It would seem that the Israeli settlers are out of control. Their violent actions have either been encouraged by the Israel Defense Forces or Israeli government, or protected by the former and quietly supported by the latter. This support exists as they set homes on fire, attack Palestinian residents, and destroy their olive trees in the West Bank. Such terrorist activity is rarely penalized in the country’s justice system because the state supports the policy of mass expulsion of the Palestinians from the West Bank.

Last Friday in Tal, four Palestinians and two Israelis were killed after there was an ISIS-like incursion into the Palestinian village. A Palestinian living in one of the attacked homes grabbed a settler’s rifle and shot two Israelis before being killed by the IDF. In response to this act of self-defense, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has advocated for turning the West Bank into Beit Hanoun, a city in Gaza that Israel destroyed during its genocide. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for “intensive counterterrorism operation[s]” and for settler outposts to expand in the West Bank.

The ISIS-KKK-like terrorist settlers reacted by torching mosques and setting fire to homes in villages, attacking an ambulance transporting a patient, and firing live ammunition at Palestinian residents. This comes on the heels of Israeli settlers detaining US Rep. and 2028 presidential hopeful Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in early July when he visited a Palestinian village that had been destroyed by settlers.

In the wider context, Israeli settlers and the IDF have killed nearly 1,200 Palestinians, including 250 children, in the West Bank since the genocidal war on Gaza after October 7. Making matters worse, Israeli terroristic violence by settlers has increased by 63% in the first half of 2026 compared with the second half of 2025. They may seem unhinged, but it is the far-right government that has fueled this level of violence.

The appearance of the Israeli settlers being out of control is a sleight of hand. They are working, like the KKK did under state governments in the American South, under the auspices of the Israeli government.

With horror, in the ashes of the failed Iraq War, ISIS drove masses of people from their homes across wide swaths of Iraq and Syria during the mid-2010s in the hope of reestablishing an Islamic state that was far more brutal than any Islamic caliphate throughout history. The creation of Israel was similar, in the hope of establishing a long-lost Jewish state in historic Palestine via ethnic cleansing of roughly 750,000 people. Both ISIS and Zionist-Israeli forces and settlers have, over time, driven millions of residents from their homes using genocide, terror, and mass murder to recapture an imagined past. ISIS was defeated thanks to Iran, the United States, Syria, and Iraqi forces working together. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Israeli version of ISIS reawakened from its post-Nakba lull, but at a slower pace until the 21st century. It was in this century that we have seen vast, state-backed settler expansion, land theft, and the destruction of Palestinian livelihoods, usually under the approving eyes of the IDF and the Israeli government. We have also seen over 73,000 Gazans killed by the IDF in the past three years during the genocidal war; the dead were mostly civilian, including about 21,000 children. Now the Israeli army, reneging on ceasefire terms, controls 70% of the Gaza Strip and already has plans for three Israeli settlements in Gaza where 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced.

But as Zionists-cum-Israelis have used violence and dispossession for well over a century in attempts to drive Palestinians out of Palestine, do they really think that they will ever fully succeed? They certainly have the US superpower’s blessing.

Yet the people of Palestine have time and perseverance on their side. They have a history that has seen the Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, and Greek empires come and go. They have seen the uncouth Crusaders’ relatively brief attempt to occupy the Holy Land. They’ve borne witness to the Byzantine, Umayyad, and Abbasid regimes. But they are still resisting in Gaza and the West Bank.

The appearance of the Israeli settlers being out of control is a sleight of hand. They are working, like the KKK did under state governments in the American South, under the auspices of the Israeli government’s goal of annexing and depopulating the West Bank of its Indigenous Palestinians.

However, they will not succeed.

The Palestinians have resilience and justice on their side. They have the support of people around the world, particularly in developing countries, and increasingly in Europe and even the United States. For example, this month Democrats in Congress followed the will of the American people and voted overwhelmingly to block military assistance to Israel.

This is only a start.

Despite the odds, Palestinians have always shown courageous resilience during famine, genocide, and land theft. Having more international support will ensure that they are not removed from their land.

This is the hardest article I’ve ever had to write.

On Sunday July 19th we lost our kind, brilliant friend and colleague, Richard Heinberg.

The world has lost a voice of clear, truth-telling wisdom—a man whose work reached millions of people and fundamentally changed the lives of thousands. Perhaps that includes you. It certainly does me.

Richard died after a short, brutal illness. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just two weeks before his passing. As you can imagine, we’re reeling and gutted.

In ways big and small, Richard displayed humility, gentleness, and joy—especially for someone grappling with such complex and difficult subject matter.

If Richard’s contributions impacted you in any way, we’d love to hear your reflections. Please visit his memorial site to share your own stories or learn more about Richard.

Countless people came to know Richard only through his books, articles, lectures, and interviews. Yet many felt as though they knew him personally. That was one of his remarkable gifts. He challenged people to face difficult truths without giving up on beauty, community, or the possibility of living well within Earth’s limits.

There’s so much I can and simply cannot say about Richard as a person and as a writer and teacher. Working alongside Richard for the last 18 years has been one of the biggest gifts in my life. In ways big and small, Richard displayed humility, gentleness, and joy—especially for someone grappling with such complex and difficult subject matter. An inveterate introvert, Richard was often quiet in groups but when he spoke it was additive, given with generosity, kindness, and humor, and always with a focus on the greater good.

When he wrote, on the other hand, it was with such powerful clarity, unflinching truth telling, and a talent for presenting complex issues in a brilliantly accessible way. He could weave together ecology, thermodynamics, history, anthropology, behavioral psychology, politics, and more into expansive explorations, as he did with his 14th and final book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, or into succinct storytelling, as he did when narrating the award-winning animation, “300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds.” He could jump from writing about the collapse of industrial civilization to writing about what he learned from chickens. Perhaps the best example of Richard’s breadth is this recording of him playing the violin and giving a talk on “Post-Carbon Music” at the New England Conservatory of Music.

I’ll miss Richard’s smile, his laugh. I’ll miss the few times when I got to see him get mad at the stupidity or cowardice of those in power. I’ll miss hearing him talk about trying to conquer an early jazz tune or the simple joy he got from his afternoon chocolate or shot of espresso. I’ll desperately miss the way he could take my meandering ideas for topics to explore and turn them into brilliantly cogent essays in a matter of hours or days. I simply loved our collaborations.

While grieving and in shock, and frankly a little lost about how Post Carbon Institute will find its voice without him, I think what Richard would want is for each of us to redouble our efforts toward his vision of people and nature thriving within ecological limits. One full of bird song, music, and laughter.

We would love to hear from you. Please share your remembrances of Richard here.

With a heavy heart,

Asher Miller

On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that decisions made by the Department of Homeland Security regarding Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, are not subject to judicial review. As the American Immigration Council notes, because of the Supreme Court’s procedures, that decision will not formally go into effect until 32 days after the ruling was issued. This small window has allowed the lower courts to continue blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to prematurely end humanitarian protections for Haitians and other groups.

That all ends on July 27—today, 32 days after Mullin v. Doe, hundreds of thousands of TPS recipients from Haiti and several other countries are expected to lose their work permits. More terminations will follow in the upcoming months. This includes protections for people from Somalia (August 20), El Salvador (September 9), Sudan (October 19), Ukraine (October 19) and Lebanon (November 27). The latter of which are currently facing violent military invasions from Russia and Israel respectively.

With the Supreme Court’s mandate now going into effect, there will be little, if anything, the lower courts can do to block these terminations.

To be frank, the situation is bleak. While the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contends that conditions in Haiti have “improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home,” the State Department actively advises Americans to avoid traveling to Haiti “for any reason due to the risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited healthcare.” Similar travel advisories have been issued for Syria, Burma, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, and Yemen.

This is what passes as “generosity” in President Donald Trump’s “Christian nation”: intentionally putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of hardworking, law-abiding people in danger while offering them a pittance to leave their lives and loved ones behind.

The Trump administration knows these countries are not safe. It knows that deporting TPS recipients to these places puts their lives at risk. It simply does not care.

On July 17, DHS General Counsel James Percival posted on Twitter-X: “For those with an expiring TPS designation, these final days provide one last opportunity to accept $2,600 and a free flight home. We strongly suggest you take advantage of this generous offer.” This is what passes as “generosity” in President Donald Trump’s “Christian nation”: intentionally putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of hardworking, law-abiding people in danger while offering them a pittance to leave their lives and loved ones behind.

Thus far, congressional efforts have failed to stop this blatant cruelty. On July 23, Senate Republicans blocked an attempt to extend TPS for Haitians.

To make matters even worse, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reportedly made plans to ramp up operations to arrest and deport Haitian migrants. Documents obtained by CBS News suggest that these operations could start as early as this week—not even a month after ICE agents murdered Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero.

These plans include targeting migrants in Ohio, home to one of the nation’s largest Haitian communities. These are the same communities that, in 2024, then-candidates Trump and Vice President JD Vance targeted with their racist lies about “they are eating the dogs” and “eating the cats.” And to be clear, even Vance admits that they were lies: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.” This is the same vile bigotry that Justice Samuel Alito and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court found to be not “overtly racial.”

Importantly, this is not the first time that ICE has reportedly made plans targeting Ohio. In late January, news outlets reported that ICE was preparing to launch an operation in the state lasting at least 30 days. That operation would have started sometime after TPS for Haitians were slated to end on February 3. Fortunately, a district court intervened and extended those protections, thereby preventing this Minnesota-style raid from occurring.

This is the reality that TPS recipients now face: either they willingly self-deport to an unsafe country or remain in the US and be hunted by ICE agents.

While there is still time (and to be clear, and it’s quickly running out), I urge everyone to call their representatives and senators and demand that they extend TPS for Haitians, Syrians, and others whose protections are at risk.

What few legal options they may have had are quickly disappearing. The Supreme Court’s decision bars review of any non-constitutional claim. Any challenge regarding racial discrimination “will likely fail.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration has indefinitely paused visa processing for nationals from 75 countries, including Haiti, Syria, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan. On February 2, the National Immigration Law Center and several other advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of this policy. That case—Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC) v. Rubio—is currently pending in court.

The administration is also making it harder to obtain a green card, not processing new Deferred Action for Childhood Arivals applications (while also intentionally delaying the processing of renewals), and severely restricting refugee and asylum programs. As the CATO Institute notes, the Trump administration’s policies have significantly cut legal immigration far more than unauthorized entries. Their analysis found that these cuts are harming US citizens, undermining US prosperity, and increasing the US deficit.

Ending TPS for Haitians and other groups will only worsen these problems. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), for instance, remarked that this decision will “create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing, and in the I/DD [intellectual and developmental disabilities] community” where roughly one-third of Haitian TPS holders work. Gov. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) has warned, “If [Haitians] lose temporary protected status and they no longer can work and the companies can’t employ them, that’s a blow to the economy, that’s a blow to the state.”

The tragic irony in all this is that the Trump administration’s policies serve no one. TPS is helping people in dire need—people who are contributing to the US. Deporting them only makes the country poorer. If ending those protections leads to more ICE agents flooding our cities, then all of us will be less safe.

As things stand now, Congress remains the most—and perhaps only—viable option for helping TPS recipients. While there is still time (and to be clear, and it’s quickly running out), I urge everyone to call their representatives and senators and demand that they extend TPS for Haitians, Syrians, and others whose protections are at risk.

Helping these people is the morally right thing to do. It is also politically and economically in the best interest of the country and international community. For their sake and our own, we must extend TPS.

When House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries sent out a recent “dear colleague” letter, its second sentence cited “the position articulated by… pro-peace organizations like J Street.” The congressman and J Street were opposing an amendment to block $3.3 billion in military shipments and other aid to Israel.

Jeffries (NY) contended that the measure was “overly broad.” On the same day, using the same phrase “overly broad,” J Street issued a statement declaring that “we support Leader Jeffries’ decision to oppose the amendment.”

Both Jeffries and J Street respectfully noted that many members of Congress had understandable reasons to back the measure. The next day, July 15, a record 103 Democrats voted in favor of blocking weaponry to Israel.

While attempting to prevent a high number of yes votes, Jeffries and J Street had emphasized mutual agreement to validate a position that amounted to support for arming genocide.

After the House vote, J Street said that “we welcome House Democratic leadership taking a stronger stance on using US leverage to pressure the Israeli government to change course.” But there are no credible reasons to believe that J Street or the “House Democratic leadership” are serious about using US leverage to “change course” in ways that would really impede the genocidal state of Israel.

Last month, a United Nations commission concluded that genocide is continuing, as Israeli forces intentionally target children in Gaza. “A significant body of research by legal and rights experts has concluded that Israel is intent on destroying Palestinians, including analyses by UN investigators, rights bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and genocide scholars worldwide,” The Guardian reported this summer.

Jeffries, a seven-term representative from New York City, has received upwards of $1.7 million from pro-Israel donors. He is now third from the top of such recipients among the thousands of House members since 1990.

During the 34 months since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, J Street has evolved from unequivocally supporting Israeli military actions in Gaza to fervently criticizing them and calling for an end to restrictions on humanitarian aid. Yet the organization has never responded adequately in ways commensurate with the actual horrific events.

Early last year, while writing an article for The Nation, I researched J Street’s public statements ever since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza. I found that “none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 [2023] and the start of the [temporary] ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to shipments of the US bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war.”

Throughout the 16-month period, as I pointed out: “J Street news releases echoed pronouncements coming from the White House and State Department, becoming grim parodies of wishful thinking and empty warnings. The headlines of J Street releases were largely contoured around hollow claims from the Biden administration that it was diligently striving to end the death and agony in Gaza.”

Only gradually has J Street expressed support for—minimally—curbing US military aid to Israel. Meanwhile, as has been the case since J Street’s founding nearly 20 years ago, many members of Congress have hidden behind J Street to legitimize their support for Israel, while often repeating the expedient “two-state solution” fantasy.

Describing itself as “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy,” J Street has long been widely seen as a liberal Jewish-led alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s right-wing politics. But J Street’s record shows that it has gone out of its way to trumpet denial.

On January 16, 2024, the organization put out a news release with this headline: “J Street Rejects Allegation at International Court of Justice of Genocide in War Against Hamas in Gaza.” Four months later, another J Street news release was equally emphatic, making clear that “J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case.”

In December 2024, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch released reports unequivocally stating that Israel was engaged in genocide.

At last, in August 2025, J Street’s president and driving force since its founding, Jeremy Ben-Ami, finally acknowledged the reality of Israeli genocide. “Until now, I have tried to deflect and defend when challenged to call this genocide,” he wrote in a blog post. “I have, however, been persuaded rationally by legal and scholarly arguments that international courts will one day find that Israel has broken the international genocide convention.”

J Street’s leader wrote those words a year ago. Yet he and his organization just teamed up with Hakeem Jeffries in support of continuing massive arms shipments to the genocidal Israeli government.

And so continues the convenient evasion with the absurd motto “pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy.”

“Leader Jeffries, President Trump is calling.”

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY): “Hello, Mr. President, this is a rare occasion!”

Donald Trump: “Well, Hakeem, I want to have a confidential talk with you on a secure line. Agreed?”

HJ: “Sure, since you made the call.”

DT: “By the way, Hakeem, my Saudi friends tell me that your first name in Arabic means ‘wise.’”

HJ: “I try not to dwell on that, Mr. President.”

DT: “Funny! Here is why I am calling. To thank you for opposing Impeachment. You’ve shown amazing political courage by standing up to the vast majority of Democratic voters who want to impeach me, remove me, and more from my beautifully renovated White House (Trump House, as we call it in our inner circle). The people are screaming at your Democrats in local town meetings because, as you know, the Dems aren’t pushing for impeachment.”

DT: “Even more so, are the real guts you have in shutting down your House Democrats shouting for Impeachment now, especially after my remarks about destroying Iran’s 5,000 years of civilization in April. You also blocked them from signing on to Rep. John Larson’s (D-Conn.) treasonous Articles of Impeachment and shut him up as well. TREMENDOUS exercise of power, Hakeem! You’ve freed yourself from Crazy Nancy, who impeached me twice. I admire that and wanted to tell you that directly.”

HJ: “As you say, Mr. President,” (noncommittedly.)

DT: “Hakeem, I wouldn’t say this publicly, but it looks like you will be Speaker in January and by a comfortable margin. So, we’re going to have to DEAL with each other, right?”

“I assume so,” replied Jeffries, wondering what comes next.

DT: “Not on the big issues, like strong support for Israel and a big military budget. I like what you said a while back that Israel could be the Sixth Borough of New York. And you have happily accepted tons of dough from the AIPAC PACs, as we have.”

DT: “Over the years, you’ve backed bigger military budgets to keep our country strong and NO. 1! Keep doing that, and I’ll go along with a tough audit of the Pentagon budget, which I’m told will take four years… I’m also OK with restoring the cuts to Medicaid, food and energy assistance, and filling the empty seats in the regulatory agencies with the required number of Democrats OK'd by you.”

DT: “Plus, as Ronald Reagan did, I’ll propose a task force to come to a bipartisan agreement to shore up Social Security for our elderly. And Melania wants me to say that I’ll join you with a real child tax credit for 60 million kids.”

HJ: “Sounds good, Mr. President. Can you get your GOP up here to go along?”

DT: “I’ll take care of them. With Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), we’ll keep them in line. As you say to your rebellious Dems, where are they going to go?”

DT: “By now, you’re probably wondering what I want in return to make it a Deal? I want you to stay with your opposition to any drive to Impeach. Explain it how you will—‘too distracting, too divisive, don’t have the two-thirds vote in the Senate, the people’s business is your priority, whatever.’ As you know, the Impeachment articles would bring up the Epstein smears, the so-called ‘Kitchen Table’ issues, and alleged non-enforcement of the laws. Also, the tax stuff with the IRS, the necessary spending directly by me for our great military actions abroad, and so on. I got matters pretty much under control with the backing of six Supreme Court justices, my veto, and pardon powers. What I can’t control, without drastic actions, is the impeachment power in Congress that is final and can’t be sent to the Supreme Court. I’m being very frank, here, Hakeem. And you know the ways I can fight back.”

DT: “Also, I don’t want you to oppose funding my beautiful White House ballroom and the greatest Arch in the world. Pretty modest requests, wouldn’t you agree, Hakeem?”

“It is too hypothetical for any response,” said Hakeem. “While I believe in compromise for the ‘greater good’ to be achieved, we have to wait until after November. Besides, as you falsely say about us, you are really trying every day to steal the elections. We also don’t know how pliable the incumbent Republicans will be to your demands. Many may blame you for their losses. I must stress that any understanding we arrive at has to be open and subject to consultation with our leadership.”

DT: “I’m not surprised by what you just said. Still, I think this exchange was worthwhile as a preview of any deal. Before closing—have my buddy Mike Johnson calling on the line again—I got to praise you for shutting down Rep. Jamie Raskin’s (D-Md.) toying with an ugly rogue hearing on impeachment by the Dems on the Judiciary Committee. That would have set me off BIG TIME! Unlike Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Raskin gets so much fawning press that it’s hard to attack him without the fake news media going bananas.”

DT: “I guess you just told him: ‘Raskin, either you’re part of the leadership or you’re on your own—NO IMPEACHMENT HEARING, you understand.’ And he took it, he took it. Great job, I must say.”

HJ: “No comment Mr. President. Thanks for your call. God Save America.”

As Big Tech races to build water-guzzling, energy-hungry data centers for its artificial intelligence, talk of an “AI race” between the United States and China has permeated public discourse. Pundits, politicians, and the media have all joined tech corporations in selling this narrative. And it’s giving license to Big Tech and their political handmaidens to ruin our communities, exploit our every action (both online and via AI-powered surveillance), and steal the wealth of human knowledge for private gain.

But the idea of an AI race between China and the US isn’t grounded in reality. The researchers, companies, and governments behind Chinese and US AI development are pursuing completely different goals.

The discourse in the US assumes that achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—computers that mimic human consciousness—would be so momentous and earth-shattering that clearly this must be the goal of anyone pursuing AI development. But that’s not the main goal of Chinese AI development. And a competition in which the competitors are running toward different finish lines isn’t a race.

If we allow the myth of an AI race with China to give Big Tech free rein, we face a more polluted, less equal world.

A Race Doesn’t Have Two Different Finish Lines

While the US is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), Chinese developers are focused on AI embedded in products. It’s ChatGPT versus robots.

Yes, China is developing LLMs, although largely in an open-source way as opposed to the for-profit competition in the US. Recent news stories report that China is “catching” the US in LLM development. Indeed, the latest Chinese model outperforms leading US models. But this isn’t evidence of an LLM-AGI race. Instead, it shows that without making AGI its main focus, China is capable of developing its own models almost as quickly as US companies.

If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced.

More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.

This isn’t to argue that China is doing it “right” and the US is doing it “wrong.” Either approach will lead to a future in which citizens become increasingly disempowered. In which work becomes more scarce and less lucrative for most people. And in which a handful of billionaires grow wealthier and more powerful.

But the arguments being hauled out to support the destructive growth of hyperscale data centers are based on a fallacy. There is no need to “beat China.” China and the US are racing on separate tracks, in different races, with different finish lines.

These two separate approaches also explain the mind-boggling scale of the data center invasion we currently face. The massive hyperscale data centers—recent proposals would demand up to 5 gigawatts, enough electricity to power roughly 3.75 million US households—are only “required” because the US is racing toward AGI. Meanwhile, the embodied AI dominating in China does not require the same amount of computational power.

The truth is, we don’t need hyperscale data centers to “beat China.” We aren’t racing China. We’re killing ourselves so Silicon Valley can race itself.

How Big Tech Is Weaponizing the “AI Race” to Build Data Centers

Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.

If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.

We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.

At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.

We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet. But the opposition is real and organic, and no amount of disinformation and pushing the “AI race against China” scare tactic will derail the movement.

Big Tech Is Selling Us a Dystopian Future

The myth of an AI race with China threatens to propel us into Big Tech’s vision of the future—one that’s more unequal than ever. Yes, tech leaders suggest their algorithms will cure cancer, but their real goal is and has been to increase their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

Even as American Tech Broligarchs have distanced themselves from earlier prophecies of widespread job loss, their vision of the future will see the vast majority of us out of meaningful work. We’ll be subject to living off whatever meager handouts are created in an attempt to mollify us.

Even if there were an AI race, is it worth running, let alone winning, if the prize is a dystopian future of mass misery with a thin layer of super wealthy tech oligarchs at the top?

At the same time, our movement will be traced whether or not we use the electronic gadgets they sell us. Already, surveillance devices linked to AI can recognize our faces, record our license plates, and report our movements. Companies and governments can buy this data in order to track us.

Meanwhile, “surveillance pricing” allows companies to change prices in an instant so that they can exploit our needs for their profit. Deepfake videos have already added to the rapidly decaying trust in a commonly shared world and a basic set of facts necessary for a functioning democracy. And this is but a scratch of the surface.

Even if there were an AI race, is it worth running, let alone winning, if the prize is a dystopian future of mass misery with a thin layer of super wealthy tech oligarchs at the top?

Big Tech’s Dystopian Vision Isn’t Inevitable

But we should be clear. This dystopian vision is not the inevitable outcome of unstoppable technological “progress” as the Tech Broligarchs would have us believe. Each and every decision being made to advance AI is a political decision. And, for now, we still have the ability to determine our political future.

Across the country, there is a growing resistance to the nightmare being shoved down our throats. Communities are coming together to fight the spread of destructive hyperscale data centers. Already in 2026, more than $130 billion-worth of proposed data center projects have been defeated and canceled.

That’s the real “AI Race.” Not China versus the US, but us versus Big Tech.

Communities are taking control of their futures by placing moratoriums on new data centers. New York enacted a one-year pause on new centers, and there is growing support for a nationwide pause in Congress.

We aren’t destined to live in Elon Musk’s fever dream. We have the power to stop him and his fellow Broligarchs. When we organize, we win. That’s the real “AI Race.” Not China versus the US, but us versus Big Tech. That’s not only a race worth running—it’s one we have to win.

Breathe deep, sigh, embrace the next word: W-A-R.

It doesn’t go away. I write about it far too often, and every time I do I feel torn inside... even though I remain personally safe from it (at least for now). Words can so easily turn the actions and consequences of war into abstractions, while failing to question why it exists at all. War is simply who we are. This is a hard certainty to shatter. But...

“Nothing exposes the bankruptcy of America’s approach to Iran more clearly than its return to more war as the answer to its own failures.”

So wrote Sina Toossi and Nancy Okail recently in The Nation. Their words start opening a deeper level of understanding, one that I’m groping for. They go on:

It is tempting to dismiss the war resumption as another example of Donald Trump’s impulsiveness. It is something deeper. Trump is less breaking with America’s approach to Iran than taking it to its logical conclusion.

The logical conclusion, as far as I can tell, is to declare victory and then start looking for the next enemy... the next evil that threatens us. This is “peace”: that brief moment of silence while everyone reloads, as someone once put it. In other words, war is inevitable and ongoing. It solves nothing. It changes nothing, except to intensify people’s hatred, toward “someone,” and their desire for revenge. It shatters connection. It shatters healing.

War’s primary function is to perpetuate itself. It’s a collective addiction to power: power over others, not with them. The enemy is always present and always dehumanized. And war doesn’t always manifest itself through militarism. Consider the criminal justice system, aka the prison system, for instance.

So let me restart this column. The word I want to embrace is: P-E-A-C-E.

Peace equals evolution. Peace means power with others, not over them. And it manifests in numerous, and often unnoticed, ways. Peace is complex and rarely produces great headlines. Over the years I’ve written about many different peace organizations, which exist in many different contexts.

In essence, peace means embracing conflict, understanding it—through non-judgmental communication between everyone involved—and looking for ways to heal, rather than punish, any harm that has occurred.

Here’s part of a column I wrote about 10 years ago, after I had attended a conference on “soul repair” in Des Moines, Iowa:

The community was out of control—the children, oh my God, the children, were sniffing gasoline and pretty much abandoning any pretense of a future—and the social and criminal-justice systems were just adding to the problem. Nothing was working.
“Our children slammed us against a brick wall," Burma Bushie said.

This is the story of a culture in shambles. It was the early ’80s. Bushie’s community is called the Hollow Water First Nation Reserve, a village of about 900 people in eastern Manitoba, more or less at the end of the highway. There was one road in and one road out.

They may have felt utterly isolated in their troubles, but what a few of them started to do—in synchronicity with people in other Indigenous communities—has spread hope and awareness across the planet. They began reaching beyond the known (i.e., Western) world, deep into their souls and into the roots of a lost way of life, to save their children and the future...

“Our children were acting out—not learning. That was our beginning," she said. "We couldn’t hide anymore. The Indian reservation-school system, the child welfare system—all these systems that came to help us more or less became our enemies."

The committed team of change-bringers began talking to one another about their own lives, as well as the troubles around them. They began addressing the issue of alcoholism, an obvious surface manifestation of far deeper matters. "Each time we cleared up one level, we found another," Bushie said. “When we got to sexual abuse—we knew that’s what we had to deal with...”

And it became a community process. When someone has been harmed, people sit in a circle as equals—victim, perpetrator, any others who are affected—and everyone has a chance to talk. When they’re not talking, they listen. There is only one goal: healing

Rupert Ross, who was at the conference with Burma Bushie, wrote about all this in his remarkable book, Returning to the Teachings. He had been a Canadian crown (i.e., prosecuting) attorney, and Hollow Water was part of his coverage area. His job was to prosecute offenders, send them to prison. He began to realize all this was doing was creating more damage to the community, and that Western “justice” had nothing to do with healing. It broke connections. It created bad guys and proceeded to dehumanize them.

He wrote, in his book: “The word ‘healing’ seems such a soft word, but, as I will show later, Hollow Water’s healing process is anything but soft. In fact, jail is a much easier alternative, because it does not require the victimizer to face the real truths about abuse.”

And this is peace: not a simplistic lull while enemies reload—that is to say, nothing at all—but the ongoing creation of a world that belongs to all of us. It’s also known as evolution.

"Thirty-Year Sentence for Transporting Zines Is a Five-Alarm Fire for Free Speech,” an Intercept headline (6/26/26) shouted days after a federal court sentenced eight anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters to a combined 450 years in prison.

The case stemmed from a July 4, 2025, protest outside the ICE Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, Texas. People had gathered for a noise demonstration to show their solidarity with the detainees inside, and one protester discharged his rifle after a police officer pulled his weapon, resulting in a minor injury to the officer.

Charges were brought against a total of 22 people from the Dallas-Fort Worth area in November 2025, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring “antifa” a “terrorist organization,” and after the related National Security Presidential Memo 7 was issued declaring a wide swath of First Amendment-protected political views as “terrorist.”

Eight of the defendants were convicted in March and sentenced on June 23; another eight were sentenced in early July, four of whom became prosecution witnesses and received shorter sentences. This was the first successful government prosecution testing the claims of EO-18709 and NSPM-7 that previously protected views and protest activity are “terrorism.”

National reporting on the sentencing missed the actual story almost entirely: that a group of people opposed to the government’s ethnic cleansing policies were given decades-long prison terms for their political views and the exercise of their First Amendment right to protest.

One of the defendants, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, was not even at the protest. He was, as The Intercept’s headline correctly reported, sentenced to 30 years because he moved a box of zines. “Five-alarm fire” seems an accurate assessment.

No Alarm Bells

Yet the extremely harsh sentences for Sanchez Estrada and the others did not set off any alarm bells among corporate media, and were underreported by national news outlets that should have covered their clearly national implications. The New York Times (6/23/26) published an online piece that ran on page A14 in print—two days later. The Wall Street Journal (6/23/26) ran an article both online and in print, while The Washington Post (6/23/26) gave the story web-only treatment.

Meanwhile, national broadcast media largely sat this story out. CBS and ABC took a pass altogether. NBC (6/23/26) ran a version of The Associated Press’ reporting on its website, as did CNN (6/23/26), but no original reporting and nothing on their flagship evening news shows. PBS NewsHour (6/24/26) ran an analysis piece (I use that term lightly) the next day; and NPR’s Morning Edition (6/24/26) gave it two minutes.

By casually and inaccurately turning the protesters’ convictions into “terrorism” convictions, these outlets further reinforced the government’s narrative of violence and subversive threat.

The coverage of the Prairieland sentencing was similar, in both content and quantity, to the reporting on the case overall. The verdict in March garnered a single article from several national news outlets, but the trial itself was barely covered. An NPR Up First piece (2/17/26) reported on it when it started; The New York Times (2/24/26) ran a piece at the start of the second trial, after the mistrial; The Washington Post (3/5/26) reported on the trial once halfway through.

By comparison, The New York Times alone ran 153 pieces on Kyle Rittenhouse, the white supremacist who shot and killed two people during a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the month of his trial in November 2021, a Nexis search revealed. Given the enormous stakes in the Prairieland case—NPR (2/17/26) accurately said “it could have nationwide implications for how left-wing movements are prosecuted”—the relative lack of coverage itself may well have implications for how left-wing movements are prosecuted.

But corporate media’s disinterest in the case is just the beginning of the problems. (There’s so much to cover on this that we’re not gonna have time for the mistrial, but the National Lawyers Guild can catch you up on that.) This piece will focus on the coverage of the June 23 sentencing as representative of the overall national reporting. (It does not look at local coverage.) If anything, the draconian prison terms should have made that coverage more skeptical than the previous coverage, but it did not.

‘Taking Part in an Armed Assault’

With the exception of PBS, every other national outlet covering the June sentencing framed the central and salient nature of the protest on July 4, 2025, as violence. The New York Times lead (6/23/26) said a jury had found the protesters “guilty of supporting terrorism while taking part in an armed assault.” The Wall Street Journal lead (6/23/26) said protesters were “accused of carrying out an attack on a Texas ICE facility.”

The Washington Post headline (6/23/26) characterized the demonstration as a “violent ICE protest.” The AP story (6/23/26) framed the event as “immigration center shooting and protest” (note the order), while NPR’s headline (6/24/26) described it simply as an “immigration center shooting.”

No one mentioned that Kyle Rittenhouse—who actually killed two people—was acquitted on self-defense grounds. Song’s conviction on attempted murder charges would be laughable if it weren’t so horrible.

What actually happened that night was that protesters set off fireworks as planned for their noise demonstration, and the evening was peaceful at first. Some protesters then engaged in property damage, including graffiti and slashed tires. When a police officer drew his gun and pointed it at the protesters, one of them, Benjamin Song, fired “suppressive shots,” aiming his rifle at the ground, in what he claims was self-defense. The bullet that struck the police officer “showed signs of impact with a hard surface,” as In These Times (3/26/26) reported, suggesting that it ricocheted off the ground. None of the national news stories on the sentencing included this information.

In the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Song’s fear certainly seems plausible, but the judge in the case had barred the defense from arguing a self-defense claim. That fact was mentioned in only one outlet, NPR (6/24/26), and without any context. And no one mentioned that Kyle Rittenhouse—who actually killed two people—was acquitted on self-defense grounds. Song’s conviction on attempted murder charges would be laughable if it weren’t so horrible.

To describe these events as “an armed assault” is at best a wild exaggeration, and at worst a deliberate mischaracterization. Between the uncritical adoption of the government’s framing of the protest as violent and the omission of so much evidence that contradicts that claim, national reporting on the sentencing missed the actual story almost entirely: that a group of people opposed to the government’s ethnic cleansing policies were given decades-long prison terms for their political views and the exercise of their First Amendment right to protest.

PBS (6/24/26) stands out as the only outlet to have framed the story this way, leading with the headline, “Anti-ICE Protesters Sentenced to Decades in Prison in Latest Crackdown on Dissent.” It interviewed George University Law Center professor Paul Butler, who said, “The concern is, when people are labeled terrorists based on their political views, that chills free speech”—an understatement.

Neither NPR nor The Wall Street Journal managed to even mention the First Amendment, and The Washington Post’s only mention of it (6/23/26) was in a quote from a federal prosecutor who said the protesters’ actions were “a far cry from a peaceful protest or First Amendment expression.”

‘Convicted on Terrorism Charges’

National news stories also failed to interrogate the central claim by the government that the protesters’ action amounted to terrorism, and none explained the charge of “material support for terrorism,” the central charge all but Sanchez Estrada were convicted on.

Several outlets simply conflated “terrorism” and “material support for terrorism,” though the two are legally and substantively distinct. New York Times (6/23/26): “Six of the defendants who were convicted of terrorism charges… which was the first time terrorism charges had been brought against purported members of antifa.” NPR (6/24/26): “The group faced terrorism charges.” AP (6/23/26): “All but one of the eight defendants sentenced Tuesday were convicted on terrorism charges.”

By casually and inaccurately turning the protesters’ convictions into “terrorism” convictions, these outlets further reinforced the government’s narrative of violence and subversive threat.

Has opposition to fascism really been defenestrated from the Overton Window?

The actual charge, material support, rests on that “support” being linked to an identified terrorist organization, and the novelty and grave danger of the Prairieland case was precisely in linking the defendants’ banal activities that allegedly prove their membership in “antifa”—wearing black, being part of a book club that reads anarchist books, having left-wing literature in their possession—to a made-up domestic terrorist organization called “antifa.”

Most of the national reports on the sentencing mention Trump’s executive order designating “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization,” and a few point out in a half sentence that there is no provision under US law for such a thing as a domestic terrorist organization (New York Times, 6/23/26; PBS, 6/24/26; AP, 6/23/26). But none spell out the alarming precedent being set here by a court legitimizing a legal category that literally does not exist in US law.

(The Brennan Center has an excellent primer on the executive order and NSPM-7 that presciently points out “extending the foreign material support for terrorism regime [to domestic organizations] would allow the government to formally assign the label to domestic groups with unpopular beliefs and prosecute anyone who supports them.”)

‘A Decentralized Movement’

All this brings us, of course, to “antifa.” All the news pieces found a way to counter the government’s fiction that antifa is an organization, variously describing it as “an umbrella term” (AP, 6/23/26), “a decentralized movement” (PBS, 6/24/26), an “ideology, not a centralized organization” (NPR, 6/24/26 ), “a loose network” (Wall Street Journal, 6/23/26), a “loosely knit movement” (Washington Post, 6/23/26), and a “movement [with] no central structure or formal membership” (New York Times, 6/23/26). A few reminded readers that “antifa” is short for anti-fascism.

But every single one of them also characterized it as “far left.” Has opposition to fascism really been defenestrated from the Overton Window? Or are corporate (and semi-corporate public) media contributing to the delegitimation of “antifa,” even as they recognize it is not exactly what Donald Trump declares it to be?

By leaving out the deliberate right-wing creation of “antifa,” while characterizing it as “far left,” media are contributing to the government narrative that “antifa” is a real and dangerous thing.

More fundamentally, “antifa” isn’t really any of those things the media say it is, either—a network, a movement, an ideology. It is a right-wing boogeyman constructed precisely for the purpose it is now being deployed to fulfill.

There are a handful of organizations in the US that explicitly identify as antifa, but the overwhelming majority of US leftists never used the term before the contemporary right, abetted by the media, put it on the map. At which point, most of us reacted with: “Antifa” isn’t a thing, but yes, I am proudly anti-fascist.

By leaving out the deliberate right-wing creation of “antifa,” while characterizing it as “far left,” media are contributing to the government narrative that “antifa” is a real and dangerous thing. This helps legitimize the legal fiction that is being used to criminalize dissent.

That a government with strong fascistic tendencies is going to smear its opponents as dangerous and violent is a given at this point. That a court will wholeheartedly follow them down the path of creating legal fictions in order to prosecute those opponents is an alarming development. But that a national press corps is so cowed by government cries of “terrorism!” that they fail to interrogate those legal fictions is a danger to the very freedoms they purport to embody.

A US$1.5 trillion defense budget isn't an accident; neither is the hunt for critical minerals, which the United States is fighting over with the same hunger it once reserved for oil. Under President Donald Trump, war has become more of a business plan than a matter of security. Strategic military moves are lining the pockets of Trump's friends and family with money. This includes the critical minerals rush to fatten Trump’s profitable war machine.

Feeding the War Machine

On February 28, the US and Israel began a ruthless bombing campaign in Iran, killing over 3,000 people in just 39 days, the majority of whom were civilians. Trump campaigned on “ending wars,” but instead has expanded military interventions and escalated new conflicts. In the first 11 months of his second term, Trump has bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. He also threatened to take over Greenland by force to create missile defense bases and mine for minerals.

War-hungry Trump needs a powerful and constantly replenished arsenal, as his wars deplete weapon stockpiles. Military aggression in West Asia, particularly the war with Iran, has burned through the munitions faster than defense factories can replace them. The US used over 45% of its Precision Strike Missiles, about half of its THAAD and Patriot PAC-3 interceptors, nearly one-third of its Tomahawks, and over a fifth of its JASSMs in its war with Iran. These weapons rely heavily on critical minerals, leaving the US desperate for more to rebuild.

As exposed by the Oakland Institute in its recently released report, a key driver of the current race for critical minerals is the military-industrial complex. Military spending in the United States is growing rapidly, and with it, the need for critical minerals. Trump's proposed 2027 defense budget is a shocking US$1.5 trillion, almost twice the 2023 budget. The only thing a budget this large signifies is plans for future military expansion and campaigns. To support this growth, up to US$100 billion was allocated to the Department of War by Trump's “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” to produce critical minerals and related industries and projects.

AI, Critical Minerals, and Modern Warfare

This record-high military budget isn't just for building more of the same defense machines. The military is expanding its tech capabilities, with a plan for an “AI-first warfighting force.” The Trump administration has declared that its priority is to secure critical minerals for “vital national security and economic activities, including rising military threats and growing high-tech industries, such as artificial intelligence, data centers, nuclear energy, and new energy technologies.”

This web between the government, tech and AI corporations, mining companies, venture capital firms, and military institutions has emerged around a common goal: securing critical minerals and advancing the use of AI in the military.

In 2022, the Pentagon awarded US$9 billion of contracts to Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon to develop and manage the US military's cloud computing infrastructure. In addition, the Department of War has administered US$75 billion to AI-driven programs and another US$9 billion to data centers since 2016. Since 2020, the Pentagon's contracts with AI firms have grown exponentially, with Palantir Technologies and Anduril Industries seeing the fastest growth. Palantir was the lead contractor on the Maven Smart System, which enabled the US military to sift through large volumes of data and rapidly select targets on the battlefield. The US used Maven in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, despite grave concerns about its accuracy. The Pentagon has still not answered whether AI systems like Maven played a role in the massacre at Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls School in Iran, where the US bombed and murdered 156 people, the majority being young schoolgirls.

Cronyism at Large

Expanding the military-industrial complex has created unprecedented opportunities for Trump's inner circle to profit. Business partners, family members, and close friends and associates have secured lucrative government contracts and preferential access to exclusive military and mineral ventures.

Donald Trump Jr. was heavily involved in selecting candidates for Pentagon jobs in 2025. Soon after, companies that his firm, 1789 Capital, had invested in—such as Vulcan Elements, Firehawk Aerospace, SpaceX, and Anduril—secured contracts with the Pentagon. Likewise, Trump's sons are proprietors of a shell corporation that has invested in a New York-based mining investment group, Cove Capital, which is working on a US$1.6 billion tungsten project in Kazakhstan, granted by the Trump administration. US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) correctly called it “corruption in plain sight.”

By gaining access to more critical minerals, Trump can expand the war machine and, in turn, make a profit. His administration has shown it will stop at nothing to achieve that. A March 2026 leaked memo from the US State Department included a proposal to withhold lifesaving HIV assistance to Zambia if its government denied access to the country’s critical minerals.

The Human and Environmental Price

Beyond the abuse of power, the US takeover of critical minerals comes with devastating impacts on the land and Indigenous communities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that mining has “severe environmental impacts” with "often […] few if any redistributive benefits for communities in regions where extraction takes place.” Instead of local development, the extraction of strategic minerals is linked to violence, human rights abuses, and conflict. None of these repercussions are a matter of concern for the Trump administration. Conflict and destabilization, in fact, help secure access and control over critical minerals, as evident in Congo.

This web between the government, tech and AI corporations, mining companies, venture capital firms, and military institutions has emerged around a common goal: securing critical minerals and advancing the use of AI in the military. This should be an urgent concern for people around the world, as the hunt for critical minerals will deepen extractivism, militarization, and geopolitical competition at a time when our focus should be on ending conflicts, securing peace, and international cooperation to fight climate change. The administration has also turned its back on Americans in the hunt for critical minerals and the strengthening of the war machine; Trump has drained funding from sectors like education, climate change, healthcare, and science. If this disregard for everyone and everything remains unchecked, irreversible damage will occur to the planet and the people of the world.

As Big Tech races to build water-guzzling, energy-hungry data centers for its artificial intelligence, talk of an “AI race” between the United States and China has permeated public discourse. Pundits, politicians, and the media have all joined tech corporations in selling this narrative. And it’s giving license to Big Tech and their political handmaidens to ruin our communities, exploit our every action (both online and via AI-powered surveillance), and steal the wealth of human knowledge for private gain.

But the idea of an AI race between China and the US isn’t grounded in reality. The researchers, companies, and governments behind Chinese and US AI development are pursuing completely different goals.

The discourse in the US assumes that achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—computers that mimic human consciousness—would be so momentous and earth-shattering that clearly this must be the goal of anyone pursuing AI development. But that’s not the main goal of Chinese AI development. And a competition in which the competitors are running toward different finish lines isn’t a race.

If we allow the myth of an AI race with China to give Big Tech free rein, we face a more polluted, less equal world.

A Race Doesn’t Have Two Different Finish Lines

While the US is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), Chinese developers are focused on AI embedded in products. It’s ChatGPT versus robots.

Yes, China is developing LLMs, although largely in an open-source way as opposed to the for-profit competition in the US. Recent news stories report that China is “catching” the US in LLM development. Indeed, the latest Chinese model outperforms leading US models. But this isn’t evidence of an LLM-AGI race. Instead, it shows that without making AGI its main focus, China is capable of developing its own models almost as quickly as US companies.

If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced.

More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.

This isn’t to argue that China is doing it “right” and the US is doing it “wrong.” Either approach will lead to a future in which citizens become increasingly disempowered. In which work becomes more scarce and less lucrative for most people. And in which a handful of billionaires grow wealthier and more powerful.

But the arguments being hauled out to support the destructive growth of hyperscale data centers are based on a fallacy. There is no need to “beat China.” China and the US are racing on separate tracks, in different races, with different finish lines.

These two separate approaches also explain the mind-boggling scale of the data center invasion we currently face. The massive hyperscale data centers—recent proposals would demand up to 5 gigawatts, enough electricity to power roughly 3.75 million US households—are only “required” because the US is racing toward AGI. Meanwhile, the embodied AI dominating in China does not require the same amount of computational power.

The truth is, we don’t need hyperscale data centers to “beat China.” We aren’t racing China. We’re killing ourselves so Silicon Valley can race itself.

How Big Tech Is Weaponizing the “AI Race” to Build Data Centers

Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.

If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.

We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.

At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.

We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet. But the opposition is real and organic, and no amount of disinformation and pushing the “AI race against China” scare tactic will derail the movement.

Big Tech Is Selling Us a Dystopian Future

The myth of an AI race with China threatens to propel us into Big Tech’s vision of the future—one that’s more unequal than ever. Yes, tech leaders suggest their algorithms will cure cancer, but their real goal is and has been to increase their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

Even as American Tech Broligarchs have distanced themselves from earlier prophecies of widespread job loss, their vision of the future will see the vast majority of us out of meaningful work. We’ll be subject to living off whatever meager handouts are created in an attempt to mollify us.

Even if there were an AI race, is it worth running, let alone winning, if the prize is a dystopian future of mass misery with a thin layer of super wealthy tech oligarchs at the top?

At the same time, our movement will be traced whether or not we use the electronic gadgets they sell us. Already, surveillance devices linked to AI can recognize our faces, record our license plates, and report our movements. Companies and governments can buy this data in order to track us.

Meanwhile, “surveillance pricing” allows companies to change prices in an instant so that they can exploit our needs for their profit. Deepfake videos have already added to the rapidly decaying trust in a commonly shared world and a basic set of facts necessary for a functioning democracy. And this is but a scratch of the surface.

Even if there were an AI race, is it worth running, let alone winning, if the prize is a dystopian future of mass misery with a thin layer of super wealthy tech oligarchs at the top?

Big Tech’s Dystopian Vision Isn’t Inevitable

But we should be clear. This dystopian vision is not the inevitable outcome of unstoppable technological “progress” as the Tech Broligarchs would have us believe. Each and every decision being made to advance AI is a political decision. And, for now, we still have the ability to determine our political future.

Across the country, there is a growing resistance to the nightmare being shoved down our throats. Communities are coming together to fight the spread of destructive hyperscale data centers. Already in 2026, more than $130 billion-worth of proposed data center projects have been defeated and canceled.

That’s the real “AI Race.” Not China versus the US, but us versus Big Tech.

Communities are taking control of their futures by placing moratoriums on new data centers. New York enacted a one-year pause on new centers, and there is growing support for a nationwide pause in Congress.

We aren’t destined to live in Elon Musk’s fever dream. We have the power to stop him and his fellow Broligarchs. When we organize, we win. That’s the real “AI Race.” Not China versus the US, but us versus Big Tech. That’s not only a race worth running—it’s one we have to win.

In an early victory for President Donald Trump’s protection racket, the leaders of nine prestigious Big Law firms collectively paid almost $1 billion and sacrificed their professional integrity to secure peace with his administration—or so they thought.

They were wrong.

The ABA Defends the Profession

In June 2025, the American Bar Association (ABA) sued the Trump administration for targeting those firms and five others. The ABA claims that Trump has sought to intimidate attorneys from representing clients and causes that he didn’t like.

After a federal judge denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the ABA’s complaint in April, the ABA subpoenaed the files of Trump adviser Boris Ephsteyn, a key liaison in negotiating settlements between the nine capitulating firms and the White House. The Department of Justice (DOJ) moved to quash the subpoena, arguing that the confidentiality of presidential communications is a constitutional safeguard.

Among the problems with the government’s position are that:

1. Ephsteyn is a personal senior counsel to Trump;
2. He has no official position in the White House or the administration; and
3. Trump has not asserted executive privilege.

The dispute may well land in the US Supreme Court, which has become Trump’s preferred forum.

The Justice Department Opens a New Front in Trump’s Continuing War

On July 2, the DOJ took a step that seemed odd: It served subpoenas on the nine capitulating firms, as well as four firms that fought Trump’s executive order and won. (It also subpoenaed a firm that took no public action.) Those subpoenas sought some of the same information that the ABA wanted from Ephsteyn:

All communications on or after January 20, 2025 that [each firm] sent to Boris Epshteyn, received from Boris Epshteyn, or participated in with Boris Epshteyn.

They also sought all communications relating to the negotiations, implementation, enforcement, and monitoring of the agreements.

Presumably the Justice Department already has access to the law firms’ communications with Ephsteyn. If so, why did it subpoena the firms for some of the same material, including documents that it didn’t want the White House to provide in response to the ABA’s subpoena?

Possible answers:

1. The DOJ wants the 14 subpoenaed firms to pressure the ABA into withdrawing its subpoena seeking Ephsteyn’s files. If so, it has misread the room badly. In April, the ABA filed an amicus brief with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on behalf of its 400,000 members supporting the four law firms that successfully challenged the constitutionality of Trump’s executive orders. The ABA isn’t going to save the capitulating Big Law firms from themselves.
2. The department doesn’t trust Ephsteyn or the White House to provide it with all relevant materials that Ephsteyn has.
3. The subpoenas were a predicate for the DOJ’s next move: trying to disqualify the ABA’s outside counsel—Susman Godfrey, one of the four big firms that won court challenges to Trump’s executive orders.

The Justice Department Tries to Avoid the Plain Language of the Applicable Rule

On July 17, the DOJ moved to disqualify Susman Godfrey from representing the ABA. It relies on the governing District of Columbia Rules of Professional Conduct, specifically, Rule 3.7, which states: “A lawyer shall not act as advocate at a trial in which the lawyer is likely to be a necessary witness….” [Emphasis supplied]

The Justice Department argues that the rule “contains a bright line rule prohibiting a lawyer from serving as both advocate and fact witness in the same matter….”

Not quite.

First, Rule 3.7 does not apply to all “fact witnesses.” It applies only to necessary witnesses. Susman Godfrey lawyers have become potential witnesses only because the DOJ subpoenaed documents from the firm as a whole.

Second, the rule applies only to individual lawyers within a law firm and, except in special circumstances inapplicable to the ABA case, not to all members of an entire firm. The DOJ has sought to depose as potential witnesses only the chairpersons of the 14 firms.

Third, the rule focuses on the interests of the client (here, the ABA), not its opponent (the White House). As the official commentary to Rule 3.7 explains: “If the only reason for not permitting a lawyer to combine the roles of advocate and witness is possible prejudice to the opposing party [the White House], there is no reason to disqualify other lawyers in the testifying lawyer’s firm from acting as advocates in that trial.”

Finally, the rule bars only an advocate who is likely to be a necessary witness at trial. The case may never reach the trial stage, and Susman Godfrey is free to represent the ABA until it does. Since 1992, DC Bar Ethics Opinion 228 has made that clear.

Meanwhile, the nine capitulating firms now face a quandary: What does Trump want from them? If they comply with the DOJ’s subpoenas, they will disclose some of the very information that the Justice Department is trying block by objecting to the ABA’s subpoena.

Regardless of the DOJ’s motivations, federal judges do not take kindly to an advocate’s misreading of the governing law or ignoring precedent that cuts against its position.

Here’s the real kicker: The subpoenas to Susman Godfrey and its fellow resisting law firms have already backfired. They are more evidence supporting the ABA’s claims of presidential intimidation and harassment.

As for the nine firms that settled—and the many other institutions that have that capitulated to Trump—the entire episode demonstrates that appeasing a bully will never produce finality.

In the recent Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, an intercontinental ballistic missile of unknown origin is detected streaking across the Pacific on a course that, in less than 20 minutes, will turn Chicago to ash. Efforts to shoot the missile down fail, as the ground-based interceptors, or GBIs, miss their target and, as the seconds count down, the president, played by Idris Elba, has only seven minutes to decide how to respond. The consequences of his decision, which the film leaves open, could mean the end of human civilization and even most life on Earth.

What was the official response to the film? A week before it streamed, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) produced a memo attacking the film’s credibility. America’s GBIs, they said, are much more accurate than portrayed in the movie, with a 100% success rate. (The Center for Arms control puts that figure at 55% in carefully controlled tests.) And an article published by the West Point-based Modern War Institute argues that the film’s premise is flawed since no adversary would launch just a single missile at the United States.

It was also judged illogical that the president’s choices were limited to “surrender” or “suicide”—the latter meaning all-out nuclear war. The country could absorb the loss (meaning the 10 million inhabitants of Chicago) and respond only after the missile’s source had been determined. Finally, as the MDA memo helpfully pointed out, the plot of A House of Dynamite is “fictional” and “intended for the entertainment of the audience.” In other words, it’s just another disaster movie.

These themes are not new to governmental pronouncements on films about nuclear war. In the 1959 feature On the Beach, Gregory Peck plays the captain of a submarine that is America’s last surviving naval vessel as it docks in Melbourne, Australia after the entire Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out in a nuclear war—and a cloud of deadly radioactive fallout is inexorably making its way south. After a brief stay and with the inevitability of death by radiation poisoning, the crew votes to return to the US and die at home.

Which way will the Trump administration go in response to Nuclear War: A Scenario the movie? If the film is faithful to the book, it should have an even more devastating impact than The Day After.

Two weeks before the film’s worldwide release, the United States Information Agency produced an “Infoguide” stating that the film was “highly fictionalized and contains scientific inaccuracies.” It argued that, because fallout diminishes rapidly, it would only affect countries directly attacked or those nearby. Moreover, shelters and decontamination measures were effective against fallout and, as far away as the Southern Hemisphere, “if any protection at all were needed, an ordinary basement would suffice.” A later Infoguide reporting on the premier noted: “Most critics review [the] film as pure drama and there has been little emphasis on social and political significance.” In other words, no big deal.

Five years later, in 1964, Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, starring Peters Sellers in three different roles, was released. In this dark comedy, a psychotic Air Force General orders the B-52 bombers under his command to attack the Soviet Union, sparking a concerted but unsuccessful effort by the president and his advisers to recall the planes. As a single B-52 gets through and the plane’s pilot rides a nuclear bomb down to its target, it is revealed that the Soviets have a yet-to-be announced “Doomsday Machine” that, upon the country being struck by a nuclear weapon, will automatically trigger the detonation of a massive array of cobalt bombs whose radiation will render the Earth uninhabitable for a century.

Although obviously a farce, the film was panned as “juvenile, offensive, and inaccurate.” As reported in The New Yorker: “An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film ‘impossible on a dozen counts.’ A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: ‘Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.’” (These assertions are in doubt following the disclosure of the policy of “pre-delegation,” in force at the time, which gave authority to commanders to deploy nuclear weapons in circumstances where the president could not be reached.)

Two decades later, in the feature film Wargames, Matthew Broderick plays a teenager who successfully hacks into the Pentagon’s supercomputer. Unwittingly, he mistakes its nuclear war command and control function for a computer game—and nearly triggers global thermonuclear war.

This time, the government response was quite different. After viewing the film, President Ronald Reagan asked his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if something like that could really happen. After a review, the president was told that, not only was the premise of the film realistic, “the problem is much worse than you think.” Fifteen months later, National Security Directive NSD-145 was issued, launching a sweeping governmental effort to improve cybersecurity.

Later in 1983, the television movie The Day After, which reached a record-breaking 100 million viewers, was the first American film to attempt a realistic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear attack on an American city. The story revolves around a doctor, played by Jason Robards, as he tries to deal with the horrific effects of blast, fire, and radiation on the citizens of Lawrence, Kansas—targeted because of its nearby nuclear missile silos.

In this case, the response was mixed. The White House initially discouraged the making of the film. The Pentagon urged—unsuccessfully—to have the script make clear that the Soviets fired first and later refused to allow the filmmakers to use stock footage of real nuclear detonations. Henry Kissinger criticized the film as “simple minded” and in danger of leading the country to “make policy by scaring ourselves to death.” But the film’s graphic portrayal of the effects on the population of an American city could not be dismissed as easily as some of its predecessors, and Reagan wrote in his diary, “It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed.” It has been argued that the film influenced him to soften his Cold War rhetoric and to meet with Mikhael Gorbachev in Iceland in 1986, where the complete abolition of nuclear weapons was discussed. Unfortunately, that meeting ended without agreement; however, a year later, subsequent negotiations led to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which resulted in the elimination of a whole class of nuclear weapons.

Which way will the Trump administration go in response to Nuclear War: A Scenario the movie? If the film is faithful to the book, it should have an even more devastating impact than The Day After. With today’s sophisticated special effects, it will, no doubt, create hyperrealistic imagery and make the absolute absurdity of nuclear war manifest. But will the administration call it unrealistic, inaccurate, alarmist or just fiction, as with On the Beach, Doctor Strangelove, or A House of Dynamite? Or will they see it as a prompt to take this existential threat seriously and move to reduce or eliminate the world’s nuclear stockpiles?

Regardless of the response, the movie should motivate us all to work to build a constituency for change in order to end the madness and build a saner world.

The 2026 heatwave is a global phenomenon, inflicting extreme temperatures on billions of people from the United States to Europe and South Asia.

Extreme heat is deadly. In Europe, an estimated 10,000 people have died from heat this summer, and the official count of a few dozen deaths in India and Pakistan is likely to be too low by several orders of magnitude, according to a recent scientific study.

Dozens of Americans died from heat over the Fourth of July weekend alone—a toll that’s still unacceptably high.

Meanwhile, much of the country has been blanketed in smoke from wildfires in Canada and Minnesota, triggered by the hot and dry conditions arising from the heatwaves. Like heat, wildfire smoke is also deadly. A similar wildfire smoke event in 2023 led to an estimated 33,000 premature deaths in the US alone.

Effectively, these legislators—like too many others—were bought by a powerful industry to put their corporate interests over the health, and the very lives, of the broader public. This is naked corruption.

Scientists have found that all of these regional heatwaves were made likelier and more severe because of human-caused climate change, mainly attributable to burning fossil fuels.

Major oil and gas corporations have known for decades that their business model would cause disasters like these. Their response was to minimize or even hide their findings to keep the public in the dark about the risks—and pay front groups to deceive them.

This drive to preserve profits at the expense of humanity has understandably caused outrage. Eleven US states, two tribes, and dozens of local governments are suing fossil fuel corporations for damages for the harm they’ve suffered from climate disasters.

State legislators have also joined the fray. New York and Vermont have passed “Climate Superfund” bills that require fossil fuel corporations to pay for economic losses arising from extreme heat, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and flooding. Similar laws are being considered in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

The US has experienced more than $200 billion in climate damages every year since 2016, and it’s only fair that fossil fuel corporations pay for some of the damage caused by their reckless greed.

But instead of trying to make Big Oil pay up, some lawmakers in Congress are trying to do the opposite. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have introduced House and Senate bills, respectively, that seek to dismiss ongoing climate damages lawsuits, shield Big Oil from similar future cases, pre-empt state Climate Superfund laws, and—most outrageously—block any state level regulation of greenhouse gases.

This is legislation expressly designed to protect a powerful, wealthy industry from having to face any accountability for harming the public. And when you follow the money, you can see why.

Rep. Hageman has received more than $23,000 in campaign money from the petroleum refining and marketing industry in this cycle, making it the second biggest industry (after sugar) backing her candidacy. She’s also received thousands more from other fossil fuel interests.

Also in this cycle alone, Sen. Cruz has gotten more than $129,000 in contributions from different segments of the oil and gas industry.

Effectively, these legislators—like too many others—were bought by a powerful industry to put their corporate interests over the health, and the very lives, of the broader public. This is naked corruption.

And if we want the kind of democracy we need and deserve, the rest of us shouldn’t tolerate it anymore.

By Marilynda Bustamente and Carmen Perez

As California's final state budget has been signed and Gov. Gavin Newsom prepares to leave office, we can’t help but look at the impact of childcare funding on families. To build a future, we must look at the present and past.

Ours is a tale of two families. We are both mothers and parent leaders with Parent Voices—Carmen in Marin and Marilynda in Los Angeles. This year, we both attended the 30th annual Parent Voices CA Stand for Children Day, where we joined hundreds of parents, children, and childcare providers to say something simple and urgent: Children matter. Together, we testified at the State Capitol until the final lap to the signing of the final state budget—to remind lawmakers: Superheroes Choose Kids, Not Billionaires!

We are similar in so many ways, but when it comes to access to childcare, we learned there is a disconnect in state policy across counties.

Imagine a state where every child has access to care from birth, where no parent has to choose between working and staying home, and where no child spends years on a waiting list.

I, Marilynda, was living in a homeless shelter when I was pregnant with my first child. I was fortunate to get off the waiting list for a childcare voucher. Because of that, I was able to get through graduate school, work, hold an internship, and earn my Master of Social Work. My daughter, Serenity, is learning, socializing, and growing, and we wouldn’t be where we are without that childcare.

I, Carmen, saw my oldest son age out of eligibility for a childcare voucher after more than 10 years stuck on the childcare waitlist. Years later, my two daughters gained access to childcare when Newsom added new childcare spaces, and today they are thriving. But now, my youngest son, Dyson, is stuck on the waitlist because the state has not expanded childcare since 2023. I don’t have reliable care for him; I can’t work more hours because I can’t leave him, which hurts my ability to provide for my family.

Our stories make it clear: Funding childcare is the difference between realized dreams and delayed futures. No childcare means lost wages for many California families.

Newsom once recognized that waiting is a policy failure. He made a promise to expand childcare, and that promise gave families hope. But then the promise was delayed. Newsom's May revision of the state budget did not provide enough to reach 200,000 new childcare spaces. It will leave more than 77,000 families remaining on what is now known as the "No Hope” childcare waitlist.

So, we advocated. We put pressure on Gov. Newsom to get closer to fulfilling his promise to childcare. He announced 130,000 childcare spaces, much closer to the 200,000 than originally proposed.

Compromises were made. But more must be done when there are thousands of eligible children stuck on the “No Hope” waitlist.

We teach our kids to keep their word. Why should we expect anything less from our governor?

At the same time, childcare educators will receive a 2% cost of living adjustment while TK-12 teachers get 4.31%. The first five years of a child's development are among the most critical, yet the educators who show up for those years are already the lowest paid and getting less than half the investment. That’s a reminder that childcare providers continue to be disrespected in budget decisions.

We have to ask a hard question: What kind of world are we building for our children?

Imagine if the billions lost to incarceration and tax cuts for corporations were invested in universal childcare instead.

Implementing universal childcare and properly supporting the industry is the solution to the affordability crisis. It unlocks opportunities for parents like us to work, pursue education, pay bills, and afford essentials like gas and food. If care becomes available for every family, the future will brighten for all families.

Imagine a state where every child has access to care from birth, where no parent has to choose between working and staying home, and where no child spends years on a waiting list.

This is not out of reach. It is about priorities.

The State has the money. But the commitment to invest in childcare has fallen short.

Will the next governor get closer to fulfilling the promise to fund childcare for all families?

Two recent deaths highlighted the importance of earlier activist leaders to struggles for health and social justice. Denise Oliver-Velez, who died on July 15, was a founder of the Young Lords Party in New York, a group that mobilized Puerto Rican and other communities to fight for their health and dignity. She also helped set the stage for alignments between movements for the rights of people of color and those focused on the rights of women.

Walt Odets, a psychologist, died on July 5th in Berkeley where he had provided therapy for gay men for decades. His activism had focused on how best to prevent AIDS and ending the stigma that this country imposes on LGBTQI people.

Their stories remind us of the important role activists play in combating injustice and reversing cruel and harmful policies. As the Trump administration’s crusade against democracy and our nation’s public health and healthcare systems continue, we can learn from these two lives lessons for today’s activists who can bring the values and passions of Oliver-Velez and Odets into the present period.

Through the campaigns she helped to organize, Oliver-Velez brought to life an alternative vision of a healthcare system that put serving people first. In 1970, the Young Lords occupied Lincoln Hospital, an underfunded, understaffed public hospital with decaying facilities and low quality of care, known in the community as the Butcher Shop. The Young Lords sent members into the hospital lobby to collect complaints from patients, which they then presented to hospital administrators. When conditions did not improve, the group occupied the hospital, winning an agreement to hire more Puerto Rican doctors committed to serving their community and to support the Lords to set up new community health and substance use programs. At a time when the city was closing public hospitals to save money, Lincoln was rebuilt and a new modern hospital was opened, in part due to persistent pressure from the Young Lords and their healthcare worker allies.

Between them, these two very different activist leaders demonstrated some of the qualities today’s activists most need to fight current threats to health and social justice.

Oliver-Velez was attracted to the Lords because they were “a puente,” a “bridge between groups, the cultural/nationalists, the Marxists, the whites, the Black and the Asians.” She also wanted to overcome the machismo that divided so many radical groups. She wrote that she and other women in the Lords “made it very clear that we were not going to be just secretaries, that we were warriors too.” Oliver, Iris Morales, and other women leaders in the Young Lords organized a Women’s Caucus which moved the Young Lords Party to adopt feminist principles as central to their political agenda.

These women led campaigns on reproductive justice; against sterilization abuse; for safe, legal abortion; and raised awareness about the institutional oppression of women. Much of their work focused on health—breakfast programs for school children, a campaign to force the city to combat lead poisoning more aggressively, and the fights to improve Lincoln Hospital. Decades before “health for all” became an international rallying call, the Young Lords showed how ordinary people can force government to translate this aspiration into action.

Odets’ practice and tactics were different. He criticized the gay movement’s approach to AIDS prevention, arguing that its guidance on safe sex was ambiguous and failed to prevent infection. He insisted movements had to tell the truth about evidence. He also championed the needs of HIV-negative men, arguing that a movement seeking health for the gay community as a whole at had to consider the needs of these men, even if their lives were not in as imminent peril as those who were HIV+.

“For gay lives,” Odets wrote “the granting of legal rights and authentic acceptance are two different issues in a society steeped in phobic aversion to real diversity.” Odets distinguished between the legal fight for societal recognition, i.e., gay marriage, and the psychological fight for self-acceptance and the rejection of social stigma. He hoped to engage the gay community in addressing both the political and emotional requirement for building solidarity and to prepare gay men to both fight for their rights and insist on their self-worth. Rather than separating these two domains, he strove to integrate them.

Between them, these two very different activist leaders demonstrated some of the qualities today’s activists most need to fight current threats to health and social justice. Both found ways to connect their personal experience to their political beliefs, a prerequisite for authenticity in organizing others.

Oliver-Velez showed the power of bringing people together across the racial-ethnic and gender divides that characterize our society and enable those in power to divide us. Odets emphasized the importance of paying attention to both the political and the psychological dimensions of activism. Activists who appeal to the mind and the heart are more likely to build the long-term support needed to change policies and systems.

Both were willing to acknowledge differences among activists, then look for ways to bridge these divides . Neither Oliver-Velez nor Odets feared conflict, but they did not demonize fellow travelers who disagreed with them, leaving the door open to build bridges.

I have been studying, teaching, writing about, and participating in health activism for more than 50 years. Never have the threats to human and planetary health seemed starker. Never has the responsibility of government to protect health been under such concerted attack. Fortunately, thousands of young and old activists are organizing to combat today’s threats, showing the possibility of an alternative to the dark and cruel view of well-being coming from leaders in Washington. By applying the lessons learned from Oliver-Velez and Odets to today’s battles, we pay tribute to them by strengthening the fights for a healthier, more just world.

Temperatures are soaring globally, and wildfire smoke just blanketed much of North America for the second time in a few years. This summer’s heat will likely make this year the hottest ever, and that heat is costing lives. It’s no surprise that concern about climate change among Americans is at one of its highest points since 1989.

But despite the fact that climate change and extreme heat are posing a threat to the health and well-being of Americans, neither major party is offering a serious policy response.

Republicans have become the official party of climate change denial. The Trump administration and its GOP allies in Congress have aggressively attacked renewable energy while boosting fossil fuels. Meanwhile many Democrats have become increasingly silent about climate, leaving voters concerned about the issue with no major political party to represent their values and interests.

In fact, The New York Times recently found that many Democratic candidates are backtracking on their previous opposition to the oil and gas industries. “With voters worried about spiking gas prices and inflation, some of the party’s leaders argue that they should stop trying to throttle oil and gas, which heat the planet when burned,” the paper reported.

Voters recognize that public investments in clean energy, public transit, and other climate-friendly policies ultimately save them money.

This messaging could cost lives and elections.

As a young voter, I saw this sense of abandonment play out in real time. I remember walking proudly around my campus all day in 2024 wearing an “I voted” sticker. I had voted early by mail, as had many of my classmates—or so I thought. What I came to realize throughout the day was that many of my classmates had yet to vote—and had no plan to.

Voting can be time consuming, frustrating, and often unnecessarily complicated. Barriers to voting are even more intimidating when you’re voting for the first time. For these reasons and more, many young people only make the effort to vote if they feel candidates will strongly advocate for the issues they care about.

On my campus, students are given access to all kinds of information about how and why to vote, and they’re given ample time and opportunity to do so. If students with access to so many resources on voting aren’t voting, how can we expect young people in parts of the country where there are larger barriers to voting to turn out en masse?

Over half of voters aged 18-29 didn’t vote in the 2024 presidential election, and 77% of young voters didn’t vote in the 2022 midterms. The 2026 midterm races are already tight, which could make the failure to address climate change a recipe for political as well as ecological disaster.

There’s no contradiction between having a serious climate policy and being responsive to voter concerns about rising costs. Progressive populists like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Janeese Lewis George in Washington, DC, and Melat Kiros in Denver, among others, have all proven that climate-friendly economic populism can be effective at increasing voter turnout, especially among young people.

Economic populism goes hand in hand with a transition to green energy, as 90% of renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels. Voters recognize that public investments in clean energy, public transit, and other climate-friendly policies ultimately save them money.

In New York, one of Mamdani’s core promises—Free, Fast Buses—was proof of this. In DC, a core component of Lewis George’s campaign was affordable energy for all, with a focus on expanding community and government solar to cut electric bills. In Denver, Kiros also campaigned on combining economic and environmental issues with her support of a Green New Deal.

These recent victories owed much to the young people who powered their campaigns. It was also overwhelmingly young people who organized the 75,000 person March To End Fossil Fuels in 2023 and organized 500,000 people around the US against fossil fuels in 2019.

These examples suggest young people aren’t apathetic—they’re just not being heard. They will power campaigns that support a transition to green energy. But they won’t make an effort for those who enable the fossil fuel industry or talk out of both sides of their mouths on the issue.

Now is the time to push for a future with cheaper, greener energy for all. It is not the time to backslide on fossil fuels.

It’s summer in Washington, DC, but members of the Senate aren’t focused on beaches, hikes, and picnics. Instead, they’re focused on President Donad Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche to run the Justice Department as attorney general.

It’s a fight worth paying attention to, because it will affect what kind of country we live in.

Attorneys general can change our lives for the better. In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy worked tirelessly to bring civil rights to the South and to dismantle organized crime. In the 1970s, Elliot Richardson resigned rather than carry out President Richard Nixon’s illegal order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor.

Todd Blanche is about as far as you can get from either of them. How do we know? Because as deputy attorney general and acting attorney general, he’s turned the Justice Department into Trump’s personal favor factory. Instead of protecting our rights, he’s lining Trump’s pocket, protecting his personal interests, and carrying out his revenge fantasies.

He has shown how much he is willing to bend the law to line Trump’s pockets.

Blanche was the one who pushed for the $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund that would have allowed taxpayer funds to be doled out, with very little public oversight, to anyone claiming that they’d been victims of the “weaponization” of justice. It looked like a slush fund for insurrectionists and other Trump allies, including those who assaulted police officers on January 6, 2021.

Some Republican senators apparently want assurances that this scheme is dead before they vote for Blanche. But even genuine assurances don’t matter. Blanche still pushed for this corrupt money laundering operation. Giving it up under torrential pressure doesn’t show that he has good judgment and can be trusted with immense power.

The same applies for another scheme Blanche proposed at the same time as the slush fund: An agreement to end a longtime audit of Trump’s taxes (possibly saving Trump $100 million) and a gift of immunity for the president and his associates from future liability for civil or criminal liability for anything they may have done up to that point.

Again, this is about as corrupt as you can get. And again, even if Blanche were to toss the idea in the shredder, it would be too late: He has shown how much he is willing to bend the law to line Trump’s pockets.

Blanche has also transformed the Justice Department into a partisan tool to go after Trump’s enemies. For instance, he’s launched a criminal prosecution against former FBI Director James Comey for posting a photo of seashells spelling out “86 47.” It will never stand up in court, but that’s not the point. The point is to harass Comey and, perhaps more importantly, intimidate other Trump critics from speaking out. It is an unacceptable abuse of power.

Then there are the Epstein files. Before Congress ordered the files released, Blanche was coming up with ideas to make it look like the administration was being open with the records when they really weren’t. He met with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving time for her role in sex trafficking for Epstein. Afterward, she got moved to a minimum-security prison, prompting a lot of questions about the deal they may have made.

Then late last year Congress ordered the files to be released, and Blanche was put in charge of making that happen. In February, media reports revealed that the Justice Department had unlawfully withheld multiple Epstein files containing allegations against President Trump. And just a few weeks ago, a federal judge held that Blanche had still not complied with the law.

It’s no surprise that Epstein survivors are urging the Senate not to confirm him.

This country is on the wrong path. Confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general will help Donald Trump’s bottom line. But it won’t do any good for the rest of us.

I want to play sockhim (oh, sorry, sockher) for President Donald Trump. In our world today, there’s nothing, it seems, he can’t fiddle with or kick around or, for that matter, sock. And whenever he feels it’s necessary (or simply has the urge to do so), he’s always been willing to sockthem, whoever they might be. If something then goes wrong, as with Iran and the global economy right now, thanks to his wild and wildly destructive acts, so what? He’s still Donald Trump and can do the equivalent again somewhere else in some other way the next second-minute-hour-day-week-month-year.

I’m thinking, of course, not just about his unbearable urge to bomb Iran for the 940th (9,400th?) time, as oil and gas prices surge once again, but about his relatively recent intervention in the soccer World Cup to ensure that one of the best players on the US team, who had committed a foul, was red-carded off the field by a referee, and then was denied permission to play in the next game against the Belgian team, could instead compete in that very game. And of course, since everything You Know Who does is headlined, you know just what happened next: The World Cup organization, FIFA, gave way instantly, that player was indeed in the next game, and the US team still lost to Belgium by a significant margin.

And Donald J. Trump just rolled right on. No matter what goes wrong, he never loses. (If you think otherwise, ask him and you’ll find out that you couldn’t be more off base!)

I sometimes try to imagine telling my parents, who died deep in the last century, about “our” president. The only way I could do so, I suspect, would be by comparing him to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Donald Trump of the early 1950s, who claimed that his opponents were “commies” and, in a distinctly Trumpian fashion, swore that he had a (fictional) list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the American Communist Party and later that the US Army, too, had been infiltrated by commies. His charges would be the focus of the 1954 televised Army-McCarthy Hearings, which did me the great favor (at age 10) of putting a television set in our apartment for the first time so that my mom, Irma Selz, then a well-known political and theatrical caricaturist, could draw McCarthy and crew for the New York Post.

At a time when this planet of ours needed rescuing (from us, of course), the American people reelected a man who continues to openly promise to send us—all too literally—to the blazes.

And yes, he was an all-American monster, distinctly clobbering various figures and destroying certain American lives. Still, in the end, he was condemned by the Senate and essentially drank himself to death, only affecting our all-American world for a few years and (at least in comparison with You Know Who) in a relatively modest way.

Historically speaking, Donald Trump, president (no less!) of the United States of America twice, puts him to shame. Of course, once upon a time (believe it or not), Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump had the very same adviser (at different moments, of course), Roy Cohn, who, in the (all too literal) end, may have helped create a president from beyond the grave.

McCarthy only had a relatively brief moment at center stage before falling apart in a big-time fashion. Donald Trump, on the other hand, simply goes on and on and (yes!) on, whacking away at so many of the rest of us—Iran being at the top of his list, right now—day after day, week after week, year after year, while our world begins to disintegrate under us. (Oh, sorry, my mistake even to refer in passing to climate change when “our” president considers it a first-class “con job“!)

Joe McCarthy was functionally ejected from his political world and then essentially ejected himself from ours. Unfortunately, Donald Trump took our world by storm, two (out of three) times, while tossing out so many others in the process. And now, at least in climate terms, he seems intent on ejecting us all from Planet Earth.

“We Have a Score to Settle”

If I had told you his tale early in this century, you would never have believed me. In fact, you would have thought me an idiot and a half (maybe even three-quarters). Donald Trump, the president of the United States (at least) twice and so many others of us his apprentices? You must be kidding! Once upon a time, that would have seemed beyond inconceivable for even a second, no less at least eight years. You simply wouldn’t have believed that so much of the Republican Party (and all too many other Americans) would ever have become Trumpublicans.

Under the circumstances, can there be any question that we now live in an upside-down, gloom-and-doom version of a fairy-tale world? Why, just as I was writing this, President Trump decided to launch a new series of air strikes against Iran (yes, Iran!), claiming that “we have a score to settle.” And he’s certainly a big-time score-settler, though who really knows what he’s doing or why—probably not even him. He just seems to get the urge to sockittothem and we’re off to the races.

Isn’t it strange that the man who, once upon a time, wrote The Art of the Deal can’t quite seem to imagine making a deal with anyone anymore? Actually, as he said recently when it comes to Iran: “We’re going to have a deal. We may just do it without a deal, because you know what, it’s easier.” Perhaps he should now change the title of his book to The Art of Doing Without a Deal.

And, of course, that shouldn’t be surprising when the people he’s dealing with there are, as he put it recently, “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” He summed things up this way when it comes to Iran, “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars… there’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.” (No matter at all that, only weeks earlier, he had praised them as “very rational people,” “nice to deal with.”)

And what do you do when you’re dealing with sick scum? You bomb the crap out of them. Or, to put it in sports terms, you sockthem to hell.

At a time when this planet of ours needed rescuing (from us, of course), the American people reelected a man who continues to openly promise to send us—all too literally—to the blazes. He’s simply hot, hot, hot, the very word he used for Trumpian rapper and “White House Barbi” Nicki Minaj. (”We also have a woman that is so respected and so hot and so great and such a great friend of, I don’t say conservative, I say of common sense.”)

You, of course, could say the very same thing about Donald J. Trump. He’s so hot, and the one thing he seems determined to do on this overheating planet of ours is heat ever more of it (which war, of course, accomplishes in a particularly striking fashion).

So, here we all are with a president determined to play sockher, sockhim, sockthem, and sockplanetEarth for at least another two and a half years. And where will we all be then? Sockme if I know?

The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get rid of what it considers to be “undesirable” people.

The administration has removed temporary protected status (TPS) for more than a million people from over a dozen countries. It is sending people back to active war zones in Sudan and Somalia. It is deporting people to Myanmar, a country under a military dictatorship. In the case of Venezuela, it is returning people to a country struggling to deal with the aftereffects of an earthquake.

Some holders of this status have been in the country for a long time. Nearly 90% of the 170,000 Salvadorans who have TPS, first granted 25 years ago, participate in the US labor force, contributing over US$5 billion to the US economy.

The administration makes no exceptions in its campaign to deport anyone and everyone. Even as it has promised to fight a war on behalf of the people of Iran, it has reportedly provided information about Iranian asylum-seekers to the Iranian government. These details about their lives, such as their sexual orientation and religious beliefs, make it even more likely that they will be persecuted on return. Dozens of Russians, who don’t enjoy TPS, were flown back to Russia, where several were immediately slapped with draft notices.

The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive.

There is no length to which the administration won’t go to deport people, even American citizens like the children born in the United States who were kicked out of the country along with their parents. So far, the Supreme Court has blocked the administration’s attempt to overturn the “birthright citizenship” clause in the US Constitution. But President Donald Trump is still pushing his allies to take up the fight in Congress to change the law.

The administration even tried to add 2.7 million living people to the “Death Master File,” which is a database of dead people maintained by the Social Security Administration. Trump’s plan was to make life so difficult for people declared “dead” that they would self-deport or, if they showed up to dispute their “death,” to detain them in preparation for deportation. It was only because of a whistleblower that this plan didn’t go into effect.

But the most visible effort by the US government has been to target the approximately 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” who, as of 2023, constituted over 4% of the US population. Such immigrants keep the American economy afloat by picking fruit, slaughtering cows, building houses, and taking care of the elderly.

Trump’s mass deportation campaign, in other words, would wreck the US economy. The undocumented don’t take away jobs from native-born Americans because the latter generally don’t want the jobs that immigrants fill. But the administration is willing to risk economic disaster in its effort to keep America a predominantly white country.

Trump’s anti-immigrant plan has not just evicted people. It has not just locked them away in detention centers. It has killed them.

In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were involved in two killings. Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national living with his wife and young daughter in a small town in Maine, was not the subject of an ICE raid, but ICE agents killed him anyway. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant, was a businessman and father of three on his way to work in Houston when agents stopped his car and shot him.

More than a dozen people have died in these kinds of interactions with ICE, including two US citizens—Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good—protesting ICE actions in Minnesota.

The number of detainees who have died in custody is even higher. Tens of thousands of people are being held in detention facilities that the Trump administration has established around the country. Despite administration claims that it is only deporting dangerous criminals, more than 70% of those detained have no prior criminal convictions.

More than 50 people have died in the detention facilities, a rate that is more than twice as high as Trump’s first term. They have died because of conditions inside the facilities or because they didn’t receive sufficient medical care. Several have died by suicide.

The Trump administration has pledged to deport a million people a year. It hasn’t quite reached that benchmark, with the administration itself claiming around 900,000 deportations as of mid-May. It has also claimed that more than 2 million people have self-deported. However, without transparent data from the Department of Homeland Security, it is difficult to verify the administration’s claims.

These numbers are critical to the administration’s approval rating. On virtually all other policies, Trump is losing popularity. Inflation numbers remain high, and the economy is failing millions of Americans. The war in Iran continues to push up gas prices. The administration is still dogged by controversies around budget cuts, corruption, anti-vaccine policies, and connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The overall approval rating for the administration is around 37%, with a large percentage of independent voters now adopting negative views of the president.

The one issue where a sizable number of Americans still approve of administration policies, however, is immigration. Compared to the economy at 33% and the war in Iran at 29%, 40% of Americans approve of his immigration policies. But even here the numbers are declining, since half of Americans supported his approach to immigration when he took office in 2025.

The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive. The detention and deportation of key members of communities—hard workers, religious leaders, even those espousing the same conservative family values of the administration—have led to a significant decline in anti-immigrant sentiment among Republicans.

Still, with the economy on the rocks and the war in Iran nowhere near an end, the Republicans will likely try to emphasize the “success” of the administration on immigration policy in the upcoming midterm elections in November. It will be a desperate strategy. As more information comes out about lives lost, communities harmed, and an economy hobbled by the loss of critical workers, the administration’s deportation strategy may turn out to be a failure politically as well for the president and his party.

President Donald Trump is asking for $1,500,000 million for the military for next year. That’s close to $600 billion (adjusted for inflation) more than we were spending on the military in fiscal year 2025, before Trump took office.

This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around 8% of the total budget. This spending request dwarfs sums that are often the subject of major debates in Washington.

For example, last year Democrats pushed to have the enhanced subsidies in the Affordable Care Act exchanges extended. This would have cost $30 billion a year, one twentieth of what Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth are demanding.

People may recall Elon Musk gleefully putting the US Agency for International Development into the “wood chipper” last spring. While ending this program is expected to lead to 4 million additional deaths over the next four years, it only saved around $35 billion a year. That is less than 6% of the increase in military spending that Trump is asking for.

Is the argument that in just 18 months in office, Trump has made the world so much less safe that we have to increase the defense budget by two-thirds?

The annual cost of extending the enhanced child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half, was around $100 billion a year, less than one-fifth of Trump’s proposed increase. And the annual appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was $550 million, less than one thousandth of the additional spending for the military that Trump is demanding. (It’s in the chart, just small to see.)

People need to know that Trump’s military spending request is really big money, compared to almost anything else that ever comes up for public debate for Congress. Unfortunately, because of incompetent or corrupt budget reporting, few news accounts make any effort to put these huge numbers in a context that makes them understandable for their audience. As a result, most people will probably have little idea of what is at stake with this military request.

Any self-proclaimed deficit hawk who is not all hair on fire about Trump’s budget demand is a lying hypocrite who only uses concerns about the deficit to argue against programs they don’t like. We got along fine with the former level of military spending, which almost everyone, including Donald Trump in his first term, considered adequate.

Is the argument that in just 18 months in office, Trump has made the world so much less safe that we have to increase the defense budget by two-thirds? Most of us knew that making our former allies into enemies was not a good idea, but Trump is placing a huge price tag on this mistake. And remember, this is Trump’s own number, not his critics’.