We’re all living in a world—and in bodies—more polluted with plastic than the one our parents grew up in. And with global plastic production increasing by 3-3.5% annually and expected to double by 2040 or 2050, our children, and their children, will inherit even more plastic particles in everything from their food systems to their internal organs.

Two new pieces of media shine a light on the enormous harm that these invasive plastics are causing to our health across generations—and how Big Oil and the plastics industry have not only caused this crisis but also are bent on continuing it with no end in sight.

The Netflix documentary Plastics Detox details how the endocrine-disrupting chemicals from plastics contaminate three generations: the mother, the fetus, and the fetus' developing reproductive cells—“a toxic trespass," according to an expert interviewed by the film’s producers. Following environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Dr. Shanna Swan as she strives to help couples struggling with infertility, the film shows how chemicals found in plastic are identified as major endocrine disruptors, significantly contributing to hormone dysfunction, lower sperm quality, and falling fertility rates.

Just as viewers begin to wonder, how did we even get here? How is there so much plastic in… well, everything? California Attorney General Rob Bonta appears on screen, succinctly explaining that “the entire plastics industry is built on a lie”—that we can simply recycle our way out of the problem. “The only reason that plastics today are ubiquitous is because the people were told that this product can be recycled,” Bonta explains. Investigations from the Center for Climate Integrity and others have revealed that the major fossil fuel and petrochemical companies that produce and sell plastics have long known recycling was not a technically or economically viable solution to plastic waste.

Attorney General Bonta has the right idea—we need to bring an end to the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry lies.

On behalf of California, Bonta has filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against ExxonMobil that seeks to hold the oil giant, and the world’s biggest producer of the polymers used in single-use plastics, accountable for helping to create and push that myth.

A new book by journalist Beth Gardiner, Plastics Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet, details the more than 100-year evolution of the plastics industry, including the industry’s deliberate efforts to reshape our society from one that, coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, reduced and reused its materials to one that simply disposed of them. Disposability equals profitability to the industry. Gardiner details how plastics’ inability to be reused or recycled was not a bug, but a feature. As one industry leader put it at the 1956 Society of Plastics Industry conference, “The future of plastics is in the trash can.” To actualize plastics’ true selling potential, the industry would have to “teach people how to waste.”

From there, the world’s leading petrochemical companies, with their ethos of single-use disposability, went on to create the plastic waste crisis. The American public, though, quickly became wary of plastic pollution and began to push back. In response, the industry first promoted landfilling and incineration to hide the plastic from view. But it quickly became clear that these disposal options would not placate a public frustrated by a flood of disposable plastics. People did not want more landfills, did not want incineration, and did not want plastic in the environment. This public outcry led to calls for bans on single-use plastics. To protect their markets, the petrochemical companies began a decades-long, coordinated effort to sell the public on plastic recycling—despite their knowledge that it was neither technically nor economically viable.

No amount of effort, investment, public education, or consumer diligence can overcome a material that resists recycling at a molecular level. Plastic’s intrinsic structure creates technical and economic barriers that make successful, safe, and scalable plastic recycling impossible—barriers that plastics producers identified in their own internal assessments as early as the 1970s. Rather than acknowledging these limitations, the industry has embarked on a nearly half-century long campaign to ensure the public never learned about them.

Now the world’s largest plastics producers make public commitments to expand the use and capacity of chemical (or “advanced”) recycling, even in the face of overwhelming evidence demonstrating that major economic and technical limitations remain unresolved. Chemical recycling operations continue to flounder as a result of predictable issues, including many of the same factors that industry insiders identified decades ago, while companies quietly retreat from their heavily publicized commitments once their public relations value has expired.

We are now awash in plastic. It is literally everywhere, quietly changing our human existence. Attorney General Bonta has the right idea—we need to bring an end to the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry lies. Consumers are legally entitled to make informed decisions. Corporations cannot be given unfettered license to continue to sell us baseless false solution after baseless false solution. They must be held accountable.

The raft of condemnations by Western governments of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir’s taunts of flotilla volunteers whom the Israeli military illegally kidnapped from international waters was attended by a good deal of hypocrisy, since the US government despises them as well, and few European governments support them.

What much of the reporting ignores, however, is how necessary the aid flotilla still is, since the Israelis have gone back to blockading key foodstuffs, medicine and fuel, and continue to shell and bomb people in Gaza. In other words, the genocide continues under the cover of the Hormuz crisis.

IMEMC reports that on Wednesday the Israeli military launched numerous assaults on the Gaza Strip, despite the supposed ceasefire enacted last October.

In the north of the Strip as well as in the center shelling was heard, “with explosions heard near Gaza City and in the areas surrounding the Al‑Bureij and Al‑Maghazi refugee camps, in central Gaza.”

The Gaza Ministry of Health said Israeli attacks had killed one Palestinian whose body was taken to a hospital, and had wounded sixteen others.

Families that came under fire in the north had to flee to central Gaza but had no place to take refuge, huddling in the debris of former schools or apartment buildings. These internally displaced families lack sewage or reliable potable water, putting them at risk of disease.

Rescue teams could not reach several of these areas because the Israelis had destroyed the roads and the rubble proved an obstacle to ambulances. Since the rescue workers could not reach the bombed sites, they could not ensure that people trapped under the destroyed buildings would be extracted.

IMEMC writes, “Humanitarian agencies reported that several neighborhoods in Gaza City and Khan Younis have gone more than ten days without running water. With pumping stations unable to operate due to fuel shortages and damaged infrastructure, sewage overflow has been recorded in multiple districts.”

Surgeons had to put off performing operations. They appear not even to have had alcohol or other antiseptics, so they could not establish a sterile field around patients. They also lacked other essential medicines.

IMEMC continues, regarding health care, “Hospitals across the Strip continued to report severe shortages. Medical teams at the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza and the European Gaza Hospital said they were running critically low on anesthesia, antibiotics, blood products, and basic surgical supplies.”

Many areas in the strip get only 4 hours a day of electricity, since the Israeli military has damaged power lines and prevents enough fuel from getting into the besieged Strip to run generators. That goes for hospitals, too.

Insecurity Insight reports that in the wake of the ceasefire concluded with Iran on April 8, 2026, the Israeli military has increased its assaults in such a way as to harm health facilities and to decrease the ability of patients to get treatment throughout Gaza. The outlet gathered credible information on seven such incidents from April 8 to April 24, whereas in the previous two weeks, when Israeli was bombing Iran, there were four such reported Israeli attacks in Gaza on or near health care facilities.

Israeli troops have been shelling targets near hospitals and at one point directed live fire at a United Nations-administered health center. Insecurity Insight also notes that on April 11 a hospital was forced to shut down one of its main generators due to fuel shortages, leaving vital departments dependent on lower-capacity backup generators operating only for limited hours.

Gaza has also seen a steep fall in bread production as the Israeli government has interfered with flour imports since early April.

This week the DNC released its autopsy of the 2024 election. DNC chair Ken Martin sat on it for months, assured us there was no smoking gun, promised he’d already been sharing the lessons, and then finally dropped the 48,000 words on a Thursday with a note on the front saying the findings don’t reflect the views of the DNC. He released the autopsy and disowned it simultaneously.

I get why he’d disown it. It’s a big turd. But the whole time he buried it, Martin kept saying the lessons from this report were already being put to work. Lessons. We’re keeping the focus on the lessons, he’d say. We’ve been releasing the lessons. I read it, most of it. It’s not that there are no recommendations. There are plenty. Go heavier on digital and connected TV, lighter on broadcast. Organize earlier. Rebuild the state parties. Those are the lessons. If they’ve taken any of them, they’ve taken the wrong ones, and there’s a reason for that.

Every question in the report is a variation on the same question. How do we campaign better with what we’ve got? How do we market this thing more effectively to the people we’re trying to sell it to? Never once do they stop and ask whether the thing they’re selling is bullshit. Whether the product is any good. Whether a single promise in it would fix a single person’s life.

Every problem this autopsy was built to diagnose is still here in 2026, we’ve yet to solve a damn one of them.

It was never about governing. It was about winning for the sake of winning, with no theory of what to do with the power once they have it. The DNC still isn’t looking for a mission of its own. It tells the campaigns to build their own contrast and definition and leaves the meaning to everyone else. The party is a machine with no idea what it’s for.

To the contrary, it’s pretty pleased with itself. The report never once treats the Biden record as a failure. Its gripe about Bidenomics isn’t that it failed people, it’s that the message leaned on big macro statistics instead of the daily reality people were actually living. When the party lost down the ballot, the report decided strong local candidates just needed to define themselves better. They’re certain Democrats are doing a great job, and that it’s just their inability to explain how awesome they are that keeps them out of power.

What I see in this report is the Biden administration in miniature. Biden was sold to us, by the press and by his own people, as proof of what Democrats could do if they got back to their FDR roots. We got the CHIPS Act. We got the IRA. We got the bipartisan infrastructure law. We were told it was the most historic spending in generations. But the rubber never hits the road. Lives weren’t transformed. Why? Because these people refuse to admit that the systems they are funding are no longer productive.

They refuse to look at the difference between an input and an output. Effort and results. You can pour trillions into a financialized housing market and a six-trillion-dollar healthcare industry, but if you never touch the monopolies and the middlemen and the rot underneath, nothing useful comes out the other side. It’s worse than that. Pour more money into an out-of-control healthcare industry and all you’ve built is a stronger monopoly, a more powerful opponent.

It was never about governing. It was about winning for the sake of winning, with no theory of what to do with the power once they have it.

The net result of all that historic spending is a Democratic Party that seventy percent of voters can’t stand and that can’t get above water with its own base. A lot of money. A lot of effort. Nothing delivered. Same as the report.

If you doubt where the party’s head is, count the words. The report runs 48,000 of them. “Spend” shows up 350 times. “Data,” 226. “Organizing,” 211. “Fundraising,” 150. “Monopoly,” zero. “Cost of living,” zero. “Affordability,” four. “Healthcare,” twice. That’s not an analysis of a country in pain. That’s a sales team studying its own pipeline.

Then there’s the New York Times, coming to the rescue with much-needed polling and data. The paper of record put out a poll a few days ago, I assume in an effort to find out how Americans actually feel and what they want from their politics and government. Among people who plan to vote for Democrats, socialism runs favorable by twenty-seven points, 49 to 22. Those same people turn around and say, 52 to 25, that the party should move to the center to win. The Times wants you to read that as confused voters. They aren’t confused. The question is garbage. This is the paper that fancies itself the one asking the hard questions and uncovering the real America, and the hard question it managed to come up with was whether the party should move left, right, or not at all on healthcare.

What does that mean? What’s the policy? What changes in your life? They don’t say. You decide. They never asked whether you want a zero-copay, zero-cost national health plan. They never asked whether we should go back to a country where the states and the cities and the government own some of the hospitals and the clinics and the research labs. They asked left or right, defined nothing, and then acted stunned when people handed them a tangle.

They asked exactly one real policy question in the whole poll. Whether you’d rather have a candidate who lowers prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gougers, or one who lowers prices by deregulating and building more. Better than two to one, people said go after the ones with the power. The reason was sitting right there. The good sense was sitting right there. They just wouldn’t go looking for it anywhere else.

The good sense was sitting right there. They just wouldn’t go looking for it anywhere else.

They keep us trapped in left and right because it’s the frame they know how to sell. But the world isn’t left and right, and I’m not sure it ever was. It’s something they lay over the top of us, the same way they sort us into black, white, Latino, Jew, Gentile, Muslim, Quaker, the way a zoologist sorts fish into types. It might be a fine theory for eking out a marginal election here and there. It’s a useless theory for fixing a broken system. And there’s overwhelming agreement out there that the system is broken.

Every problem this autopsy was built to diagnose is still here in 2026, we’ve yet to solve a damn one of them. The NYT poll proves it. Same disgust, same broken trust, same party underwater with its own people. Nothing got fixed because nothing got understood. And they’re going to win anyway. Not because they earned it. Because the other side is handing it to them.

So they’ll win in November, call it proof the model works, and walk right back into the same wall in 2028 having learned nothing. Winning is the very thing that lets them skip getting better.

We’re in a deeply unpopular war in the Middle East. Gas is climbing. The president is corrupt as hell and everyone can see it. The headwind is so strong that, as Pelosi once put it, you could run a glass of water with a D next to its name and win in half these districts. So they’ll win in November, call it proof the model works, and walk right back into the same wall in 2028 having learned nothing. Winning is the very thing that lets them skip getting better.

So no, I don’t think we live in a left-right world anymore. We live in a world of capacity, of competency, of outcomes. That’s the whole game now, and it’s exactly where the government and the corporations have failed us, over and over, while the political class argues about a spectrum that means nothing to a family trying to buy groceries. It is not baked in. I’ve spent ten years trying to build something that takes that seriously, and I’m going again, harder, with my latest political project: A Fight Worth Having.

How we do it, and why I think the people telling us to keep our hands clean have it exactly backwards, is next.

The fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, told CNBC earlier this week that he doesn’t think people making $70,000 a year should pay a penny in income taxes. For him, that’s a threefer.

First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.

Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”

If we just got rid of — or privatized/profitized — all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.

Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.

Here’s how it works: If Bezos is paying an Amazon programmer $70,000 a year and that programmer then pays $12,000 a year in income taxes (his example, only for “a nurse in Queens”), their after-tax take-home pay is $58,000. That $58K is what they’re actually living on, and Bezos knows it.

So, if their income tax payment goes away, Bezos can drop their pay from $70K to $58K and they won’t notice any change at all in their lifestyle. And Bezos gets to keep the difference.

But there are even more fundamental problems with Jeff’s little tax scam. Back in 1904, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Homes Jr famously said, “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” He was right, and it works in two dimensions.

The main one is that taxes represent the money government must collect to cover the cost of the services its citizens have demanded of their elected representatives. With the exception of emergencies like the Civil War and World War II, the money coming into government and the money spent out should pretty much be in balance. And, with the exception of the period since 1981, they historically have been.

When Ronald Reagan first put into place the GOP’s infamous “Two Santas” strategy of running up the debt during Republican presidencies and squealing about the national debt to block legislation during Democratic presidencies, he broke with an understanding and tradition that dated back to George Washington’s presidency.

Reagan tripled what was left of our WWII national debt, which Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter had all paid down to a mere $800 billion by 1981. He deficit-spent like crazy, producing an illusion of good times because of the stimulus of all that purchasing, and left us a $2.4 trillion national debt when he handed the reins of government over to GHW Bush.

While both Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama tried to go along with the GOP and balance or near-balance budgets during their presidencies, the Two Santas spending of GW Bush and Trump has exploded our national debt to $39 trillion, about the same as the sum of all economic activity in the country (our GDP).

As I noted a few weeks ago, if we weren’t paying a trillion dollars a year in just interest on that debt, we could have a national healthcare system and free college education right now.

But keeping us from having nice things — from healthcare to education to housing to an electrified grid — is one of the main goals of the GOP’s Two Santas deficit-spending program.

Each of those programs has to be paid for with tax dollars, and morbidly rich people who are obsessed with making more, more, more want them all killed off.

“We can’t afford it because of the national debt!” is their favorite mantra. “Democrats must shoot their Santa of Social Security and other programs in the face by ‘cutting spending’ before we can talk about taxes!”

The simple reality is that income taxes are largely irrelevant to the lives of working class people. If they got a big tax cut, as noted earlier, their employers would simply reduce their pay to make up for it, or at least freeze it until inflation caught up. If their taxes go up, on the other hand, pressure falls on employers to raise gross (before-tax) pay enough to keep take-home pay where it had been.

Tax increases on working class people, in other words, lead to pay increases, while tax cuts on working class people inevitably lead to pay freezes or cuts, as the history of every tax increase since 1913 and every tax cut since Reagan’s first in 1981 proves.

On the other hand, the rules are completely different for the morbidly rich. If they pay less in taxes, they keep more money for themselves because they’re generally the ones determining how much they take out of their businesses or trust funds, not some employer. When taxes go up, they have less to throw into their money bins.

Which brings up the second and really most important dimension of taxation: it’s supposed to incentivize behaviors society wants and discourage behaviors that harm the rest of us.

When we wanted people to buy cars to increase the mobility of Americans and jump-start the car industry after WWII, we made the interest on car loans tax-deductible. Ditto for house purchases. When the auto industry matured and there was no longer a reason to encourage new car purchases, we did away with that tax deduction.

The things people call “loopholes,” in other words, should be carefully designed to encourage behaviors we want, and historically have been.

We want companies to do research and design to develop new products and make our economy vibrant, so we offer R&D tax deductions. We don’t want companies “making money” by manipulating their own stock prices, so we attach a huge penalty to companies buying back their own stock (or we did until Reagan legalized this form of stock price manipulation in 1983).

And tax rates should be high enough to discourage the kind of hoarding and other antisocial behavior we don’t want rich people engaging in. Prior to Reagan shattering our tax system, people at the top of the economic pyramid generally weren’t in a bizarre competition to amass and display conspicuous levels of wealth.

Certainly, there were dynastic families and people who had fancy houses in the Hamptons, but by and large people with control over their own income (the CEO class) maxxed out their annual take-home around $2 or $3 million because above that the 74-90% tax rate began to bite. The Hearst Castle was the exception that proved the rule; most of the “wealthy” lived in nice suburbs like Beverly Hills and Long Island.

Republicans have been playing cynical tax games with the American public ever since Jude Wanniski invented his Two Santas strategy for the GOP back in the 1970s, and our media generally plays along both to keep in good Republican graces and also because so few people (including reporters) actually understand taxes and taxation theory.

There’s a popular internet meme where an American asks a European, “How can you be happy when you pay so much in taxes?”

The European replies by calmly listing everything those taxes pay for — free health care, free college, inexpensive childcare, quality public transit, a strong social safety net — and then says, “You have to pay a billionaire and his markup for all of those things; we get them for free.”

Similarly, years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV in Asia. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”

“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”

There are a few wealthy Americans, like Tom Steyer, who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks.

And Jeff Bezos is just the most recent to publicly try to run this scam on us.

On Wednesday, Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, publicly shared videos of the mistreatment of the activists of the Global Sumud Flotilla, illegally intercepted by Israeli forces earlier this week in international waters, including in broad daylight.

In addition to condemnation by representatives of several countries, Ben Gvir also faced internal criticism. Israel’s Prime Minister himself, Benjamin Netanyahu, expressed his disapproval by saying that “[t]he way that Minister Ben-Gvir dealt with the flotilla activists is not in line with Israel's values and norms.”

This is where I invite you to pause the unfolding story. Let’s put what we are seeing in other words: Israel’s Prime Minister, who has an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is telling one of his ministers that his treatment of illegally captured activists doesn’t match Israel’s values and norms. Netanyahu says that after congratulating the Israeli army for intercepting the flotilla just days ago. According to him, this kind of abuse is not what Israel is about; Ben-Gvir, his own minister, should not form our image of Israel.

A question comes to mind: If it is not his own government official's, whose actions, according to Netanyahu himself, should we consider as we form an image of Israel’s values and norms?

For the ones willing to listen, Israel’s actions have spoken louder than any of its hasbara statements and have represented its values and norms very clearly.

Could it be when the Israeli soldiers continuously brag about their looting in Gaza on social media, when armed settlers—protected by the Israeli army—increasingly torch Palestinian houses in the West Bank, or when “Death to Arabs!” is being shouted with pride by the marchers on Jerusalem Day each year?

Would any state policy exemplify those values and norms? Like what we can read in the multiple reports describing systematic torture and sexual violence in Israeli detention (reports by the United Nations, B’Tselem, and Amnesty International)? And if someone argues that the Israeli government is not in fact showing what has become normalized through this specific state policy, it is difficult not to wonder what its values and norms have become when the detention of prison guards, caught brutally sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee on camera, is protested by fellow Israelis, when they are welcomed to Israel TV stations, and finally acquitted of any crime?

This is what this story illustrates: While Israel claims to represent many (for example, the global Jewish community), conveniently, no one seems able to represent Israel itself. Because if official state policies, military instructions and actions, public demonstrations, and the conduct of prison guards supported by the people do not represent Israel’s values and norms, the notion of Israel’s representation has become nothing more than what we find in political dystopias: just words we are supposed to accept.

The words become both the representation and the represented: The world’s most moral army is so because that is how it describes itself; there is no forced starvation because those responsible deny it; the abuse of the Global Sumud Flotilla crew is an exception because the war criminal in charge says he does not approve of it.

This is how simple Israel’s hasbara has become. And if it purely relies on the credulousness of its audience, who is left in that audience by now?

It is clear to see that this Orwellian reality is cracking. US citizens’ support for Israel is at an all-time low. The petition to suspend European Union-Israeli trade reached over a million signatures. Even something as seemingly unshakable as Europe’s fascination with Eurovision saw five countries and many viewers boycott the show due to Israel’s participation. The Government Pension Fund of Norway, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, divested from 11 companies, including Israeli banks, because of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank. For the ones willing to listen, Israel’s actions have spoken louder than any of its hasbara statements and have represented its values and norms very clearly.

Ultimately, what Netanyahu’s comment shows is a complete disconnect from reality. And perhaps that is the ultimate representation of how Israel and its supporters are left to operate.

“It’s got no anything,” President Donald Trump said of Somalia in a recent xenophobic rant. “All they do is run around shooting each other.”

As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession.

US troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H. W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, US and United Nations troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The next month, in a major escalation, US helicopter gunships attacked a house in that city where a group of Somali clan leaders was meeting. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 54 people were killed and 161 wounded. Aidid claimed that 73 Somalis had died, including women and children, and more than 200 had been wounded. US forces suffered no casualties whatsoever.

Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the US has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa.

And it wasn’t long before—in the early 2000s, under Bush’s son, George W., as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror—American troops began slaughtering Somalis again. In addition to major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush, the younger, launched early drone wars from Pakistan to Yemen, including in Somalia. His successor, President Barack Obama, upped the Forever War ante, becoming an assassin-in-chief in Somalia and beyond. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, continued the drone war there, too, when he entered the White House.

However, for all those years of slaughter in Somalia, no American president has ever attacked Somalis with the persistence and at the rate of President Donald J. Trump, especially in his second term in office.

The second Bush administration conducted 11 airstrikes in Somalia, killing as many as 144 people—including possibly 55 civilians, according to the think tank New America. Obama presided over 48 strikes during his eight years in office that killed as many as 553 people. Trump’s first term saw a massive escalation in such drone strikes. Over his first four years, Trump carried out 219 attacks, a 271% increase over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But even that spike has paled in comparison to the relentless rate of attacks during Trump’s second term in office. While Biden exceeded Obama’s total in half the time—51 strikes in four years—Trump is already set to eclipse his own infamous first-term record in less than a year and a half. He has presided over at least 190, if not more, air strikes in Somalia.

Trump’s killing spree in Somalia is just a small part of his wider war on the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has the US military “run[ning] around shooting” people on an epic scale. During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations—including air strikes, commando raids, proxy conflicts, so-called 127e programs, and full-scale wars—in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. His second term has, in fact, been a furious blitz of global war making, only half noticed by the American news media. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents during just three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the US also struck a civilian boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the US has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” said Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a British-based organization that tracks civilian harm globally. She also pointed to attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the eastern Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

A War on Children

Since the US began conducting air strikes in Somalia back in 2007, as many as 170 civilians have been killed, according to Airwars. The US military has, however, only admitted to six of those deaths and 11 other injuries—and has never publicly apologized to any families of the victims or those who survived its attacks.

In one April 2018 attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term, a US drone strike killed at least three (and possibly five) civilians. A woman and child were among the dead, according to formerly secret US military investigation documents, but the same report concluded that their identities might never be known. A 2023 investigation I undertook for The Intercept, however, exposed the details of that disastrous attack. The woman and child—22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse—survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, said of the Americans who killed his sister and niece: “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable.”

More recently, President Trump has been responsible for the slaughter of scores, if not hundreds, of children in his war of choice in Iran. “US-Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team, told this reporter and other journalists during a recent press briefing. The deaths include more than 150 children killed in a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran. The preliminary findings of a US military investigation into that attack acknowledged that the United States was indeed responsible, contradicting assertions by President Trump that Iran struck the school. Publicly, however, the Pentagon continues to evade responsibility. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently told lawmakers, refusing to answer questions about the attack during testimony on Capitol Hill.

Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) US military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones spiked.

The administration has also been responsible for a steady drumbeat of attacks on civilians in the waters surrounding Latin America. Under Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration has conducted around 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing close to 200 civilians since last September. Trump officials have insisted that the victims are members of one of at least 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties insist that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Trump has also killed and wounded many people in Yemen, including dozens of Ethiopian civilians killed in an attack on an immigrant detention center there last year. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the US military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said recently. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the US military has taken to address it.”

In the spring of 2025, Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by US airstrikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes (codenamed Operation Rough Rider) against that country’s Houthi government. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at a minimum of 238 civilians, with another 467 civilians injured.

Such deaths are just part of a long butcher’s bill in Yemen stretching back to the very beginning of Trump’s first term. A report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights examined 12 US attacks in Yemen between January 2017 and January 2019, 10 of them “counterterrorism airstrikes.” The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians—19 men, six women, and 13 children—were killed and seven others injured in the attacks. Among them was a raid by Navy SEALs on a Yemeni village just days after Trump took office for the first time in which women and children died. A year later, the US fired a missile into a sports utility vehicle near the village of Al Uqla. Three of the men inside were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor, Adel Al Manthari, was gravely wounded and forced to turn to a GoFundMe campaign in 2022 to save his life.

“The Attack Was Horrible and Their Response Was Horrible. I Lost a Wife and a Child”

“It’s a horrible place,” Trump said of Somalia during that same racist rant. “Everything is horrible over there.”

Horrible is a word I also recall from my trip to Somalia to meet the family of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse in 2023.

The US attack that killed the mother and daughter was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed, imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members, according to the military investigation conducted later, considered themselves inexperienced. That inquiry led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias (a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information confirming their preexisting beliefs). Despite that, the investigation exonerated the team involved.

To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam—or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia.

“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” according to that investigation. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, was stunned as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told me. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

Trump had, in fact, secretly issued loosened rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including for drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a partially redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of US airstrikes in Somalia had skyrocketed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, recalled. During the Obama administration, by contrast, strikes required high-level approval, according to a drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.” Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) US military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones spiked.

“They have nothing but crime,” President Trump—himself a convicted felon 34 times over—said of Somalia, as he raged on about that country.

To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam—or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia. Nor has anyone been held responsible for those killed in the strike in Yemen that gravely wounded Adel Al Manthari. Or those slain in the raid on a Yemeni village by Navy SEALs. Or the innocents who died in the attack on an immigrant detention center in that country. Or in the strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Or for the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran.

Some of those attacks could well have been categorized as crimes of war. Others are certainly extrajudicial killings—or, simply put, outright murders. Those deaths and so many others can be traced back to Donald Trump and his contempt for the lives of people across this planet.

“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it. “It’s a horrible place,” he continued about Somalia.

And once again, every accusation of his should be considered a confession, too.

Washington usually measures American decline in external terms: China’s rise, Russia’s revisionism, strained alliances, and military crises in the Middle East. But one of the clearest warnings is coming from inside the United States. In 2025, only 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job where they lived, 21 points below Americans 55 and older. In no other surveyed country was the generational gap this wide.

That finding should unsettle a country that is still speaking the language of primacy. Young Americans are not turning gloomy because they have forgotten how to be optimistic. They are reading the economy in front of them. Youth unemployment stood at 9.5% in April. Renter cost burdens hit a record 22.7 million households in 2024. The share of first-time home buyers fell to a record-low 21%, while the median first-time buyer’s age rose to 40. For a generation told that education, discipline, and work would translate into stability, the bargain looks broken.

This is not only a domestic story. It is also a foreign policy failure, because budgets reveal what a government treats as urgent. The Defense Department’s 2026 request totaled $961 billion, among the largest inflation-adjusted requests of the past half century. Additional military-related funding has pushed “national defense” spending beyond $1 trillion. The point is not that every dollar spent on the Pentagon could be mechanically converted into a job, an apartment, or a mortgage. The point is that Washington still knows how to mobilize at scale—but most reliably when the beneficiaries are weapons programs, contractors, and permanent military infrastructure.

The war with Iran has made that imbalance harder to ignore. By May, the US campaign had cost an estimated $29 billion, including operations and equipment repair or replacement. The conflict has also disrupted energy flows through one of the world’s most important corridors, raising the risk that households already squeezed by rent, debt, insurance, and food costs will face still more pressure. For young workers, “foreign policy” is not abstract when it comes back as higher prices, lower confidence, and another delay in leaving home.

If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys.

Washington often treats these costs as unfortunate side effects of leadership. They are better understood as evidence of an outdated model of security. A country is not secure simply because it can strike targets, protect bases, or surge forces across oceans. It is secure when its people can see a future worth defending. A state that can finance escalation faster than housing, debt relief, or public investment teaches its younger citizens a bleak lesson: Their insecurity is manageable, but imperial credibility is an emergency.

A serious foreign policy would start from that recognition. It would pursue diplomacy with Iran rather than convert each crisis into a test of dominance. It would restore the congressional role in decisions of war and peace. It would subject military spending to the same moral and fiscal scrutiny imposed on social programs. And it would treat economic security at home as part of national security, not as an afterthought to be discussed after the next supplemental defense bill.

This is not a call for withdrawal from the world. It is a call to abandon the habit of confusing militarization with responsibility. The United States can cooperate, mediate, trade, provide humanitarian assistance, and support climate resilience without treating armed escalation as the default proof of seriousness. In fact, a foreign policy built around restraint would be more credible abroad precisely because it would be more defensible at home.

The warning from young Americans is not just that the job market feels weak. It is that the future feels rationed. If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys. It will appear in politics, institutions, and the country’s declining ability to persuade anyone—including its own citizens—that American power still serves a public purpose. The real measure of decline is not only what rivals do to the United States. It is what the United States keeps choosing to do to itself.

We know the Trump Department of Justice has threatened individuals they consider political opponents. Echoing authoritarian regimes worldwide, they’re now indicted Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC.

In response, major Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs), including Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab, have prevented clients from donating to SPLC, cutting the organization off from funding without even a shred of due process. If the DAFs follow this precedent, it could eliminate a key source of funding for any nonprofits this—or any future—administration chooses to attack.

The funds claim their action is necessary because, according to the administration, it constituted fraud for SPLC to have paid hate group informants. But federal and state law enforcement agencies have known about the infiltrations for years, using information they provided to help secure indictments and convictions. So the charges are spurious.

Fidelity justified its actions by citing a policy of pausing DAF giving if an organization “is being investigated for alleged illegal activities… such as terrorism, money laundering, hate crimes or fraud,” or if “state and federal agencies” are investigating a charitable organization. Schwab’s fund quietly removed SPLC from its list of eligible nonprofits, and a representative read me similar boilerplate, saying the fund was deciding on next steps.

If the Trump administration and its enablers can do this to SPLC, they can do it to far smaller and more vulnerable nonprofits.

The danger is far larger than the SPLC case. The listed criteria would let federal or state authorities cripple any nonprofit they choose, simply by launching an investigation. The organization doesn’t have to be convicted, or even indicted. They just have to be investigated, which makes this a perfect way to target political opponents. The administration has already issued a memorandum promising investigations of groups that promote “anti-fascism,” “anti-Christianity,” or “hostility” toward “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” It’s threatened Wikipedia, the Vera Institute for Justice, and the governmental watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, not to mention major universities. All the federal government, or even a state government, would need to do to launch a DAF freeze is to open an official public investigation. And these major DAFs would then block the targeted organization from receiving funding.

The implications aren’t confined to the Trump administration. Under this precedent, Democrats holding power could do the same to disfavored nonprofits. Just launching an investigation would cut off a significant part of a targeted organization’s money flow. The defunding or banning of targeted NGOs is exactly what Vladimir Putin did in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. It’s a classic way to eliminate opposition and consolidate power. And the anticipatory compliance of Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab is the exact kind of response that empowers would-be dictatorships, whatever their politics.

If a nonprofit is convicted of fraud or money laundering, it’s of course legitimate to remove or suspend their 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. But SPLC has neither been tried nor convicted, so the DAFs are letting a hostile administration’s mere accusation of wrongdoing become an excuse to block funding. The $326 billion of money that DAFs hold is part of the lifeblood of nonprofits. The actions of these DAFs directly undermine democracy by excluding a group the administration has targeted and potentially denying funding to other targeted groups. That’s true whatever you think of SPLC.

If there’s a nonprofit that could weather this, it’s SPLC, with its $786 million endowment. I don’t give to them because I think other groups are more impactful for the money they spend. But if the Trump administration and its enablers can do this to SPLC, they can do it to far smaller and more vulnerable nonprofits. For instance, they could target nonpartisan voter engagement groups, drying up funding (including pledged contributions) at the point when these groups need it the most to engage citizens in democracy. Damaging attacks on nonprofit funding also don’t have to come from the federal Department of Justice. Under Fidelity’s criteria, attacks could come from state governments as well, with potential targets including either conservative or liberal groups depending on which party runs a particular state.

But ordinary citizens have the power to change this. The campaigns that got ABC to reinstate Jimmy Kimmel offer a model. This issue has less visibility, but for the nonprofits it could affect is equally critical. If we have money in a DAF, our calls or emails could well make the difference. Schwab told me that they’d been getting lots of critical responses. But even if we don’t have a DAF, nearly 60% of us have retirement or other investment accounts, with most housed at the major affiliated brokerages. So we can reach out as well, threatening to switch our investments to brokerages that don’t empower authoritarian initiatives, like TIAA-CREF (at least for now Merrill Lynch-Bank of America is still putting through grants as well), and, if we have DAF’s, transfer them to ones that haven’t banned SPLC contributions, like Amalgamated Bank, Impact Assets, or Daffy. A group of socially responsible investment advisers have created a sign-on letter. New York’s historic Riverside Church just divested $12 million from Vanguard. A long-time activist friend created a leavefidelity.com site with cut and paste templates to send to the companies involved.

The goal is to echo what people did in the Kimmel situation when they boycotted the channels, advertisers, and theme park properties of national ABC-Disney and local Sinclair and Nextstar stations. People also protested in front of affiliated ABC stations—something they could do at the headquarters of the relevant brokerage houses. While DAFs are technically separate entities, they share investment management, administration, and the parent brand, which offers them as an incentive for clients. So we’re far from powerless.

The job of the brokerage houses is not to police client giving. Their affiliated DAFs need to allow donations to all legitimate nonprofits, whether or not the Trump administration—or any administration—agrees with what they do.

A recent political event at a local community center left me smiling. A Latina special educator teacher running for state legislature had gathered a room full of supporters. Labor union members, religious leaders, political activists, family, and friends showed up in the late afternoon this spring to help her launch her campaign. The fundraising pitch was co-led by a very exuberant trans performer and a buttoned-up county prosecutor, filling the space with laughter and donations.

It was just one event, but it reminded me that building grassroots power goes hand in hand with building community. Both will be needed if the upcoming midterm elections are to be the pivot we need. This is the time grassroots power can stop fascism and begin the long but hopeful journey to an inclusive, fair, and sustainable world.

What Has Community Got to Do With It?

We are bombarded by news of the disastrous policies coming out of a billionaire-led administration, following the marching orders of the tech bros; the Heritage Foundation’s corporate agenda; and, according to conjecture, such foreign leaders as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s enough to create chronic panic.

Less often discussed are the victories of the people working together in their neighborhoods and towns to push back on Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns and AI data complexes, to stand up for voting rights, and to fight to get food and healthcare to those cut off from these basic needs. These grassroots groups are also providing essential backing to the elected officials who are standing up to the Trump regime’s worst abuses.

History shows that fascism can overrun a society when people are fractured and isolated. We can counter powerlessness when we act with others where we live.

These victories don’t come from national Democratic Party leaders or celebrities. They come from ordinary people who show up; work together; and build the trust, relationships, and coordination that make further action possible.

The Midterms Pivot

This grassroots power will make the difference in the upcoming midterm elections, which could in turn determine whether fascism strengthens its hold on American life.

Poll after poll is telling us that growing majorities of Americans oppose President Donald Trump’s policies, and that his disapproval rating is reaching unprecedented levels. Still, there are strong headwinds for those working for change.

Funding for progressive grassroots work is falling short, according to a recent analysis by the Movement Voters Project. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is rolling out executive orders and court cases that can discourage voting by those who might oppose him, removing citizens from the voting rolls, raising false claims about election integrity, and putting bureaucratic roadblocks in the way of casting a ballot.

And then it got worse. On April 29, 2026, the US Supreme Court ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case struck a near-fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act. After years of struggle for equal voting rights for African Americans, this case threatens to fracture the power of Black communities, diluting their ability to elect members of Congress and state and local officials who truly represent them. According to Black Voters Matter, the ruling threatens to create an additional 19 entrenched seats for Republicans in Congress, and 191 entrenched Republican legislative seats.

But here is what the ruling also did: It relocated the battle to exactly the terrain where organized communities are strongest—the state and local level. The people with the most power to determine what happens in November are not in Washington. They are wherever you are, deciding whether to show up.

How we organize locally could make the difference.

Building power means inviting in people who have not been active until now. It means building an agenda for a better, more inclusive future, and making political gatherings a time for community building as well as for carrying out effective strategies. It means prioritizing collaboration across races and identities and issues to build power for the common good. Now is the time—during primary season, when we have the most leverage.

Here’s what that looks like:

We Need to Keep Voting Accessible, Safe, and Fair. Restore Voting Rights

Elections are run by state and local officials, not by the federal government. The work varies by region, but wherever you are, you can work with your local, county, and state officials to make district maps fair, to ensure polling stations are secure and that eligible voters have unfettered access to the polls, and that the election process is free from bias and intimidation.

The Callais decision makes this work tougher, but it also is unleashing the unstoppable energy of those who have been excluded too often and for too long.

Organize Sustained Grassroots Power. Candidates Are Not the Whole Story

Elected officials work for us. We have the right to set the agenda, and find and elect candidates who will carry out our priorities. And we have the right to hold incumbents accountable. For the vast majority of us who lack billions of dollars, building power means organizing: creating collaborations among existing groups, creating new groups when needed, affiliating with regional and national organizations when appropriate. It means building connections and power year round, not only during election season.

National groups that are effective in building grassroots power include the Movement Voters Project, which supports grassroots groups building progressive power, especially in swing states, year round, not only during election season. The Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, which played key roles in organizing and mobilizing the massive grassroots campaign that won the New York mayoral election for Zohran Mamdani. Your local Democratic Party might—or might not—be helpful.

Elect Fighters!

This is the right time, during the primaries, to challenge incumbents to take strong positions supporting voting rights and the interests of all working people in our communities, not the corporations and billionaires. Ask candidates tough questions when they are on home visits or campaigning. Research their voting records. Hold candidates forums.

If the incumbent is caving in to corporate interests or racist gerrymandering, taking money from American Israel Public Affairs Committee or Wall Street PACs, or failing to fight for poor and working class people, support strong candidates who challenge them. In the general election, we may need to support any candidate who will oppose MAGA, but in the primaries, we should press for the leadership that will best serve us.

Spread Stories of Power, Not Just Fear

Many of us live with the daily drama of Trump’s latest impulses. It’s hard to avoid. But we need to remember that there is so much more to our nation’s story. Research and share news about the progressive office holders and community organizing that is making life better for everyday people. What you share on social media makes a difference. Supply your elected officials with tangible examples of successful policies to help them see a path forward. Write an editorial or letter to the editor of your local newspaper or in your group’s newsletter about wins. Mamdani’s recent successes are great examples—offering free day care for 2-year-olds, and increasing the stock of affordable housing with funding proposed through a tax on luxury second homes.

People need to see what grassroots power looks like, and so do our elected representatives. Allowing the outrages of the MAGA Regime to occupy all of our attention makes us think and feel like victims, preparing for the next blow, rather than embodying our rights to be powerful protagonists. We forget that we can get things done and that we deserve better.

Gather With Others

History shows that fascism can overrun a society when people are fractured and isolated. We can counter powerlessness when we act with others where we live. People want to make a difference—many are just waiting for the right invitation. Create spaces that foster belonging, a topic I explore in my recent zine, “Community As Strategy.” Combine the hard work with joy-filled gatherings. Hold dance parties, picnics, or fun runs. Turn protests into parades.

***

We actually do have a path forward. We can defeat fascism before the remaining institutions of American democracy are corrupted and dismembered. We can do that best by joining together locally and finally offering Americans what so many want—universal healthcare, peace, protection for our natural heritage, an economy that works for working people. We have majority support for many of these positions, and the creativity and energy to make them a reality. Together, we have the power when we organize where we live.

So apparently the Trump administration has decided that what Cuba really needs right now—after decades of economic strangulation, CIA assassination attempts, sabotage campaigns, invasions, sanctions, blackouts, shortages, and more than half a century of failed regime-change policy—is the indictment of 94-year-old revolutionary icon Raúl Castro.

The United States and Cuba do not have to be enemies. In fact, just 10 years ago, the two countries were normalizing relations. I was in Panama City at the 2015 Summit of the Americas when, to the delight of everyone there, former US President Barack Obama and Raúl Castro famously shook hands, marking the first substantial public interaction between leaders of the two countries in decades. Obama said, “The United States is not interested in being prisoners of the past,” while Raúl Castro thanked Obama for taking steps toward normalization and called him “an honest man.” The opening was a win-win for both countries: an influx of US tourists, a flourishing of private businesses, and new openings for civil society. Then came Donald Trump, who sent relations spiraling downward once again.

Fast forward to today, with the indictment of Raúl Castro for allegedly ordering the 1996 shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes that left four men dead. I was in Cuba at the time leading a group of US CEOs interested in investing on the island. The next day, we were supposed to meet with Fidel Castro. But after the planes were shot down, the meeting was canceled and the business executives rushed to take the next flight back to Miami.

It was a tragic and regrettable incident—not only because of the lives lost, but also because it hardened political attitudes toward Cuba for years to come, paving the way for the codification of the US blockade into law.

Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, Cuba poses no threat to the United States. And the United States has absolutely no right—zero—to interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs.

But it’s critical to understand the context.

The group’s leader, José Basulto, was a veteran of the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion with a long history of anti-Cuban militancy. He openly admitted, “I was trained as a terrorist by the United States.” The group repeatedly violated Cuban airspace and dropped anti-government leaflets over Havana. Basulto himself declared after one such mission: “We want confrontation.” Between 1994 and February 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cuban civil aviation authorities documented more than 25 serious and systematic violations of Cuban airspace by aircraft associated with Brothers to the Rescue.

The Cuban government repeatedly warned Washington, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and international aviation authorities that these flights were illegal and dangerous. US officials knew the risks. The National Security Archive’s declassified records, published on May 19, 2026, reveal that high-level US officials understood that continued Cuban airspace violations could lead to disaster. An FAA email from January 22, 1996—one month before the shootdown—explicitly warned of the “worst case scenario” that “one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes.” The same document acknowledged that State Department officials understood the overflights could “only be seen as further taunting of the Cuban Government.”

On February 23, 1996, White House Cuba adviser Richard Nuccio warned National Security Adviser Sandy Berger that “tensions are sufficiently high within Cuba… that we fear this may finally tip the Cubans toward an attempt to shoot down or force down the plane.” Yet the FAA refused Nuccio’s request to ground the flights.

While there is disagreement over whether the planes were ultimately shot down in Cuban or international airspace, the pilots had reportedly filed a false flight plan and again approached Cuban airspace despite direct warnings from Cuban controllers.

The hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro nearly 30 years later is staggering, given the long history of anti-Cuban extremists operating from US soil to wreak havoc against the island with bombings, sabotage, and airline terrorism. In 1976, terrorists bombed Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 people onboard, including the entire Cuban national fencing team. In 1997, a 32-year-old Italian tourist was killed in a hotel bombing aimed at destroying Cuba’s tourism industry. Yet men implicated in these horrific acts, including Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, were protected by US authorities and allowed to live freely in Miami.

And let’s remember: The same US government now pursuing charges against Raúl Castro has itself been carrying out deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, strikes that have killed at least 193 people since September 2025, with no transparency or due process.

This new indictment is simply a cynical escalation in the long US effort to force regime change in Cuba. Will Washington try to use it as a pretext to invade the island and “extract” Raúl Castro, as it did with Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela? Will it once again send US troops to occupy Cuba, as it did in 1898, 1906, and 1912? Will it ignite a civil war? We have no idea.

But we do know this: Despite unfounded allegations to the contrary, Cuba poses no threat to the United States. And the United States has absolutely no right—zero—to interfere in Cuba’s internal affairs.

Raúl Castro is 94 years old. Let him live out his final years in the country where he was born and for which he fought his entire life. Instead of tightening the blockade and pushing Cuba toward greater poverty, instability, migration, and despair, the United States should finally abandon its failed policy of domination, lift the sanctions, and allow Cubans—not Washington politicians or Miami hardliners—to decide Cuba’s future.

With the traditional summer driving season rapidly approaching, gasoline prices in the US—already grossly inflated by President Trump’s ongoing conflict of confusion with Iran—are likely to spike even higher. As of mid-May, the average price at the pump has reached $4.52 a gallon—a 54 percent increase over the pre-war cost. By Memorial Day the average American could be paying more than $5 a gallon—an unthinkable reality just a few months ago.

But how could this be? After all, Trump has claimed for years that a “drill, baby, drill” approach to domestic energy policy, heedlessly advancing the interests of Big Oil, would surely benefit everyday Americans with lower energy costs. What Trump’s foreign and domestic escapades have produced instead was likely his actual intended outcome all along: massive profits for fossil fuel corporations and their executives that helped get him elected. We should be shocked but not surprised that these dirty favors are now being repaid on an unconscionable scale, all at our expense.

As the war with Iran has so glaringly proven, the assertions by Trump and his fellow Republicans about consumer cost benefits of American “energy independence” are a complete sham. There is a remarkably straightforward explanation for this: Domestic oil and gas prices are set by the global marketplace. Our constant interaction with this marketplace, through voluminous oil and gas exporting and importing, makes the US vulnerable to any disruptive occurrence around the world. Increased domestic production does not generally translate to lower energy prices for Americans.

There are key steps that Congress can take right now to substantively reduce fuel costs for US consumers immediately. All they require is the political will to stand up for everyday Americans by standing up to Big Oil.

In recent days Trump has bizarrely claimed that he “doesn’t think at all” about Americans’ financial pain, but has also suggested suspending the federal gasoline tax to provide relief for drivers. This is highly unlikely to make much difference, as little of the modest 18-cent tax would actually be passed down through the supply chain to savings at the pump.

Yet there are key steps that Congress can take right now to substantively reduce fuel costs for US consumers immediately. All they require is the political will to stand up for everyday Americans by standing up to Big Oil.

First, Congress should halt gasoline exports when domestic prices spike. A bill recently introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) would do just this. This simple policy is a no-brainer. A temporary halt on gasoline exports would provide effective insulation from moments of international market turmoil by suddenly bolstering domestic supply and quickly relieving stress on prices at the pump here at home.

The second bill Congress should pass now to help struggling American families is the Windfall Profits Tax—a special levy on the very largest fossil fuel companies. Sponsored by Khanna in the House and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in the Senate, the bill would impose a supplemental quarterly levy based on the difference between “normal” (but still massive) corporate oil profits made last year versus the absolutely mind-blowing profits raked in since price spikes in 2026. Revenue collected would be returned directly back to taxpayers.

Egregious profiteering aside, Americans shouldn’t be asked to subsidize dirty, climate-killing fossil fuels in the first place.

The Windfall Profits Tax would only fall on the very largest fossil fuel corporations, leaving smaller companies accounting for 70 percent of domestic production untouched. This approach would prevent giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron from further gouging consumers without the very real threat of losing significant market share. With oil priced over $100 a barrel, as it is now, the tax would raise at least $33 billion annually. An average American family would receive at least $325 of this pot. Again, the only loser here: the very biggest of Big Oil.

Egregious profiteering aside, Americans shouldn’t be asked to subsidize dirty, climate-killing fossil fuels in the first place. Congress must act on this absurdity as well, via the End Polluter Welfare Act. First introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2012, the bill has been updated over the years to keep up with the ever-expanding amount of taxpayer aid foolishly funneled to one of the richest—and most hazardous—industries in the world. Trump’s disastrous “Big, Beautiful Bill” of 2025 only doubled down on the madness.

Sanders’ bill would eliminate more than $190 billion in tax loopholes and federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry over the next 10 years. A reinvestment of this huge sum in countless other ways, for countless other purposes, would have a direct and lasting positive impact on Americans’ financial and physical health.

As President Trump continues to address the deepening energy cost crisis in America with an oscillating assortment of meaningless platitudes, false promises, and outright dismissiveness, Congress has an opportunity to step up and advance real, tangible solutions that would help families and small businesses. The legislative tools to address the crisis are sitting on the shelf, waiting for the political will to pull them down, dust them off, and put them to work.

Only a day after President Donald Trump spoke of unity following a gunman’s abhorrent attempt to kill him and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents' dinner, the president quickly returned to his regularly scheduled programming of berating members of the press that ask him unwanted questions.

In a "60 Minutes" interview with CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell taped and aired the day following the assassination attempt, Trump repeated many of his now-tired insults about the press, referring to the media in general as “horrible people,” and calling O’Donnell a “disgrace” who should be “ashamed” of herself for raising excerpts of the alleged gunman’s manifesto in a question to the president.

At this point, understandably, many of us have simply begun to tune out Trump’s now-frequent diatribes against the press. Nearly a decade since Trump first tweeted the now-ubiquitous phrase “fake news” and infamously labelled the news media the "enemies of the American people," such insults just don't land like they used to.

Yet Trump's words do in fact matter. While many of Trump’s rhetorical attacks against the press during his first term were dismissed as bluster from a president known for his flair for the dramatic, they laid the groundwork for the broad attack on the media that we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.

Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes.

Under his second presidency, the Trump administration has waged a multifaceted campaign against free speech and independent journalism, characterized by retaliatory lawsuits against major media outlets; legal harassment and intimidation of journalists; slashed budgets for public broadcasting; and regulatory pressure, taking aim at reporting not to the administration’s liking.

Even as the First Amendment comes under unprecedented pressure in the US, the impact of the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media hasn’t stopped at the US border. The linguistic framing Trump popularized to villainize the press (and justify executive action against them) has also contributed to a growing crisis of press freedom worldwide.

Trump’s attacks on the media have inspired copycat behavior from press freedom pariahs around the world. From Hungary to Turkey, authoritarian or illiberal leaders have echoed Trump’s hostile rhetoric against the press, adding their own spin in remarks designed to discredit the news outlets and journalists intent on exposing corruption and holding their leaders accountable to their people.

Autocratic regimes in Russia, China, and Egypt have seized on to Trump’s “fake news” framing with actual legislation barring the spread of “false” or “misleading” news and information. What actually defines fake news usually isn’t clear—the vague, ambiguous wording of many of these laws gives the government wide latitude to decide how they are applied.

Amid a rise in global conflict, governments around the world are increasingly using “national security” as a pretext to censor critical war reporting. Only weeks prior to the Correspondents’ dinner, Trump threatened to jail an unnamed journalist from an unnamed media outlet if they did not reveal the identity of the government source who gave the press information about a US military operation to rescue a pilot whose plane was downed in Iran.

While Trump hasn’t yet followed through on this particular threat, other countries have not hesitated to lock up journalists that report inconvenient truths about the conflict. In early March, the government of Kuwait arrested Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a day after he shared a verified CNN video depicting the downing of a US F-15E fighter jet by the Kuwaiti military during a friendly fire incident. Luckily, after a wave of international pressure on the part of the press freedom community, Shihab-Eldin was released and was able to safely leave Kuwait—at the cost of his citizenship.

Despite the bad news, there are still a few bright spots as journalists and independent media outlets in places like Hungary have demonstrated remarkable resilience and strength in the face of sustained political and economic pressure.

Perhaps no one has better mastered the art of media capture than Hungary’s now-ousted prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Despite Trump’s ill-fated bid to save Orbán’s reelection campaign, the Hungarian people in April proved that government pressure on the media has its limits, and that public interest reporting that holds leaders responsible for corruption and abuses of power cannot be so easily silenced.

At this critical time for democracy around the world, we must not become complacent to rhetorical threats against the media, no matter how banal or flippant they may seem. As history has proven, over and over again, attacks on the press are a harbinger of broader crackdowns on civil liberties and personal freedoms.

The US is not immune to democratic backsliding. Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes. We must not make the mistake of normalizing Trump-style attacks on the press. When the president makes a threat against the media, we should listen to what he says. The world’s autocrats certainly are.

The notion that the US is an empire in decline has been a recurring theme in international relations literature since the 1980s. Surely, the United States remains the dominant force in the world economy, but it faces daunting challenges from the emergence of China as an economic superpower. And there is no denying the fact that while the US is a military superpower, with the highest defense budget in the world and possessing a range of weapons that other major powers simply do not have, its influence over global politics has been getting weaker. It can bully a country like Venezuela into submission and strangle Cuba to death as part of a strategy of selective hegemony under Trump 2.0, but cannot shape political outcomes across Latin America; holds no monopoly over diplomacy in the Middle East; cannot dictate policy to Europe; cannot force Russia to end the war in Ukraine; and surely lacks the political and economic leverage to contain and isolate China.

Last week’s Trump-Xi summit drove home the reality of shifts in global power. Chinese leader Xi Jinping made US President Donald Trump look weak. Not only did “philosopher-king” Xi concede nothing to the American wannabe emperor but made a subtle threat to the US by invoking the Thucydides trap. In so doing, Xi was letting Trump know that China’s rise is real and that, as such, the world has once again come to a new crossroads. Subsequently, the US should be careful how it handles the new reality of a world no longer dominated by Washington; a strategic miscalculation on its part over Taiwan (the reddest of red lines for China) could lead to war.

Nonetheless, while the debate continues to rage over whether US global hegemony is in decline or not, there should be much less doubt about domestic decline. The over-extension of the empire, characterized by forever wars and endless aggression, an enormously bloated Pentagon budget, and roughly 800 military bases in over 80 countries, has imposed severe pressures on the domestic economy and led to the worsening of social conditions and the unraveling of civil society. The economy has been facing unsustainable economic imbalances (deficits in its fiscal and current account balances) since the late 1990s, and the national debt now exceeds the country’s GDP. In the meantime, the problems of the country as a whole are mounting: crumbling infrastructure, decaying cities, disintegrated education, an unaffordable healthcare system, and a housing crisis that has reached a breaking point make the US resemble a third world country. And the rich are getting richer every day while wages have remained stagnant for most US workers since the late 1970s.

As if this wasn’t bad enough for what is still the wealthiest country in the world, economic alienation and racism are tearing the social fabric apart, thereby offering more opportunities to extend the police operations of the imperial state to the domestic realm as well—increasing the size of the police and building more prisons, as mass incarceration is indeed “big business” in the United States.

Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society.

The rise of Donald Trump to power is a symptom of the decline of the US as a world power and as an advanced industrial society. It is in that context that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan captured the imagination of a large segment of the population, reflecting a desire for a return to some idealized state of American society. But it wasn’t simply economics that drove so many to Trump’s arms. The MAGA movement is dependent on racial resentment and straight-up racism. “Make America Great Again” is a politico-cultural project, not some blueprint for economic restructuring.

Many of followers of the MAGA movement professed an aversion to US imperial ambitions and believed that the system is somehow rigged, although they never explained in whose favor. But like traditional conservatives before them, they opposed the federal government not only because they saw it as an instrument of a globalized elite but because they oppose the expansion of federal programs. Their real frustration was over the direction in which the country was moving socially and culturally, which they felt had major ramifications for the economic status of white Americans. This made them perfect prey for Trump’s demagoguery.

Trump himself did identify some of the real economic problems facing the United States, such as decades of manufacturing decline and a growing trade deficit, and spoke from very early on of a collapsing infrastructure that made the US resemble a third world country. But it’s not just that Trump’s actual diagnosis of the structural problems facing the United States is wrong and that the remedies pursued by his administration (sweeping tariffs and mass deportations) are incoherent and designed to backfire. Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, enforce a plutocratic agenda, roll back decades of social progress, and get revenge on his political opponents any way that he can.

Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic. From the 20th century onward, the enemy for the political tradition that Trump and his billionaire allies stand for is equality, social welfare, and redistribution. It was so for the era of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and remains so for today’s reactionaries. As Project 2025 perfectly epitomizes, which the Trump administration has been enforcing with great dedication, the enemy is a society that seeks to place the interests of working people ahead of greed, profit making, and the unlimited accumulation of capital by striving to create institutions that strengthen the public good and enforce democratic accountability.

What we have with Trump and the MAGA movement is an updated version of Social Darwinism, a foundational pillar of fascism. Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society. For decent people everywhere, it can be said that the greatest of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. For Trump and his ilk, it can be judged by raising plutocratic power to new heights and inflicting as much pain as possible on the poor and the weak. In this manner, the Trump administration’s politics of cruelty and the callousness of its approach to social policy go beyond simply serving the interests of capitalism as they are designed to produce systemic fear and turn brutality into a source of pleasure. Part of the aim is to make the public numb and apathetic to the astonishing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and how it corrupts politics and the media.

How Trumpism ends is anyone’s guess. But while it must be defeated if there is to be a future hope for the United States, it must also be understood that a major part of the nation’s history is intrinsically linked to the anti-democratic tradition that made possible Donald Trump’s rise to power. How to uproot it is of vital importance for the realization of a good and just society.

One way to think about the climate crisis is that we are systematically reducing the margin on which we live on this planet. There were always places where humans couldn’t live: the Antarctic, the centers of the great deserts, the high mountains. But now we’re systematically adding to that list, as places become dangerously combustible, or overrun by rising seas, or just plain too hot. We’re shrinking the board on which we play the sublime game of being human.

I was thinking of this on Monday because I read a truly remarkable piece in The New York Times, the kind of reporting that justifies a subscription despite all the endless disappointments. It was written by Peter Goodman, with powerful photographs from Finbarr O’Reilly.

The two of them traveled widely in recent weeks across Somalia, and what they found—well, you need to read the whole thing. But climate change and war are making life there almost impossible, and now that the US has shut down the US Agency for International Development, the “almost” is disappearing:

For nine days, they trudged across the parched soil of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their 3-year-old daughter on their shoulders. Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife, and their seven children sought escape from a landscape drained of life.

Another drought had killed their goats and sheep, turning their life savings to dust. So they pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn by the same things that had already attracted more than 100,000 other people: International relief organizations were clustered there, offering food, water, and healthcare.

Yet when they arrived in late January at a camp on the fringes of town, they were horrified to learn that aid groups had abandoned the area. President Trump had dismantled the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, eliminating Somalia’s primary source of assistance. From London to Berlin, governments had reduced funding for humanitarian aid. Relief organizations had been forced to choose where to focus their remaining money.

Let me get my anger out of the way first. Elon Musk, in particular, shut down USAID—boasted about “feeding it to the woodchipper” in the first weekend of his DOGE assault on the federal government. That is to say, the richest man in the world did this, under the auspices of our government. His cruelty and his self-regard—and his abject racism—know no bounds.

And then the most piggish and self-involved man in the world, Donald Trump, started a war in Iran, and now the price of fertilizer is through the roof, making life much harder for the people who grow food in Africa (and those who eat it). And an El Niño is now bearing down on the planet, riding on the highest temperatures in human history, which were caused mostly by us in the Western world. All of it taken together is too much

Drought ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5 million people—roughly one-third of the population—were suffering hunger at levels deemed an emergency, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February. That included more than 1.8 million children under 5 facing acute malnutrition.

Those numbers have almost certainly increased given the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest source of aid in Somalia, has only enough funding to support 300,000 people a month through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million people a month it was reaching in early 2025.

Humanitarian relief organizations now contemplate a surreal hierarchy of suffering.

“There are different categories of starvation,” said Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia director. “We are only able to reach those who are really on the verge of, if you don’t give them something now, they will not be there tomorrow.”

In some areas, children are still getting food, but not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies first,” he said, “and who dies next.”

Somalia is, of course, a particularly apt place to do this reporting. Trump has referred to its citizens as “garbage people,” and he and Stephen Miller dispatched Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Minneapolis to hunt Somalis. As it happens, it’s on the fairly short list of places I’ve never been, but one of my closest colleagues is Somali, and she is as fine a human being as I know, so I thought of her as I read and reread this piece. But as Goodman points out in his reporting, Somalia is by no means unique.

Indeed, the news this week of a new Ebola outbreak elsewhere in Africa reminds us of another way we keep shrinking the world: There are places it’s too dangerous to go because we’ve unleashed diabolical illnesses. As Kat Lay reports:

The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a report published on Monday that “as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent they are also becoming more damaging”, warning that pandemic risk is outpacing investments in preparedness and “the world is not yet meaningfully safer”.

Disease outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the climate crisis and armed conflict, while collective action is being undermined by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial self-interest, the report said.

In fact, it’s more or less Musk again—he made a joke at a presidential cabinet meeting about “accidentally” cutting Ebola funding, but insisted it had been restored, something that—and this will shock you—seems not to be entirely true:

In Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have played a role in leaving the world “playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”.

He said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost weeks of response time. By the time the alarm was raised, the virus had already moved along major transport routes and crossed borders.

“This crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early. We are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.”

That margin is thinner all the time. Consider this report from Laura Paddison about the heatwave that shook India last week: There was a day when all the 50 hottest cities on our planet were in that country:

On April 27, average peak temperatures across all 50 Indian cities on the list hit 112.5°F.

Top of AQI’s list was the city of Banda in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a harsh, sub-tropical climate which often delivers brutal summers.

Even before what are typically hottest summer months, the heat has ratcheted up. On April 27, temperatures in Banda reached 115.16°F, according to AQI, the highest temperature recorded anywhere on the planet that day. The coolest Banda got, in the early hours of that morning, was 94.5°F…

Experts have warned heat in India is becoming so extreme, it may “cross the survivability limit” for healthy humans by 2050.

Across the border in Pakistan, as Asad Mumtaz Rid reports, it’s at least as bad:

In southern Pakistan throughout April and May, temperatures have risen far above seasonal norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have frequently crossed 44°C to 46°C, forcing residents indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers, and farming communities.

The impact has been particularly severe in Karachi’s coastal settlements, where prolonged electricity outages and water shortages have compounded the effects of extreme heat. In Ibrahim Hyderi, one of the city’s largest fishing communities, residents say survival is becoming increasingly difficult.

Abdul Sattar, a fisherman with more than three decades of experience, recalled how one of his colleagues collapsed from heat exhaustion during the recent heatwave. “We gave him lemon water and rushed him to a doctor,” he said. “He regained consciousness after receiving intravenous fluids.”

There are things we can and must do to make a short-term difference. One is to provide cooling—air-conditioning—to much of the planet. As a study last week from the Rocky Mountain Institute described:

Between now and 2030, the increase in electricity demand for air conditioning systems alone will exceed that for data centers, one of the fastest-growing energy uses globally. By 2050, cooling electricity demand is expected to match the combined annual electricity consumption of the United States, China, India, Germany, and Japan today.

That’s not optional—at this point, it’s medicine. In those kinds of heatwaves cool air is as important to the human body as water, or food. But, obviously it will drive up demand for energy, which is why, as the RMI experts point out, we need to

Reduce energy use and emissions through super-efficient technologies, improved system design, and better refrigerant management, while scaling next-gen, innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs and emissions.

All of this is possible—new heat pumps are far far more efficient at cooling air than old AC units, and we can paint roofs, plant trees, and do lots more.

But at the most basic level we have no more important task than converting absolutely everything we can, right away, to sun and wind and batteries, so that we stop pouring carbon into the air and making the problem ever worse. And the horrible part is that we can do this, which makes the fact that we’re not doing it as fast as we can deeply and profoundly immoral. Hell, no one is even asking Americans to do with less, because that is clearly impossible. We’re just asking them to do with slightly different, and save money in the process. Here, for instance, is the latest update from former President Joe Biden’s key energy deployment expert, Jigar Shah, talking about a new method for coaxing more juice through existing transmission lines, which experts call

reconductoring with advanced conductors. Reconductoring replaces the wire on an existing line with advanced conductor technology that carries 50 -110% more current through the same towers, on the same right-of-way, in 18 to 36 months. No new permitting. No land acquisition. Montana-Dakota Utilities reconductored a 15-mile 230 kV line, increased ampacity by 77%, finished a full year ahead of schedule, and came in 40% under cost estimate. The Berkeley and GridLab 2035 study found a national reconductoring program could quadruple the rate of transmission capacity expansion at only 20% higher total system cost—saving $85 billion by 2035 and $180 billion by 2050.

But we have to do it. We have to force our leaders, state by state at the moment since DC is such a disaster area, to actually make these relatively small changes.

A way to look at the work we’re doing together is that we’re trying to build some margin back in. Every gas car that becomes an EV buys us back an inch or two, every furnace that becomes a heat pump, every solar panel and wind turbine that sprouts takes the tiniest bit of pressure off the system.

We were born onto a world with lots of margin, especially those of us who are older. The size of the game board was expanding back then, as we learned new ways to grow and store food and the like. But through shortsightedness and greed we began to shrink that buffer, and now greed and short-sightedness have become the cornerstones of government policy, along with pure and undiluted racism. It’s not like anyone is fooled. Goodman again:

As he sat beneath the shade of a mango tree, its branches sloping toward the river dividing Somalia from Ethiopia, Adan Bare Ali, deputy mayor of Dollow, said his community was suffering from troubles that had been concocted far away. The drought was worsened by climate change—primarily the result of industrial polluters in larger, more powerful nations. The war was the handiwork of foreign actors.

“The situation has become unbearable,” he said. “The American regime is led by a person who really doesn’t care about anything happening outside his gates. The Americans are not honoring their commitment to the world.”

He is right, and we are very very wrong.

Just this week, I saw a video that captured one of Colorado’s elected US representatives, Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, happily dodging questions about the huge Medicaid cuts he supported with his vote for President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” I found it especially offensive because I’ve always thought of the US House of Representatives and the people elected to serve there as having a constitutional duty to actually represent. Running away from questions about your vote that will injure one-third of the people you are elected to represent is cowardice.

While Gabe Evans described his vote for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (and the Medicaid cuts it included) as “cost saving” during another video, the lives in his district damaged by horrific Medicaid cuts have value far beyond the bottom line. They are his constituents, his neighbors, his friends—the disabled, children, seniors, pregnant women, veterans. Evans’ disregard for the suffering caused by his actions—his vote—is cowardly.

Then I started to wonder if Republican US House members from Colorado are trained to dodge questions and avoid accountability. Some will remember a decade ago when Rep. Mike Coffman ducked out of a town meeting at the local library because 150 of his constituents showed up to ask questions about—guess what?—healthcare and losing coverage. Coffman is now the mayor of Aurora, Colorado—the third largest city in Colorado. It seems cowardice runs in his Republican extended family as hurting people in your own community—town, city, county, state, nation—is not in any oath of office he has taken in a long political career.

Wondering what happened to some of our leaders to create this sense of power devoid of compassion toward the most vulnerable people in our communities? I wonder. How does a person divorce themselves from the reality that a vote that cuts healthcare access is barbaric and people will suffer? Maintaining program integrity would surely have included keeping people covered who need the healthcare social safety net the most. When fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program is uncovered, it is almost always for-profit providers at the core of greedy schemes, yet it is the Medicaid-covered individuals whose integrity is sullied, not the profit takers. It is fascinating and sickening that as a society brainwashing is so pervasive that we label our Medicaid program as something bad rather than the program that has saved millions of lives from descending into illness, isolation, and despair.

Gabe Evans governs from his own cowardice. He’s afraid of rocking the Republican power boat more than he is afraid to hurt tens of thousands of his constituents.

Both men asked us to celebrate their military service to the country. Yet, I find myself angered by that. The men and women I know who served in the military forces are not apt to allow community members to suffer and die as some badge of honor. Most I know who have served hold themselves to a sometimes impossibly high standard of being. They are courageous in ways it is hard to define. It does not involve inflicting pain and calling it something else—or worse. A person of honor would face people with differing views as still worthy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Gabe Evans governs from his own cowardice. He’s afraid of rocking the Republican power boat more than he is afraid to hurt tens of thousands of his constituents. When tough questions come his way, he ducks and runs. He learned his lesson well from other Republican leaders around him about ignoring his constituents when his boss says so. And though the Constitution says his constituents are his bosses, cowardice makes that impossible.

Problems in the healthcare industry have only grown in post-pandemic America, and it will take a very long time to right a ship that was already sinking. Taking access from people who most need it is so wrong, and Gabe Evans knows it. When cowardice governs, there is no room for reason or for explanation. When cowardice governs, we all lose trust in one another. And we must not stand for that. While some run from painful problems, governance must be courageous and protective of those who have given their trust and vote to make sure that it always will be governance for us all.

On Tuesday, May 19, incumbent Congressman Thomas Massie—the congressman who helped lead the charge to force the release of the Epstein Files to the American public—was defeated in the Republican primary by former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein. The race became the highest-spending House primary in American history, and many immediately interpreted the result as yet another demonstration of Donald Trump’s overwhelming political power.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung celebrated the result bluntly: “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power. Fuck around, find out.”

But I think the deeper story is more complex than this, and I feel uniquely positioned to comment on this election, not only as a constituent of Northern Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District and someone who has interacted personally with Thomas Massie, but also as someone involved in ongoing anti-corruption and civic reconstruction efforts in the region.

In April 2016, when I was a college student, I attended a luncheon hosted, if I recall correctly, by the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. At the time, I was studying conflict and security in my political science program while interning on research related to the Syrian conflict. I had noticed something that was not yet being widely discussed publicly: Pentagon-backed militias and CIA-backed militias in Syria were reportedly engaging in firefights with one another—different arms of the same American security apparatus, literally shooting at each other through proxies.

I brought this up with Massie privately afterward. To my surprise, he confirmed the reality of the situation to me directly, when much of the press still barely acknowledged it. As we walked toward his car, we both shook our heads at the absurdity of it all: an empire increasingly at war with itself while the public drifted deeper into spectacle and apathy. That moment stayed with me because it was one of the few times I saw a federal politician speak candidly and honestly without rehearsed talking points.

Ten years later, Massie is now effectively gone from Congress. How does someone widely regarded as unusually principled, intellectually independent, and personally honest lose in such dramatic fashion? Especially after helping push one of the largest public accountability stories in recent American politics with the Epstein affair?

To understand how someone like Massie could lose in this environment, I think we first need to step back and examine the broader social psychology at work—not only in Northern Kentucky, but increasingly in the United States itself. Erich Fromm, drawing on psychoanalytic concepts originally developed by Freud and later expanded within social psychology, argued in The Sane Society that individuals under prolonged conditions of fear, alienation, instability, and social fragmentation can psychologically regress into more primitive modes of thought and behavior.

Mature forms of reasoning and moral responsibility begin to weaken, and people increasingly retreat into dependency, tribalism, spectacle, aggression, and irrationality as defense mechanisms. Fromm’s contribution was extending these dynamics beyond the individual and into the social sphere, arguing that entire societies can regress under conditions of deep political, economic, and spiritual dislocation, producing cultures driven less by reasoned civic life than by fear, conformity, resentment, and authoritarian impulses.

In many ways, the history of Northern Kentucky reflects precisely this kind of social adaptation to institutional decay. Newport became nationally infamous during the twentieth century as “Sin City,” a vice hub built on organized gambling, prostitution, racketeering, and institutional corruption. Criminal syndicates connected to figures like Meyer Lansky and the Cleveland Four embedded themselves deeply into the region’s political and economic life. Corruption extended into police departments, political offices, business networks, and broader civic culture. Vice became normalized because it generated money, jobs, and local economic growth. Over time, entire communities psychologically adapted themselves to corruption and decay as an ordinary feature of public life.

Despite the reform efforts of the 1960s, many of the underlying patterns never truly disappeared. Look at the headlines from just the last several years:

In 2018, former Campbell County judge Tim Nolan—a major Trump ally in Northern Kentucky who had served as Trump’s campaign chairman in Campbell County—was sentenced to twenty years in prison after pleading guilty to charges connected to a large-scale human trafficking operation involving minors. The case shocked the region nationally because it revealed how deeply institutional prestige, political influence, and criminal pathology could intertwine beneath the surface of respectable civic life.

More recently, another longtime Campbell County official was arrested after allegedly engaging in sexually explicit online conversations with someone he believed to be a fourteen-year-old girl.

The City of Florence, the district’s second-largest city, announced an FBI investigation into possible long-running revenue diversion schemes tied to municipal finances. Erlanger officials openly discussed limiting public records requests and explored mechanisms to refuse requests deemed “political.”

FOX19 previously documented extensive corruption scandals across Northern Kentucky involving embezzlement, abuse of public office, and theft of taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors revealed that a Russia-linked transnational fraud network used a Northern Kentucky storefront company as part of a massive $10 billion Medicare fraud operation spanning multiple countries—the largest fraud scheme of this kind in U.S. history, under the nose of local authorities and almost entirely ignored by major press (and right-wing influences who claim to be against fraud, for instance, in Minnesota).

There does not really seem to be a coincidence here. Northern Kentucky’s history shows, with remarkable consistency, that weakened civic culture, normalized corruption, collapsing institutional trust, and chronic public nihilism become soft terrain for exploitation—whether by local patronage networks, organized crime, political demagogues, or even transnational criminal enterprises. It is no wonder that voters are tolerant of the rampant corruption today in Washington; they have already done so for generations, at various points

A healthy society rewards honesty, independence, transparency, and institutional courage. A diseased culture—one that is regressing—increasingly rewards tribal loyalty, emotional spectacle, obedience, factional identity, and the destruction of dissenters. In such an environment, integrity itself becomes politically dangerous because it disrupts the emotional equilibrium of the system.

As I see it, this victory says less about Trump’s power and more about America’s moral decline.

A hate crime had struck close to home. On the TV screen, more than four dozen police cars, blue lights swirling in a cold, mechanical rhythm. The news ticker crawled across the bottom of the TV screen, sanitizing horror into a newsbreak: police responding to an "incident" in San Diego's Clairemont Mesa neighborhood. An incident. I didn't think much of it at first. Then my phone rang. A friend. I couldn't bring myself to answer. Moments later, a text came through, cryptic, short and to the point: "Check on the Imam, shooting at the Islamic Center."

The world stopped.

I scrolled through my contacts, found the number, and dialed. My heart hammered against my chest with every ring. Then his voice. I closed my eyes. "We are okay. The school children are safe. We evacuated the mosque," Imam Taha said.

I let out a breath I did not know I had been holding. But okay, I would learn in the minutes and hours that followed, that was not the whole story. Three men who had been okay that morning would never be okay again.

The politicians who run their election campaigns casting American Muslims as enemies owe this community more than thoughts and prayers.

Under the steady and visionary leadership of Imam Taha Hassane, the Islamic Center of San Diego has grown into far more than a place of worship. It is a living, breathing hub of culture and education, a place where faith leaders of every denomination and neighbors of every background have always found an open door and a welcoming table. It is, in the truest sense of the word, a community, one that has spent decades building bridges in a city that repaid the generosity with bullets.

In less than 10 minutes, hate stole the life of three human beings. Amin Abdullah, who welcomed you with a curious smile when you came in, a father and a husband. Mansour Kaziha, a husband, father, and grandfather who greeted his community every day from behind the mosque store counter. And Nader Awad, who, as bullets tore through the air around him, ran into the fire to save others. Three men. Three families shattered. A community in mourning.

This hate crime did not occur in isolation. It comes amid an unprecedented and metastasizing culture of Islamophobia in the United States, where politicians have discovered that Muslim hate is a reliable path to election and commentators have built empires of followers on the broken backs of a vilified community. The names attached to this campaign are not fringe figures shouting into the void from dark corners of the internet. They are sitting senators. Elected congressmen. A president of the United States and his closest advisers. They speak from podiums, not podcasts, and have press secretaries, not anonymous accounts. And they have never—not once—been made to answer for what their words have unleashed.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump claimed that “Islam hates us." His close associate Laura Loomer wasted no time making the blood of victims useful to her agenda. Hours after the shooting, questioned the shooting calling it “The mosque that was 'supposedly' shot up today… people who attend this mosque want us all to be killed." Three men were murdered, and she called the victims a threat.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) says of Islam, “The enemy is inside the gates.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wants Big Brother to monitor Muslim neighborhoods. Congressman Randy Fine (R-Fla.) is the most explicit in spewing hate, declaring, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.”

Imagine the cry if another congressman said we need more Jewish hate.

A Washington Post investigation found that since the beginning of 2025, more than 100 members of Congress have mentioned Muslims or Islam in social media posts, with two-thirds of those posts referencing radical Islam, Sharia law, extremism, or terrorism. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, these statements have amplified Islamophobia and created an environment that fosters discrimination against Muslims. Hate and Islamophobia appear to be a winning election strategy for Republican candidates in November.

When powerful men and women with microphones and platforms tell the public that Muslim Americans are enemies, invaders, and less than human, some people listen. Some people act. Two teenagers in San Diego just did.

I will say something that many might find abhorrent, but that I believe with every fiber of my being: The murderers Cain Clark and Caleb Vazquez were also victims. Not of the same order as Amin, Mansour, and Nader, for nothing diminishes what was taken from those three men, their families, and community. But victims, nonetheless. Victims of a political and media ecosystem that fed them a steady dose of dehumanization, paranoia, and hatred of Muslims. They were radicalized by adults who knew exactly what they were doing but faced no accountability for it. Trump, Loomer, Tuberville, Fine, and many others did not pull the trigger, but they loaded the gun with the bullets of hate and pointed it at a place of worship. The blood of five people—including those two teenagers—is on their hands.

The failure is not at the federal level only. In the City of San Diego, Mayor Tod Gloria's performance of solidarity rings hollow against his record of deliberate exclusion. His administration refused to call for even a symbolic ceasefire as genocide unfolded in Gaza. He declined to meet with Muslim and Arab community leaders, fearing the political cost for acknowledging Palestinian life. Most recently, his City Council moved to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, a Zionist tool to silence voices critical of Israel’s malevolent policies. Every one of these decisions sent a message to San Diego's Muslim community: We don’t value you unless you’re dead, and your lives are worth less than the political comfort of those in power. That message was heard far beyond City Hall.

That dismissal, that deliberate erasure was incubated, fertilized, watered, and brought to lethal bloom by years of sanctioned dehumanization of Muslim Americans and sent a signal to every hateful actor watching: This community is fair game.

San Diego Mayor Gloria, who dismissed our cries in life, has no standing to console us in death. The politicians who run their election campaigns casting American Muslims as enemies owe this community more than thoughts and prayers.

The blood in San Diego does not belong only to two lost teenagers. It belongs to everyone who fed them, directly or indirectly, the ideology of Muslim hate.

On Monday, Donald Trump dropped his sham lawsuit against the federal government. In exchange, the Justice Department under his control will establish a $1.8 billion fund for “victims of lawfare,” as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it. This will be a slush fund for Trump’s allies—presumably January 6 insurrectionists and others already rewarded with a pardon.

There is a zone of lawlessness around the Oval Office, erected by the Supreme Court when it granted current and former presidents effective immunity from prosecution if their crimes involved “official acts.” Loot the taxpayers, misuse government power for graft, and you’re off the hook.

Last week, the president filed a report with the Office of Government Ethics detailing the stock trades he made this year. It is a novelistic tale of profiteering, recognizable as insider trading in every way except, perhaps, under the law.

Former US Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer offers a useful guide.

It’s epic corruption in plain sight. History shows that after scandal comes reform—often, but not always.

In recent months, as Paramount and Netflix vied to buy Warner Brothers, Trump bought stock in all three companies. Now the Justice Department is considering whether to approve Paramount’s purchase of Warner Brothers.

As CNBC reported, Trump “scooped up shares” in the data firm Palantir. Soon after, he abruptly praised the firm. “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment,” Trump posted, even highlighting its ticker name. “Just ask our enemies!!!” All this while Palantir was winning big federal contracts.

He invested in Oracle while brokering its deal to buy TikTok.

Just this week, he paraded off Air Force One in China, flanked by the CEOs of Nvidia and Boeing. Trump bought millions of dollars of Boeing stock before the trip, which led to the sale of 200 Boeing airplanes to the Chinese government. Among his biggest purchases has been Nvidia stock, which has seen steep increases after the US government cleared 10 Chinese companies to purchase its advanced chips, in a big reversal from earlier national security concerns.

Altogether, Oyer writes, “You’ll find it hard to avoid the conclusion that, to Donald Trump, governing is synonymous with profiteering.”

This president is constrained by the weakest legal rules in history.

Start with that immunity ruling, Trump v. United States. Before that, presidents knew they could be criminally prosecuted if they looted the government. Chief Justice John Roberts’s ruling all but stops any bribery prosecution before it starts, by preventing any inquiry into the president’s motivations, even when the act looks and smells like a bribe. Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that the ruling would “hamstring the prosecution” in a case such as bribery. (Having critiqued the misguided majority, Barrett then mystifyingly voted with it.)

Insider trading laws are weak, in any case. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 prohibits using nonpublic information to guide stock trading, but its application to elected officials remains murky. In 2012, Congress passed the Stock Act to prevent insider trading among members of Congress, but the president and vice president remain exempt.

It’s epic corruption in plain sight. History shows that after scandal comes reform—often, but not always.

In January, the Brennan Center published Nine Solutions for Political Corruption. In it, we call for a law to require the president to divest from all stocks and other assets that could generate a conflict of interest. That was the norm, and now it must be a law. Ethics rules should cover presidents and vice presidents too.

And we call for a constitutional amendment to end the unilateral power of a president to issue corrupt pardons.

What about that Trump v. United States ruling? In the past, after the Supreme Court has erred so gravely, we’ve changed the Constitution. The 14th Amendment, for example, undid the Dred Scott decision. Another amendment is needed to clean up the immunity mess.

The sturdiest protection against corruption would be fierce anger from fleeced taxpayers. A few months ago, when asked about his conflicts of interest, Trump said, “I found out that nobody cared, and I’m allowed to.”

It turns out that Americans do care. In January, a YouGov poll found that “large shares of both Democrats and Republicans think their party focuses too little on corruption.”

Let’s make this a major issue for the campaign trail and press politicians from both parties to provide solutions, not just soundbites. Or else, as Oyer wrote, we risk having future presidents who “loot and pillage our country without a shadow of shame.”

As the controversy over the Democratic National Committee’s buried autopsy report continues to rage, more Democrats from the party’s establishment wing are offering their two cents. The latest contribution is a column in The Bulwark, written by Rob Flaherty, the former deputy manager of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

Flaherty’s piece “Here’s What I Told the DNC Autopsy” discusses his conversations with DNC operatives tasked with writing the still-unreleased report. He then continues into his own analysis of what went wrong with Harris’ 2024 campaign for president.

To his credit, Flaherty is willing to do what very few mainstream Democrats have done since Harris' 2024 loss: take a long, and public, look at the campaign’s missteps. But, as with so many other analyses from the establishment wing of the party, he believes that tweaks to the campaign’s messaging strategy and media apparatus could have won the race.

Progressives operating inside the party, meanwhile, have long argued that no amount of messaging acumen could have plastered over the gaping hole in Harris’ campaign: a total dearth of popular policies. (At RootsAction, where I’m the political director, we’ve written our own post-2024 autopsy that focuses exactly on this issue, and where Harris’ campaign fell out of step with popular sentiment.)

If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are.

Flaherty, by his account, was principally responsible for the digital dimensions of the campaign (social media, content creators, etc.) and so his analysis proceeds through that lens. He devotes a lot of time to worrying over message alignment—alignment between earned and paid media, between the campaign and independent expenditures, and so on. What's missing in that analysis, though, is what that message was.

At the tail end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the nation was embroiled in a number of crises. The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic had been uneven, with many at the bottom of the labor ladder still struggling to find steady work and keep up with runaway inflation. Americans at all income levels, in fact, were reeling from spiking costs in basic consumer goods. And, while Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza unfolded in full view of anyone with a social media account, Biden and his administration continued their unyielding support for Israel. On top of it all, the unpopular Biden broke his promise to be a “bridge” president, ignored the polls showing that most Democrats wanted a different candidate, and unwisely opted to run for a second term—dropping out only after a disastrous debate and massive pressure from inside the party.

His vice president was then thrust into the unenviable position of having just 107 days (as she often reminds us) to mount a presidential campaign that could defeat Donald Trump.This entailed massive logistical challenges, yes—but it also meant reckoning with Biden’s tenure as president. Would Harris continue to argue, as the Biden administration had, that Bidenomics had been a boon for the working class? Would she continue to support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he laid waste to the Gaza Strip? These questions demanded answers. Harris and her campaign though, seemed loath to provide them.

Flaherty appears to understand that this was a major problem for Harris. He bemoans the campaign's vacillation on its core message, contrasting that with Trump's comms discipline: "Trump's message was much clearer: The economy feels bad and Harris says it's good. Those vibes were tough to argue with."

He is heavily focused on vibes: "The moment the [BidenHQ] account switched from Biden to Harris, the campaign channeled a vibe shift that showed up in polls. We needed to consolidate the base, make the campaign cooler, and have a campaign voice that could be more flexible and nimble than the candidate’s own."

Putting aside how a “vibe shift” appears in polls, it’s clear from the outset that Flaherty’s level of analysis is all branding, no substance. He gets into the weeds of individual social media accounts and their relative impacts with critical constituencies. Was the KamalaHQ online presence too "girls and gays" coded? Did the account turn off men? For someone who devotes a footnote to scolding the “DC crowd” for believing Biden to be broadly unpopular, Flaherty sure seems to have drunk the Beltway insider Kool-Aid when it comes to assessing the impact of an individual social media account on an election in which more than 152 million Americans cast a vote.

Vibes should not be the basis for a campaign. Yes, a sour mood in the electorate requires a particular approach, but it doesn't mean that Democrats can entirely punt on the difficult work of crafting a resonant political message. Coordination and message discipline between social media influencers, independent expenditures, surrogates, and official campaign accounts is meaningless if those voices aren’t making a compelling argument. In 2024, Democrats’ biggest political liability was that voters had no idea what four more years of a Democratic administration would entail. It was like Harris was running back Biden’s infamous campaign promise to donors in 2019: that “nothing would fundamentally change.” Such an approach couldn’t work in 2024, given all the public discontent and anxiety.

When Flaherty steps back from the arcana of digital strategy, he seems to understand this problem quite well. He points out that Democrats, in focusing on picking up comparatively well-off, suburban voters, have shed too many votes elsewhere. "The resulting [Democratic] coalition, which has involved a shrinking share of working-class voters of color, especially men, just isn't big enough to beat a motivated MAGA base." He even goes on to write that Democrats should embrace "economic populism with teeth."

Progressives in the Democratic Party would certainly agree with the last point. Poll after poll confirms that this is popular policy: Most voters support taxing the rich and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Flaherty understands enough to give lip service to this idea, but is either unwilling or unable to continue this line of thinking to its logical conclusion: Democrats should embrace this reality, codify it in their political platform, and let it ring out loudly in all their campaign messaging. Like many in the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Flaherty shows a remarkable ability to diagnose the party’s political ailments without being able to clamor for a cure.

This trend continues. Flaherty touches briefly on the discord between Harris and pro-ceasefire activists, but he is eager to wave away the negative impact it may have had on her campaign. He writes that the Biden's administration's support for Israel's war in Gaza hurt the campaign "but not in the ways people think." He then goes on to quote another campaign worker who characterizes Biden's support for Israel (and Harris' inability to create daylight between herself and Biden) as a "giant, rotting fish around [the campaign's] neck."

This is actually exactly how progressives think that Gaza hurt the campaign. Those of us who were pro-ceasefire, and who clamored for Harris to reject the policy of unquestioning support that the Biden administration had pushed, worried that the moral stain of US complicity in Gaza would be impossible to wash out, even as the Democrats switched standard-bearers midstream. We worried that critical constituencies—young people, Arab and Muslim Americans—who had been bombarded on social media with an unending stream of carnage from Gaza would be unable to hold their noses in the ballot box when it came time to vote for the Democratic ticket, even against Trump. Harris’ campaign faltered because 6.8 million Americans who supported Biden in 2020 did not support her. With such a stark drop off in support, it makes sense to focus on an issue where the Democratic Party policy was firmly out of step with popular sentiment among the Democrats’ base. This disconnect can’t simply be brushed aside.

Flaherty admits that, by the time the Harris campaign got going, they were “playing around the edges.” That is, campaign staff were permitted only to make marginal tweaks to a campaign that was already underway; the time for grand strategy had passed. Postmortems from insiders about the 2024 election sometimes read like the accounts of survivors struck by some environmental catastrophe. But this was a tragedy of the Democrats’ own making; Flaherty himself was a deputy manager of Biden’s aborted 2024 campaign.

Donald Trump’s political career is nearing its end, but the effects of Trumpism will be felt for decades to come. If Democrats want to present themselves as a convincing alternative to the post-MAGA Republican Party, they’re going to have to articulate what their political differences are. Progressive policy is increasingly popular among Democrats and the broader American electorate: universal healthcare, debt-free public college, AI regulation, and an end to endless war all rank as attractive policy planks with majority support. Any candidate running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 should have this policy at the core of their platform.

Otherwise, there is no amount of consulting, brand management, influencer outreach, or narrative shaping that can save a campaign with no message at its core. If Democrats can’t internalize the real lessons of Harris’ campaign, they may be doomed to repeat its failures.

Earlier this year a number of participants announced their withdrawal from Australia’s Adelaide Festival’s "Writer’s Week" following the disinviting of Australian-Palestinian author, Randa Abdel-Fattah. The event was subsequently cancelled.

This made me think of United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese’s words—“The occupation of Palestine must be understood as part of a broader project of domination. This is not merely about the physical borders of historical Palestine. It is a systematic assertion of permanent supremacy that knows no border…”—delivered in her Nelson Mandela Lecture.

Indeed, the impact of the ongoing genocide and occupation not only echo far beyond Palestine, because of our shared humanity, but also because of the impact it is having on freedoms across the globe. The censorship of Abdel-Fattah is yet another example of this, and it is not only happening in Australia. Even in South Africa, a country that charged Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), artists are facing attempts to constrain their work.

The global wave of solidarity with Palestine has been used by some governments as a pretext to diminish freedoms by attacking the right to protest and political participation. While some did this by using laws that were already in place, others enacted ambiguous or unduly expansive legislation criminalizing Palestine solidarity and weaponizing the battle against antisemitism.

Protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.

For instance in the US, Project Esther was released by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank also responsible for the odious Project 2025. The strategy’s recommendations have made their way into the policy of the Trump administration. This includes suing, firing, deporting, and defaming activists, organizations, and institutions by effectively claiming that involvement in advocacy for Palestine is material support of "a terrorist support network.” And also clamping down on college and university campuses where “more than 3,100 people have been arrested or detained.”

The United Kingdom, on the other hand, used counterterrorism legislation to ban Palestine Action. This despite an intelligence assessment report undermining the government’s claims by finding that most of the groups’ activities are “not terrorism” and the ban risked wrongfully criminalizing people. While the ban has been found to be unlawful, since put into effect in July 2025 terrorism arrests have increased by 660%, with the majority of these linked to it.

Across Europe Palestine solidarity was particularly targeted, like in Germany where the homes of pro-Palestinian activists have been raided and support for Israel has become a prerequisite for citizenship.

The effects of these actions will not be limited to Palestine advocacy and puts all movements at risk by diminishing freedoms that enable organizing across issues. So protecting the freedom to advocate for Palestine is essential to protecting the right to protest, a fundamental tenet of democracy.

Research by investigative journalist and author of The Palestine Laboratory, Andrew Loewenstein, identified over 120 countries that have bought weapons or some form of repressive technology from Israel, all principally tested on Palestinians.

Israel provided military and strategic support to apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola, resulting in mass casualties; it is among the countries that armed perpetrators of Rwanda’s genocide and Myanmar at a time it was found to be committing a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against its Rohingya Muslim population.

In modern times Israel’s offerings have included drones, spyware, and surveillance tools. Like the Israeli-made spyware being used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an immigration agency that has been found to not only undertake abusive practices, but also violate its own policies.

For us in South Africa though, this is no surprise. The "homeland" of Bophuthatswana, where I was born and raised, was a product of the South African apartheid regime’s segregationist policies—which Israel took interest in—and stripped Black people of South African citizenship.

Like other homelands when it declared "independence" in 1977, it was shunned by the world. Despite its official stance, Israel was the only country to quietly recognize Bophuthatswana through informal connections and a quasi-diplomatic mission. A Jerusalem Post editorial in 1992 even referred to Bophuthatswana as "Africa’s Little Israel."

The backdrop of this relationship was the “clandestine alliance” between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid regime. Not only did the two countries collaborate on nuclear, but Israel would also become South Africa's largest weapons importer after the 1977 UN arms embargo and support the regime’s attempt to undermine sanctions.

It was a relationship of mutual admiration, an ideological alignment that in recent times is only matched by India’s admiration of Israel.

Apartheid had far-reaching consequences that extended beyond South Africa's borders. Along with unlawfully occupying Namibia, a colonial legacy embraced by the regime, it also launched hostilities in countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe. Similarly, Israel continues to conduct atrocities and aggression not only against the Palestinian people, but also in places like Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria. More recently, more than 300 people have been killed and scores injured following Israel's 10 minute assault in Lebanon—despite a two-week Middle East ceasefire, which Israel would afterwards claim did not include Lebanon. In the same way apartheid was deemed a threat to international peace and security, so too is the occupation and genocide in Palestine.

Not only is taking a stand against the overwhelming devastation that has been unleashed on Palestinians a duty, but also an obligation for people desiring peace and liberation for all. Because beyond the bombs, Israel has used international humanitarian law to try to justify the murder of civilians—a template being adopted by others like the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

Like the people of South Africa and oppressed people everywhere, the people of Palestine too will continue to make their rightful claim to freedom. And for the sake of humanity everywhere, people of conscience must continue to stand with them and keep the fire of freedom within reach.