, Trump says that the Convoy is a threat to national security, the rule of law, and his bid for a Nobel Prize.

Here’s a tip: If you have to keep telling people you’re the most moral army in the world—you ain’t.

Then, in the dark of night, in a MAGA-friendly rural county, 200 masked and heavily armed men in rental SUVs force much of the Convoy off the road. The men are never identified, but they are presumed to be ICE and private contractors. They trash the Convoy cars, slashing the tires, smashing the GPS systems and radios with rifle butts, and ripping the hoses and wires from the engines.

Most of the volunteers in those cars are taken away in trucks, beaten, sexually assaulted, and then released in a town so small it doesn’t even have a Greyhound stop. They are never charged or even given the identity of their attackers. On the night of the attack some are left without food or water or means of communication, out in the desert, in disabled cars. A couple of the Convoy organizers disappear into federal custody for questioning.

The Convoy manages to regroup, rescue their comrades left in the desert, and continue toward the Miller Strip. Then ICE and National Guard troops descend en masse on the Convoy. The participants in the Convoy are taken to a US Army base where they are charged with trespassing—trespassing on the very Army base where they were brought in zip ties.

Again, like the first attack, there are widespread beatings, repeated tasings, strip searches, and sexual assaults.

The Convoy cars are seized under civil forfeiture laws, the attorney general of the week alleging the cars were used in illegal activities to be named later. Trump, while climbing into a golf cart, is asked what laws were being broken to justify the seizure of the cars. He says only, “So sue me.”

Stephen Miller stages a photo op at the base, taunting the prisoners, screaming at them, calling them antisemites and communists. A few laugh at him, even though they are on their knees, their hands still zip-tied behind them. He has them dragged across the floor for individual abuse.

When Miller’s video goes viral a handful of news outlets feature it with reports of the violence against the Convoy volunteers. Climbing out of a golf cart, Trump is asked about the reports of violence and sexual assaults. He replies that he hardly knew Jeffrey Epstein and has the reporter who asked the question removed from the golf course.

Of course, this is satire. None of this has happened—yet. But this is exactly what Israel did to the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF).

Israel attacked the Flotilla off Crete, in international waters, some 600 miles from Gaza and hundreds of miles from their self-declared, illegal exclusion zone. Israeli commandos attacked 22 boats, ripped up the engines, smashed the radios and navigation equipment, doing thousands of dollars of damage to privately owned boats that they had no legal authority to board. They took almost 200 hostages and left the boats disabled and adrift. At least one, Tam-Tam, was left adrift with a crew of seven stranded aboard. The hostages were beaten, some sexually assaulted, and then dumped ashore on Crete.

(The Tam-Tam is seen on the dock in Barcelona before the mission. Photo by Mark Milinich)

The remaining boats of the flotilla scrambled to regroup, to reorganize the rigging, electrical, and engine teams who had been keeping the boats patched together. They searched for the disabled boats to take them in tow, but many are still adrift today, including Gotico, the boat I helped sail to Sicily. One of those ghost boats recently washed up on a beach near Alexandria. They did find Tam-Tam and rescue the crew.

The Flotilla limped into port in Türkiye. They made repairs, resupplied, got the volunteers onto working boats, and, undeterred and unbowed, headed back to sea with 58 boats.

And Israel attacked again—again in international waters hundreds of miles from Gaza, Israel, and Israel’s self-declared exclusion zone. This was another blatant act of piracy.

In Gaza and Lebanon, the Zionists found a garden and made a desert.

Again there were beatings and sexual assaults. There were broken bones and wounds from rubber bullets and tasers. Every one of the flotilla volunteers kidnapped by Israel suffered injuries, abuse, and violence at the hands of Israeli soldiers. At night, when the volunteers were forced to sleep on an open deck, the deck was flooded with several inches of cold sea water.

This from the self-described “most moral army in the world.”

Here’s a tip: If you have to keep telling people you’re the most moral army in the world—you ain’t.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli security minister, posted a video of his photo op with the kidnaped volunteers, haranguing people who were zip-tied and forced to their knees, having the thugs in his entourage beat a few, just for fun. He did the same thing last summer, with the hostages from the first GSF flotilla, but this time it got some media traction and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to distance himself.

Netanyahu’s Captain Renault impression—I’m shocked, shocked to find that prisoner abuse is going on in here!—would be comical if it weren't part of an ongoing genocide.

On that note, the flotilla volunteers chose to join an act of political disobedience knowing that they would face Israeli violence—albeit minor when compared with the mass murder of Palestinians. The absolute arrogance that Israel showed, its contempt for maritime law, for the rights of property and persons to be protected from violence in international waters, is not minor. Agnes Callamard, head of Amnesty International, called Netanyahu, Trump, and Russian President Vladimir Putin “voracious predators” bringing us a world where “primitive ferocity could flourish.” She was not wrong.

Need I mention Trump and Netanyahu’s unprovoked war of choice on Iran? Thousands killed, massive destruction, global economic chaos, most of the world opposed but powerless to stop thugs who are undeterred by the United Nations Charter, or what Stephen Miller called the “international niceties” the world tried to build after the carnage of two world wars.

And as part of that war Israel chose to Gazafy southern Lebanon. They leveled towns, destroyed farms, and erased essential infrastructure. They even destroyed an entire forest with white phosphorus and bulldozers.

One of the foundational lies of Zionism is that they found a desert and built a garden. In reality the whole coastal zone of Palestine, including southern Lebanon and Gaza, was farmland long before the Zionists showed up.

In Gaza and Lebanon, the Zionists found a garden and made a desert.

But, Ben-Gvir is just getting started. He pushed for, and passed, a Palestinian-only death penalty law. On his 50th birthday his wife presented him with a cake with a hangman’s noose on it and the words, I’m told, “Sometimes dreams come true.” He wears a noose lapel pin. Even the Redeemer white governments that passed the Jim Crow laws weren’t that blatant; even the Ku Klux Klan wore hoods. Ben-Gvir grins like a game show contestant.

France has banned Ben-Gvir for his little stunt with the flotilla hostages, but Israeli clementines, from those stolen orchards, are in every market in Paris.

After the first death penalty was passed, the Knesset passed a special, retroactive death penalty for October 7 detainees. This second death penalty was passed 93-120, which interestingly, is very close to the 80-20 majority David Ben-Gurion wanted to achieve by ethnic cleansing when he sicced Irgun and Lehi on defenseless Palestinian villages—beginning in December 1947—six months before the UN Partition Plan was to take effect.

These death penalty laws relax the rules of evidence—rules that have been developed over hundreds of years to help insure fair trials—making it possible to make allegations in court that are not reliable evidence, that wouldn’t be allowed in fair trials. This is hardly necessary, since Israeli military courts already have a 99.74% conviction rate.

Relaxed rules of evidence make no sense until you factor in that the trials will be live streamed—show trials.

And what’s to point of a show trial? To put on a show.

What do they want to live stream that they couldn’t ordinarily put into a trial? I will hazard a guess.

In the first hours of October 7 Israeli first responders—to the cameras—told lurid tales of beheaded babies, babies strung up on clotheslines, and dismemberments. A doddering Joe Biden claimed to have seen pictures of beheaded babies, pictures that didn’t exist. The Israelis had learned well from the fantasist Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ who claimed she was a volunteer nurse during the invasion of Kuwait and witnessed babies being taken out of incubators and left to die on the floor. Turns out she was the daughter of a Kuwaiti ambassador and all of it was a lie. But, a good lie will go viral around the world while the truth is still fact checking, and the Israelis know that.

Why repeat stories you can’t properly prove, over and over, in show trials? It seems Ben-Gvir and his 92 allies in the Knesset know that, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.

And after the show comes the executions. Pro forma appeals will be heard quickly by the same military tribunals that tried the cases; the laws mandate that execution, by hanging, will be within 90 days of conviction.

Get ready for a lot of hangings.

A large percentage of Israel’s exports in its first couple of years was citrus fruit, from existing orchards taken by force from the people who had planted and tended the trees for decades.

But this harvest, of Strange Fruit, will be solely the product of “galant” Israelis like Itaman Ben-Gvir.

For context I recommend the recording by Billie Holiday, but you might prefer Nina Simone.

So, when will it be enough? France has banned Ben-Gvir for his little stunt with the flotilla hostages, but Israeli clementines, from those stolen orchards, are in every market in Paris. Basically everyone who knows anything about genocide agrees Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. There is no point to repeat the numbers of dead, of amputations, of double-tap strikes on doctors and journalists. Everybody knows. But Israel is still allowed to spread their aggression to Iran and Lebanon and beyond.

When will it all be too much?

When will the conscience of the world grow beyond a few scruffy activists in beat-up sailboats, throwing themselves at the wall, again and again.

I guess the answer, my friend, is still blowing in the wind.

The current, rapidly metastasizing Ebola outbreak in East and Central Africa is a sobering reminder of how unprepared we remain for the inevitability of the next pandemic that is always sure to come. Especially when the US continues to hamstring the global efforts needed to contain deadly eruptions.

As of Sunday, May 24, there were 231 deaths and more than 1,000 cases reported, primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though 10 African countries are now considered at risk. “You cannot cut the systems that detect and stop outbreaks early— then act shocked when they spiral. Pathogens exploit weak systems,” said Krutika Kuppalli, MD FIDSA, in a post on Sunday.

On Monday, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), told the world that the outbreak was “outpacing us."

The Trump administration, previously the WHO's largest funder, is the biggest reason of these failures and need to play catch up. Assistance from the US to the DRC reportedly fell from $1.4 billion in 2024 to just $21 million in 2026, said Kuppalli.

“Many of the international systems created or strengthened after earlier Ebola crises have been weakened,” the Washington Post reported last week. While the US once "played a central coordinating role in previous Ebola response efforts,” the newspaper noted, "that infrastructure has been significantly diminished following Trump administration cuts" in early 2025.

With the US pulling out of the WHO and eviscerating the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which routed money and supplies quickly, the ability to help organizations on the ground pivot from prevention "to contact tracing and communications" has vanished, said Stephanie Psaki, US coordinator for global health security in the Biden administration.

The Trump administration has even barred key infectious disease officials from communicating with the WHO. “The whole disaster response capability at USAID no longer exists,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, the former lead of USAID’s Ebola response team.

On May 20, National Nurses United, issued a statement admonishing the Trump administration for making everyone less safe in the face of the outbreak.

“Nurses understand the life-or-death importance of prevention, and when it comes to infectious diseases, that means having strong infrastructure in place to rapidly detect and respond to new outbreaks before they are out of control," said NNU. "The Trump administration has purposely taken a sledgehammer to that infrastructure over the past year.”

Nurses are prominent among the health workers, and health policy researchers, who have long warned of the danger of sudden outbreaks that can lead to massive, deadly pandemics.

“The arrival of the next great pandemic has always been a ‘when,’ not an ‘if,’ and firewalls for stopping it are getting thinner,” journalists Conn Hallinan and Carl Bloice wrote in 2005 in the California Nurses Association’s Revolution magazine. That piece was written amid concern for the spreading of avian flu, but the warning signs of a failing prevention and response system were already evident. “Public health budgets in this nation and across the globe are being systematically starved of funding,” they wrote.

Four years later, H1NI, also known as swine flu, brought the fears to life. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated there were 60.8 million cases and an estimated range of between 151,700 to 575,400 deaths worldwide its first year alone. Deborah Burger, RN, then president of the California Nurses Association, warned, “We should learn the lessons of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, one of which was the enormous mitigating effect on mortality of adequate nursing care.”

Those working on the frontlines to care for infected patients are particularly vulnerable. Speaking to Hallinan and Bloice, University of Minnesota researcher Michael Osterholm predicted back in 2005 that “health care workers would become ill and die at rates similar to, or even higher than in the general public" in the face of a pandemic.

On July 17, 2009, Karen Ann Hays, a cancer care RN at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael, CA near Sacramento, and a healthy triathlete and marathon runner, became the first health care worker in California to die of H1N1. Only after the union announced plans for a one-day strike affecting 16,000 RNs in California and Nevada, did then-Gov. Schwarzenegger and major hospitals implement new safety protocols.

In March 2014, the largest outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus was reported in West Africa. By August, the WHO declared a public health emergency as it spread in Africa, and reached Europe and the US. As noted, the outbreak was particularly dangerous for healthcare workers exposed to Ebola patients.

Recalling the spread of H1N1, NNU urged federal, state, and local officials to adhere to strict infectious disease guidelines to protect patients, healthcare workers, and the public. Seeing little done by September 2014, more than 1,000 nurses held a march and die-in during a convention in Las Vegas to alert the public to inadequate US preparations to stop the spread of Ebola and similar pandemics.

Days later, a patient recently returned to the US from Liberia, was diagnosed with Ebola in a Dallas hospital and died. Within two weeks, two Dallas nurses in that hospital, Nina Pham and Amber Vincent, were infected. NNU called on President Barack Obama to “invoke his executive authority” to order all US hospitals to meet the highest “uniform, national standards and protocols” to “safely protect patients, all healthcare workers and the public.”

Burger testified to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the lack of mandated protections for nurses and patients. “The risk of exposure to the population at large merely starts with front-line caregivers like registered nurses, physicians and other healthcare workers—it does not end there," Burger told lawmakers. "If we cannot protect our nurses and other healthcare workers, we cannot protect anyone.”

A two-day strike the next month at 86 hospitals and clinics over the lack of Ebola preparedness again helped spur needed measures. Within weeks, the federal government, and some states, including California, enacted reforms to improve pandemic protections in US facilities, and as NNU was also urging, escalated support for global protections in West Africa.

Cuba was in the forefront of providing direct frontline care in West Africa in 2014, sending 165 Cuban nurses and doctors, risking their own lives. At a time today with the US threatening an invasion of Cuba following months of an illegal blockade that has had a debilitating impact on its health care system, it’s worth recalling that as recently as 2024, Cuba had dispatched more than 20,000 medical staff to more than 50 countries in humanitarian missions.

When Trump first came into office, he ignored the preparedness lessons. Beginning the morning after his 2017 inauguration, Trump systematically dismantled a pandemic infrastructure response program put in place by Obama. By January 2020, when the WHO had begun warning of the outbreak known as Covid-19, the Trump administration was caught flatfooted. As the initial US infections appeared, Trump’s first public statement that month was this: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

In contrast, NNU had already begun to press Trump to implement national and safety protocols and measures, with public accountability. Instead, Trump’s response was months of denials, deflections, and promotion of false cures while dismissing the best protective measures. By June 2020, with 110,000 dead Americans, Trump insisted, “It is dying out, it’s going to fade away.”

By February 2024, the US counted nearly 7 million cases, and over 1.1 million deaths. So many lives could have been saved with advance preparedness and rapid implementation of the proper safety measures.

Hospital employers and numerous state governments, especially in GOP-controlled states, took their lead from the Trump administration to slow walk or ignore critical protections. Workers in essential front-line occupations, from public transportation to nursing homes and hospitals, as well as lower income jobs in grocery and drug stores, poultry and other meat processing, and service industries generally, paid a high price, especially workers of color.

Through August 2023, the Covid death count hit 5,753 for health care workers overall, including 501 RNs. Filipinos, 4 percent of all RNs, accounted for 21 percent of the deaths among nurses.

In the 2014 outbreak, 881 doctors, nurses, and midwives were infected in West Africa, and 513 died. The crisis created a severe shortage of healthcare workers across the region.

By May 21 in the current Ebola outbreak, at least four health worker deaths have been reported in the DRC. Three Red Cross volunteers have also died. One doctor evacuated from the DRC, waiting in a specialized hospital room in Prague to see whether he has Ebola, said his former colleagues in the DRC are beginning to die of the deadly disease.

The International Rescue Committee warned on Tuesady that thus outbreak is spreading faster than responders can contain it and risks becoming "the deadliest on record."

As the NNU warned last week, neither the nation nor the world can afford another public health mismanagement disaster from the like of Trump. “Nurses have already lived through one bungled, global health emergency response during the first Trump administration," said the union, "and we are appalled to know that when it comes to Ebola, hantavirus, or any other infectious disease, the United States under Donald Trump is now even less prepared than in 2020."

When Chinese leaders claim that the American empire is in decline, I immediately assume their analysts are decoding dispatches from ESPN, The Athletic, and columnist Shams Charania. After all, it’s in sportswriting, I’ve come to think, that the songs of the canary in the all-American coal mine couldn’t be clearer. If the games we play and watch reflect our past and present lives, then the coverage and commentary about them may help predict our future.

American sportswriters have been cheerleaders for empire since the early 20th century, when Bat Masterson decided that shooting people in Dodge City wasn’t fulfilling enough for a man of his talent and ambition. Yes, that Bat Masterson. He came East and, as a boxing columnist for the New York Morning Telegraph, became a new sheriff in the emerging industry I’ve come to call SportsWorld.

Opinionated and self-righteous, he was an early singer of those canary songs that, for the next hundred years, would both forecast and reflect Jock Culture’s impact on American life. The words might change, but the melody remained. The billionaires who now own and run sports were the robber barons of Bat’s time, and the gambling that helped fuel his Gilded Age is now institutionalized as the proud partner of all the major leagues (whatever the sport may be).

Writing this in the twilight of my own sportswriting career, I find it remarkably easy to trace a path from those early oligarchs to the robber barons who now run American sports, and from the early sports bettors who fixed the 1919 World Series to the FanDuel and DraftKings proposition bettors who are changing the climate of our games—and even perhaps to the Kalshi and Polymarket prediction market gamblers whose wagers on wars may someday (if they haven’t already) help start them.

If my Chinese spies are any good, they understand that more than 100 years after Bat Masterson died writing about boxing, the clues extracted from sportswriting also pertain to the games our government is playing.

The major sports of Bat’s era were fiercely segregated expressions of the Jim Crow backlash that continued to fight a version of the Civil War. Keep in mind, for instance, that baseball, the anointed national pastime, was Whites Only until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Most white sportswriters had then stayed silent on the issue and so supported the racism of the owners who ran their clubs like plantations and of the white players who didn’t want any job competition from Negro Leaguers.

Black newspaper sportswriters and Lester “Red” Rodney, who wrote for the Communist Daily Worker and died in 2009 at the age of 98, were then counterpoints to the mainstream. He was one of the most outspoken advocates of racial desegregation in major league baseball. Early in his life, the focus on sports integration had been boxing, a sport that had gone to great lengths to ensure that a Black boxer would never become the world heavyweight champion (then considered a symbol of all-American manhood). When Jack Johnson took that crown in 1908, sportswriters, including such luminaries as novelist Jack London, called for “white hopes” to reclaim it. If Chinese spies had been on the job then, they would have noted this country’s overwhelming racism.

White (and Black) Positions

The National Football League’s color barrier was breached in 1946, but it was replaced by pro football’s version of Jim Crow, or “positional segregation.” Again, sportswriters tended to go along with the establishment dictum that roles like quarterback and center were for leaders and thinking men, and so reserved for whites only. This delayed the appearance of the first starting Black quarterback until 1968. Meanwhile, Blacks were considered more fitted for the “natural” or “athletic” roles of defensive back and running back. Coaching, of course, is still a white man’s prerogative in a league whose rosters are now about 70% Black.

Sportswriters bring this up from time to time, but never in a sustained enough way to effect real change. And while sportswriters and players might seem like natural allies, they have generally been willing to go along to get along on their separate tracks, especially in shaky times. Sports journalists, of course, tend to work for the corporate media, often the broadcasters of sports events (if not for the media outlets of various sports leagues). Historically, pointing out discrimination is no road to success, since all the owners of sports teams belong to the same white billionaires’ club, ready to boycott activists. Athletes, with their typically short shelf lives, are wary of antagonizing the people who pay their salaries and might help employ them after their games are over.

All of that was pretty much set in the days of creation. Bat Masterson’s peers and spawn, the scriveners of the Roaring 20s, were rewarded for “godding up” athletes as commercial celebrities in the booming new sports markets, particularly college football and the Olympic Games. The most famous of the early mythmakers was sports columnist Grantland Rice. In print, on radio, and by newsreel, he gilded the likes of home-run king Babe Ruth, boxer Jack Dempsey (also known as “the Manassa Mauler“), golfer Bobby Jones, and Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, who ironically died in a 1931 plane crash on his way to work on a Hollywood movie.

While they erected a predominantly white male pantheon, those sportswriters insisted on proclaiming the righteousness, meritocracy, and character-building nature of their subject. Even the skeptics who snidely mocked the demigods when they failed did so in a way that maintained their importance as signifiers of the best in the best of all worlds.

When it came to the post-World War II generation of sportswriters, two spirited tabloid journalists, Jimmy Cannon and Dick Young, dominated. Cannon dubbed the Black heavyweight champion Joe Louis “a credit to his race, the human race” when that seemingly quaint phrase actually meant something in a Jim Crow world. He also mocked his fellow sportswriters as “the vaudevillians of journalism.”

Dick Young led those vaudevillians from the Olympus of the press box, where he and his companions dispensed lofty punditry all the way down to the sweaty locker rooms where they began to buttonhole athletes and coaches for quotes. Young also ran blind items in his gossipy New York Daily News columns that alluded to jock shenanigans on and off the field.

His cracking of the sports curtain presaged a 1950s and 1960s sports reporting populism that proved to be a turning point in Jock Culture, inspiring the “Chipmunks” (so labelled by Cannon for their constant press box chatter), a new breed of smart, more progressive young men (and they were still mostly men) who saw themselves as real journalists capable of being fair-minded, clear-eyed, humorous, and honest. Chief among them were Leonard Shecter and Larry Merchant of the New York Post, and Stan Isaacs of Newsday.

Business Models

That was about when I arrived on the scene in New York in 1957, during what came to be known as the Great Betrayal. Two of the three New York baseball teams, the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved to California. That decision proved smart economically and it did finally make the national pastime truly national, but it also woke fans to the realization that, while sports might be sacred rites to them, they were businesses to their ever-wealthier owners.

At the time, sportswriters (except for those in New York who lost jobs because of the move) were not particularly emotionally disrupted by those moves because they knew that sports was, above all, a business, even if that was their own little secret—and a surprisingly corrupt business at that. After all, unmarked brown envelopes stuffed with cash were regularly handed out to sportswriters (along with free tickets to games and expensive Christmas presents).

I was lucky then to be working for The New York Times, which paid all my expenses. Most sportswriters, however, got their travel money and meal money from the teams or the promoters of the events they were covering—and an honest reportorial job could be considered an ungrateful act to be punished with loss of access (and cash).

If the reactions of most sportswriters to the activism of athletes were all too often unsupportive, their reaction to their more daring colleagues was disgracefully weak.

In those days, players and reporters usually stayed at the same hotels on the road while traveling together on trains (and later chartered planes). Sportswriters often drank and night-owled with the players and coaches, but that easy access came with a price. We were all supposed to be on the same team. “Sports of the Times” columnist Arthur Daley referred to his newspaper colleagues all too accurately as “lodge brothers.” They were all male, all white, and (with the exception of a few athletic and journalistic superstars) pretty much in the same financial class. There was a community of interest, and the fans were the rubes at the carnival.

When I first began covering the Yankees in the 1960s, Manager Ralph Houk took me aside to ask if I was going to be “a booster or a ripper.” He was not satisfied with my lame promise to be “fair-minded.” He coldly said, “We’re all in this together.”

But the expulsion of the scribes from that sweaty Eden had already begun. In 1958, it was reported that Houk, then a coach, had scuffled with pitcher Ryne Duren on the train coming back from winning the American League pennant. Such family squabbles, drunkenness, or screwing around had, in the past, rarely been reported. And even the New York Post‘s Leonard Shecter, like other reporters, initially turned a blind eye to what had happened. But a hint of the story by a cityside reporter on another paper made that position unsustainable. So, Shecter told his editors what he knew—that Duren, probably drunk, had gotten rowdy. Houk, while subduing him, had accidentally cut him over the eye with his World Series ring. The Post editors then blew the story into a wild melee with front-page and back-page headlines.

“With one dispatch,” wrote Alan Schwarz, 50 years later in The New York Times, “Shecter had violated a sacred code that had existed in the 100 years of newspaper coverage of baseball.”

A dozen years later, Shecter would do it again, although more mindfully. He had become a beacon of hard-nosed honesty, the curmudgeonly scourge of entitled jocks and sycophantic sportswriters. He persuaded a bright, politically progressive Yankee pitcher, Jim Bouton, to write an honest account of his life in the big leagues, which included a scene of Yankee star outfielder Mickey Mantle leading his teammates in “beaver-shooting” (hotel expeditions in search of naked female guests).

Bouton’s 1970 bestseller Ball Four would prove to be his valentine to baseball. It would enrage sportswriters because it exposed their Faustian bargain of silence for access as well as baseball officials because it broke open the world they thought they controlled. It fueled the coming decades of adversarial relations between sportswriters and their subjects and an internal rift between rippers and boosters.

Enter Ali

At the same time, television was, for the first time, giving athletes direct contact with their fans. They were no longer dependent on the pencil press as intermediaries. No athlete took greater advantage of that than boxing champion Muhammad Ali, perhaps the first athlete to take control of his own narrative.

Most of the senior scribes of the 1960s attacked Ali, first for his breezy lack of respect for their eminence, then for his pugilistic unorthodoxy (particularly the way he leaned back from punches rather than “slipped” them over his shoulders), and finally for his politics, especially for declaring himself a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. While younger sportswriters (like me) were besotted by the early Ali, our elders like Cannon and “Red” Smith attacked him as unpatriotic and ungrateful for the opportunity to become rich and famous that America had offered a poor Black boy.

And that would prove to be a running theme (however subtly expressed) of the disapproval of all too many establishment sportswriters for those athletes labelled rebels—from Ali to Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who protested and demonstrated with Black power salutes at the 1968 Olympics, to Curt Flood’s failed attempt to unlock baseball’s reserve clause on player contracts, to San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick taking a knee against racism and police brutality during a game.

If the reactions of most sportswriters to the activism of athletes were all too often unsupportive, their reaction to their more daring colleagues was disgracefully weak, particularly when an emerging cohort of women sportswriters tried to gain equal access to locker rooms for post-game interviews. It took a 1978 lawsuit by Sports Illustrated‘s Melissa Ludtke to begin to truly open the doors that were already so open to their male equivalents.

It’s not even as if the boys had been too busy breaking two of the biggest stories of the late 20th century, sports or non-sports, the use of performance-enhancing drugs and the epidemic of brain damage among football players. Actually, the boys were too busy yet again reinventing their craft, this time by using the internet to imitate Bill Simmons, who taught them that sportswriting was not so much about covering games as expressing one’s own emotional reaction to those games.

I suspect my Chinese intelligence analysts were already moving beyond all of this to concentrate on the most consistent obsession of establishment sportswriters (as well as of the establishment itself): Follow the money (and yes, we’re indeed talking about millions or even billions of dollars). After all, stories about the recent bonanza of endorsement money for college athletes and the scandals linked to the explosion of sports gambling sites proliferated and a new breed of “transactional” sportswriters like Shams Charania of ESPN, whom you met at the beginning of this ramble, were prepared to cover such things in our present billionaire world of sports (and, of course, nonsports).

Shams is himself one of the country’s highest-paid sportswriters because he can beat the opposition, sometimes by minutes, in reporting trades, salary disputes, and coaching changes. While he specializes in the National Basketball Association, he’s a model for the “analysts” and “insiders” throughout sports journalism today. Pumping their popularity is the insatiable need of gamblers for fresh information.

If my Chinese spies are any good, they understand that more than 100 years after Bat Masterson died writing about boxing, the clues extracted from sportswriting also pertain to the games our government is playing, and reading about sports is another way of understanding where our world is heading. The clues are no longer within the games, the players, or even the roar of the crowd. They are in the clubhouses of the billionaires who recently traveled with President Donald Trump to China to grease the wheels for transactions to come, not to mention those who actually own the teams.

In Trump’s ballpark, it’s all in the deal.

One of the great injustices of our current tax system is that working people often end up subsidizing the luxury consumption of the billionaire class.

One example of this phenomena can be found in the world of private jets, one of the most ecologically indefensible forms of transformation. The private jet lobby has worked for years to secure tax breaks for aircraft purchases and fuel—and shift their costs on to taxpayers and the commercial flying public.

The lobby scored a big win when a 100% bonus depreciation for business assets including private planes was included in the 2017 Trump tax cut. That provision was renewed in 2025’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

With that provision in place, if a billionaire buys a $170 million luxury jet, they can deduct the entire purchase as a business expense in the year they buy it, greatly reducing their tax bill. Most business expenses are deducted to reflect their depreciation over multiple years. A purchase of a truck or vehicle, for example, is typically depreciated over five years.

Every day commercial flyers are taxed more heavily for their tickets compared to private jet travelers who are only taxed on their jet fuel.

Current tax loopholes give the ultra wealthy—including both private citizens and businesses—millions in tax write-offs for their luxurious travel, including the costs of planes themselves and related expenditures like private pilots and fuel.

The Private Jet Accountability Project (PJAP) at the Institute for Policy Studies has been working with members of Congress to rollback these subsidies. US Reps. Eugene Vindman (D-Va.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), and Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) recently introduced the Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026.

“Right now, the tax code allows those buying private jets worth tens of millions of dollars to receive enormous write-offs, while middle-class families do not get deductions for basics like gas or groceries. That is wrong,” Vindman said in a statement. “My bill is a commonsense fix that ends these unfair giveaways while protecting farmers, small businesses, and emergency responders who depend on aviation for real business and community needs.”

Today, private jets, even those valued at $100 million or more, are not considered a luxury vehicle, which means the full value can be a business expense write-off. Expenses such as fuel, pilots, decor, and in-flight services are also a write-off. It is estimated that the owner of a $100 million jet can get a $21 million tax benefit.

This legislation will end these loopholes while protecting “exemptions for aircraft, primarily used to transport property, as well as planes used for agriculture, firefighting, emergency medical services, flight instruction, sky diving operations, and certain commercial flights available to the public” as described in the bill.

These are funds we cannot afford to lose. An Institute for Policy Studies report found that private air travel is a significant portion of air traffic, with a ratio of 1 private jet per 6 commercial planes. Despite this, private jet travel only contributes 2% of the taxes that go to fund the Federal Aviation Administration. At the same time, people flying commercial pay a 7.5% federal excise tax on tickets to fund the FAA’s Airport and Airway Trust Fund. Every day commercial flyers are taxed more heavily for their tickets compared with private jet travelers who are only taxed on their jet fuel.

“It’s ridiculous and unfair that the ultra wealthy get million-dollar tax breaks for their private jets while working families are seeing their healthcare and food assistance cut,” said Rep. McDonald Rivet. “We need to get rid of this insane loophole, because if you can afford a private jet, you can afford to pay your fair share in taxes.”

“The fact that our tax dollars are still funding tax breaks for someone’s private jet is insane,” Rep. Landsman added. “We have to fix the tax code so the super wealthy stop getting special treatment, and our small businesses and farmers can actually get ahead.”

In the face of the jet fuel crisis, European lawmakers are exploring banning certain kinds of private jet operations. Here in the US, all we are asking is that private jets pay their fair share.

Luxury travel that isn’t taxed appropriately epitomizes the inequality that exists in the tax and travel systems. Why should everyday Americans foot the bill for the ultra-wealthy’s private air travel and the air travel infrastructure we all use?

The passage of the Stop Subsidizing Private Jets Act of 2026 is an important step in correcting the imbalance of wealth and power in our democracy.

“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips

With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:

While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.

The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:

The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.

US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.

One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.

These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).

The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You've worked hard. You've played by the rules. You're not getting ahead. Well, it's not that the system is stacked against you. It's that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.

Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:

By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.

According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.

The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.