With the US midterm elections drawing near, the growing support among the US public for the salvation and liberation of the Palestinian people is tremendously heartening and indicative that Israel’s 80-year war and lawless reign of terror and annihilation must and will come to an end. It is also encouraging that global Jewry writ large does not support the Israeli regime’s genocide and occupation of the Palestinians.

Dramatic evidence of global support for Palestinians came on September 16, 2026 when Emmy, Grammy, and MTV award-winning singer Ed Sheeran received tremendous backlash for kicking the singer Macklemore, champion of Palestinian rights, off his music tour. Sheeran said he did it under pressure from Boston Patriots football team and stadium owner Robert Kraft and other stadium owners. The situation escalated into a snowballing public relations disaster for Sheeran, with his entire tour lineup—including pop group Lukas Graham, singer Finneas, Aaron Rowe, and his own backing band Boega—withdrawing from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.

Attempting to reverse his losses, Sheeran then issued a tearful apology at his Philadelphia concert on Saturday, September 19, which many have criticized as turning attention to his own pain and shame, rather than that of the Palestinians.

Given the way in which the US and Israel easily bulldozed the world’s elites into accepting the Board of Peace, we turn to a way to pressure the US governments, and all governments, to do the right thing: boycott.

The massive pro-Palestinian energy demonstrated by the Sheeran incident, on top of the already pronounced movement of US and world sentiment toward Palestinians, suggests success for pro-Palestinian candidates in the US midterm elections, and possibly the edge that will shift the control of the US House and Senate to the Democratic Party.

However, even with a shift in Congress to the Democrats, we need not only an indefinite halt to the shipment of all US weapons to Israel; we must also have legislation that defines the conduct that the US demands of Israel as essential to restoring land and full rights to the Palestinian people.

Fortunately, a detailed description of the conduct that the US must demand of Israel with respect to the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) is clearly laid out in United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24, overwhelmingly approved by the UN General Assembly on September 18, 2024. The Occupied Territory includes all of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

Here are the basic requirements of Israel with respect to the Occupied Territory under Resolution 10/24:

• Withdraw all its military forces, including from air and maritime space;
• Immediately cease all new settlement activity, evacuate all settlers from occupied land, and dismantle parts of the separation wall it constructed inside the occupied West Bank;
• Repeal all legislation and other measures discriminating against the Palestinian people;
• Return land and other immovable property as well as all assets seized from any natural or legal person since the occupation began in 1967 and return all cultural property and assets taken from Palestinians and Palestinian institutions; and
• Allow all Palestinians displaced during the occupation to return to their place of origin and make full reparation for the damage caused by its occupation.

This is what, at a minimum, must become US policy toward Israel.

Trump and Israel have attempted to bury Resolution 10/24 under a US-commandeered Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 17, 2025 (Russia and China abstained), that created a so-called “Board of Peace.” This entity has acted as a diplomatic-public relations shield for the continued Israel genocide against the Palestinian people, the occupation and bombardment of much of Lebanon, the surreptitious expansion of its illegal occupation of southwest Syria, and all the killing that goes with it. The board allows Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip to continue; no legitimate framework for Palestinian self-determination is provided.

Under cover of the Board of Peace, Israel continues to have control of what happens to Palestinians while it continues its brutal settler-colonial enterprise based on daily killing and abuse of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

It is important to understand that General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24 still stands as a recognized action of the UN General Assembly, instructive not only to the US but all UN Member States, regardless of its de facto cancellation by the US and Israel that resulted in the creation of the Frankenstein’s monster Board of Peace.

General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24 not only incorporates all previous UN General Assembly, Security Council, and Human Rights Council resolutions pertaining to Israel’s illegal occupation of the OPT, it incorporates the landmark opinion issued in July 2024 by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which said that Israel’s occupation violated international law and should end "as rapidly as possible” and set a deadline for September 18 2025. That deadline has come and gone, requiring that new measures be taken.

In this moment, it is necessary for the political and financial elites of UN Member States to muster the courage to enforce General Assembly Resolution ES/10/24’s terms by cutting trade, commercial, and diplomatic ties with Israel. However, given the way in which the US and Israel easily bulldozed the world’s elites into accepting the Board of Peace, we turn to a way to pressure the US governments, and all governments, to do the right thing: boycott.

Many have likened the boycott of Ed Sheeran to the broader and intensifying global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign launched in 2005 to put economic, cultural, and political pressure on Israel to conform to international law, as the culmination of a Kairos moment which could and should lead the United Nations to boycott Israel as it did South Africa.

In 1985, the United Nations led a decades-long campaign of General Assembly resolutions calling upon member states to boycott, sanction, and embargo South Africa to end the country's system of apartheid. This led, in 1994, to South Africa officially ending its system of apartheid with the election of Nelson Mandela as the nation’s first Black president in the country's first fully democratic, non-racial general election.

Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinian Buddhist peace activist, Columbia University graduate student, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s 2026-2027 Walter and June Wink Fellow, told us in an interview that the world is witnessing a pivotal moment as global civil society is coming together in ever-increasing numbers to demand that international law and human rights, including for Palestinians, be at the center and forefront of international actions.

“One important part of this,” he said, “is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, which has been criminalized and shut down” however unsuccessfully, as was attempted by kicking Macklemore off of the Ed Sheeran concert tour.

Mahdawi said further:

People all over the world are not waiting for governments to liberate Palestine. We know that love, not hate, and the need for justice can and will concur. Through BDS, we are witnessing and manifesting a nonviolent global transformation not only for Palestine but the whole world, as the liberation of all humanity is deeply interconnected and interdependent. Macklemore is encouraging this and has shown that people who defend Palestine will prevail.

Mahdawi is convinced that the liberation of Israelis from their own moral injury, spiritual damage, and violation of Judaism’s core moral and ethical teachings also will occur.

“Government and institutional change at all levels will take some time,” he said. “In the meantime, we exercise our First Amendment Right to Free Speech and through speaking our truth, we manifest collective empathy, which is part of our innate nature, and manifest change. This is stronger than all of the weapons and censorship that they have.”

Sahar Alsahlani, board member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York (CAIR-NY) and board member of the Parliament of World Religions, the oldest and largest interfaith organization in the world, concurs.

She said: "This is the moment for organizers for Palestine in the US to demand that requirements of UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/24 become the requirements of US policy toward Israel, and to back up this demand by dramatically increasing BDS mobilization."

Nothing taught me more about the danger of silence in the military than surviving rape twice while wearing the uniform of the country I volunteered to serve, because I learned firsthand how quickly an institution built around honor, courage, and loyalty can become terrifying when the person who has been violated must decide whether speaking up will cost them even more.

Our service members understand that fear, which is why attacks on anonymous reporting should alarm anyone who actually cares about protecting the people who serve.

Being able to report misconduct without immediately exposing yourself can mean the difference between speaking and staying silent when rank, retaliation, career consequences, and the instinct to protect the institution are stacked against you.

Let us stop calling silence discipline, stop calling environmental disregard strength, and stop pretending accountability somehow makes our military weaker.

Once those protections are weakened, the misconduct does not magically disappear; the person experiencing it simply has fewer safe ways to expose it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly attacked anonymous complaints while presenting his campaign against what he considers politically correct military culture as a return to strength.

Yet there is nothing strong about creating more fear around reporting abuse, harassment, or misconduct, especially inside an institution where power and rank shape nearly every part of a service member’s life.

I call that feeding the conditions where rape culture survives, because I know personally what happens when silence becomes easier for an institution than accountability.

Survivors should never have to prove their toughness by enduring abuse quietly.

Disregard for accountability also appears in Hegseth’s approach to another responsibility the military cannot escape: what it does to the land, water, and communities where it operates.

In his own words, “No more climate change worship,” but treating environmental responsibility as weakness ignores the damage military activity has already left behind in American communities.

Service members and Mother Earth have something painful in common: Both have been expected to absorb damage in the name of a mission and remain silent about the scars.

Pollution from military operations has contaminated land and groundwater on Guam, the island where I was born, where decades of military activity have left contamination near an aquifer our people depend upon for drinking water.

Our community here in Tucson knows another version of that story, with PFAS contamination threatening groundwater and military facilities, including Davis-Monthan, identified among the sources requiring investigation and cleanup.

Strength cannot mean demanding unlimited sacrifice from people, communities, and the planet while treating accountability as an inconvenience.

As a veteran, a survivor, and someone born on an island carrying the environmental scars of America's military presence, I cannot separate these issues, because both force us to confront what happens when powerful institutions decide that accomplishing the mission matters more than acknowledging who or what gets harmed along the way.

Bodies can be raped, land can be violated, water can be poisoned, and although those harms are not identical, they grow from a dangerous belief that something valuable can be used, damaged, and discarded because those holding power have decided the cost is acceptable.

Let us stop calling silence discipline, stop calling environmental disregard strength, and stop pretending accountability somehow makes our military weaker.

Enough: No service member, no community, and no piece of Mother Earth should ever be treated as disposable.

xoxo, military members & Mother Earth

P.S. Read the first letters of each paragraph.

Affordability is getting worse, especially if you have to drive to work or anywhere else.

By late September, the total cost of the higher gas and diesel prices triggered by President Donald Trump’s war against Iran exceeded $103 billion, according to my organization’s analysis of the federal government’s energy data. And those higher prices aren’t showing any sign of slowing. If current trends hold, the price tag by the end of this year will approach $180 billion.

For the average household, that comes out to $750 extra so far, and that figure is on pace to top $1,300 by year’s end.

If life feels more expensive today, that’s because it is.

For a family of four with two drivers, those costs are even higher, topping $1,000 already and slated to be over $1,700 by the end of the year if the war continues. Our interactive tool, online at itep.org/iran-war-fuel-cost, lets you punch in your region and household size to get a sense of how much your family’s costs are rising.

To be clear, this isn’t the cost of the weapons and soldiers fighting the war, which the Pentagon estimates to be around $44 billion. This is the higher cost you’re paying to fill up your gas tank and to buy products that cost more to move.

In a normal year, fall is when drivers get some reprieve at the pump. As summer travel winds down, demand for gas falls, and prices should fall too. But not in 2026.

According to AAA, Americans have never paid this much for gas at this time of year. The national average gas price is $4.47 per gallon as of this writing, and a growing number of states are seeing average prices top $5 per gallon.

Equally troubling is the sky-high price of diesel fuel, which has hit record highs this year and now stands at $6.45 per gallon. When diesel prices rise, the cost of making and shipping products rises too. While most of us don’t buy diesel fuel ourselves, this raises the cost of everything else, bumping up the high rate of inflation we’ve already been seeing.

These soaring fuel costs hurt businesses, local governments, and families.

Businesses have had to shell out $48 billion extra for motor fuel this year, mostly on diesel, because of the Iran War.

Local governments also feel the squeeze. Higher fuel prices make it more expensive to operate school buses, garbage trucks, construction equipment, fire trucks, police cars, and other vehicles and machinery. So far this year our local and state governments have had to pay over $2.7 billion extra for fuel because of the Iran War, and we expect that figure to top $4 billion by the close of the year. This expense, of course, ultimately falls on local taxpayers.

These expenses come on top of other new costs for households like rising interest rates, the Trump administration’s widespread tariffs on products you buy every day, and high healthcare prices, made worse by cuts to government programs like food assistance and Obamacare.

If life feels more expensive today, that’s because it is. The higher price you’re paying for gas because of the Iran War isn’t the whole reason for that. But it sure doesn’t help.

Will this be a “wave” election, sweeping new people into power? In some ways, it already is.

Due to retirements and primary defeats in safe districts, there will be 99 new members of Congress next year—and that’s before accounting for any seats that change party hands. A powerful anti-incumbent fervor pervades both parties.

Throughout history, there have been times when voters spoke loudly. The 1974 Watergate election, in which Democrats won 49 new seats. The 1994 “Republican Revolution” that made Newt Gingrich speaker after gaining 54 seats. The 2018 election, the first time voters rejected Donald Trump’s chaos. Polls do not suggest a swing of that magnitude. Democrats are lagging in popularity, even as voters recoil from Trump’s Republicans. But voter sentiment is not the only reason less may change than before.

Even if the Supreme Court does no further damage, it will have designed a dystopian political system where competition is scarce, billionaires dominate spending, and voters of color have little protection against abuse.

Daunting structural obstacles will make it harder for voters to be heard. We can trace many of these back to the Supreme Court and its destructive rulings on democracy over the past two decades. If the voice of voters is muffled this year, blame the Roberts Court.

To start, there are far too few competitive congressional districts. In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Roberts Court refused to police gerrymandering. Then Louisiana v. Callais earlier this year finally demolished the Voting Rights Act and let Southern states eliminate seats held by Black lawmakers.

Political scientist Peter Miller of the Brennan Center for Justice explained it this way: “About 1 in 10 Americans are in a new US House district this year. Mid-decade redistricting in nine states ahead of the elections in November has scrambled the House elections (an 11th-hour attempt to redraw the map in Missouri was rejected by the US Supreme Court for the third and hopefully final time just last week). All of this effort to gerrymander the maps, however, may come to nothing as it is becoming clear that the two parties have fought the redistricting wars to a draw.”

But even amid electoral upheaval, nearly all seats are reliably Democratic or Republican. Political scientist Larry Sabato calculates there are only 21 competitive seats this year. The Cook Political Report counts 22 toss-up seats.

The Supreme Court has also demolished the laws that curbed big money in politics. Today big donors wield greater power than in memory. The top 20 donors have already spent $1.2 billion this year—all but two of them helping Republicans—and that figure is from before the start of the general election campaign. Elon Musk alone has already spent over $90 million. And while donors like Musk can be identified, much of this funding consists of “dark money,” where the identity of the donor is obscured.

It can all blur. But until 2010’s Citizens United and the cases that followed in lower courts, all this spending would have been flatly, explicitly illegal.

Then there are laws, big and small, by which states restrict the right to vote. The Supreme Court has not reversed a state voter suppression law this century. Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 first gutted the Voting Rights Act. Since then, our research shows, the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters has grown all over the country. And it has grown at twice the rate in the places once covered by preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. That means hundreds of thousands fewer votes are expected this year than might have been the case otherwise.

Generally, the court has refrained from injecting itself into election contests. In 2020, after all, the justices refused to countenance Trump’s bid to overturn the election.

This year, the court’s record is mixed. Encouragingly, two weeks ago the justices upheld a ruling that blocked a Postal Service rule on mail voting. A different decision would have been a disaster, since 1 in 3 Americans votes with a mail ballot.

But on Friday, the justices let the administration use the “SAVE program.” This is a notoriously inaccurate and incomplete tool to verify citizenship status, which the Trump administration wants to use as a prod to purge voter rolls. The ruling will likely not affect this election. But this all augurs continued legal battles over voting in years to come, especially as the next presidential contest looms.

We want the justices, mostly, to stay out, and let state and local election officials do their work of protecting voters. At the same time, if politicians try to steal the election, crying “fraud” and “rigged,” we may need the Supreme Court to step up. Let’s hope it never faces that test.

The court’s term begins next Monday. It will hear major cases on the public funding of private religious schools, environmental laws, and more. Much of the most important work of the term has been done already with the emergency rulings on the “shadow docket” policing the elections.

But even if the Supreme Court does no further damage, it will have designed a dystopian political system where competition is scarce, billionaires dominate spending, and voters of color have little protection against abuse.

On November 3, 2026, California voters will vote on Proposition 40, a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of billionaires who were California residents on January 1, 2026. Ninety percent of the revenue would fund healthcare programs, with the remainder set aside for food assistance and education.

A small segment of the state’s 200-plus billionaires has stepped up to oppose Prop 40, contributing millions to opposition groups and vocally speaking out against the one-time fee.

In a brief report, California’s Billionaire Wealth Surge: Meet the 22 California Billionaires Opposing Prop 40 Billionaire Wealth Tax, we identified 22 California billionaires who are active funders and outspoken opponents of Prop 40. Together they have given over $150 million to oppose the initiative—with more rolling in every day. These 22 include a prince, several private jet flying chums of Jeffrey Epstein, and a bunch of crypto and tech bros designing the AI future for the rest of us.

Thiel’s wealth is 10,759 times the median wealth of a Californian household.

On January 1, 2025, these 22 billionaires had a combined wealth of $439.8 billion. By September 1, 2026, their wealth had grown to $722.1 billion.

In a little under 20 months, their combined wealth increased $282.6 billion, a gain of over 64%.

Just to be clear, these “snowflake billionaires” are whining, wailing, and donating money to fight a tax that would effectively require them to part with one-eighth of the wealth they’ve gained since January 1, 2025.

This group includes Google’s Sergey Brin who has been the single largest opposition donor, chipping in over $102 million to fight Prop 40. Brin has seen his wealth grow a whopping 70% in the last 20 months, from $148 billion on January 1, 2025 to $253 billion on September 1, 2026. Brin’s wealth is 83,498 times the median wealth of a Californian household, which is $303,000.

Palantir’s Peter Thiel gave $3 million to the No on 40 campaign and has called on other billionaires to move out of California. In the last 20 months, Thiel’s wealth increased a whopping 120.27%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025 to $32.6 billion on September 1, 2026 (Forbes). Thiel’s wealth is 10,759 times the median wealth of a Californian household.

Chris Larsen, founder of cryptocurrency firm Ripple, has given over $5 million to the No on Prop 40 Campaign, along with another $5 million from Ripple and $12 million to Building a Better California. His personal wealth increased 23.5%, from $10.2 billion to $12.6 billion in the last 20 months. His wealth is 4,158 times the wealth of the median California family.

Venture capitalist John Doerr gave $10 million to No On 40. In the last 20 months, Doerr’s wealth increased 47.97%, from $14.8 billion on January 1, 2025 to $21.9 billion on September 1, 2026. Doerr’s wealth is 7,227 times the median wealth of a Californian household.

Three of the 20 saw their wealth decline over this 20-month period: Tony Xu, Marc Pincus, and Marco DeGeorge. But most have experienced substantial gains.

California Billionaires vs. the Median California Household

The number of billionaires in California has grown, with their average wealth remaining roughly between $9.1 to $9.4 billion. As of September 1, 2026, the 231 billionaires identified as living in California have a combined wealth of $2.117 trillion. Just 20 months ago, there were 178 billionaires in California with a combined wealth of $1.685 trillion.

To show how quickly billionaire wealth has accelerated since the pandemic, let’s go back in time six years. In early 2020, all 815 billionaires residing in the United States had a combined wealth of $2.9 trillion, only slightly more than what the 231 California billionaires have today in 2026.

Meanwhile, the median net worth of a California household has risen a marginal 5.2% increasing $15,000 from $288,000 in 2025 to $303,000 in 2026. A Californian with $1 billion dollars in wealth has 303 times the wealth of the median California household.

Under Prop 40, this billionaire will pay a one-time tax of $50 million to support healthcare, education, and food assistance for their fellow Californians leaving them $950 million to survive on.

The Under-Taxed California Billionaire

In California, the state’s 231 billionaires (as of Sept 1, 2026) hold approximately $2.117 trillion in wealth ($2.3 trillion as of Sept 22, 2026) and pay incredibly low taxes on their riches.

According to an analysis published by economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, from 2019 to 2025, while California billionaires’ wealth grew an average of over 15% per year, they paid, on average, just 0.26% of their wealth annually in state income taxes. Sergey Brin and Larry Page paid just 0.07% of their wealth annually in California income tax during that period. I guess we can see why they don’t want anything to change.

This analysis was prepared by the Institute for Policy Studies and Tax the Ultra-Rich Now (TURN). More detailed dossiers will be available soon. Press release HERE.

In this run-up to the 2026 mid-term elections, progressive movements and candidates remain caught up in the challenges of rising authoritarianism and militarism both at home and around the world.

We are mobilizing against new US-Israeli wars against Iran and across the Middle East/West Asia region, including Israel’s US-enabled genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. We face explosive US bombing raids and illegal military interventions in Latin America, Africa, and beyond, as well as threats to Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and elsewhere — with President Donald Trump at the center of all of it.

What’s different now compared to past crises is that many bold progressive leaders have won competitive primaries in this year’s midterms — often putting opposition to war and genocide at the center of their messaging.

While all of the self-defined democratic socialist and progressive candidates around the country have their own sets of priorities, the most common areas in their electoral platforms include opposition to ICE and military support for Israel, support for expanding health care, affordability, and housing, and anti-authoritarianism writ large.

What’s still needed, beyond the broad principles of progressive foreign policy (see also my 2018 article on the same question as the Squad was winning primaries) is a set of ideas for specific policy proposals to address at least some of the key priority foreign policy issues that will face a new Congress during two more years of the Trump administration and going forward into the elections of 2028.

What Should Progressive Foreign Policy Look Like?

Part 1 of this series identified key principles of a progressive foreign policy. Briefly, foreign policy should reject the goals of US military and economic domination and instead be grounded in global cooperation, international law, human rights, and real diplomacy. It must also take responsibility to repair damage that US military, economic, climate, and other policies have wrought.

This section looks at some of the key global issues that progressive members of Congress will face — and what initiatives may best respond to them.

Official “US foreign policy” will never completely match the much broader internationalist goals of progressive and left movements. But there are examples of good (however limited) and bad foreign policies chosen by past governments.

The Obama administration chose some of each. Its foreign policy victories were all diplomatic: the Paris climate accord, moves towards normalization with Cuba, and especially relevant now as the US-Israeli war against Iran continues to rage, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Its greatest foreign policy failures occurred because Obama chose military action instead of diplomacy, including its escalations and new illegal interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia.

The Biden administration’s important (though still completely insufficient) domestic successes have already been largely relegated to the sidelines and will likely be forgotten by history when weighed against his massive international catastrophes — including the failure in execution (though not in principle) of the Afghanistan withdrawal and, especially, Biden’s enthusiastic arming, financing, and defense of Israel’s genocide against Gaza.

During both of those administrations, including during the periods when Democrats also controlled both House and Senate, only a few progressives in Congress directly challenged the White House — never enough to force an end to the dangerous policies. With more candidates winning elections backed by explicitly left and socialist organizations, as well as the broader progressive movement, their political base will likely expect much more. And the work of movements in highlighting the human and economic costs of wars means that the public will accept — and increasingly will demand — much more as well.

Here are some brief ideas on a few global priorities — and potential crisis points — with some ideas of what policy responses should look like.

Nuclear Weapons

• Recognize that as the only country to have actually fired nuclear weapons in wartime, with horrific human consequences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as holder of one of the two most powerful nuclear weapons arsenals in the world, the US bears particular responsibility towards ending the threat of nuclear war. That means developing a congressional response to the weakening of international anti-nuclear norms (including by the US abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal and the 2026 ending of the New START treaty with Russia) towards the goal of real disarmament and ultimately nuclear abolition.
• Reaffirm US obligations as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires (in Article VI) moving towards “nuclear disarmament and a treaty on general and complete disarmament.” Move the US towards taking the lead among nuclear weapons states in joining the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
• Push Congress to recognize that the goal of nuclear non-proliferation (preventing any other country from getting nuclear weapons) can never work in the long run without nuclear disarmament by the official nuclear weapons states (China, France, Russia, the U.K., the US) and unofficial nuclear weapons states (India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan).
• Accept the South Korean president’s recognition that nuclear disarmament of the Korean peninsula will not start with unilateral North Korean disarmament as a precondition. Instead, it will require recognizing North Korea’s nuclear status and then moving towards freezing its nuclear capacity as the starting point for a disarmament process.

Sanctions, Drones, AI, and the Changing Nature of Warfare

• Mobilize in Congress to reject strategies based on broad economic sanctions. Sanctions, especially secondary sanctions, are not “alternatives to war.” Instead, they damage entire populations and are themselves acts of war.
• End the glorification of military “lethality” and prevent the Pentagon from carrying out recruitment campaigns in language coded to appeal to white supremacists.
• Cut overall numbers of US troops, and stop allowing the Pentagon to escalate recruitment by targeting high-poverty areas or reducing standards for joining the military. As air wars replace most large-scale deployments, far fewer troops are required, but it is important to reject the “doing more killing with fewer soldiers” framework.
• Ban all AI-controlled weapons or military systems.
• Stop allowing the ostensible “dangers” of munition shortages to justify increasing military budgets and escalating weapons production. The danger is not munitions’ absence but their use against civilians and civilian infrastructure around the world. Even as cheap drones replace multi-million-dollar rockets and missiles, expensive anti-missile weapons systems do not make us safer — they make US wars easier to wage by reducing US military casualties, while at the same time causing far more civilian deaths and injuries around the world.

Climate Change

• Rejoin the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and implement its requirements to publish comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) reports on Pentagon emissions, and include military emissions in all emission-reduction plans.
• Redirect funds from the Pentagon budget to support the Global Just Transition Fund.
• Support the creation of an international Fossil Fuel Treaty to coordinate the phasing out of military fossil fuel consumption, including phasing out weapons production and closing military bases.
• As AI and other advanced technology expands, support serious local, state, federal, and global governance regulation to address the dangerous climate impact of these technologies.
• During trade negotiations, stop pressuring other countries and multilateral groups to purchase more US fossil fuels, a tactic that undermines global efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and replace it with renewables.
• During treaty negotiations, stop using pressure tactics designed to prevent the passage of global climate justice regulations, such as the recent US-forced postponement of the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework to limit and tax large ships’ CO2 emissions.

Global Poverty and Inequality

• Recognize the interconnections of nations, economies, and especially peoples around the world, and how economic and human crises caused by war, climate change, and legacies of colonialism and resource theft across the Global South always come back to impact the lives of people — especially poor people — in the United States.
• Acknowledge the role the US has played in creating the current economic crisis facing the Global South — including crises of debt, privatization, “free trade,” austerity, and more. Take responsibility for reversing those crises, including by expanding the Third Reconstruction Bill now pending in Congress (which calls for challenging domestic poverty, systemic racism, militarism and inequality from the bottom up) to include the Global South.
• Through institutions including the UN and the G20, call on the US, its allies, and others to challenge international inequality through such means as a global wealth tax and the creation of new systems of enforcement of global rules and accountability.
• Expand the common foreign policy goal of stability to include human and environmental security, and work for implementation of that goal through new collaborations between governments, multilateral organizations, and civil society and social movements.

The US Role in Global Institutions and Its Obligations to the World

• Pay all back dues owed to the United Nations, and rejoin and repay assessments owed to UN and related global agencies that the US has left or has stopped or reduced paying, including the World Health Organization, Paris Climate Agreement, UNRWA, World Food Program, UNESCO regional commissions, UN Women, Office for Children in Armed Conflict, and more.
• Stop using the veto to prevent the UN Security Council from acting when it tries to hold the US or its allies accountable for violations of human rights, international law, and UN resolutions.
• Support campaigns for the US to join the International Criminal Court, and in the meantime recognize and commit to enforce its indictments and arrest warrants.
• Recognize the international legitimacy of the International Court of Justice, and commit to supporting and implementing ICJ decisions that impose obligations on Member States of the Court. Particularly urgent is recognition and implementation of the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion finding the Israeli occupation illegal, and its provisional ruling determining that Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly constitute genocide.
• Stop preventing other countries’ implementation of the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution ES-10/24 based on those two decisions, by ending the threats and punishments designed to prevent realization of the arms restrictions, trade and banking sanctions, and other non-violent pressures aimed at achieving Israeli compliance with international law, human rights, and UN resolutions.

This is the second article in a two-part series. The first part, Progressive Principles for a New US Foreign Policy, can be found here.

Hegemonic decline comes in many different forms. From the Roman empire to the Islamic caliphates of old, great powers of the world have repeatedly risen and collapsed under the weight of their excess. While the arc of human history and empire carry diverse experiences and paths, it is near the end of the imperial line that often sees some of humanity’s most volatile moments. Today, the United States represents the end of that line in a rapidly transforming world, with US President Donald Trump’s United Nations General Assembly speech embodying a challenge to the international system and the American decline accompanying and driving it.

To be sure, no one should be surprised by bombastic rhetoric at the UNGA’s annual gatherings. World leaders often use the international forum more as an opportunity to bolster their domestic image at home than for diplomacy and problem solving, as intended. This dynamic is understandable: As the adage goes, “All politics is local.”

Yet it is this exact cliché that makes Trump’s speech different.

The world understands the United States in this context: An empire at the height of its decline, hellbent on aggrandizement in a desperate attempt to grip what remains of its global primacy, even at the expense of the international system.

Approaching the UNGA podium on day one of the plenary session speeches by world leaders from countries like Brazil, Türkiye, and France, Trump understood his political position. The supposed leader of the free world, the American president is in his second and final term in the White House, which has reached a pinnacle moment that will define his legacy.

That moment and legacy are imperiled, if not already ruined. Trump’s sinking domestic approval rating, at its lowest across his two presidential terms, stems from a disastrous domestic and global economy hitting the working class and most vulnerable. His ongoing forever war with Iran and its allies in the Middle East with no end or direction drives those economic problems and the worsening polls.

As such, Trump finds himself underwater politically. His response has been clear: He is as stubborn as ever.

The president launched into a tirade at the UNGA. Opening with a statement that could understandably be confused for a stump speech on a campaign trail or rhetoric meant for the State of the Union, he boasted about his would-be accomplishments at home and abroad. Trump repeated his old lie that he has single-handedly ended multiple wars across the globe. He claimed to have saved the United States, kicking of a “Golden Age of America” while arguing that the country has never been stronger.

Yet it was his rhetoric on multiple American wars in 2026 that should speak. On Venezuela, Trump openly bragged about overthrowing a neighboring country to extract their natural resources—in this case, oil. He gloated about military strikes on alleged cartel boats in the Caribbean Sea, actions amounting to extrajudicial killings. He threatened military action against another neighbor—Cuba—in the near future.

If these boasts reflect a foreign policy disconnected from international law, then Trump’s comments on Iran mark an insult to humanity. In this regard, the American president openly used genocidal language to threaten the country he has taken the United States to war with for the last seven months, openly pondering: “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly… Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness [f]or generations?”

To use such bombastic rhetoric at the UNGA—the heart of global diplomacy, even for all the UN’s warts—marks a new low for American leadership and foreign policy. In directly challenging an international system that is arguably dead, his diatribe puts front and center the state of American decline on the global stage.

These words represent the mindset of an American president who chose a war of aggression against a sovereign state without authorization from the US Congress, meaning American citizen approval, the UN Security Council, or any real international legal basis. These checks—largely cast aside in recent decades—exist with their own warts specifically because this war represents a strategic and humanitarian disaster, as have the wars of the past that informed the international legal system the world understands today.

Instead of leaning into concepts of diplomacy and humanity, playing a leading role in bringing nations together through diplomacy and in support of the principles of international law, the president of the United States has leaned deeper into imperial and interventionist desires, going so far as to hearken to a pre-World War II system of chaos in which the world operated on a simple rule: “To the winner goes the spoils.” Trump used this cliche when discussing American efforts to steal Venezuelan oil.

Instead of recognizing the pain that war, in no small part waged by US weapons and defended in the UNSC by American diplomats, Trump espoused the importance of it in perpetuity to fight some ill-defined “evil.” Instead of recognizing how the inertia of US foreign policy has become an illness for people at home and abroad alike that many akin to the true “evil,” he crowed on about war and violence as if they constitute abstract concepts and games, not real consequences for people around the globe.

The people of Minab, where American missiles hit a school full of children and teachers, killing over 150 civilians, would dispute the abstractness of American power and the giddy willingness to use it in such brutal fashion. Iranians writ large can and do contest the use of genocidal language against their country and civilization. The American people, tired of war amid major domestic problems at home, do not see strength in their president bragging about his would-be personal accomplishments abroad that reflect more of the same mistakes of the past.

People around the world did not see a man espousing American greatness at the UNGA. They witnessed a leader with immense power brag about his ability to cause unspeakable pain and suffering at will as his popularity at home collapses. This comes as the United States proves itself incapable of seriously using its position as a global power to enact real change for the better abroad. In fact, it uses that position in increasingly malign ways and has done so for years.

The world understands the United States in this context: An empire at the height of its decline, hellbent on aggrandizement in a desperate attempt to grip what remains of its global primacy, even at the expense of the international system.

From Ukraine to Gaza to Iran, the old world is regressing to a time before the international legal system was crafted in a way that proclaimed and systematized a simple term: “Never again.” While states will always act with raw power considerations and national interests in mind, the international system marked a valid and worthwhile attempt to temper humanity’s worst instincts. Trump and other leaders of the world, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, represent those worst instincts, explaining why they work to destroy ideals that ultimately improve the human experience—diplomacy, cooperation, development, and human rights.

The UNGA, despite Trump’s ramblings, can and should remind the world that these values matter, just as pure national interests can still be informed by such principles. Such an approach to foreign policy is not a contradiction as strength and humanism are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they must form the basis of how Washington and other capitals approach the world now and in the future.

For most of my life, I’ve had a guitar in my hands and a melody in my head. Traveling this country as a musician, with Perpetual Groove and The Brock Butler Band, has allowed me to share music with people from all walks of life, and I know firsthand the profound power music has to bring us together. Being fortunate enough to travel as much as I have has also meant the opportunity to see a lot of this beautiful country firsthand.

I’ve become more aware and informed about the most corrupt administration in history, and its attempts (failed and successful) to develop public lands with everything from data centers to golf courses (as long as it’s not windmills, I guess?). I grew up in a rural area of Virginia and the thing I enjoy most about my visits home is the tranquility. I find my grounding out under the open sky. I’m lucky that where I grew up remains relatively intact. If a data center got plopped in the woods behind my home I’d be devastated. Everyone should have the opportunity to get grounded in lovely and peaceful places.

The quiet majesty of our public lands should remain unadulterated. I find profound inspiration in the vast, open spaces and the sheer awesomeness of nature. These places are where we go to breathe, to reflect, and to remember who we are. Whether you’re a hiker, a painter, or someone who loves to pick an instrument around a campfire, whatever your reason and intention to get out in nature might be, it should not be limited or compromised by easements and condominiums.

It seems like anything not nailed down is finding its way into the pockets of a handful of billionaires. And this includes our sacred public spaces.

That’s why every day the news is like torture: war, poverty, sickness—and through it all a looting of the public. It seems like anything not nailed down is finding its way into the pockets of a handful of billionaires. And this includes our sacred public spaces. I get told in comment sections often enough I should just stick to music.

So when my dear friend Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, asked if I was interested in helping to expose Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s ongoing pilfering of our public lands through song, I jumped at the opportunity. Because while music can unite us, sometimes it needs to be wielded to shine a light on the wrongdoings of the powerful. And right now, no one is doing more wrong by our public lands than the man who defines the phrase "All Hat, No Cattle." That man is US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

Burgum is treating our sacred landscapes like an industrial lot for tech billionaires. He has earned the moniker "Secretary AI" for his huddles with data center heavyweights, spending the last year taking a string of meetings with data center investors just as his agencies start handing over our lands for development. He is actively plotting to hand over more public lands to AI developers. We are witnessing an aggressive push to build data centers on public lands, with the administration considering more proposals than previously known. You only have to look at the massive facility—five times bigger than Meta's—planned for public land near Boise, to see the scale of the threat, prompting leaders like Rep. Jared Huffman to lead the charge against this industrialization.

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But Burgum isn't just giving away our land; he is deliberately dismantling the infrastructure meant to protect it. After installing right-wing operatives, his Interior Department has blocked tens of millions in national park funds. Meanwhile, his highly touted national park fee scheme has raised only a quarter of what he promised.

The sheer volume of cancelled projects and defunded parks is staggering. Over the past month, local and national news have painted a devastating picture of what Burgum's tenure looks like on the ground:

• The administration blocking $25 million in national park projects, while Oregon's Senators are questioning where the money is even going
• The feds rejected over 130 park projects last month, hitting California the hardest
• Vital funds have been slashed everywhere: Yellowstone lost $428K for cultural resource projects, and Nevada’s parks are losing millions after federal funding blocks
• The Interior Department is actively clawing back NPS money to fund Trump’s projects, allowing national park maintenance work to be sidelined as the "Freedom 250" takes precedence
• Utah's national parks are drowning in a $350 million maintenance backlog without federal help
• Public land agency contractors have suffered a devastating $1.3 billion dip
• Internally, the agencies are in crisis. The National Park Service is poised for an overhaul, spring buyouts have eaten into the Interior Department’s ranks, and staff fear a major agency shakeup.
• The New York Times summed it up best: it's a story of "gold statues and staff cuts" disrupting America's parks

We cannot allow our shared natural heritage to be bulldozed, defunded, and sold off by men who look at a majestic forest and only see square footage for server racks. Protecting our public lands is like protecting the soul of the nation—and that is sorely needed at this time.

And I hope my little musical contribution helps save the soul of our nation, check it out at AllHatDougBurgum.org.

By any measure, 2026 has been a disastrous year for President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

An Iran war in which Trump promised quick victory has turned into a protracted farce dragging down the world economy. The president’s “reciprocal tariffs” were gutted by the Supreme Court, and his administration’s trade agenda remains deeply unpopular. Even his regime change operation in Venezuela, an apparent success, was broadly rejected by the American public and has put the United States into an imperial caretaker role in that country that could prove complicated and costly.

It is no surprise, then, that the president’s approval rating on foreign policy has sunk by almost 30% since his inauguration for his second term. With Trump’s overall polling numbers cratering, Democrats appear to have a decisive advantage in November’s midterms. Yet this has not translated into a lead in foreign affairs, where polling suggests the two parties are essentially tied.

This reality may stem from the fact that, while Democrats have correctly lambasted the president’s actions abroad, the party — and especially its top leadership — has yet to articulate a vision for US foreign policy that reckons with how Trump’s two terms have changed the world and America’s role in it.

While Trump’s first presidency could be viewed as an aberration from the normal course of American politics, his second has been more consequential: a “rupture,” as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney memorably put it in his Davos speech early this year.

American partners who have relied on US markets or security backing can no longer hope for a return to normalcy after Trump. They are acting accordingly: in the past year, US allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have engaged in a flurry of activity, inking new trade and defense agreements in a long-term effort to reduce dependence on the United States.

If Democrats are to regain some credibility on foreign policy with audiences both at home and abroad, they must show a similar willingness to break with the past. Yet this willingness has so far been in short supply. While some leading party figures acknowledge that a return to business as usual is impossible, their prescriptions have continued to echo the agenda of the Biden administration: restoring US leadership, renewing alliances, and crafting an international coalition to compete with China.

As much as former President Joe Biden’s foreign policy struggled under the weight of its contradictions, a retread of his agenda would face even more daunting challenges. Can the United States credibly claim to lead its allies — much less the world — when it has repeatedly shown that its commitments don’t outlast a single presidency? Will any partners want to double down on ties with a hegemon that has proven so eager to exploit dependencies for short-term gain? And what kind of international program can the American public be expected to support after years of anger at the status quo and Trumpian disruption alike?

The Democrats have yet to address these questions in a serious way. Fortunately, the intra-party struggle taking place around the US relationship with Israel has created an opening for a broader reevaluation of Democratic foreign policy.

What kind of international program can the American public be expected to support after years of anger at the status quo and Trumpian disruption alike?

Across the country, progressive primary challengers have trounced establishment candidates by appealing to voters’ desire to end blank-check support for Israel. The relationship has become a litmus test for candidates’ willingness to break with destructive orthodoxies. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) put it, “primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues.”

If the party is to meet the moment, restructuring US ties with Israel is only a starting point. Candidates and elected officials alike need to put forward bold ideas covering a range of issues, from reasserting congressional war powers to crafting a reformed approach to global aid.

Crucially, their proposals need to go beyond opposition to Trump. Rather than just calling out the stupidity of the Iran war, Democrats should pointedly reject the policy of US military primacy in the Middle East that led to it and make the vigorous case for diplomacy that the conflict has so clearly validated. In addition to overturning Trump’s tariffs, the party should develop an agenda for positive-sum economic engagement with the world that does not treat economic prosperity as a scarce resource to be hoarded by some countries at the expense of others. Instead of attacking Trump for weakness in his apparent dovish turn on China, Democrats can advance a strategy that centers cooperation and conflict prevention alongside targeted pushback on Chinese policies where necessary.

In the broadest terms, a new Democratic foreign policy should entail uniting behind a vision for US global engagement that recognizes America cannot lead on every issue and in every instance. This does not mean abandoning the commitment to a world governed by rules and institutions; in fact, renewed investment in international cooperation stands the best chance of sustaining a genuine “rules-based order” at a time when the United States clearly lacks the will and ability to stand up such a system on its own. This approach would mesh well with proposals by allied leaders like Carney and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who have each sketched out ideas for a more just, resilient global order upheld by multilateralism and flexible coalition-building.

Democrats must build on these efforts and offer a compelling alternative both to Trumpism and to the exhausted status quo that helped produce it. Failure to do so would invite disappointment on the world stage — and provide a blessing to Trump’s would-be successors.

One of the most important elections in recent Latin American history will take place Sunday in Brazil. Incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has recently been emphasizing the issue of national sovereignty. One reason: The challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, has the strong backing of the Trump administration—and the US has been intervening heavily on his behalf.

In the last few months of Brazil’s election campaign, Trump has met with Bolsonaro at the White House, imposed new tariffs on Brazilian goods and tried to send State Department officials to Brazil. (Both Brazilian and American officials said the presence of Trump administration operatives would cast doubt on the integrity of the voting there.)

A letter last week to Secretary of State Marco Rubio from 31 members of Congress documented additional hostile actions and concluded that “the United States is acting as an agent of interference and destabilization.”

The election is forecast to be very close, and the sovereignty issue could be persuasive for swing voters.

Trump’s intervention undermines a basic and generally cherished right to self-determination, as well as the right to democracy itself. It is even clearly illegal under the Charter of the Organization of American States, to which the United States is a signatory.

But Brazilians currently have reasons to attach even more urgency to preserving their sovereignty and independence. This can be seen in the recent history of Brazil and Latin America and in the economic impact of political independence on living standards.

Starting with Brazil: Lula was a metalworker and union leader who helped found, and then lead, the Workers Party. He served two consecutive terms as president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010 and left office with one of the highest approval ratings in the world—83%.

There were compelling reasons for that, which stemmed from the government’s changes in economic and social policy. These changed the lives of tens of millions of people in Brazil. GDP per person, the most basic measure of living standards, grew about four times as fast as it did in the eight years prior to Lula’s presidency. Poverty was reduced by 61% and extreme poverty by 64%. There was also a 57% increase in the real (inflation-adjusted) minimum wage. University enrollment almost doubled.

Lula was able to implement these and other life-changing reforms because he broke with the “Washington consensus” policies that had governed economic decision-making in the region as perhaps never before, from 1980 to 2000. This included economic policies that were often decided at the International Monetary Fund or sometimes other Washington-controlled institutions. The result was a disaster: Those two decades saw the worst long-term economic growth failure in Latin America for more than 100 years.

This historic economic growth collapse helped bring about the election of left-of-center governments in the majority of the region for the first time. As in Brazil, these governments were more independent than the prior regional norm and therefore pursued more progressive and effective economic policies. The turnaround was historic: From 2002 to 2013, the percentage of the population of Latin America living in poverty fell to 28.4 from 45.6 after increasing over the prior two decades.

The independence that these governments were able to establish is what Rubio and Trump appear to most want to abolish. Hence their current efforts at regime change in Brazil. This is the big prize for Rubio. It’s the largest country in Latin America, and a Lula government won’t support the Trump administration in its illegal efforts to control the region. But Lula’s opponent would almost certainly be a solid Trump ally.

That is Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator handpicked by his father Jair Bolsonaro, who was president from 2019 to 2023; he has branded himself “Bolsonaro 2.0.”

Flávio and his team are trying to link Lula to the biggest bank fraud in Brazilian history, which forced a deposit insurance payout of almost $8 billion for about 800,000 victims. But the dirt is actually on Flávio and his allies. He is up to his neck in this scandal. Nothing on Lula.

Bolsonaro 1.0 took a page from the Trump election-denial playbook when he lost the election of 2022 to Lula. He was unable to get enough military commanders to support a decree to prevent Lula from taking office. The nation’s Supreme Court subsequently convicted Bolsonaro of leading an attempted coup. The Brazilian “January 6” was on Jan. 8, 2023, when supporters of the defeated president vandalized Congress, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court and demanded that the military intervene to overturn the election result.

Last year Trump tried to stop the trial of Bolsonaro by slapping Brazil with an additional 40% tariff. Most Brazilians rejected the economic collective punishment as an assault on their national sovereignty, electoral democracy and justice system—which it clearly was. Bolsonaro was convicted and sentenced to prison.

Almost every one of the democratically elected, social democratic governments that came to power in the 21st century faced efforts from Washington to weaken, destabilize or remove it. This reached the level of US-backed coups d’état in Bolivia, Honduras and Haiti. The U.S was also involved in a 2002 coup in Venezuela that was quickly reversed, followed by years of US efforts at regime change there—and later the economic sanctions that killed more than a hundred thousand people, destroying most of the Venezuelan economy in the process. Argentina has also suffered from repeated US interventions that have caused and worsened economic downturns and crises, with serious costs.

Most recently, Trump has increased the economic violence against Cuba, which is Rubio’s foremost target. Cuba’s infant mortality rate has increased 148% since the US began tightening its sanctions, which currently include a devastating cutoff of fossil fuel and electricity.

In the most recent national elections in Colombia (June 21) and Honduras (last Nov. 30), Trump was seen as threatening economic harm (implicitly in Colombia and more explicitly in Honduras), if these citizens did not vote for his chosen candidate.

This is the recent and regional context of the fight for Brazil’s future. The Trump-Rubio interventions, with the collaboration of the Bolsonaro clan, have made the Flávio campaign into another US regime change operation. This should be defeated, for the sake of Brazil and the whole hemisphere.

On September 30, 2025, a swaggering Secretary of Defense (“War”), Pete Hegseth, delivered his “warrior ethos” lecture to the 800 top generals and admirals of the American military, whom he had assembled for a command performance.

One year later, an assessment is called for.

“The military has been forced by foolish and reckless politicians to focus on the wrong things... we became the ‘woke’ department,” he said. We must “remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage,” he fulminated, adding that “serving with fat or unfit or under-trained troops” is a violation, in effect, of the Golden Rule. (You wouldn’t want to share a foxhole with a fat person, so don’t be fat yourself). Henceforth, the “highest standards” must be met. He told his audience that it is “completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals.”

Was our first president and commander-in-chief too “woke” for Secretary Hegseth?

Secretary Hegseth would see to it that “grooming standards” would be strictly enforced. “No more beardos!” He wants a “lethal department of war.” Furthermore, “words like bullying and hazing and toxic have been weaponized and bastardized... basic training is being restored to what it should be: scary, tough, and disciplined.”

“We’re empowering drill sergeants to instill healthy fear in new recruits, ensuring that future war fighters are forged... and yes, they can put their hands on recruits.”

In what way has Hegseth’s tough training regimen been helpful in the country’s pursuit of its war with Iran? Probably in no way. A drone operator obviously requires different skills from a WWI or WWII infantryman.

Finally, in his oration, Hegseth announced, “We don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.” That particular point raises serious questions, discussed later. (The questionable legality of the Iran War itself cannot be discussed in this limited space.)

In his blustering speech, Secretary Hegseth either ignored or was unaware of important critiques published shortly after WWII. During that war, a team of social psychologists conducted for the Research Branch, Information and Education Division of the War Department, an extensive study, consisting of numerous opinion surveys, on the attitudes of American fighting men. It was an attempt to discover the motivations that made men fight. This four-volume study, edited by Samuel A. Stouffer and published in 1949, is known as The American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath.

The study debunked the myth that discipline will crumble in combat in the absence of terror in training. It further debunked the myth that glorification of trivia (grooming and “spit and polish”) increases combat proficiency. It also shattered the illusion—prevailing in the officer corps at the time—that Black soldiers would prefer to serve under white officers rather than under Black officers.

In 1946, another in-depth military study, known as the Doolittle Board, issued even more striking assessments of officer-enlisted relations in the armed forces. Among other proposals, it recommended that the social distinctions between enlisted soldiers and officers be greatly eased.

Secretary Hegseth’s machismo, his atavistic and simplistic notions of warrior ethos, clearly drive his policy preferences. If he were aware of the Stouffer study or the Doolittle Board, he would likely deem their recommendations as too “woke.”

And yet, they were in step with the American military’s original philosophy of maintaining morale, good order, and discipline. For hundreds of years, army manuals have exhorted officers to recognize the intimate relationship between discipline and morale. Even Baron von Steuben, the Prussian military theorist whose codes were adopted wholesale by the American revolutionary army, realized the importance of morale in armies that reflected the caste systems of 18th-century Europe. These, for example, are some of von Steuben’s “Instructions for the Captain”:

His first object should be, to gain the love of his men, by treating them with every possible kindness and humanity, inquiring into their complaints, and when well founded, seeing them redressed.

The baron’s “Instructions for the Sergeants and Corporals” convey the same message:

In teaching the recruits, they must exercise all their patience, by no means abusing them, but treating them with mildness...

George Washington relied on Baron von Steuben’s manuals. Was our first president and commander-in-chief too “woke” for Secretary Hegseth?

There is an aspect of Hegseth’s bombastic oration which is even more problematical, his proclamation that henceforth, “we... don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.” This dangerous notion has impelled Hegseth to launch policies which, in the opinions of many lawyers, military and civilian, have led to American officials and military personnel committing murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—both in the war against Iran and in the campaign to execute without trial suspected drug traffickers in small boats in the Caribbean.

Although military subordinates must obey all lawful orders or be subject to court-martial for violation of Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), they must disobey unlawful orders. What makes an order illegal? When an order is “so manifestly beyond the scope of the superior officer’s authority and the order is so obviously and palpably unlawful as to admit of no reasonable doubt of its unlawfulness,” there is actually a duty to disobey it. (U.S. v. Kinder, 14 CMR 742, 1953). “I was just following orders” in such a case is no defense. Examples of obviously illegal orders are those to target civilians; or abuse trainees; or torture or kill detainees; or otherwise to violate federal law or the Constitution. The prosecutions of Americans for their cruel actions at Mai Lai in the Vietnam War and Abu Ghraib in the Iraq War are situations where the defense of “just following orders” was not successful. In those situations, crucial rules of engagement were not followed. The bottom line: The law requires American soldiers to be reasoning agents, not unquestioning robots. Scaring trainees into unquestioning obedience does not prepare them for modern warfare.

Violations of international law, as embodied in the Geneva Conventions, can also subject a civilian or soldier to criminal prosecution. At least since 1949, the Geneva Conventions have prohibited “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Since his speech, Secretary Hegseth has announced that under his regime, American troops should “give no quarter,” meaning show no mercy, even to surrendering or disarmed combatants. This policy was applied to the drug-trafficking suspects in the Caribbean who, under Hegseth’s orders, were killed by American military personnel. The excuse given by him and President Donald Trump, is that the drug-runners are combatants in a “war,” which is nonsense. Trump and Hegseth claim they were given legal cover by an official opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel. That classified opinion—which purports to justify the killing of drug traffickers without legal proceedings—is strongly disputed by human rights organizations and many others. Unfortunately, it remains classified to this day. In my opinion, like the memo written by John Yoo purporting to render lawful the waterboarding of terrorism suspects during the Iraq War, it will someday be discredited. And the perpetrators of the Caribbean killings might find themselves indicted.

The hard-nosed approach by the Trump administration and Secretary Hegseth toward the training and deployment of American armed forces is not only unwise and counterproductive. It is a disgrace to the reputation of the United States.

Every day in the United States, millions of people wake up and face a version of the same impossible arithmetic. They need to earn income. They also need to care for their children, their aging parents, a spouse or sibling with a disability, or themselves—especially when illness strikes. The market offers no solution to this equation. The government offers patchwork. And so families improvise—women in particular absorb the shortfall in unpaid labor, often at permanent cost to their earnings, their retirement security, and their own health.

This is not a private misfortune. It is a public failure, and an expensive one.

The care that families provide—raising children, supporting elderly parents, tending to those who cannot fully care for themselves—is among the most economically productive work in any society. Children who receive attentive, high-quality care in their early years are more likely to become healthy, educated, productive adults. Workers who can take time to recover from illness or to be present at a family crisis return to their jobs more quickly and with greater stability. Caregivers who receive adequate support are less likely to exit the labor force permanently, less likely to fall into poverty in old age, and more likely to participate fully in economic and civic life. The benefits of care are not merely sentimental—they are measurable, and they are large.

Yet the United States persistently underinvests in care and consistently treats it as a personal rather than a shared responsibility. We spend less than half of what comparable wealthy nations spend on early childhood programs as a share of GDP. We are the only high-income country without a national paid parental leave policy. Our system of support for elderly and disabled individuals is means-tested to the point of cruelty, requiring many families to exhaust their savings before receiving assistance and funneling care into nursing homes, even when home-based support would serve people better and cost less. The result is a care deficit that falls hardest on those least able to bear it: low-income families, workers in jobs without benefits, and the women who disproportionately provide unpaid care when public provision falls short.

The costs of this deficit are not borne equally. Research consistently documents that inadequate support for caregiving suppresses women’s labor force participation and depresses their lifetime earnings. Mothers who leave employment during their children’s early years—often because affordable care is simply unavailable—face lasting wage penalties that compound over careers and into retirement. Families caring for an elderly or disabled adult spend on average more than a quarter of their income on that care, a burden that falls with particular force on Black and Hispanic families, who have less accumulated wealth to draw upon. Children growing up in poverty face developmental disadvantages with lifelong consequences, yet more than one in four American children under seventeen are excluded from the full benefit of the primary federal child support program by restrictions that penalize the families who need help most.

These are not the inevitable features of a wealthy society. They are the results of specific policy choices—and they can be changed.

This week, as part of the Game Changers Webinar series, Nancy Folbre, Kate Bahn, Jaimie Worker, and Pilar Gonalons-Pons participated in this online discussion about how the "US Needs a Care Package" as they offered an overview of specific policy proposals for funding universal childcare, paid family leave, increased support for the elderly and disabled, and a guaranteed minimum income for children.

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The Game Changers Care Package

Three bold, interconnected proposals—universal child care, paid family and medical leave plus long-term care support, and a monthly child allowance—would transform life for American families. Together, they form a coherent package that addresses caregiving at every stage of life: from infancy through old age. Other wealthy nations have already figured this out. It’s long past time the United States did too.

These proposals would work together to give families the flexibility they need. They build on policies that have already been put in place by individual states or experimented with at the federal level. They are game-changers because they are all conceived as free, universal benefits that would be funded by taxes on income from capital, rather than from labor. They all promise social benefits that far exceed their cost.

Other comparable nations have demonstrated this. Countries that have invested in universal child care, paid family leave, and adequate support for aging and disabled individuals have not sacrificed economic dynamism to do so. They have expanded women’s workforce participation, reduced child poverty, improved population health, and in many cases generated public returns that substantially exceed the cost of the investment. The evidence from states within the United States that have implemented paid family leave programs, expanded child care access, and shifted long-term care toward home- and community-based services confirms the same pattern: these policies pay for themselves in reduced poverty, improved health outcomes, and increased labor supply, while also producing something harder to measure but no less real—a reduction in the daily stress and insecurity that care gaps impose on ordinary families.

The three proposals developed in this Game Changers Care Package—universal child care, paid family and medical leave combined with expanded long-term care support, and a universal monthly child allowance—form a coherent response to this failure. They address caregiving across the full life course, from infancy through old age. They are designed to work together, with each reinforcing the others: affordable child care enables parents to work and earn; paid leave allows them to respond to family needs without permanent economic penalty; a child allowance provides a universal floor of support that no family falls below. Taken together, they represent not an expansion of welfare as it is conventionally understood, but a fundamental reorientation of how we value and support the work of care—recognizing it, at last, as the indispensable foundation of everything else the economy produces.

The time for modest adjustments has passed. The following pages make the case for something bolder.

Important synergies between the elements of this portfolio of proposed policies can

help overcome potential tensions between reducing child poverty, advancing gender equality, and rewarding family and community care provision in the U.S. Fully universal child care services address an immediate problem for parents of small children seeking to earn sufficient income to support their families and have long-run implications for women’s lifetime earnings trajectories. Paid family and medical leave, like home and community based long-term care for disabled individuals and the elderly, provides support for in-home care of dependents. A universal basic income for children in the U.S., which could also be referred to as a family allowance, builds on and expands current tax subsidies in ways that could dramatically reduce child poverty in the short run.

Advancing these policies in concert leads to a more complicated picture than choosing to prioritize one or the other (especially in terms of funding details) but it is more likely to help us achieve important common goals.[1] All three policy proposals emphasize the public-good argument for financing, and refer, where relevant, to social-cost-benefit analysis. Public expenditures on care provision are often interpreted as a drag on economic growth because growth is defined almost entirely in terms of Gross Domestic Product (the final value of all goods and services purchased in a country), and investment is defined in ways that largely exclude investments in the production, development, and maintenance of human capabilities.[2]

Policy issues vital to the care economy extend well beyond the three proposals here, inviting collaboration with other game-changing policy groups. The two most direct overlaps lie with the health care working group, and the labor working group. Out of respect for an initial division of labor we have omitted consideration of the health care system as a whole, policies regarding job flexibility, penalties for part-time employment, and rights to remote access to employment from home.

Note: The author is grateful for the assistance of Kate Bahn, Jennifer Glass, James Heintz, Julie Kashen, Katherine Moos, Laura Valle-Gutierrez and Jaimie Worker

On September 24, the Senate rejected a resolution directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran. In American politics, the end of military operations does not necessarily end a war’s political consequences. Some wars enter a decisive phase when the public judges their costs. Missiles may fall silent, troops return to their bases, and governments announce agreements or claim victory, but questions remain: Who decided? Why was war necessary? How transparent was the decision? What did it cost taxpayers, soldiers, allies, and America’s credibility? Who should answer for it?

Elections do more than transfer power between parties. They are among the few institutional channels through which Americans can translate dissatisfaction with foreign policy into political action. A vote need not express partisan loyalty or simple opposition to a president. It can demand answers for decisions whose consequences outlast any administration.

One of American democracy’s fundamental contradictions is that the government makes decisions with far-reaching international consequences while citizens often have little direct power to shape them. Launching or expanding military operations, deploying troops to crisis zones, and allocating billions to foreign wars involve executive and congressional powers, security considerations, and classified intelligence. This setting can distance decision-makers from those who bear the economic, human, and geopolitical consequences. War becomes a question about the quality of political representation: Can democratic institutions balance government power with the public’s right to know, question, and judge?

Voting cannot solve every problem. Its value lies in its capacity to turn passive observers of foreign policy into participants who take positions on government direction and the limits of its authority.

A government that goes to war in the name of national security must explain its objectives, costs, and prospects for an end. A war that begins with a specific justification but continues without a clear endpoint, public evaluation of its outcomes, or political accountability can turn an emergency policy into a permanent condition. It may persist because of the political difficulty of admitting failure, the cost of withdrawal, or institutional and security interests, rather than a new necessity.

This is where elections matter. If citizens cannot intervene when a war begins, can they judge how it is managed, prolonged, or ended? Choosing a candidate can also convey a demand about war, military spending, or presidential powers without endorsing every part of that candidate’s platform.

A vote can register dissatisfaction, demand a change of direction, and warn officials who believe they can manage the political costs of war without public accountability. Someone may approve of a government’s economic policies while opposing its war, or disagree with parts of a party’s social agenda while seeking limits on the incumbent administration’s military powers. Elections allow these conflicting preferences to find expression through political choices, primary contests, civic participation, and pressure on representatives.

America’s two-party system, money in politics, the influence of interest groups, and the many issues bundled into electoral contests can prevent a single concern from translating clearly into a political outcome. Those limits do not necessarily leave citizens with a powerless ballot. They make deliberate use of the vote more important.

Foreign wars are often shaped within security, military, and executive circles whose language centers on threats, deterrence, national interests, and urgent action. During crises, that language can narrow public debate: Opposition may be accused of undermining national security, while demands to end a war may be portrayed as retreat. Democracy requires that national security remain open to scrutiny. Citizens are entitled to know the objectives, measures of success, how costs are financed, and when responsibility for decisions will be assessed.

Supporting the armed forces does not require unconditional acceptance of decisions about their use. Respecting soldiers is compatible with criticizing the politicians who send them to war. Those who hold political power remain responsible for defining missions, setting objectives, and explaining why they must continue.

The long-term costs of Middle Eastern wars, the social consequences of deployments abroad, and doubts about whether interventions were worth their costs can fuel public dissatisfaction. But war fatigue alone does not necessarily change policy. Discontent must move beyond scattered emotions and become a political demand that can be pursued and sustained. Elections offer one route.

When war becomes an electoral issue, candidates and parties face pressure to explain military costs, objectives, and the limits of foreign commitments. Congressional decisions on defense budgets, authorizations for military force, and oversight of foreign operations can affect voters’ trust and lawmakers’ futures. These are not merely technical matters detached from public opinion. A protest vote may not end a war, but it can form part of a chain of pressure through civil society, the media, Congress, and oversight institutions, raising the political cost of leaving questions unanswered.

Accountability must extend beyond ending a particular conflict. Even after fighting ends, the question of how the United States enters future wars remains. If politicians can invoke ambiguous threats, shifting objectives, and vague promises to enter wars, then move past their consequences without clear explanations, changing administrations will not necessarily change how decisions are made.

Are presidential war powers subject to sufficient congressional oversight? Do voters have the information needed to evaluate foreign policy? Are war costs transparent in the budget? Do officials remain accountable after fighting ends? These questions concern the architecture of power, the limits of executive authority, public oversight, and the meaning of representation.

When war decisions can cost billions, endanger lives, reshape regional orders, and have consequences lasting generations, political indifference carries a cost beyond withdrawing from an electoral contest. Beyond deciding who occupies the White House or controls Congress, citizens can remind officials acting in their name that power without accountability eventually becomes detached from representation.

For Americans who see endless wars as a rupture between the public’s will and foreign-policy decisions, voting can express a clear demand: National security must not become a blank check for unlimited wars. Politicians must not be allowed to hide responsibility behind geopolitical complexity, classified information, or partisan competition.

Voting cannot solve every problem. Its value lies in its capacity to turn passive observers of foreign policy into participants who take positions on government direction and the limits of its authority. It is not a final answer to endless wars. It can begin to reclaim a right that opaque decisions and unaccountable foreign policy have pushed beyond the public’s reach: the right to ask why a war began, why it continued, and who should be held responsible for its consequences.

Return with me now to the thrilling days of yesteryear. In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon had paid a few hundred million dollars for the naming rights to the new hockey rink in Seattle. But instead of calling it Amazon Arena, he instead decided to commemorate his recent signature on a pledge to go carbon neutral. The name Climate Pledge Arena, if not as mellifluous as Wrigley Field or Candlestick Park, was intended, he said in an Instagram post, to be

a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action.

Oh, and it would also be

the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world, generate zero waste from operations and events, and use reclaimed rainwater in the ice system to create the greenest ice in the NHL.

Look, even then this seemed mostly PR. Amazon first committed to the Climate Pledge itself—net zero by 2040—the day before a giant 2019 walkout organized by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. The arena seemed kind of gimmicky from the start. As Ken Belson reported at the time:

Watermelons are served as vegan sashimi, and their rinds are pickled and used in salads. Carrot tops are turned into gremolata, a condiment.

Still, credit Bezos with recognizing the spirit of the moment. Greta Thunberg and her numerous compatriots had scared the oligarchs and financiers of the world into at least rhetorical action. (He could have named it Greta Garden). As he said at the time:

Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.

But that fright has faded over time, even as the effects of the climate crisis have become ever more legible. And in the eternal battle between fear and greed, the latter has taken on more prominence in the last couple of years. In fact, it would make sense to rename the hockey rink, perhaps AI Avarice Arena.

That’s because Amazon—and, as we shall see, the rest of the once aspirationally green tech industry—are adding 19th-century smoking chimneys to their facilities in order to churn out more Compute, the 21st century equivalent of wool or steel. It’s hard to keep track of the ever-mutating list of grand new plans, often named things like “Prometheus” (or, in the weird case of one Ohio behemoth, “Socrates the Younger”), though here’s a brand new attempt to do so from the folks at Climate Power.

On at least one list of the most polluting proposed data centers, Amazon’s planned facility in Pecos, Texas comes in at the top; indeed, by some calculations it would be the single largest source of climate pollution in the US, with 35 giant natural gas turbines burning through vast quantities of fracked gas. On that same list, if you look carefully, Amazon’s planned “energy campus” in Pennsylvania would come in fourth on the list. Anyway, far from heading for net zero, Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions were up 16% last year.

Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, Kara Hurst, was designated to go to New York and take the company’s lumps during Climate Week; she told a gathering organized by the news site Semafor that the company needed to “do better.” Not on lessening its environmental impact, but on “communicating its environmental impact.”

There is a lot of debate, backlash against data centers in this country right now, and one of the things that we’re doing is taking a look at what have we done well and where have we fallen down and what do we need to do better. And so, we’re revising a number of our practices. We’re calling for a lot more transparency and accountability because that’s what people in these communities deserve. We’re saying, "Hold us accountable for our practices."

I read this to mean: "It’s getting harder to build data centers, so we’re going to try and up the ante for local communities with more payouts." (Word came today of one Pennsylvania data center that will offer $10,000 to every family in town if they’ll just change the zoning code and let them build).

But of course even if they figure out how to buy off the communities where they want to build their factories, it won’t affect by an iota the quantity of greenhouse gases they plan on pouring into the air—or the fact that this vitiates all their proud climate pledges.

Amazon is not alone, of course. Meta, for instance, had joined RE100, a renewable energy campaign all the way back in 2016, when it was still known as Facebook. It left this summer because… it wanted to use gas, not renewables, to power its data centers. As ESG News reported:

"After several in-depth conversations between Meta and Climate Group, Meta has withdrawn from the RE100 initiative, as it is no longer able to meet the technical criteria due to investments made in new gas power,” a Climate Group spokesperson told the website.The withdrawal comes as Meta expands its global data center footprint. The company has entered arrangements that support new natural gas generation to supply growing electricity demand.

In Louisiana, utilities are expected to bring 10 new gas plants online to support Meta’s Hyperion data center.

Google reported an 18% increase in emissions in 2025. If you want to talk about an example of fairly comprehensive corporate failure, consider this. As Heather Clancy reports:

Google’s cumulative emissions have risen more than 80% since 2019, the baseline year for the company’s “intentionally aspirational” pledge to cut its operational emissions and certain supply chain emissions in half by 2030.

Planning to cut your emissions in half and instead raising them by eighty% led the company’s chief sustainability officer to change the title of her office to tell investors that they were “navigat[ing]the tension between hyper-growth and environmental stewardship.” In this case, “navigating” seems to involve accelerating full speed ahead into the iceberg that you identified a decade ago.

And of course there’s Elon Musk, whose Colossus data centers in the Tennessee-Mississippi corridor set the early standard for environmental irresponsibility, pouring pollution into poor Black neighborhoods and triggering a wave of lawsuits. Dave Roberts and I were on a panel early in Climate Week with LaTricea Adams of Young, Gifted, and Green and Abre’ Conner, director of Environmental and Climate Justice at the NAACP, and I would not bet against their ability to bedevil the richest man in the history of the world.

In fact, that pushback is now beginning, and the oligarchs behind these hyperscalers are clearly an important target. Not the only target. As Amy Westervelt notes: “We gotta start referring to data centers by both their mother and father's last names, Spain style. The Microsoft-Chevron data center, the Meta-ExxonMobil data center.” And of course we should keep beating on the dirty truth that much of the data center capacity is directly employed in raising the planet’s temperature—as Emily Atkin pointed out last month, companies like Amazon are marketing their AI services to the oil and gas companies to help them find more crude, and this may ultimately do even more damage than their emissions.

Still, the easiest way for organizers to operate may be simply to connect the much-despised oligarchs with the increasingly-despised data centers and in turn with every climate disaster that now unfolds. This is starting to happen. I got to join a demonstration outside Amazon HQ in Manhattan last week, and a day later the folks from Climate Defiance managed to shut down a program with the company’s sustainability guru “in less time than their warehouse worker’s pee break.” It’s definitely worth watching the action. As organizers explained:

A company that co-founded something called "The Climate Pledge" is now building the single largest source of climate pollution in the country, on purpose, in 2026. Lol. No really, it's utterly fucked.

But don't worry guys, because we have a pledge too. And one that we won't break...

We solemnly pledge to keep disrupting all the BS "sustainability" directors doing Simone Biles-level backflips to make emissions sound like a hipster yoga retreat while the planet burns. We pledge to keep confronting all the cowardly politicians who take corrupt death-enabling money while calling it economic development. And we pledge to keep coming for ANYONE who thinks merely uttering the word "pledge" is a substitute for actually keeping one.

Remember, as I said above, that for a jerk like Bezos the equation is always going to be greed versus fear. If he had a mild moment of social responsibility a decade ago, greed has ruled him in recent years (his one useful action this decade was trading in his wife for a younger model, thus freeing McKenzie Scott to become one of the most remarkably effective philanthropists in American history). But fear—of damage to reputation, of investigation by new majorities in Congress, maybe even someday of consumer boycotts of his ever-shabbier and more self-serving empire—might inspire change. (And if you want another reason to dislike them, read this account of waves of drones dropping packages across a test area in suburban Texas. “We hear them zoom, zoom, zoom, back and forth from morning until past dinnertime,” one resident explained).

If you think this is confined to America, think again. Ketan Joshi provides an excellent report from Down Under, where they threaten the country’s efforts to truly rein in emissions. Meanwhile, from Denmark, I had an email today from Søren Hermansen, the hero of the pioneering wind power buildout on Samsø Island, which became a model copied around the world:

I am struggling with Microsoft here in Denmark. They want to establish 2-3 data centers in one municipality and several more all over Denmark.

The two I am involved in are among the largest in Denmark covering 60-70 hectares of building and 110 hectares of land used for diesel-gas turbine back up with a depot of 25.000 tonnes fuel oil for emergencies.

Microsoft is acting like colonial criminals and there is no way we can find the head of the dragon. Every time we find a CEO it is always a lower ranking person who can not answer anything but has to go back and ask someone higher in the system…

The already proposed data centers in Denmark will more than double the total Danish electricity consumption. In other words we will return to the fossil fuel area 30-40 years ago and carbon emissions will skyrocket.

It is all dire. But it can be fought—we are winning plenty of battles.

Earlier this summer, for instance, Microsoft backed away from its commitment to build a giant gas-fired data center in West Virginia. It never said why, but the folks at Stand.Earth speculate that “the groundswell of community resistance and threat to its 'climate leader' public image played a bigger role than they’d like to admit.” As Monica Nickelsburg had reported:

An analysis by Michael Thomas, CEO of the renewable energy research firm Cleanview, estimates the project could increase Microsoft’s data center emissions by 40%.

AI is proving to be plenty unpopular for its own reasons. Microsoft’s Bill Gates warned on Meet the Press yesterday that it could cause “a billion deaths” if “something goes wrong.”

But of course on the climate front something is already going wrong. The closest thing we have to a number comes from a 2021 study, which found that for “every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 that we add beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, we will kill one person.” The Amazon Pecos Ranch project is projected to generate 33 million tons of carbon equivalent annually. You don’t need to ask ChatGPT, you just need a calculator. That’s about 7,442 lives right there.

Ridicule is useful too, of course. I’m grateful to Brian Kahn for an alternate list of names for Bezos’ arena. I think my favorite is The Plunderdome, though The Arena of Public Relations isn’t bad either.

Artificial intelligence confronts humanity with a paradox of historic significance. Used to enhance human cooperation and shared learning in service to life, AI can be a powerful tool for creating a world that works for all. Used as a competitive weapon in the pursuit of profit, political control, and military dominance, it will almost certainly accelerate humanity’s path to self-extinction.

The threat is real and immediate. Yet it may also be our greatest source of hope. AI confronts us more clearly than any previous technology with a truth we have long resisted: humanity cannot survive as a collection of competing individuals, businesses, and nations pursuing their separate advantage without regard for the wellbeing of the whole. By making the consequences of our current path unmistakable and potentially imminent, AI may provide the most powerful incentive humanity has ever experienced to undertake the deep cultural transformation on which our common future now depends.

Public discussion commonly treats AI as an independent intelligence that may one day turn against its human creators. This directs our attention to the wrong question. AI does not possess an independent moral purpose. It is a human-created tool that serves the purposes of those who develop, own, and control it. The defining question is not whether AI will choose to control humanity. It is whether humanity can transcend its commitment to competition and domination sufficiently to govern AI—and itself—in service to life.

The intelligence most essential to our future would reside neither in the machine nor in the isolated individual, but in the relationships through which we share experience, deepen understanding, and organize collective action in service to life.

Within our current global culture, AI is being developed primarily as an instrument of competitive advantage. Businesses use it to eliminate jobs, monitor workers, manipulate consumers, appropriate human creativity, capture personal information, and achieve market dominance. Political actors use it to spread falsehoods, inflame fear, and discredit opponents. Governments use it to expand surveillance, while militaries use it to identify targets, guide weapons, and develop autonomous killing systems.

The justification for developing AI as quickly as possible is always essentially the same: If we do not do it, our competitors will. Corporate executives may recognize that eliminating millions of jobs could devastate society, yet fear losing to businesses that move more quickly. National leaders may understand that autonomous weapons could escape human control, yet fear defeat by nations that develop them first. Political leaders may know that AI-generated deception is destroying democracy, yet fear losing to opponents who use it more aggressively.

This is the logic of a global suicide pact. Everyone may recognize the danger, yet no participant feels free to withdraw from the competition.

AI increases the speed, scale, and reach of every competitive undertaking. It can manipulate millions of minds, monitor entire populations, eliminate vast numbers of livelihoods, and make military decisions at speeds beyond human comprehension. It can concentrate unprecedented power in the hands of the corporations and governments that control the largest data systems and computing facilities. Meanwhile, those facilities consume growing quantities of electricity, water, land, and scarce minerals, further burdening the living Earth on which all life depends.

These dangers are not intrinsic to AI. They are consequences of a civilization that defines progress as increasing consumption, treats money as humanity’s highest value, rewards the pursuit of unlimited private wealth, and organizes relationships around domination and competition. AI does not create these pathologies. It magnifies them.

We urgently need laws prohibiting the most dangerous applications of AI, including for autonomous weapons, mass surveillance, political impersonation, theft of intellectual work, and reckless uses of energy and water. We need transparency, democratic accountability, protection for workers and creators, and clear legal responsibility for harms. Such measures are essential to slow the damage and give humanity time to choose a different future.

They will not, however, be sufficient. No regulatory system can make AI safe so long as businesses and nations remain locked in struggles for dominance. Rules will continually be weakened, evaded, or abandoned by those who fear that compliance will place them at a competitive disadvantage.

Our only enduring protection is therefore a transformation of the global culture that determines how we humans use AI. This requires that we move from a civilization organized around competition for money and power to a civilization dedicated to the wellbeing of living Earth and all its humans and other living beings. What many of us choose to call an Ecological Civilization.

Such a civilization will recognize Earth as a living community, not a storehouse of commodities waiting to be claimed, extracted, and sold for profit. It will understand that human wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the whole and that our distinctive capacity for conscious choice carries a responsibility to care for the life that sustains us. It will organize economies to meet the needs of all while healing Earth, distributing power, limiting extremes of wealth, restoring local self-reliance, and holding businesses accountable to the communities and ecosystems that depend on them.

For the first time, humanity is creating an instrument so powerful that its safe use may be impossible without transforming the culture of the civilization that created it.

An Ecological Civilization will not eliminate competition. It will encourage competition, not to dominate and exploit others, but rather to be the most creative and excellent in advancing a culture of cooperation and mutual responsibility on behalf of the wellbeing of the whole. Essential AI capabilities will be governed as part of a global information commons. The knowledge on which they depend—created over generations by countless human beings—will be treated as a shared inheritance. Its use will be subject to democratic oversight, ecological limits, and the foundational requirement that its use serves life.

AI could then help educators, farmers, healers, scientists, public officials, Indigenous knowledge keepers, and community organizers share what they are learning. It will identify relationships beyond the reach of any individual mind, translate among languages, expose error, and support us in adapting successful approaches to the distinctive needs of each place. It could strengthen our collective capacity to restore soils and forests, conserve water, prevent disease, eliminate waste, localize production, resolve conflict, and secure a good life for all.

In this role, AI would not replace human intelligence. It would augment our ability to learn together. The intelligence most essential to our future would reside neither in the machine nor in the isolated individual, but in the relationships through which we share experience, deepen understanding, and organize collective action in service to life.

Climate disruption, ecological collapse, extreme inequality, and war have demonstrated the failure of our competitive civilization. Yet these threats have often seemed distant, gradual, or separable. AI brings them together and makes it increasingly apparent that no business can secure its future by destroying the society that sustains its markets; no nation can achieve security through weapons that threaten all nations; and no part of humanity can flourish on a dying Earth.

For the first time, humanity is creating an instrument so powerful that its safe use may be impossible without transforming the culture of the civilization that created it. This may be AI’s greatest gift. It confronts us with a choice we can no longer postpone. Cooperate to secure the wellbeing of the whole or continue competing toward our common destruction.

The question is whether we will recognize the choice and act in time.

Author's Note: My purpose in sharing this column is to help move this essential message into the world as quickly and widely as possible through many messengers and channels. If this column speaks to you, please, without need for my permission or acknowledgement, forward our newsletter, share the link to our website, post on social media, and/or otherwise reproduce it, adapt it, share it with your friends and followers, and publicly express its message in your own words and voice. Then, I invite you to share with me how you are using it by sending the information to info@greatturning.org.

On Tuesday, September 1, 2026, the United States military struck a home in the town of Kuhestak, in Sirik County, southern Iran, where a wedding was underway, killing four people and wounding more than 50. The youngest victim was 4-year-old Amir Ali Karimi. Asked about the strike, US Vice President JD Vance told reporters: "What I can say with 100% confidence is that, unlike the IRGC, the United States never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that." However, he added, “Sometimes, things happen.”

It's worth remembering that the campaign the United States and Israel waged against Iran—launched without United Nations Security Council authorization—opened with a strike on the office of Iran's Supreme Leader that killed him along with his daughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and his 14-month-old granddaughter. Roughly an hour or two later, the US struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab with Tomahawk cruise missiles, killing 156 people, including 120 schoolchildren between the ages of six and 13. That same day, an attack on the small town of Lamerd used Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM)—munitions that burst in midair and scatter thousands of tungsten fragments—killing at least 21 people, including four children, among them 2-year-old Avina Barzegar, and wounding 100 more. In the months since, the US and Israel have struck not only military sites but universities, bridges, power plants, police stations, and even desalination plants serving remote islands in southern Iran. Whatever assurances Vance offers, the record is clear that the United States has a long history of striking civilians.

Of course none of this is new. More than two years have now passed since Israel launched its full-scale assault on Gaza, backed fully by the United States and most Western governments. Over those two years the world has watched strikes on hospitals, schools, and universities, the shooting of civilians, even an assault captured on camera—and despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Israel's prime minister, no action has been taken either to enforce that warrant or to halt the war. It was hardly surprising that a year-plus of unanswered war crimes in Gaza—what many now call a genocide—normalized the same conduct elsewhere. Israel applied much the same pattern in Lebanon, violating that country's sovereignty to bomb schools, apartment buildings, universities, and villages. The absence of any serious response to crimes broadcast live to the world sent every power on Earth a clear message: If you are strong enough, you can commit any crime—including the crime of crimes.

Isn't it time that those responsible for striking a bridge, a wedding, a power plant, a desalination plant, be held to account?

President Donald Trump himself has, through his own public statements, documented attacks that could easily amount to war crimes. In one Truth Social post, he wrote, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." In another, he shared footage of the strike that brought down Karaj's unfinished B1 bridge—a civilian structure, not yet even complete, hit on Sizdah Bedar, the 13th day of Nowruz, when most Iranians are out picnicking in nature and many families were gathered under and around the bridge. The strike was a so-called double tap: A second missile hit after rescue workers arrived to help the wounded, killing two more and injuring several others. In all, 13 people were killed and 95 wounded.

This scale of targeting civilians, met with so little response from the media or the international community, is itself a troubling kind of normalization—one we cannot afford to treat with indifference. Imagine, for a moment, that Iran had bombed the White House on a holiday morning, killing the American president along with members of his family, and then struck an elementary school in Texas, killing more than 120 American students along with their teachers. How would American society, and the West more broadly, have responded? Would the dead children be called a "necessary action" or "mistake"? Or would the entire West have mobilized to respond to such an atrocity?

This same Western indifference to the deaths of people in the Global South—particularly at American hands—is visible in the words of Afghanistan's former president, Hamid Karzai. Asked recently why he, perhaps alone among Afghan leaders, had wept in public, Karzai spoke of "our national helplessness before powers that had come in the name of helping Afghanistan," and recalled asking American officials a simple question: If their bombs killed Afghan children, was that terrorism? They told him no—terrorism, he said they told him, is when American interests are put at risk.

This becomes painfully concrete when you consider that the Sirik wedding was only the latest entry in a long, grim record of American strikes on wedding celebrations across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen going back more than two decades—a pattern trackers have documented since at least December 2001.

Isn't it time that those responsible for striking a bridge, a wedding, a power plant, a desalination plant, be held to account? Don't the citizens of a country whose president launched a war on another nation without UN authorization, and whose forces have committed numerous documented war crimes in the process, bear some responsibility for holding their own leaders accountable? Would the West have stayed this indifferent if a wedding, or a school, had been hit at home—or would it have moved heaven and Earth to bring the perpetrators to justice? These are the questions that demand an answer. The world cannot continue to condemn violence selectively while treating the deaths of civilians in the Global South as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of geopolitics.

Every time a war crime is ignored, the threshold for the next one becomes lower. Every time accountability is abandoned, impunity becomes stronger. If we truly believe that all human life has equal value, then we must demand that those who order and carry out attacks on civilians face the same scrutiny and consequences, whoever they are. The first step toward ending war-crime normalization is refusing to look away.

Over the summer, the Fifth Circuit Court, in a case brought by ExxonMobil, ruled that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, had “exceeded its statutory authority” by citing Exxon for failing to record a work-related mental illness.

This case followed an incident in Baytown, Texas where an explosion and fire occurred during repairs on a hydro-desulfurization unit, injuring multiple workers. After the explosion, a technician volunteered to lead firefighters to several valves that needed to be shut off to prevent the fire from continuing. While receiving treatment after his first excursion to assist the firefighters, he courageously agreed to lead the first responders to another valve.

Following this incident, the technician experienced anxiety and was later diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by two professionals. Despite these diagnoses, Exxon did not accept the determination that his PTSD was work-related and requested that the technician see another provider, which the technician refused. The union that represented workers at the Baytown location reported the incident to OSHA, which then issued a penalty against Exxon for failing to record the technician’s PTSD as work related.

It is also important to acknowledge that there is not a clear distinction between physical injury or illness and mental illness.

After Exxon challenged the penalty, the Fifth Circuit Court canceled the penalty based on a narrow reading of OSHA’s authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to “prescribe regulations requiring employers to maintain accurate records of, and to make periodic reports on, work-related deaths, injuries and illnesses,” concluding that the “illnesses” referred to in the act do not include mental illnesses.

While others have questioned the soundness of the legal reasoning in the decision, it is clear from occupational health research that work does impact mental health, and that this impact on mental health has consequences for the life, well-being, and indeed physical health of workers. This impact should compel politicians to explicitly legislate and develop regulations to protect workers' mental health.

Recognizing the impact of work on mental health is nothing new. In an 1844 issue of the Lowell Offering—the publication created by Lowell Mill Girls in the early days of the industrial revolution in the United States—Harriet Farley speculated on how the nature of the toil in work at the Lowell Mills could have contributed to the recent suicides of two of her comrades:

In factory labor it is sometimes an advantage, but also sometimes the contrary, that the mind is thrown back upon itself—it is forced to depend upon its own resources, for a large proportion of the time of the operative. Excepting by sight, the females hold but little companionship with each other.

Specific work-related factors associated with adverse health consequences include long work hours, shift work, bullying, harassment, workplace violence, traumatic events, low control over work, and job insecurity. These factors stem from the work environment and are not just a concern because of their impact on workers' mental health, although this connection is clear. These sources of stress in the work environment can also increase the risk of physical health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, musculoskeletal disorders (such as carpal tunnel syndrome and low back pain), and acute traumatic injuries. The burden of exposure to these workplace factors is not borne equally by all workers. Due to occupational segregation, exposure to these workplace stressors is often higher among Black and Hispanic workers, thereby contributing to health disparities.

A large proportion of workplace fatalities are also tied to mental health. In 2024, in the US, there were reported 410 workplace drug overdoses and 263 workplace suicides. The role of the workplace in these causes of death, both of which are among the leading causes of death in the United States, even when they occur outside of the workplace, has become clear. One recent study estimated that work-related factors, including chemical exposures, lack of social support, and long work hours, contribute to 10-13% of suicides. Similarly, research has revealed that the mental health impacts of factors like workplace stress and job insecurity contribute to the risk of drug overdoses. The role of the workplace in this risk for drug overdoses is seen in the fact that the loss of manufacturing jobs at the county level is associated with increases in drug overdose mortality.

It is also important to acknowledge that there is not a clear distinction between physical injury or illness and mental illness, as the Fifth Circuit Court Ruling suggests. Indeed, the very event that prompted the ruling was both a physical hazard, as shown by the resulting injuries, and a mental health hazard, as shown by the technician’s PTSD. Injuries at work have negative consequences for mental health. Research suggests that both physical and psychosocial hazards at work affect the risk of musculoskeletal disorders.

A variety of methods exist to protect workers’ mental health. In Australia, workplaces are required to minimize psychological hazards “so far as is reasonably practicable.” Reducing occupational psychosocial risks is an imperative under the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work. Denmark requires that “[a]t all stages, the work must be planned, organised and carried out in a responsible way to ensure that its impact on the psychosocial working environment is safe and healthy, individually and collectively, in both short and long term.” In the US, some states have addressed parts of the problem by including work-related PTSD in workers' compensation laws; workplace violence regulations; laws that require minimum nurse staffing levels or ban mandatory overtime for nurses; and paid sick leave, paid family leave, or coverage of domestic workers under labor laws.

Workplaces can also implement policies and programs to protect workers’ mental health. MATES in Construction is an Australian program that has since been adopted elsewhere and seeks to prevent suicide in the construction industry—an industry with the highest suicide risk in the United States—by increasing awareness of mental health challenges, reducing stigma, and connecting workers to support resources. In a similar way, Recovery Friendly Workplaces seek to create work environments that support people with substance use challenges in receiving the support and treatment they need.

While the prospect of similar regulations being applied nationally in the United States may seem bleak in the current political environment, especially following the recent Fifth Circuit Court ruling, the need to address the impact of work on mental health remains.

On September 21, Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Republican Senate nominee, called for a “successful and immediate end” to the Iran war. In Washington, the conflict still appears primarily to be a question of presidential power. In Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, however, it has become a question of Republican candidates’ ability to win or retain office. As the midterms approach, the White House continues to define the war through its own authorities and objectives, while Republicans facing voters increasingly have to explain how it should end. Their cautious distancing suggests less a change in foreign policy than a belated confrontation with political accountability.

Republican appeals to party loyalty rest on a familiar premise: On national security, the party should stand behind its own president. But a war without a clear end in sight raises a difficult question: Can party loyalty substitute for an explanation of where a military conflict is heading? Or do elected representatives, even when they support their own administration, have a duty to ask why the war continues and under what conditions it can end? The recent positions of some Republicans suggest that these questions are no longer confined to debate among analysts; they have entered the governing party itself.

Alongside Hinson, Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Michigan Rep. John James, and Ohio Sen. Jon Husted have called for an end to the war, while others continue to support it. Retiring Sens. Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis have also questioned its duration or the lack of a clear path to its conclusion. Yet on September 22, Senate Majority Leader John Thune appealed for Republican unity. The next day, he encouraged candidates to run their own campaigns, even when they disagreed with President Donald Trump. These positions suggest a party in which alignment with the president carries growing political costs.

Republicans cannot indefinitely choose loyalty to the president over accountability to the public.

The significance lies not simply in the number of Republicans calling for an end to the war, but in their changing political language. The issue is no longer merely whether to support or oppose the president. It is also how representatives explain a prolonged war to voters who may demand answers about its necessity, purpose, and prospects. Calling for an end to the war becomes a way of redefining the relationship between lawmakers and their constituents—a relationship that cannot remain indefinitely obscured by party discipline or loyalty to the White House.

This shift does not necessarily indicate a principled reassessment of Republican foreign policy. Distancing from the war may stem from electoral calculations, concern about voters’ reactions, or an effort to reduce the political costs of a protracted conflict. Even if some lawmakers have concluded that continuing the war conflicts with the preferences of some voters, their positions cannot yet be treated as a strategic break with Trump’s approach. What is emerging is cautious distancing: an attempt to avoid the war’s political costs while preserving ties with the party leadership.

Nevertheless, that caution reveals an important reality: The war can no longer be treated solely as a matter of executive decisions and geopolitical calculations. Responsibility extends beyond the White House to lawmakers who have supported its continuation, remained silent, or used party unity as a substitute for public debate. Accountability is no longer simply an external demand imposed on the party; it has become an internal issue affecting its credibility and cohesion.

Thune’s appeal for unity matters in this context. Party unity during wartime can be presented as a sign of strength and political stability. Yet as disagreements over the war grow, that unity risks becoming organized silence. The party may ask lawmakers to stand with the president, but loyalty must not render the ballot powerless or erase constituents’ questions. Unity that cannot articulate a clear objective or a conceivable endpoint for the war may turn from a political asset into a liability.

The midterm elections are thus becoming a mechanism of political accountability. Lawmakers who once explained the war primarily through party loyalty must now demonstrate whether they accept responsibility for limiting it, defining the conditions for its conclusion, and responding to public concerns. This demand does not necessarily imply opposition to every aspect of the war. Voters may support the administration’s security objectives while demanding explanations for the conflict’s prolonged duration, the absence of an exit strategy, and its uncertain costs. Republican politicians are increasingly being forced to take that distinction seriously.

From this perspective, some lawmakers’ distancing from the Iran war is less evidence of an abrupt transformation within the party than a sign that accountability has entered Republican political calculations belatedly. Calls to end the war are growing louder because the conflict is no longer merely a presidential decision; it can affect politicians’ relationships with voters. Yet that delay leaves a fundamental question: Why has explaining how the war should end gained such urgency as the elections approach?

Political accountability has meaning when it begins before a crisis becomes an electoral threat, not when politicians conclude that continued silence may cost them votes. If Republicans are calling for an end to the war, they must pursue that position beyond campaign statements through clear demands concerning the conflict’s objectives, limits, and exit strategy. Otherwise, their recent distancing may amount less to accountability than to managing the consequences of a policy that previously escaped scrutiny.

The Iran war is not merely a test of Republican foreign policy; it is a test of when responsibility is assumed. Republicans cannot indefinitely choose loyalty to the president over accountability to the public. The question is not who distances themselves from the war first, but why calls to end it have grown louder as the elections draw closer. If that question remains unanswered, these positions will signal not a change of course, but only that the cost of silence has finally become greater than the cost of dissent.

I had the first call with my lawyers four days after my arrest. The guards escorted me to a room across the detention center, a multipurpose hall with scattered chairs and a small table and a phone next to the reinforced window overlooking the inner yard. Several people were already on the call, attorneys whose names and faces I would see on the screen over the next hundred days. They asked me to confirm that I was alone. I did. “Do a visual sweep,” one of them suggested. I scanned the room and checked the corners, beneath the air-conditioning vents, along the ceiling lights, searching for something I couldn’t name. It felt performative. If they wanted to listen, they would listen.

The lawyers filled me in on the court proceedings so far. I had so many questions. They tumbled out of me, one after another, the accumulation of four days of confusion and dread. How could they do this? What are the charges? How is any of this legal? When will I be out? When will I be returned to New York?

They had no conclusive answers, only mostly legal terminology that obscured as much as it revealed. The lawyers were careful with their words, precise in ways that frustrated me. I wanted certainty. They could only offer procedure.

The king wanted to send a message, and I was the messenger, sent to everyone who might consider speaking out.

They explained that they had filed something called a habeas corpus petition on my behalf. It sounded ancient, almost biblical. Baher, one of the lawyers, was generous enough to explain that the Latin phrase dated back to the Magna Carta, to the thirteenth century, when kings could make people disappear and the barons had to invent a mechanism to find them. Habeas corpus was a demand: Produce the body. Show us the prisoner. Justify his detention, or let him go.

I was the body in question, shipped over thirteen hundred miles from New York to Jena, Louisiana.

The habeas corpus petition had been filed in federal court in New York, along with two requests or motions, one for release on bail while the case continued and another to compel my return to New York. Federal court was different from immigration court, I learned. The separate immigration process would start in two weeks, which was indicated in the papers they had handed me in New York. I didn’t understand. It’s all the same country, the same system. What difference does it make which court hears my case, and where?

A huge difference, it turned out—one that would decide the fate of my case in the days to come. “Immigration court is not a real court,” one of the lawyers said. Immigration courts are the president’s courts, where arguments challenging presidential illegality are swallowed by the urgency of an executive campaign of mass deportation. Immigration judges are government employees, appointed by the attorney general, who is appointed by the president—the same president who had tweeted about me. In immigration court, there is no presumption of innocence, no jury or real independence. The process is designed for efficiency, not justice. Federal courts were different. The federal court is a constitutional court, which can hear constitutional claims against the executive branch. The judges are appointed for life. They don’t answer to the administration. They must follow the Constitution and case law. The government wanted my case in immigration court because the outcome was easier to control. In federal court, they would actually have to justify what they had done. In federal court, I might win.

The government had concealed my whereabouts in those first crucial hours, the lawyers said. They hadn’t known where I was. New York? Elsewhere? They had even tried tracking flights to Guantánamo. They had filed an emergency petition at 4:38 in the morning to prevent my deportation, but I had already been moved to New Jersey at that point. By the time everyone figured out I was in Louisiana, the government was arguing that any legal challenge should be heard there, not in New York.

Louisiana’s courts, heavily Republican, would be more favorable to the Trump administration. By moving me here, the government had shifted the fight to terrain they controlled, using geography as a weapon.

But there was another reason. They wanted to isolate me. In New York, I had my wife, friends, community, and the press. In Louisiana, I had nothing. I was alone in a facility in the middle of the woods, cut off from everyone who knew me.

The battle, then, was over two things: Which court system would hear my case, immigration or federal? And which venue, New York or Louisiana? Our argument was simple: I resided and was arrested in New York. This wasn’t really an immigration case. I wasn’t detained for violating immigration law. I was detained for what I said. For protesting and speaking out about Palestine. That made it a constitutional case, one where the First Amendment was crucial, and constitutional questions belong in federal court.

The government’s argument was equally simple: You’re an immigrant, now detained in Louisiana. This is an immigration matter. Stay in your lane.

It all sounded technical. Procedural. The kind of thing that puts people to sleep. But the venue and jurisdiction would determine everything. The government knew it. That’s why they had moved so fast to get me out of New York. That’s why they hid where they were taking me.

My case was the blueprint they wanted to set, and the one we had to tear up.

As the lawyers talked, I began to understand the scope of what I was facing. This was not a mistake. It was not overzealous enforcement. This was deliberate and planned at the highest levels of government. The president had tweeted my picture. The secretary of state had invoked obscure powers. Multiple agencies had worked together to snatch me from my home and transport me across the country in less than a day.

By the end of the call, one thing was clear: The lawyers were as shocked as I was. These were experienced attorneys: Some had worked on landmark Guantánamo cases. They had seen government abuse and overreach. But this was different: the speed, the secrecy, the coordination. The invocation of powers they had never seen used before. They compared it to the Red Scare.

“This provision the secretary of state used,” or the Rubio Determination, as it was called, “we’re not aware of it ever being applied in a case like this,” one of the lawyers said. “It’s unprecedented.” So I was not just a case; I was an experiment, I realized. The government was testing what it could get away with, using me as the test subject or “blueprint,” as the White House would boast. If they succeeded with me, a permanent resident with no criminal history, imagine what they could do to others. To the men sleeping in bunks around me, who had no lawyers, no press, no one watching. We would later learn, from the government’s own court filings, that this law had never before been used against anyone with my status.

My case was the blueprint they wanted to set, and the one we had to tear up.

This was the turning point, the moment when I grasped that this was bigger than me. It was bigger than my case, my green card, my deportation. I had not been detained for a crime I committed. They knew I never committed a crime. I was detained for what I represent, for saying something the king and his courtiers didn’t like.

The king wanted to send a message, and I was the messenger, sent to everyone who might consider speaking out. Every student who might join a protest would get the message, every person who might dare to criticize Israel or question American policy, domestic or foreign. The message was simple: This could be you. Your rights will not protect you. Your innocence will not protect you. We can take you in the night, and there is nothing you can do about it.

If I chose not to fight the case, I could “self-deport,” the lawyers explained, and leave “voluntarily.” But the Rubio Determination came with a lifetime ban against returning to the United States. We ended the call. I made no response to this offer. Maybe I should have.

Lying on my bunk that night, my eyes wrapped in a makeshift blindfold of socks, I knew I couldn’t walk away. If I left, they would call it a victory. They would say I must have been guilty of something. My departure would confirm their accusations without them having to prove anything. Every lie they told about me would be validated by my departure. The smear campaign would become the official record. And it wouldn’t end with me.

If I self-deported, I would be handing them the road map for silencing dissent. Immigrants joining a protest would remember that green cards offer no protection, that years of building a life in this country can be erased if the government doesn’t like their speech. Everyone would understand the new rules: Speak up, and we will find a way to make you disappear.

The Palestine solidarity movement in America was already under siege when I was abducted. Students had been doxxed, smeared, suspended, expelled. Others had lost their jobs for signing letters or joining a protest. During his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to donors who were furious at the student uprising that he would crush the pro-Palestine protests and “set that movement back twenty-five or thirty years.” My case was meant to be the capstone, proof that they could go further than suspensions and firings.

I thought about the students I had met at Columbia, the ones who had risked their careers to pitch tents on the lawn, to demand that the university divest from companies profiting from occupation. If I ran, what message would that send to them? That the fight wasn’t worth it? That when the pressure got real, even the people who told them to speak up would flee?

I thought about the Palestinians who had been waging this struggle for decades, long before it was fashionable, before celebrities posted about it on Instagram or walked red carpets with pins on their lapels. They had faced worse than arbitrary detention. They had faced ethnic cleansing, daily humiliation, dehumanization, imprisonment, the loss of everything. Who was I to give up at the first serious test? I thought of the people in Gaza buried beneath rubble while the world debated the justifications for their deaths. About farmers in the West Bank facing Israeli settlers burning their villages with impunity. About the millions of refugees, scattered across the world, still holding keys to the homes to which they could not return. They couldn’t self-deport out of their suffering. They couldn’t sign a paper to make it stop.

I was the test case. And I refused to comply.

Excerpted from NO LAND TO STAND ON: Notes from Detention by Mahmoud Khalil. Published by Metropolitan Books. Copyright © 2026 by Mahmoud Khalil. All rights reserved.

There are many ways in which the swinging pendulum could lower onto the neck of the human.

The human could come to represent something wholly different than themself in relying on advanced artificial intelligence. More drastically, the human could become subservient to AI at some point in the future. And, in the worst-case scenario, the human could be physically wiped out by AI-launched nuclear weapons. AI is already embedded in command-and-control systems surrounding American nuclear weapons. If given greater allowance in the future, it would be unlikely to have the same reservations about using them that humans do.

Then, there is danger with the human themself, as we see with End of Times-bent leaders, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. They could continue to further escalate wars and international criminal behavior to the point that would push the world into a wider conflict in which nuclear weapons may be used. Even if these destructive weapons were not used in a future global conflict, conventional weapons have the ability to decimate cities as we’ve seen with Dresden, London, and Gaza.

The human underneath the pendulum has agency, although it can be hard to remember this in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

Lastly, there is climate change. While unlikely to cause the pendulum to drop on the human’s neck in one fell swoop, continuous massive fires, heat, flooding, and violent storms will cause further mass migration and xenophobic backlash. The countries where climate migrants go to—wealthy Western ones—will have their own weather-related disasters and will be depleted of relief funds. With no relief from “natural” devastation, the human is unlikely to see any use for government and likely to live in increasingly gated communities with tribalistic mindsets.

Already there are 450,000 projected heat-related deaths mostly in the Global South over the next half year from climate change and Super El Niño. This seems to have hardly caused most Westerners to bat an eyelash, as they have already heightened their walls against migration either by letting people drown in the Mediterranean or by voting for someone who promised mass deportations. The fascists we’ve elected or who are growing in power, like AfD in Germany, reflect the current lack of empathy for the Global South other, and we’re only seeing the beginning of human-caused climate change’s wrath.

But the human, beneath the lowering pendulum, is not trapped. There are no ropes around their torso or arms tying them down. The human can get up and develop national legislation and international treaties to stop the pendulum’s movement and, eventually, remove it entirely. The US, on a national level, nearly did this under former President Joe Biden. The Democrats were one vote away from passing Build Back Better, which would have created tens of thousands of green jobs and throttled the fossil fuel industry. Former Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was the single holdout. Biden needed to arm-twist him to get him onboard, as we know the GOP would’ve done if they were in his shoes. Europe passed the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 that makes it more difficult for Big Tech to collect individuals’ data without their consent. In 1987, nations came together and adopted the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Every country in the world has joined since, and the ozone layer is on track to recover. It is a proven template for future global climate action.

Thus, the pendulum need not fall on the human’s neck. The blind advance of AI to the detriment of workers, the environment, and what it means to be human can be stopped. The fascist wave has crested, but it can fall like in Hungary and potentially in the US after the November elections. The extent of future climate change disasters can be mitigated when the people take the power back.

The human underneath the pendulum has agency, although it can be hard to remember this in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.

The time to retake control of the human condition is now.