Israel has annihilated the institutions and infrastructure that made Gaza a society—public schools, hospitals, places of worship, universities, housing, farms, the agencies that distribute food to the needy, utilities, water supplies. Israel’s relentless bombing and shelling have killed or wounded well over 138,000 Palestinians, and Israel is inflicting a famine on Gaza, using starvation as a weapon of war.

Kamala Harris’ continued support for Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza is despicable. But Donald Trump is a fascist who poses an imminent danger to America, and must be stopped.

Many people are saying they can’t bring themselves to vote for Harris in light of her position on Gaza. But those who plan instead to vote for the Green Party or to sit out the election have a bad misunderstanding of what voting means. If enough people share their confusion, disaster lies ahead—because along with a Trump victory will come Middle East policies that are even worse for Palestine.

Supporting the people of Gaza is imperative. But voting for the Green Party is no way to support them. Whatever Jill Steins says about Gaza, there is zero chance she will be our next president. And Donald Trump, the de facto beneficiary of the Green Party campaign, would certainly be no better for Gaza.

If Harris gets my vote for president, it does not mean I approve of her acts or her statements on Gaza. It only means I think our country, our way of life, and the future of Gazans, too, will likely be better if Harris holds that position of power than if Donald Trump does.

Refusing to vote for Harris misapprehends the meaning of voting. There is nothing on the ballot next to Kamala Harris’s name that says, “By checking here, I express my approval of all Kamala Harris has done, affirm that I share her values, and convey my deep admiration for her.”

Voting does not mean any of these things. Voting is not speech. It is action, action that advances one candidate over another, makes one state of affairs more likely than another. Voting means playing a role in a collective decision that one candidate will win and another will lose. Its content is not personal expression but what one political leader may do that the other opposes.

If Harris gets my vote for president, it does not mean I approve of her acts or her statements on Gaza. It only means I think our country, our way of life, and the future of Gazans, too, will likely be better if Harris holds that position of power than if Donald Trump does.

Either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be elected president. One or the other, no one else. No one can argue with a straight face that it doesn’t matter which.

A Trump victory would be a calamity. A calamity for the eleven million immigrants Trump means to deport—a calamity for everyone on a planet Earth impacted by climate change—a calamity for the people of color Trump demonizes, degrades and disenfranchises—a calamity for women entitled to control their own bodies and fates—a calamity for those who rely on the social safety net—a calamity for Jews fearful of the rising power of antisemites befriended by Donald Trump—a calamity for activists and public officials targeted by MAGA threats and violence—and a calamity for our fragile and imperfect constitutional democracy.

A Trump victory would be a calamity for the Palestinian people as well, likely to exacerbate the second nakba already engulfing Gaza and the West Bank.

Either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will be elected president. One or the other, no one else. No one can argue with a straight face that it doesn’t matter which.

Trump opposes the creation of an actual Palestinian state, and suspended U.S. opposition to West Bank settlements when he was president—resulting in “an aggressive Israeli settlement spree” that “pushed deeper than ever into the occupied West Bank.” Trump opposes calls for an immediate cease-fire, and his response to the broad student protest movement of support for Gaza is only: “Deport pro-Hamas radicals.”

“Israel has to do what they have to do,” says Trump. Only last week Trump promised, “We’re going to do a lot for Israel, we’re going to take care of Israel.”

On January 20, 2025, we can have a flawed individual as president, Kamala Harris, and attempt to pressure her to do the right thing, as the Congressional Progressive Caucus and many others have attempted. We can have a President Harris who will, by and large, adhere to the rule of law. A President Harris who will move us in the right direction on climate change. A President Harris who is grounded in reality and will seek to protect our democracy and our rights.

Or we can have the deranged fascist Donald Trump, who will annihilate our Constitution, our democracy and our freedoms in a maelstrom of political violence, misogynist aggression, mass deportation, racism and antisemitism, accelerating inequality, nepotistic corruption, and plutocratic fascism.

Harris and Trump are the only alternatives. This is our only real choice.

Opinion by opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court has moved toward a judicial framework that insulates justices from growing public concern about their own corruption. In a series of cases, the court has overturned corruption convictions of public officials who received substantial gifts and other things of value in exchange for government favors in decisions that detail the officials’ egregious behavior and yet absolve them of it.

In his law review article “Corruption and the Supreme Court,” Georgetown law professor Josh Chafetz exposes the self-serving nature of these decisions: The court is letting other government officials off the hook to shelter itself from scrutiny about the justices’ own deep-seated corruption.

Professor Chafetz’s disturbing theory is borne out by the evidence. In five cases concerning public corruption heard within the past decade, the Supreme Court issued in each one an opinion that diminished anti-corruption statutes by either framing them as too broad and vague, or by recategorizing corrupt behavior as simple acts natural to government life. As Chafetz stated to The New York Times, which recently wrote an article about his work:

In all five of the decisions, the court’s message has been that “federal law must be interpreted so as not to cover behavior that looks, to any reasonable observer, sketchy as hell...” Taken together, he added, the decisions make a basic point and a more subtle one. The basic one, he said, is that “the justices keep letting crooked politicians off the hook.”

From honest services fraud to quid pro quo bribery, in case after case in which the Department of Justice, a U.S. district court, a unanimous jury, and a U.S. court of appeals have found the official’s conduct to be egregious enough to warrant a felony conviction, the Supreme Court has thrown out convictions and shielded government officials from accountability. And as Chafetz explained, it has done this to shield its own misconduct from criticism. The justices responsible for weakening our anti-corruption laws include not just Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, whose records of lavish gifts have recently been exposed, but all justices who in at least some cases voted unanimously to throw out the convictions of corrupt government officials.

The Supreme Court’s forgiving rhetoric on corruption is not new. Its recent opinions emerge from dangerous precedent set in campaign finance law cases, like Citizens United. The Supreme Court has overlooked evidence of undue influence in elections by entities capable of vast political spending, and instead informed the federal and state governments that their only legitimate anti-corruption state interest is in blocking quid pro quo corruption or its appearance. That skyscraper bar, which notoriously is difficult to document, has proven deficient and led to unprecedented levels of campaign spending where the risk of corruption can only be higher. The court’s early refusal to enforce a thorough and meaningful framework of corruption created a slippery slope, unraveling corruption law altogether. And now, the Supreme Court is relieving public officials accused of serious misconduct at all levels.

The Supreme Court’s shocking leniency on matters of corruption does not quell growing concerns about public erosion of trust in government systems, but rather pushes to the public a reimagination of its own corruption as being equally ordinary. It is not. The Supreme Court’s tolerance of public corruption is a self-serving feat to insulate the justices from growing reports about the court’s own corruption. It must end now.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump must be defeated in November. Under his leadership, the country saw some of our darkest days of climate denialism, antidemocratic authoritarianism, and planet destruction. As the leader of a national environmental organization, Friends of the Earth Action, I am certain that the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, is the only one who can defeat Trump.

While I have been dissatisfied with many policies of the Biden-Harris administration, I recognize that there are no other candidates with viable experience and platforms. Jill Stein and the Green Party may seem to be an obvious choice for environmental advocates, yet they have failed to demonstrate that they are a real national party or can build a real national party.

This election comes down to a choice between a catastrophic dictator and a livable future for our planet.

Out of more than 519,000 elected offices in the United States, the Green Party currently holds 142 offices, none of which are statewide or federal offices. Even in California and New York, where there is rank-choice balloting and fusion battling, the Green Party has failed to make headway in electing candidates. The mayor of Oakland, California remains the party’s greatest electoral victory. Clearly this is not a political party worthy of a national ballot.

In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris is a strong candidate with a climate record. As California attorney general, Kamala Harris stood up to corporate polluters and worked to further environmental justice. In California she vigorously defended multiple state-level consumer, public health, and animal welfare laws. And as vice president, she cast the deciding vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, one of the most important federal climate actions to date.

This election comes down to a choice between a catastrophic dictator and a livable future for our planet. Trump did irreparable damage under his first administration, handing favors to Big Oil billionaires and rolling back over 100 environmental rules and protections. Trump has repeatedly proven his presidential bid is solely for selfish gain, and that he will always put his own interests and his rich buddies above the American people.

If you deeply care about the fight for a more healthy and just planet, and if you deeply care about building power, then I believe—regardless of our policy disagreements with Vice President Harris—that we must support her in this election. Third-party candidates threaten to take votes away from Harris by painting themselves as an alternative to Democrats, but they will only spoil votes in Trump’s favor. I urge those who care about climate, democracy, and social justice to reject the Stein smokescreen and instead support Vice President Harris for President of the United States. Vote like the future of our planet depends on it, because it does.

Back in 2020--during the BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd—NBA and especially WNBA support for the Biden-Harris campaign played an important role.

Now Kamala Harris—the first Black woman to run as a major candidate—has a very real chance of winning the presidency.

And she is running against a Donald Trump that is even more racist, and angry, than he was in 2020, spreading lies about the Haitian community, promising to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, and publicly calling for a “very rough day” in which police could violently punish suspected criminals—a nod to the racist police brutality that sparked the 2020 protests. He even ranted against President Biden for rescuing WNBA star Britney Griner from Putin’s Russian prison.

This would seem to be an all-hands-on-deck moment for the NBA and WNBA, many of whom care deeply about these things and often act on their convictions. Yet little seems to be happening, especially compared to 2020.

An active campaign by top NBA and WNBA players to support Harris could have a major impact in mobilizing voters...

There are some promising signs.

Back in July many high-profile WNBA players publicly backed Harris.

Both Steve Kerr and Steph Curry publicly endorsed Harris at the DNC Convention in Chicago (both enjoy a Bay-area connection to Harris, a Golden State Warriors fan).

An Athletes for Harris group was recently formed, whose co-chairs include Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Steve Kerr, Candace Parker, Doc Rivers, Dawn Staley, and Chris Paul. Johnson spoke clearly for the group, declaring: “I’m so happy to be a part of Athletes for Harris . . . For all of the athletes out there, don’t be afraid to use your platforms – we need all of you to get involved.”

These things matter.

But there was so much more in 2020.

Back in 2018, when LeBron James was scolded by Laura Ingraham to “shut up and dribble,” he responded: "I get to sit up here and talk about social injustice. We will definitely not shut up and dribble. ... I mean too much to society, too much to the youth, too much to so many kids who feel like they don't have a way out.” In July of 2020 he joined with other players to form “More Than a Vote.” The following month he publicly praised Biden for nominating Harris as his vice-presidential candidate. In October he endorsed the ticket. And in November, he celebrated the Biden-Harris ticket victory.

But where is James now? As far as I can tell, he has said little about the presidential race.

In August, James publicly turned over leadership of “More Than a Vote” to Nneka Ogwumike--a 9-time WNBA All-Star and current president of the players union. The group pledged to focus its attention on reproductive freedom—a theme obviously resonant with the Harris campaign, as James alluded: “I started More Than a Vote to give athletes a place to educate themselves and get active authentically to who we are. It’s only right that this election be about women athletes. We’re all following their lead right now and Nneka is the perfect person for this election. I’m excited to support her vision.” But neither James nor “More Than a Vote” has publicly endorsed Harris. The group’s Instagram account features powerful posts on reproductive freedom, but nothing about the election, even though Trump opposes reproductive freedom and it is the centerpiece of the Harris campaign.

To be fair, like “More Than a Vote,” the NBA has “teamed up” with Power the Polls to promote poll worker volunteerism, and has also promoted non-partisan voter registration. But this is a far cry from making a strong political statement or endorsing the Harris-Walz campaign.

An active campaign by top NBA and WNBA players to support Harris could have a major impact in mobilizing voters, especially in large cities of hugely important swing states. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, Charlotte, Phoenix—these are cities with major NBA and/or WNBA teams that feature some of the sport’s most revered stars.

Is there a television network in the country that would say “no” to interviews with James or Curry or A’ja Wilson or Breanna Stewart or Candace Parker? Where is the Kamala campaign ad featuring “Magic” Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Where is the warm-up gear with the slogan “Kamala, We Won’t Go Back?”

One very promising development: Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, two outspoken retired NBA champions, recently hosted Harris on their popular webcast, “All the Smoke.” The 47-minute interview has had 605,000 YouTube viewings in two weeks. It’s a great interview, highlighting Harris’s affinities with millions of NBA fans.

Professional basketball is big business, for the league and for its players. There are serious economic risks to being “too political,” as the recent controversy surrounding Celtics star Jaylen Brown’s exclusion from the U.S. Olympic team because of a dispute with Nike make clear. And NBA professionals are certainly no more “obliged” to take a stand than any other professionals or citizens.

At the same time, many NBA stars, and increasingly WNBA stars as well, are huge celebrities with their own “brands” and media companies. As James himself stated back in 2018, “the Association” furnishes a huge platform for professional athletes to promote social and racial justice. In 2020 these athletes very visibly, and heroically, used this platform at a moment of real decision.

The current moment is perhaps even more serious.

Kamala Harris represents the promise of social justice and democracy.

Donald Trump represents contempt for them and contempt for everyone who does not share his racist and xenophobic vision of “American Greatness.”

The choice is clear. And time is running out.

I’ve crossed paths with Vice President Harris multiple times over the last decade at various phases in her political career. In 2014, I attended a luncheon in Los Angeles featuring then-Attorney General Harris sponsored by Junior State of America, the largest high school student-led organization in the United States, where I served as Southern California State Speaker of the Assembly. In 2019, I saw then-Senator Harris campaign for President in Iowa, where I served as a Field Organizer on the Bernie 2020 presidential campaign in rural areas outside of Iowa City. In 2023, as Climate Campaign Manager at the West Coast-based environmental nonprofit Pacific Environment, I was invited to greet Vice President Harris at LAX following my successful advocacy for the Biden-Harris Administration’s approval of an air quality regulation for California.

Fast forward to the presidential election season of fall 2024, and Kamala Harris is the Democratic Nominee for President going against Republican Nominee Donald Trump. Trump is running on a white Christian nationalist Project 2025 agenda of restructuring the contours of U.S. democratic government to dramatically increase the powers of the executive branch to limit abortion access nationwide, discriminate against transgender people, deport immigrants in mass, surveil Americans’ data without warrants, unleash undue force on First Amendment protestors, and censor critical theory in classrooms.

I am voting for Harris-Walz for the best realistically-possible political conditions for pro-Palestine organizing—and other forms of progressive organizing—in the United States for the next four years.

Harris is the Vice President of an Administration that spent $22.76 billion in arms transfers to Israel between October 7, 2023—September 30, 2024 as Israel’s religious extremist, apartheid government has conducted a full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign of the vulnerable Palestinian refugee population that Israel mass incarcerates within the 160 square mile Gaza Strip. The Biden-Harris Administration has enabled Israel’s Jewish supremacist government to weaponize Israeli suffering caused by Hamas’s October 7 attacks to carry out a systematic genocide of Palestinian non-citizens intergenerationally mass incarcerated in the Gaza Strip and under the control of the Israeli state. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has attacked Gaza with the equivalent force of several nuclear bombs, killing over 40,000 Palestinians and destroying 80% of schools in Gaza, 60% of buildings overall, and 57% of agricultural land. Recently, the American-armed IDF has attacked Lebanon with the stated goal of targeting Hezbollah, leading to mass civilian casualties including the killings of over 1,640 people.

Meanwhile, during this election, I’m a first-year Ph.D. student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley focusing my research on post-World War II U.S.-Israel-Palestine-Iran relations. I’m an Iranian American transgender woman with relatives who live in Iran, including Tehran, where the Israeli military just attacked with the blessing of the Biden-Harris Administration. I’ve also been a volunteer Palestine solidarity activist since 2017 with Students for Justice in Palestine at Yale University, the Democratic Socialists of America’s BDS and Palestine Solidarity Working Group, and other organizations. How do I vote and advance my political interests in and beyond this election?

Some Americans in my position who care about Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iranian dignity, freedom, human rights, and peace and want to make their interests known in this election are opting to vote for third party candidates. They seek a candidate who does not have a track-record of financing Israel’s 76-year-long, Jewish-supremacist military occupation and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. They seek a candidate that can be trusted with protecting human life during this moment of global crisis that the Biden-Harris Administration’s reckless decision-making has worsened.

I’m highly sympathetic to these Americans and I even voted third party in the presidential primaries. That said, for the presidential general election, I respectfully disagree with voting third party most especially in swing states. I will be voting for Harris-Walz, even though it’s quite hard to stomach given how Harris has positioned herself in relation to Israel-Palestine and Iran over the course of her career, in her Vice Presidency, and in this election. I am voting this way not out of an overabundance of enthusiasm for Harris, but due to a realpolitik calculation of what is necessary to defeat Trump and prevent our global crisis from getting even worse.

The reality is that most Americans think of politics through the lens of the two-party system. This, I believe is a flaw in our democracy that prohibits creativity, but it is a current reality. The project of strengthening additional parties to be able to compete in presidential elections is noble, but it is going to more time than we have available before November 5, 2024. Third party presidential candidates are not realistically going to win enough electoral college votes to secure the presidency. This means our two realistic choices for our next President are Harris and Trump. A pro-Palestine voter’s vote for a third party candidate in a swing state may thus inadvertently help Trump win that state and ultimately the Presidency.

I am voting this way not out of an overabundance of enthusiasm for Harris, but due to a realpolitik calculation of what is necessary to defeat Trump and prevent our global crisis from getting even worse.

While the Biden-Harris Administration’s management of this moment of global crisis has been nothing short of abhorrent, a Trump-Vance Administration would be materially worse. In addition to campaigning on cracking down on rights of transgender people and women domestically, denying climate change and opposing climate action, and revoking the visas of pro-Palestine international students at U.S. universities, Trump believes in an unqualified Israeli offensive on Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. He told Netanyahu in response to Iran’s missile attack on Israel an unrestricted “do what you have to do,” and has explicitly stated that Biden has gotten in the way of Israel’s war. Meanwhile, while the Biden-Harris Administration has armed Israel in its war, it has recently threatened to stop the flow of arms to Israel, openly criticized Netanyahu’s tactics in the war, and pressured Israel into narrowing its attack on Iran to targeted non-nuclear military sites. As an Iranian American with family in Iran, I worry for the possibilities that could arise with someone as unstable as Donald Trump as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces during this moment of global crisis. Trump should be nowhere near in charge of American nuclear weaponry in a time as fragile as this.

That said, my political action is not confined to my vote. Just as important as voting is organizing. I am voting for Harris-Walz for the best realistically-possible political conditions for pro-Palestine organizing—and other forms of progressive organizing—in the United States for the next four years. I see my vote as a prayer for the possibility of a shift toward a U.S.-policy of peace, justice, reparations, democracy, freedom, and equality in the Middle East against the current status quo of institutionalized supremacy and political violence—possible only with good political conditions and good organizing. Trump, an open white nationalist and warmonger with a wide religious fundamentalist following, as President would foreclose many possibilities for peace in Israel-Palestine. Harris at least represents more of a multiracial coalition and speaks the language of pluralism. Between these options, there is more political room under a potential Harris presidency to organize for advancing a pro-Palestinian, pro-human political agenda.

While my emotions have been high surrounding the election and the genocide in Gaza, I am finding it important to take a step back and rationally assess my choices on November 5 in the context of this moment of global crisis. It’s clear—even if hard to stomach —that Harris-Walz is the best realistic choice.

The morning before Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, Brendan Buck, a former communications aide to Speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan, appeared on MSNBC. Buck said that comparing Trump’s event with the infamous pro-Nazi gathering at the Garden in 1939 was “silly” and “completely obnoxious.”

“It is an arena,” a visibly angry Buck insisted. “I don’t think setting foot in Madison Square Garden makes anybody who goes there a Nazi.”

Professing to be a Trump critic, Buck said that comparing Trump to Hitler—and his views to Naziism—alienated undecided voters who might vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“That’s the kind of rhetoric that just tells people like ‘it doesn’t matter.’ They’re going to say anything they want.’” Buck continued. “I can’t tell you how much that upsets those people who are on the fence on Donald Trump, and they say, ‘They’re just out to get him. They’re going to say anything.’”

Now that Buck has seen the rally, I wonder if he is still offended at the Trump/Hitler comparison.

Trump’s Rally v. Hitler’s Reich

If Trump regains the presidency, he has told everyone what he’ll do with it. Take him at his word.

Lies at the Heart of Trump’s Sales Pitch

TRUMP: Rode to the White House on the wings of his “birther” lie about President Barack Obama. His lies at the Madison Square Garden rally flowed so quickly that fact checkers couldn’t keep up. And his media echo chambers are repeating those lies over and over again until they stick.

As Jonathan Swift observed, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”

HITLER: “[A]t a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty…” (Shirer quoting Hitler, p. 22-23)

Immigrants Are Trump’s Centerpiece Lie

TRUMP: Trump and his vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, portray immigrants as subhuman. In their fantasy world, immigrants are responsible for everything that ails American voters: inflation, high prices, exorbitant rents, housing shortages, crime, everything. They lie to feed that narrative.

Vance’s admitted that he made up his claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing household pets and eating them. But Trump still repeated and amplified the lie, turning the community inside out.

Trump claims that he’ll “liberate” Aurora, Colorado, from non-existent immigrant gangs he claimed run the city.

He calls America a “garbage can” of the world’s worst people—another lie..

He refers to immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He says, falsely, that millions of them are criminals from “prisons,” “mental institutions,” and “insane asylums.”

HITLER: Wrote in Mein Kampf that he “was repelled by the conglomeration of races…repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews… [His] hatred grew for the foreign mixture of peoples….” (W. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 27) And, similar to Vance’s views on the need to increase birth rates, he spoke repeatedly about the need to “increase and preserve the species and the race.” (Shirer, p. 86)

“The Enemy From Within” Comprises Trump’s Retribution Agenda

TRUMP: “We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala, and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat party,” Trump told the Madison Square Garden crowd, singling out Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “They’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”

In fact, their only crime was to disagree with and criticize Trump publicly.

Pledging that he will be “dictator for a day,” Trump has said that he will use the military against his foes and tell the Justice Department to target his adversaries. He has vowed publicly to “root out” his political opponents and imprison them.

And he promises to stack the federal government with loyalists who will never disagree with him.

HITLER: “I will know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals [who, he falsely claimed, had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ with the onerous Versailles Treaty of 1918] had been overthrown.” (Schirer quoting Hitler, p. 70) He banished or executed those who crossed him and surrounded himself with sycophants.

TRUMP: During his first term, Trump stacked the courts, including a federal judge in Florida who dismissed a criminal case against him. Like many of his appointees, she is manifestly unqualified for her position. But now she is reportedly on a list of candidates to be Trump’s next attorney general.

HITLER: Co-opted the judiciary and then established his own special courts. Shredding Germany’s constitution, he alone became the law. (Shirer, 268-274)

Phony Populism

TRUMP: Promising to pursue corporate-friendly policies in return for financial support of his campaign, Trump has pre-sold the presidency. Examples abound: He promised to reverse climate initiatives affecting the major oil companies in return for $1 billion in contributions to his campaign; he now supports cryptocurrency (which he called a “scam” until recently); he adopted a new position favoring the legalization of marijuana; and he vowed to put Elon Musk, who is pouring tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, in charge of slashing government regulation—which would create stunning conflicts of interest between Musk’s sprawling commercial interests and his government contracts.

Trump got surprising help from media owners Jeff Bezos, who killed a Washington Post editorial endorsing Harris, and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who refused to let his paper endorse a candidate, which also would have been Harris. At a time requiring courage, they buckled.

HITLER: Cultivated industry leaders who thought they could control the dictator as they supported his rise to power—until it was too late to stop him. They reaped short-term profits, but Germany and the world suffered devastating long-run consequences. (Shirer, p. 143)

Fear, Anger and Terror Are His Favorite Tactics

TRUMP: After losing the election, he encouraged the January 6, 2021 insurrection to remain in power.

HITLER: “I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.” (Shirer, p. 23)

Trump’s Role Models

TRUMP: Trump praises authoritarian leaders of other countries, including Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping. His longest-serving chief of staff and retired four-star general John Kelly reported Trump’s statement to him that “Hitler did some good things” and that Trump wanted generals who gave the kind of deference that Hitler’s generals gave him.

According to Kelly, Trump meets the definition of a fascist: “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”

Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to the country.” More than 100 other former top Trump advisers agree. Every day, the list grows.

HITLER: His professor described him as lacking “self-control and, to say the least, he was considered argumentative, autocratic, self-opinionated, and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline.” (Shirer, p. 13)

Here’s the Scariest Part

Whether Trump wins or loses in November, more than 70 million Americans will cast their ballots for him. Most of them know who Trump is. They hear his vile words and heinous promises to destroy democracy and the rule of law in America.

And they are the reason the election will be close. As Brendan Buck asserted, maybe they become upset at Trump/Hitler comparisons.

Or maybe it’s because they can’t handle the truth.

This presidential contest has generated an intense debate within the Arab American community. If it were a normal election year, I’d be out in the field urging my community to vote for Democrats. I’d be warning Arab Americans that we needed to do everything we could to stop Donald Trump from re-entering the White House. I’d remind them of his racism, xenophobia, and anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric. I’d point to the danger he poses to women’s rights, civil rights and civil liberties, the environment, health and safety protections in the workplace, health care, academic freedom, civil discourse, and the Constitution. It would be, as we say, “A slam dunk.” But this isn’t a normal election.

My community has been deeply traumatized by the genocide in Gaza and now the devastating war on Lebanon. They are justifiably furious at the Biden administration’s refusal to enforce U.S. laws that could rein in Israel’s unconscionable and illegal actions, and accuse them of enabling Israel’s impunity.

Given this, there’s been a significant decline in Arab American support for Democrats, an uptick in support for the GOP, and many saying that they want to punish Democrats by voting for a third-party candidate. I, too, feel this pain and am torn as to how to move forward. I wish it were different, but it just isn’t.

However, I have some questions for those who rightly hold this Democratic administration responsible for genocide and want to punish the Democratic nominee for president. When they say they are voting their conscience by supporting a third party, I ask them to explain how punishing Vice-President Harris and enabling Donald Trump to become president will end the genocide—especially as we have allies in the progressive side of the Democratic Party who support and have been working with us to advance our foreign and domestic policy concerns and will be with us to pressure a Harris White House?

I wish it were different, but it just isn’t.

Meanwhile, the party of Trump is dominated by hardline hawks who have little or no concern for Palestinians or our civil rights. Or how voting for parties that have been around for decades and struggle to gain even 1% of the vote will advance anything other than helping elect Donald Trump? Or how turning our backs on all of the groups who have been our allies in the struggles for our civil and political rights and for a just foreign policy adds up to “voting one’s conscience”?

It reminds me of a lesson I learned from the late Julian Bond in the aftermath of the 1968 election. A decade ago, I wrote a reflection on that lesson. I ask you to consider it again:

***
It was 1968 and the U.S. was reeling from the Vietnam War, urban unrest, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy.

In the wake of voter opposition to the war, President Lyndon Johnson had been forced to end his reelection bid in favor of his Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

All of this was in the air when Democrats met for their convention to formally nominate Humphrey. On the first night of the convention, there was a fight over whether to recognize the all-white Georgia delegation or the mixed black and white delegation led by a young Georgia civil rights leader Julian Bond. The mixed delegation won a partial victory. On the second night, the convention wrestled with an effort to amend the platform to oppose the continuation of the war. Bond was a leader in this fight too. The amendment lost.

On the third night, when the convention met to nominate Humphrey’s vice-presidential running mate, the anti-war delegates proposed Bond to run against the party leaders’ hand-picked choice, Senator Ed Muskie. When the party leaders couldn’t silence the anti-war opposition, they brought in the police who were televised beating delegates who were chanting Bond’s name.

On the final day of the convention, after Humphrey and Muskie gave their acceptance speeches, Julian Bond came on stage and in a show of unity held up Humphrey’s and Muskie’s hands. Many young activists, like myself, were devastated.

A few years later, I got to know Julian Bond, and asked him why he did that and told him how let down I had felt. In response, he told me that there were two types of people. Those who looked down at the evils of the world and said, “I’m going to stand on my principles because it’s got to get a lot worse before it gets better.” Then there are those who say, “I’ve got to get to work to see if I can make it at least a little bit better.”

He told me “I’m with the second group because if I took the first view, I’d be allowing too many people to continue to suffer while I maintained my purity and refused to do anything to help. At the convention, it wasn’t Julian Bond versus Ed Muskie. It was Hubert Humphrey versus Richard Nixon, and I had to make a choice as to who would help make life at least a little bit better.”

I never forgot that lesson and am challenged daily to apply it. It is the reason why I have so little patience for ideologues from the right or the left.

They often miss the muck of the reality in which most of us live and the tough, and often less-than-perfect, choices with which we are confronted in the never-ending challenge to make life a little bit better—whether in the struggle for human rights, improvements in the quality of life, or the provision of security for those who are most vulnerable.

Before Barack Obama ran for president, I remember thinking there would never be a black president in my lifetime. And I remember feeling overwhelmed, even tearful, when I watched on television as the new First Family walked on the stage at Grant Park in Chicago. It wasn’t so much the sight of President Obama that got to me. It was seeing Michelle and the girls, and Barak’s aged mother-in-law who would be living in dignity and esteem in the White House.

I was born in the segregated south, and there black women were mainly consigned to domestic work. But back in 2008, a majority of Americans voted to elect a young black man with a foreign-sounding name, and then four years later re-elected him.

Now we have the question—in a time of heightened stress and deepened divides, and a time of post-pandemic malaise, social isolation, an affordability crisis, and a corrupted social media—can we take another step forward in our democracy and elect a black woman as president?

Watching the DNC renewed my hope. So many men stood up for one black woman brave enough to run for the highest office in the nation, but also for each woman and girl of all colors who face the terrible vulnerability of simply having a body that can both bring new life into the world and endanger her life with a pregnancy, voluntarily and otherwise, that can end her life. So many of these men said that they would use some of their political capital to make right for women what the Supreme Court made wrong.

Change takes bottom-up organizing, building a base, doing the hard work of governing locally and building up to national participation, not parachuting in during razor-thin elections.

But the dread has crept back in recently as I hear people say they don’t really know Kamala. Is the real question about whether she is like me and, perhaps even more to the point, would she like me? Would I still belong, as a white person, or as a man, if a black woman holds the highest office in the land?

Or would I be reminded that our nation has not always been kind or just to people who look like her? Might her presence force me to question where I stand given our nation’s legacy of exclusion and violence directed at women and people of color. Will I feel uncomfortable or even shame?

Since the pandemic, so much of our anxiety, political and otherwise, has centered on the question of belonging. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy declared loneliness a public health crisis. Perhaps that contributes to the fear, especially In places with large immigrant populations, where some long-time residents wonder if they will still belong in their communities, or if they will feel excluded, not able to understand an unfamiliar language or new cultural norms.

So what do the two candidates offer the public in terms of belonging? Kamala Harris has promised to govern for everyone, and instead of giving priority to the rich, to especially focus on those who work hard to support their families. Those who see her in person or on the media often speak of her personal warmth.

Donald Trump’s track record shows he will govern not based on policies or the best interests of the country, but based on what benefits himself and favored members of his family and inner circle. Billionaires and right-wing ideologues are salivating at the money and power they can extract from Americans when given the green light by Trump. All they have to do is turn on the flattery.

Trump gives some people a sense of belonging—wearing those red hats, laughing at his jokes about who he is going to rough up, creating an out-group—all that seems to scratch the itch for many people who are angry and feeling excluded. But the truth is that he has nothing but contempt for people who aren’t wealthy, and for men and women who served in the military (who he calls suckers), especially if they had the misfortune of being wounded, captured, or to have died in the line of duty.

Yes, his thirst for power and flattery, his threats of violence against those who fail to follow his most unhinged directives, and his ugly rhetoric mark him has a fascist.

The truth is that we create belonging at the local level, not by vilifying our neighbors but by fostering relationships of mutual respect, supporting small business, civic groups, and other local institutions that keep us connected, and showing up for one another during times of need.

We need the political space to do this work, and we need leaders willing to be swayed by the things we the people (not the billionaires) are asking for.

Belonging is, of course, just one of the issues raised by Kamala’s candidacy. What about Gaza? This is the most painful question for me. I was hoping for a much more robust commitment to stopping the killing and starvation in Gaza, and preventing the war from spreading through the region.

But a vote for Trump will not help Palestinians. Recall that Trump was the one who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, turning their back on hopes for peace with Palestinians. And he told Netanyahu, “Finish the problem” in reference to the sustained killing which some now are calling genocide.

Harris has at least said that the killing must stop. A vote for her is not a vote for everything I would like, but I believe it is a harm reduction strategy compared to the alternative.

And here is the bottom line for me. Voting for Harris is not a vote for a savior who will make everything right—anyone who claims to be able to do that is a cult leader or a demagogue, not a serious political leader.

Voting for Harris is a vote for someone who authentically cares about people, and is a smart and capable leader.

To get the deeper changes we need to make housing and child care affordable, to straighten out the mess in our health care system, to combat the climate crisis, to bring peace to the world—all of these and so many other changes will require work by “we the people.” Even if we have an ideal candidate, the future is largely up to us. When we fight, we win. Or more specifically, when we organize and mobilize, we can get real change.

A vote for Kamala is a vote for someone who will not direct the National Guard to shoot at demonstrators, as Trump has tried to do.

Third party candidates rightly point out ways both of the two parties fall short. But change takes bottom-up organizing, building a base, doing the hard work of governing locally and building up to national participation, not parachuting in during razor-thin elections.

A vote for Kamala is a vote for someone who will not direct the National Guard to shoot at demonstrators, as Trump has tried to do. Under her presidency, we can do our work as the people of this nation to build powerful social movements that empower people to make change.

We need the political space to do this work, and we need leaders willing to be swayed by the things we the people (not the billionaires) are asking for.

Under a Kamala presidency, ordinary people can be heard, even if we make powerful interests uncomfortable, and we can achieve real wins for ordinary people and for our future. And as imperfect as it is, democracy of and by the people has a chance at working.

As I head back from Cali, Colombia after attending the Convention on Biological Diversity this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the attempts by countless advocates around the world to take on one of the biggest drivers of biodiversity collapse: toxic pesticides. Reducing the use of pesticides is one of the key ways we can help beneficial insect species rebound, protect vital pollinators, ensure thriving aquatic ecosystems, and much more—all while protecting human health.

With all that we know about the benefits to biodiversity of reducing pesticides, why haven’t we made more progress in tackling these toxic substances? The latest clue came to us last month thanks to an investigation by Lighthouse Reports, which revealed that the Trump administration had used taxpayer dollars to fund a pesticide industry PR operation targeting advocates, journalists, scientists, and UN officials around the world calling for pesticide reforms.

The investigation exposed the details of a private online social network, funded by U.S. government dollars, with detailed profiles of more than 500 people—a kind of Wikipedia-meets-doxxing of pesticide opponents. It showed how the network was activated to block a conference on pesticide reform in East Africa, among other actions.

My interest in the leaked private network is also personal: I’m one of those profiled, attacked for working on numerous reports, articles, and education campaigns on pesticides. In my dossier, I’m described among other things as collaborating on a campaign alleging pesticide companies “use ‘tobacco PR’ tactics to hide health and environmental risk.” Guilty as charged. While it may be creepy to read an industry-funded dossier on you online, it pales in comparison to what other pesticide industry critics have faced.

When you don’t have science on your side, you have to rely on slime.

There’s Dr. Tyrone Hayes, the esteemed UC Berkeley professor, who has persevered through a yearslong campaign to destroy his reputation by the pesticide company Syngenta whose herbicide atrazine Hayes’s exacting research has linked to endocrine disruption in frogs. There’s journalist Carey Gillam who faced a Monsanto-funded public relations onslaught for raising substantive questions about the safety of the company’s banner herbicide product, Roundup. There’s Gary Hooser, former Hawaii State Senator and Kauaʻi County Councilmember who weathered a barrage of industry attacks for his advocacy for common sense pesticide reform—a barrage so effective he lost his seat in office. The list goes on.

Why develop elaborate attacks on journalists and scientists raising serious concerns about your products? It’s simple: When you don’t have science on your side, you have to rely on slime.

This latest exposé does not surprise me, of course, nor many colleagues who are also listed in this private online network. I’ve been tracking industry disinformation and its attacks on those working to raise the alarm about the environmental and human health impacts of pesticides for decades: this is what companies do. They try to defame, marginalize, and silence scientists, journalists, and community advocates who raise concerns about the health harms of their products.

Growing up, I saw this up close. My father, the toxicologist and epidemiologist Marc Lappé, was a professor of medical ethics and a frequent expert witness in legal cases where chemicals were a concern. He died at age 62 of brain cancer. By the time he passed away, I had heard countless tales of his legal wranglings in depositions and on the stand. Cases where he served as an expert witness for lawsuits on behalf of people harmed by exposure to dangerous chemicals, lawsuits against some of the biggest chemical companies in the world.

Thanks to this investigation, we now have another example of how the pesticide industry tries to shift attention away from these very real concerns, even using taxpayer dollars to do it.

The defense attorney’s strategy with my father was always the same: undermine his expertise, rattle his equanimity so juries would trust well-paid lawyers, not my dad. There was the time they quoted an excerpt of one of his journal articles to make it sound like he was contradicting himself, which backfired when he asked the lawyer to read for the jury the rest of the paragraph, putting the words in context and solidifying his point. The worst story was from a trial not long after my stepmother died in a tragic accident, leaving behind my three younger half-siblings. As my dad walked to the stand, one of the defense lawyers said under his breath, “Marc, how was Mother’s Day at your house this year?” Slime indeed.

But while they have the slime, we have the science: We know that many of the pesticides now ubiquitous in industrial agriculture are linked to serious health concerns, from ADHD to infertility, Parkinson’s, depression, a swath of cancers, and more. The insecticide chlorpyrifos is so toxic there are no determined safe levels for children or infants. Paraquat, linked to Parkinson’s, is so acutely deadly a teaspoon of the stuff can kill you—something its largest producer, Syngenta, has known for decades. And, 2,4-D, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War to wipe out forest cover in that country has been linked to birth defects among children there—and in the United States—even decades after the war.

The threat for biodiversity is severe, too. A 2019 comprehensive review of more than 70 studies around the world powerfully tied widespread pesticide use to insect declines worldwide. And, as reported in the Pesticide Atlas (I edited the U.S. edition), despite these known risks, pesticide use is increasing in many regions in the world. In South America, pesticide use went up 484 percent from 1990 to 2017. In Brazil, alone, pesticide sales have shot up nearly 1000% between 1998 and 2008

Thanks to this investigation, we now have another example of how the pesticide industry tries to shift attention away from these very real concerns, even using taxpayer dollars to do it. As I land in Colombia, where tens of thousands are gathered to envision a world conducive to thriving biodiversity, I hope this reporting will remind policymakers to rely on science, not spin.

Images of homes that collapsed under mudslides or falling trees, waterlogged farms, and debris-filled roads drove home (yes, home!) to me recently the impact of Hurricane Helene on rural areas in the southeastern United States. That hurricane and the no-less-devastating Hurricane Milton that followed it only exacerbated already existing underlying problems for rural America. Those would include federal insurance programs that prioritize rising sea levels over flooding from heavy rainfall, deepening poverty, and unequal access to private home insurance — issues, in other words, faced by poor inland farming communities. And for millions of rural Americans impacted by Helene, don’t forget limited access to healthcare services, widespread electricity outages, and of course, difficulty getting to the ballot box. Case in point: some 80% of North Carolinians under major disaster declarations live in rural areas.

Given that Helene’s human impact was plain for all to see, what struck me was that significant numbers of headlines about that storm’s devastation centered not on those people hardest hit, but on the bizarre conspiracy theories of extremist observers: that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is funneling tens of millions in funds and supplies meant for hurricane survivors to migrants, that the Biden administration has been in cahoots with meteorologists to control the weather, or that Biden and crew actually planned the storm! One of my personal favorites came from a neighbor I encountered at the post office in our rural Maryland town: we don’t have enough money for FEMA rescue operations, she told me, because we’re funding Israeli healthcare and housing — a reference, undoubtedly, to the tens of billions of dollars of bombs and other aid this country has sent Israel’s military in its war in Gaza and beyond.

Of course, some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth at their core: if only we had focused long ago on issues of human welfare here instead of funding decades of foreign wars, it’s possible we might not be living in such an inequitable, infrastructurally weak country, or one increasingly devastated by climate-change-affected weather. But why did it take the deranged rantings of figures like former President Donald Trump and multibillionaire Elon Musk on social media to begin a discussion about how we choose to spend limited federal dollars? If only more government relief money was indeed spent on basic human necessities like housing and healthcare, anywhere at all, and not on war!

All of this ambient chatter has had an impact as real as the 140 mile-per-hour-plus winds and severe flooding that razed communities in six states across the Southeast in the last month and killed hundreds of Americans, with more still missing. In a region where death remains so omnipresent that observers can smell human bodies as they drive through mountain passes, conspiracy theories have led to real threats that forced FEMA crews to relocate from hard-hit Rutherford County, North Carolina, after reports of armed militia members who said they were “hunting FEMA.”

Given the truly destructive nature of all that chatter, I wasn’t surprised to hear New York Times “The Daily” host Michael Barbaro open one of his podcasts about Hurricane Milton with a question to fellow political journalist Maggie Haberman that would have seemed odd in any other context: “How quickly do we expect this storm to become political?”

How quickly do we expect this storm to become political? How about: How long before the next storm hits category 4 or even 5 status and makes landfall? It seems as if the world we’re living in isn’t Helene’s or Milton’s but the alternative-factual world of former Trump staffer Kellyanne Conway and forecasting what nonsense will pop up next about the weather (or almost anything else) has become more real than the weather itself.

The Complex Identity of Rural America

At the start of the Covid pandemic, I moved to a fairly progressive rural community in Maryland after my family purchased a small farm there where we have an orchard, a large produce garden, and a flock of egg-laying chickens (all of which are, I suppose, our versions of hobbies). I remain confounded by the fact that so many Americans — especially rural ones — vote for the party whose leaders divert aid and attention from solving problems that affect their communities, including the hurricane season and other kinds of extreme weather, not to speak of the rescue work that follows such natural disasters, and the need to provide services and protection for migrants who work on such farms and in rural businesses. Case in point: Republican members of the House and Senate voted against stopgap funding for FEMA a few weeks before Helene hit, doing their part to jeopardize aid to so many of their supporters, even though such efforts may ultimately prove unsuccessful.

It’s well known that many rural Americans provide a bulwark of support for Republican candidates and far-right causes. During the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump gained more backing from that group than any other president had in modern American history. The impact of rural America on his coalition of voters in the 2020 presidential elections was comparable to that of labor unions for Democrats.

Some rural voters also have spoken up loudly when it comes to far-right causes and identity politics. Typically, Tractor Supply Company, which bills itself as the “largest rural lifestyle retailer” and sells gardening tools, feed, small livestock, clothing, and guns, among other things, succumbed last summer to a pressure campaign from its customers to stop anti-discrimination and awareness-raising diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring programs that had previously earned it national recognition. Its management also pledged to stop participating in LGBTQ+ pride events and eliminate its previous goals to cut carbon emissions in its operations. The campaign kicked off after a right-wing influencer in Tennessee, who ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in 2022, posted on X that the company was funding sex changes, among other baseless accusations.

Rural America and Climate Change

I had to balk at such a campaign. Anywhere you look in my town, you can find evidence of how initiatives like Tractor Supply Company’s serve to benefit our community.

To consider (at least to my mind) the most pressing case in point, it’s increasingly difficult for people to farm in today’s climate because governments are not curbing greenhouse gas emissions fast enough. The Biden administration has significantly chipped away at the problem by investing in clean energy, reining in the worst corporate polluters, and curbing emissions and coal usage. Unfortunately, this country still produces record amounts of oil and natural gas, and the ravages of extreme weather in my mid-Atlantic agricultural community are plain to see, as is also true nationally.

Let me share a few small-scale, personal examples. A few years ago, I found that there was enough water locally and nighttime temperatures dipped sufficiently low to grow vegetables, meaning my family wouldn’t have to purchase much produce during the summer months. The past two summers, however, heat, wildfire smoke, and more recently, drought, have made small-scale farming prohibitively difficult, at least for my less experienced hands. My tomatoes haven’t cooled enough at night to ripen sufficiently. More than half of the new fruit trees I purchased to add to our orchard died for lack of sufficient water, and I found myself having to stay up in our barn with one of my best laying hens that I found collapsed from heat stroke one summer day. Dipping her little feet in cool water and forcing electrolytes down her beak ultimately revived her, but the near death of that tiny animal that the local Tractor Supply branch had sold me and advertised as “heat hardy” shook me.

Worse yet, earlier this spring, wildfires swept through my back woods and neighborhood, burning down one of my neighbor’s sheds, threatening numerous homes, including mine, and forcing a neighboring farm to evacuate their livestock. And even worse than that, there wasn’t enough water in my once robust creek for the local fire department to extinguish the flames quickly before the fire impacted several properties.

Our family is lucky. We each have a full-time job to sustain us and so don’t have to rely on farming to do anything but enrich our lives. Unfortunately, other families who have bravely sought to feed more people for a living can’t always say the same. Hurricane Helene is a case in point. According to the American Farm Bureau, that storm (and Milton on its heels) had a unique impact on rural communities and agriculture, with billions of dollars in fruit, nuts, and poultry lost. Food supply in rural communities across the Southeast has already been impacted and grocery price increases throughout the country will be likely.

In the U.S., where more than half of all land is used for agricultural purposes, the number of farms has been decreasing since the 1930s. And while climate change has made growing seasons longer, it’s also made the weather far less predictable. Despite farmers scaling up production and adapting their methods, doing everything from bringing horticulture indoors to using recycled human food waste as feed, yield has fallen and it’s growing ever more difficult to stay in the black. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the crucial global research body tracking that phenomenon, recently found that the largest casualty of our overheating planet is the struggle of agriculture to produce enough food for people to live, leading to growing food insecurity in regions around the world.

Worse yet, government efforts to help farmers survive sometimes create more problems than they solve. For example, financial and tax incentives for farmers who can demonstrate that they are using their crops to capture carbon require large amounts of paperwork, while climate regulations that may help farms in the long run entail red tape and restrictions that make paying the bills far harder in the short term. Yet some of the more vulnerable farmers like those in communities of color have welcomed recent government interventions as reparations for decades of discrimination in federal loan programs, as have indigenous communities who benefit from grants to develop more sustainable farming practices.

Nonetheless, if voting patterns and consumer pressure campaigns are any harbinger of the future, too many rural voters and consumers don’t seem to be thinking about how to create just such sustainable farming practices in a climate-changing world. Instead, the loudest voices in rural America seem focused on fear-based identity politics and anger rather than what elected officials have — and have not — said and done to aid their everyday lives in increasingly difficult times.

By some indicators, rural lives have only grown far more precarious in our moment and maybe that helps explain why so many farm families are frustrated with the powers that be. Farmers in this country are more than three times as likely to die by suicide as people in the general population. Factors like high rates of gun ownership and social isolation have an impact, but so do unpredictable weather, supply chain interruptions born of the Covid-19 pandemic, and our government’s slow and haphazard response to so much in the Trump years.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

I find it perplexing that the rural customers of Tractor Supply rejected diversity, equity, and inclusion campaigns from that rural retailer, since people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ folks make up a significant part of rural communities, just not the well-paid or well supported ones. Most farmworkers who tend crops and livestock and engage in other forms of manual labor like processing or transporting our food are, in fact, foreign born and work for only the little more than half of the year that encompasses the growing season. Those workers or others in their families need to get second jobs just to make ends meet. They are more at risk of climate- and access-related health issues because of air pollution and heat-stroke. Such risks were compounded by Trump-era policies that cut federal funding for rural health centers and curbed insurance regulations in struggling rural clinics and hospitals.

In an America where discrimination as well as pay gaps based on race, gender, and sexual orientation remain rampant, making equity a priority can only help those who actually sustain this country’s farming communities. In my county, where equity and inclusiveness are central to social policy, about a third of the children at our small rural school receive free lunches and other services. That portion of the school population consists significantly of kids whose parents are willing to do low-wage work on local farms and that’s not generally white, American-born families.

What’s clear is that Donald Trump’s politics of grievance appeals to voters who see their lives and those of their children worsening, not getting better, as time goes by. Social science research has identified emotions like anger, fear, and nostalgia as key to his appeal to rural Americans and other groups whose health indicators, isolation, and economic well-being are only worsening. If his recent seemingly unhinged “dance party” in Pennsylvania is anything to go by, I suspect he’s hearkening back to a time in American history when communities were smaller, life was simpler, and racism was rampant and — yes! — unhinged. (Note, by the way, his inclusion of “Dixie,” the unofficial Confederate anthem, on that playlist he danced to for 39 straight minutes.) While rural America certainly struggles in more ways than I can describe, it’s precisely the things that Democratic candidates are trying to do now that would bring them back to a healthier, more sustainable way of life.

In a world where the weather’s only growing worse, if my community is a good example — and I suspect it’s as good as any — rural Americans need to think hard when they go to the ballot box (or the cash register) and consider the universe of hard scientific facts rather than just listening to the latest conspiracy monger on X or Instagram. Their lives and their livelihoods may just depend on it.

I cancelled my Washington Post subscription Friday evening. Jeff Bezos, Mister “Democracy Dies In Darkness” (the Post’s slogan on their masthead), by blocking his editorial staff from endorsing Harris chose darkness over his nation’s future, and I can’t support that.

The big mistake John D. Rockefeller made back in the day—that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk appear committed to not repeating—was not buying a media outlet like a newspaper. Had John D. had that sort of a vehicle to mold public opinion, American history may be very different.

By 1880, Rockefeller’s Ohio-based company controlled over 90 percent of the nation’s oil, owned 4000 miles of pipelines, and employed over 100,000 people. As Rockefeller’s oil empire got larger and larger, eating alive hundreds of smaller operations, ruthlessly driving up prices, destroying his competitors, and throwing workers out of a job, public outrage grew.

At some point, America is going to have to confront its oligarch problem.

In 1887, Ohio sued him, arguing that he was operating in ways that were detrimental to the state and its citizens and businesses; in 1892 the Ohio Supreme Court ordered his company dissolved. As I lay out in detail in Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People,” this led Rockefeller to move Standard Oil to New Jersey after that state changed its corporation laws to allow for his monopolistic behavior.

Which brought in the federal government; in 1890, Ohio Senator John Sherman introduced and saw passed into law the Sherman Anti-Trust Act which provided not just fines but jail sentences against people like Rockefeller who were committed to destroying competition and owning entire markets. The law was flawed with a few loopholes and ambiguities, so it was amended in 1914 with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act.

Nonetheless, in 1906 progressive Republican Teddy Roosevelt’s administration filed an antitrust action against Rockefeller that went to the Supreme Court in 1911 during the administration of progressive Republican President William Howard Taft. The behemoth was broken up into 34 separate companies, an action that, like the breakup of AT&T by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, led to an explosion of competition in the marketplace and a dramatic increase in shareholder value.

But back to Jeff Bezos and his 2013 purchase of The Washington Post.

It was reporters and editors for the hundreds of independent newspapers during the First Gilded Age (1880-1900) era that led the crusades against Rockefeller and his fellow monopolists. Investigative journalism was all the rage then, and it fed public demand for a return to competition and the de-throning of that age’s oligarchs.

The vast majority of workers were struggling and they worked for a very small 10 percent of the population who controlled most of the nation’s wealth (a situation we’re at again).

The result was constant strife, strikes, and the murder of labor leaders; entire towns were in arms (and sometimes ablaze) with labor conflict. The “problem of labor”was the number one issue of the day. As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:

“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

There was a broad consensus across American society that those “Robber Barons” were feathering their own nests at the expense of the American public, hurting both working class people and small businesses. The Supreme Court endorsed breaking up Standard Oil in 1911, and even broke up the Associated Press in 1944.

The law was so rigorously enforced — so the game of business could be played by all comers, not just the “big boys” — that in the 1960s the Supreme Court barred the merger of the Kinney and Buster Brown shoe companies because the new combined company would control a mere 5 percent of the shoe market.

Back in the ’60s every mall and downtown in America was filled with small, locally-owned businesses; there might be a Sears to anchor the shopping center or a retail part of town, but most shops, restaurants, and hotels were family-owned.

But then Reagan, in 1983, ordered the DOJ, SEC, and FTC to stop enforcing the Sherman Act, which is why today Nike, for example, controls about a fifth of the entire nation’s shoe market. It’s the same across industry after industry, from retail to grocery stores to railroads to computer software to social media to chip manufacturing to airlines to hotels…and on and on. In virtually every industry, a handful of massive companies control 80 percent or more of the market.

The Biden administration is the first to seriously try enforcement of the nation’s anti-trust laws since Carter broke up AT&T, going after Google and blocking mergers in multiple industries. It’s led a bunch of American billionaires to demand that the Federal Trade Commission’s head, Lina Kahn, be fired.

Kahn and her FTC went after Bezos last year, suing Amazon for running a monopoly that price-gouges customers and blocks out competition. The trial is scheduled for 2026 if Kahn keeps her job; a Trump administration would fire her immediately, and pressure from major corporate donors and billionaires is building on Harris to do the same.

Bezos also must remember well when he got on the wrong side of then-President Trump because of the Post’s coverage of the orange oligarch’s lies and crimes; Trump, in a fit of pique, awarded a $10 billion Pentagon contract for cloud computing to Microsoft, shocking analysts across the industry.

Bezos is also working for his Blue Origin spaceship company to get more billions in NASA and Pentagon contracts. He and his companies also own billions in Google and AirBNB stock as well as owning outright almost a hundred other companies.

Might be a good time to own one of the two most influential newspapers in America, eh?

Similarly, billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, in addition to apparently taking orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin, is fighting numerous government efforts to regulate his companies (which exist in large part because Obama bailed out Tesla in 2010 with $465 million, and NASA is now pouring hundreds of millions into SpaceX):

— Tesla is fighting the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over union-related issues, with Musk taking a lawsuit to the Supreme Court alleging government protections of unions are unconstitutional.
— SpaceX is battling the NLRB over employee firings.
— The SEC is investigating Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) and his “funding secured” tweets about taking Tesla private.
— The FTC is investigating X’s compliance with a $150 million privacy settlement.
— The Federal Communications Commission recently denied SpaceX’s Starlink a $886 million rural broadband award.
— The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing Tesla over alleged racial harassment.
— The FAA is in conflict with SpaceX over launch licensing and environmental reviews.
— The EPA has fined SpaceX for water-related violations.
— The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened multiple investigations into Tesla’s vehicle safety and Autopilot system.
— SpaceX faces scrutiny over its environmental impact at its Texas launch site.

To avoid the Rockefeller mistake, Musk — with the apparent help of two Russian oligarchs and the leader of Saudi Arabia — purchased Twitter, the online digital equivalent of our nation’s largest newspaper.

Now that we’re in America’s Second Gilded Age — with today’s billionaires vastly richer than Rockefeller’s wildest dreams — we confront a similar crossroads to that of previous generations.

And he’s now using it to try to get Trump and Republicans into office, presumably so they can gut the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and any other regulator that might take him on to protect workers, the public, and the national interest.

We took on the superrich with success during the First Gilded Age, and our enforcement of antitrust laws lasted all the way to 1983, when Reagan blocked them, leading to the “merger mania” of the 1980s and bringing us today’s oligarchic business empires across multiple industries.

Now that we’re in America’s Second Gilded Age — with today’s billionaires vastly richer than Rockefeller’s wildest dreams — we confront a similar crossroads to that of previous generations.

Is it okay, for example, for billionaires to own media properties they can use to manipulate politics and government agencies to amplify their other business interests? Or that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that our morbidly rich plutocrats can own judges and politicians? Most Americans would probably say “No” to both.

At some point, America is going to have to confront its oligarch problem. And the sooner the better, if we don’t want darkness to entirely subsume our democracy.

First the Los Angeles Times, then the Washington Post. Two of the country’s largest newspapers, including the one based in the nation’s capital, have now declared that they won’t endorse either major-party candidate for president. That’s irrefutable evidence that, in today’s United States of America, the self-interest of billionaires will always come before the needs of democracy. The financialization of journalism, which is so vital to a functioning democracy, has crushed the concept of a “free press.”

This is what oligarchy looks like.

This is why Democratic rhetoric about “saving democracy” has been so unpersuasive for undecided voters. Anti-Trump voters may know that democracy is important, but working people know something else: that what the billionaires want, they get. It’s hard to ask people to save something they feel they’ve already lost.

We’ve reached the point where a caudillo—a strongman figure—can openly threaten supposedly independent institutions and suppress opinions he doesn’t like.

Would a second Trump term do profound harm to democratic principles? Yes. Would this country’s vital institutions be cowed and manipulated with threats, hate speech, revenge, and the hideous lineaments of pseudo-Christian fascism? Yes. It’s a frightening prospect.

That may not be a big deal to this country’s elites, but they’d prefer the stability of a Kamala Harris presidency to the unpredictability of another Trump term. It’s better for their business interests. That’s why she’s raising so much more money than Trump.

But the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post don’t dare act against Trump, who has been open about his pursuit of vengeance and equally clear that he’ll reward his friends with government contracts.

These are the signs that an already-damaged democracy is entering a new stage of decay. We’ve reached the point where a caudillo—a strongman figure—can openly threaten supposedly independent institutions and suppress opinions he doesn’t like.

These newspapers’ cowardly actions prove, in one way, that Trump has already won. He has stripped the veneer off our democracy and revealed the cowardice and greed beneath it. It is the latest in the series of political innovations Trump has brought to American politics: rule by fear.

Whoever wins the election, we know now that naked intimidation works. The owners of American media are financially dependent on government contracts, tax breaks, and the good graces of the executive branch. Their reporters depend on government officials as sources. That’s why Trump’s threats are working.

These newspapers’ cowardly actions prove, in one way, that Trump has already won. He has stripped the veneer off our democracy and revealed the cowardice and greed beneath it.

Democrats could take Trump’s cynical lesson to heart, as Lyndon Johnson might if he were still around. But it would be better to call out a system that allows billionaires to censor the news because a bully is pressuring the billionaires.

What they shouldn’t do is talk about “saving” a democracy so few voters believe in. It would be wiser to talk about “restoring” it—although it never functioned perfectly, especially for Black voters and the poor.

Polling bears that out. A July 2024 Pew Research survey found that an overwhelming 72 percent of Americans don’t believe the United States is a good example of democracy. Democrats were slightly more likely to believe in American democracy than Republicans, but they’re hardly starry-eyed. Less than one-fourth of Democrats think we have an exemplary democracy.

The best way to talk about democracy is as an unrealized ideal. That would mean renouncing the endorsement of anti-democratic figures like Dick Cheney, who ascended to the vice presidency in an undemocratic power grab by the Supreme Court; Gen. John Kelly, who defended pro-slavery Civil War insurgents and committed ethical lapses; James Clapper, who gave false testimony to Congress; and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who approved illegal torture programs under President George W. Bush.

I understand that they’re trying to reach Republican voters who are uncomfortable with Trump’s totalitarian tendencies, but how many voters like that are there? This approach may alienate more people than it gains.

Trump may regain the presidency, or he may not. But either way, he has changed politics forever, reshaping it in his own image.

In any case, this campaign is almost over—“all over but the shouting,” as the old saying goes. Trump may regain the presidency, or he may not. But either way, he has changed politics forever, reshaping it in his own image. There will be candidates who don’t hesitate to use what he’s taught them this year.

Americans who believe in the ideal of democracy will have to fight even harder for it—now, and for generations to come.

There are the laws on the books and the laws that ought to be on the books. There are the laws of nature and the laws that are an abomination of nature. And there are the egalitarian laws of self-governance and the authoritarian laws of the oligarchy.

In most presidential elections for the last forty years, there has really only been one issue that should have been the focus of every voter: Do you favor taking money out of politics or not?

All other issues, such as health care, immigration, criminal justice reform, literally saving the planet, are truly secondary because we can’t address any of them while our system of self-governance is paralyzed by legalized oligarchic bribery.

There has only been one issue for forty years, and until we learn to focus on it, we are wasting the precious time we have left to prevent the Earth’s ecosystem from becoming incredibly hostile to civilization as we currently know it.

So, this has been the question: Do you favor taking money out of politics or not? Because if you don’t favor taking money out of politics, then you are an outlaw in a self-governing society. If you don’t favor taking money out of politics, you favor authoritarian oligarchy that says, “we the few can lord it over the rest,” and that justifies its oppression of others with deceitful justification ideologies claiming moral supremacy based on lies to which the commitment can become so strong it drives the liar into psychological self-delusion. And this delusion does not excuse the people who believe their own lies from the crimes they advance based on those lies. As a mass-psychosis, these delusions are driving civilization off a cliff in an absolutely criminal manner. We do the MAGA-mad among us a favor by holding them accountable for their madness before the election so that they don’t rue it after when the consequences may be unbearable.

Don’t let anyone frame the issue in any other way. Use your words to hold people accountable to declare themselves for or against self-government. Any other discussion is a distraction and irrelevant.

So, here’s some accountability: Bat-sh*t crazy or not, if you, like Justice Kennedy, argue that “independent expenditures, including those by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” then you support an agenda that is criminal in the eyes of the laws of self-governance. But in this election, the sickness of authoritarian oligarchy has spread its delusion so extensively throughout society, that the question is no longer even as far removed to the very immediate issue of taking money out of politics. This election season, the question is absolutely direct: Are you for or against self-government? This is the only issue that matters. This time, we have a candidate we know incited insurrection.

This election, that means the accountability we do our people a favor in insisting upon is this: Supreme Court Justice or not, looney-toon self-deluded Billionaire narcissist or not, proud-to-be-a-MAGA-manipulated-lie-swallower or not, if you believe there is justification for Donald Trump’s instigation of the January 6, 2021 insurrection and so cast your vote for him in the presidential election, then you are an abettor of a sacrilege against egalitarian human nature, and you are breaking the code of your own honor, giving your self-governance away like a beast-of-burden kneeling to his yoke in the field.

It does not matter if the corrupt Supreme Court excuses him with phony arguments, insurrectionist Donald Trump is a criminal. He has been accorded every procedural opportunity. The investigations have been multiple, the evidence is overwhelming, and the record of Donald Trump’s lies is also irrefutable. Everyone knows the Republican nominee for the presidency presumed the authority to try to establish himself as President against the people’s exercise of self-government on January 6, 2021. There is no going back from that assault on our democratic process. Donald Trump is an outlaw. People who would vote him back into power are abetting a crime, obstructing justice, and defying the natural order of civil society.

Journalists, in particular—but all of us who favor and believe in self-government as the law of the land, the law of nature, and the law of a moral society—cannot commit the mistake of arguing the merits of every issue out there. As bystanders or participants in the public debate, there is one and only one issue: Do you favor self-government or not?

We see billionaire Elon Musk spreading misinformation to advance Donald Trump’s campaign, we see him giving people million dollar checks at campaign events, and somehow, the press wants to know why Elon Musk says Trump will be better for our nation. That’s not the question. The question is: Mr. Musk, do you favor self-governance or not? Because if you favor self-governance, we will not allow you to deny that Donald Trump is a criminal who broke the law of self-government. You either denounce Trump and demand his prosecution or we take your conduct as an admission that you are a criminal abettor of a known insurrectionist. There is no other option now that you’ve jumped up and down on his stage.

We see billionaire Jeff Bezos afraid that publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris in his newspaper, The Washington Post, might cost him devastating damage if Donald Trump returned to power, and the press wants to talk about the corruption of the press, but that’s not the issue. The issue is this, Mr. Bezos: Do you favor the self-government that allowed you to become so successful or not? Because if you favor self-governance, we will not allow you to deny that Donald Trump is a criminal who irrevocably broke the law of self-government on January 6, 2021, and we will force you to either denounce him in your newspaper as a criminal or we take your silence as an admission that you too are a criminal abettor of a known insurrectionist. You wanted to be a newspaper publisher. Now, you are learning that a publisher has to publish. So publish: Is your allegiance to that law of self-government or are you are a criminal oligarch abetting a fascist lunatic? Staying silent is the wrong answer.

And it is not just billionaires we must hold accountable to the law of self-government. It’s every person who appears on a political news show to discuss the issues. There is only one issue. “Are you for self-government or against it?”

It’s all of your friends: “Are you for self-government or are you against it?”

It’s the family member at your dinner table. “Are you for self-government or against it?”

There is no disputing Donald Trump is an insurrectionist. The 2020 election was not stolen. There is no evidence it was. There never has been any such evidence. Donald Trump knew there was no evidence from the start. He rehearsed his lies even before the election day, anticipating he would lose. He is rehearsing them again now, with the same strategy deliberately in mind. Countless court cases and an extensive congressional investigation make clear: Joe Biden won the election and Donald Trump is an insurrectionist. There is no evidence anywhere that allows for any other conclusion.

And even if there was evidence supporting Trump’s lies, under the law of self-government, he still has to follow the law; he doesn't get to violently take over the Capitol. In the 2000 election, Al Gore conceded the election when the corrupt Supreme Court illegitimately threw it to George W. Bush. Gore recognized, win or lose, he did not have the authority to incite insurrection. Self-government required the people to take action through their peaceful political process. The 2000 election result was an abomination before the law of self-government, but that was the Supreme Court majority’s dishonor and abomination. Al Gore was a law-abiding candidate. He left self-government intact to the people, honorably, dutifully.

The 2020 election result, by contrast, actually abided by the law of self-government. Trump lost and Joe Biden won and became President. But whether Trump won or lost is not the issue today; the issue today is that Trump’s actions in fomenting the January 6, 2021 insurrection make him an enemy of self-government, an outlaw whom a self-governing people cannot allow to hold office.

In the remaining days of this election, we, the law-abiding people who are for self-government, need to be absolutely disciplined, civil, polite, but disciplined, firm, and unsparing in our analysis, keeping the conversation always focused on this one question: Are you in favor of self-government or not?

And if someone at your dinner table tries to assert that Trump had the right to incite violent insurrection or that the rioters were not engaged in violent insurrection or that Trump will be better for America, then, if you want your self-government to survive, you need to insist they answer you when you ask: “Are you for self-government or against it? Have you really thought about what it means to lose self-government? It’s not the same as losing an election; it is losing the vote entirely forever.”

And then you need to tell them:

“There has been ample investigation. The facts are clear. Trump’s lies are clear. Your denial of the facts and commitment to Donald Trump’s lies are not an excuse for you continuing to abet a crime against self-government by voting for an insurrectionist whose criminal actions are widely in evidence. If you stole a car to drive to our house for dinner, I would not simply pass you the potatoes. I tell you now, your vote for Donald Trump is a crime that changes my relationship to you the same way it would if you deliberately sought to hurt my neighbor. You need to respect the law of self-government. Nothing is more basic than that. Wake up.”

Don’t let anyone frame the issue in any other way. Use your words to hold people accountable to declare themselves for or against self-government. Any other discussion is a distraction and irrelevant. Help people understand the choice they are making. They will thank you for it, when they come to their senses.

The conclusion that Donald Trump is a fascist has gone mainstream, gaining wide publicity and affirmation in recent weeks. Such understanding is a problem for Trump and his boosters. At the same time, potentially pivotal in this close election, a small proportion of people who consider themselves to be progressive still assert that any differences between Trump and Kamala Harris are not significant enough to vote for Harris in swing states.

Opposition to fascism has long been a guiding light in movements against racism and for social justice.

Speaking to a conference of the African National Congress in 1951, Nelson Mandela warned that “South African capitalism has developed [into] monopolism and is now reaching the final stage of monopoly capitalism gone mad, namely, fascism.”

Before Fred Hampton was murdered by local police officers colluding with the FBI in 1969, the visionary young Illinois Black Panther Party leader said: “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”

Do we want to be organizing against a fascistic militaristic President Trump, with no realistic hope of changing policies . . . or against a neoliberal militaristic President Harris, with the possibility of changing policies?

But now, for some who lay claim to being on the left, stopping fascism is not a priority. Disconnected from the magnitude of this fateful moment, the danger of a fascist president leading a fanatical movement becomes an abstraction.

One cogent critic of capitalism ended a column in mid-October this way: “Pick your poison. Destruction by corporate power or destruction by oligarchy. The end result is the same. That is what the two ruling parties offer in November. Nothing else.”

The difference between a woman’s right to an abortion vs. abortion being illegal is nothing?

“The end result is the same”—so it shouldn’t matter to us whether Trump becomes president after campaigning with a continuous barrage against immigrants, calling them “vermin,” “stone-cold killers,” and “animals,” while warning against the “bad genes” of immigrants who aren’t white, and raising bigoted alarms about immigration of “blood thirty criminals” who “prey upon innocent American citizens” and will “cut your throat”?

If “the end result is the same,” a mish-mash of ideology and fatalism can ignore the foreseeable results of a Republican Party gaining control of the federal government with a 2024 platform that pledges to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” Or getting a second Trump term after the first one allowed him to put three right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court.

Will the end result be the same if Trump fulfills his apparent threat to deploy the U.S. military against his political opponents, whom he describes as “radical left lunatics” and “the enemy from within”?

Capacities to protect civil liberties matter. So do savage Republican cuts in programs for minimal health care, nutrition and other vital aspects of a frayed social safety net. But those cuts are less likely to matter to the polemicists who will not experience the institutionalized cruelties firsthand.

Rather than being for personal absolution, voting is a tool in the political toolbox—if the goal is to avert the worst and improve the chances for constructing a future worthy of humanity.

Trump has pledged to be even more directly complicit in Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian people in Gaza than President Biden has been. No wonder, as the Washington Post reports, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “has shown a clear preference for Trump in this election.” During a call this month, Trump told Netanyahu: “Do what you have to do.”

Palestinians, Muslim leaders and other activists in the swing state of Arizona issued an open letter days ago that makes a case for defeating Trump. “We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide,” the letter says. “We understand this sentiment. Many of us have felt that way ourselves, even until very recently. Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones.”

The letter goes on:

As we consider the full situation carefully, however, we conclude that voting for Kamala Harris is the best option for the Palestinian cause and all of our communities. We know that some will strongly disagree. We only ask that you consider our case with an open mind and heart, respecting that we are doing what we believe is right in an awful situation where only flawed choices are available.
In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet.

Exercising conscience in the most humane sense isn’t about feeling personal virtue. It’s about concern for impacts on the well-being of other people. It’s about collective solidarity.

The consequences of declining to help stop fascism are not confined to the individual voter. In the process, vast numbers of people can pay the price for individuals’ self-focused concept of conscience.

Last week, an insightful Common Dreams column—entitled “7 Strategic Axioms for the Anxious Progressive Voter”—offered a forward-looking way to put this presidential election in a future context: “Vote for the candidate you want to organize against!”

Do we want to be organizing against a fascistic militaristic President Trump, with no realistic hope of changing policies . . . or against a neoliberal militaristic President Harris, with the possibility of changing policies?

For progressives, the answer should be clear.

Exactly one year ago today, on October 28, 2023, Bilal Saleh was shot dead by Israeli settlers while peacefully harvesting his olive trees. It happened near the field he had tended for years, with his wife and children as witnesses. He was unarmed. The settler who killed him walked free, back to Rehelim. The world barely noticed.

Cast into the shadow of the more than 40,000 Palestinian lives lost since the war on Gaza began, Bilal’s death is barely a blip.

Farmers won’t fight with guns, but they will plant. Again and again, they will plant.

But it’s a different kind of death, being murdered in an olive grove. It’s part of a larger colonial strategy of dislocation to sever the deep connection Palestinians have to their land. Olive trees, once symbols of peace, have become battlegrounds—and settlers, soldiers in this war of erasure. This year alone, 4,000 trees have been destroyed by settlers.

What does it mean to destroy a tree? It’s not just vandalism—it’s an attack on identity, history, and survival.

The Tree of Souls: Palestine’s Living Resistance

For Palestinians, the olive tree isn’t just a crop. It’s their Tree of Souls. Remember that scene in Avatar when the Na’vi fight the colonizers to save the giant, sacred tree that holds their entire world together? The olive tree is that for Palestinians.

For thousands of years, olive trees have provided food, oil, income, spiritual roots, and cultural pride. They have withstood droughts, fires, and wars; held back the desert; and kept the soil from vanishing into dust. And here’s another feather in their leafy cap: Each tree quietly absorbs around 75 pounds of carbon a year. So when 4,000 trees are destroyed in a single season, it’s like leaving 300,000 pounds of carbon hanging around. Worse still, the Palestinian Farmers Union estimates that since the occupation began, 2.5 million trees have been destroyed. That’s the carbon equivalent of millions of transatlantic flights.

All of which makes farmers like Bilal the last line of nonviolent defense—not just against the occupation but environmental disaster. Farmers won’t fight with guns, but they will plant. Again and again, they will plant.

Colonization 101: The Settler’s Guide to Killing Trees

Olive trees don’t just die by accident. They’re methodically cut down, one by one, in a calculated sweep of colonization. For years, Israel has leveraged an Ottoman law allowing the state to claim uncultivated land. By destroying olive trees—trees that take years to mature and produce—they clear a path for more illegal settlements. That’s the game. It’s a slow deliberate erasure.

If even a fraction of the $18 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel were spent planting trees, we’d have hundreds of millions of trees helping transform a polarized holy land into a prosperous heartland.

Each felled tree isn’t just about clearing the land or fouling the air. Passed down like heirlooms, the trees hold a different kind of currency: history, survival, pride. Destroy them, and you don’t just take away a crop, you sever a people’s claim to the soil and connection to their past.

Without their olive trees, Palestinian farmers lose their autonomy, becoming increasingly dependent on external aid and less able to resist the encroachment of settlements. The landscape changes—slowly at first, then all at once.

Planting is the New Protest

But here’s the thing—Palestinians refuse to disappear. When Bilal was killed, we at Treedom for Palestine worked with the Palestinian Farmers Union to plant a new “Freedom Farm” for his widow, Ikhlas. She’s now a caretaker, a breadwinner, and the steward of a new olive grove—one that will nourish her family and keep Bilal’s memory alive. The grove is surrounded by steel fencing, protecting both farmer and trees.

Today there are 70 Freedom Farms across the West Bank: 17,500 more thriving olive trees, each a source of income and prosperity in a region hungry for both. But the need for more is great. In plain numbers: $30 plants, irrigates, and protects an olive tree. If even a fraction of the $18 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel were spent planting trees, we’d have hundreds of millions of trees helping transform a polarized holy land into a prosperous heartland.

Resistance doesn’t have to be violent to be revolutionary.

The Global Cost of Colonization

Settler violence against olive trees isn’t just unsettling—it’s unsustainable. Each tree felled isn’t just a lost crop; it’s a severed connection to the past and a stolen future. For Bilal’s family, the loss is deeply personal. For the world, it’s a reminder that justice, equality, and sustainability are intertwined, like the vast mycelium network beneath the soil, linking trees together in profound ways and sustaining life. As below, so above.

Above ground, the consequences of this ecological warfare ripple outward. Climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental collapse. The destruction of olive trees in the West Bank is just one battle in a much larger war.

What’s happening in Palestine isn’t far removed from us. The violence against the land isn’t just about one place—it’s about the shared fate of people and the planet. Palestine is our Pandora. If we continue to let violence against their land and people go unchecked, we’ll all pay the price. But for now, Palestinians are teaching us an important lesson: When your roots run deep, you can withstand almost anything.

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.—Yale historian Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

Once upon a time, in a world that feels so very far away, stories of courage by the reporters, editors and publisher at The Washington Post inspired a generation of young people to believe that journalism was a way—and maybe the best way—to change the world for good.

The pivotal scene in 1976′s All The President’s Men—which burnished both the facts and some legend about the Post, star reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and their role in the Watergate scandal that took down Richard Nixon—takes place in the dead of night on the pitch-black lawn of top editor Ben Bradlee. The two journalists, fearful they are being bugged, relay their source Deep Throat’s warning that “people’s lives are in danger, maybe even ours.”

The cowardly Bezos can spend billions to erect a manmade projectile that sends him into space, but he’ll never have the cojones of a Katharine Graham.

In a famous monologue, Bradlee (played by Jason Robards, who won an Oscar) tells Woodward and Bernstein to keep reporting the story, that “nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country,” adding his trademarked newsroom cynicism, “not that any of that matters.”

Yet perhaps an even more revealing scene occurs earlier, when Nixon’s campaign manager John Mitchell—called by the reporters for his comment on a damning article—instead issues a warning to the Post’s trailblazing publisher, saying “Katie Graham’s going to get her [crude word for breast] caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” Katharine Graham’s Post had a lot at stake—federal regulators could strip her company’s lucrative TV licenses—yet both the story and the quote, minus the T-word, were published and the Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its relentless pursuit of Watergate.

These are the stories that journalists tell ourselves in order to live—so much so that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos felt compelled when he bought the Post from Graham’s heirs in 2013 to invoke them to reassure a wary newsroom that he would never diminish the Post’s reputation for courageous journalism. The $200 billion man wrote in a letter to staffers: “While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham’s example, I’ll be ready.”

Bezos was lying.

On Friday, the world’s third-richest person, his scandal-scarred British publisher Will Lewis, and the iconic newspaper they control stunned both the American body politic and the media world by spiking their editorial board’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. The move came just days ahead of an election defined by her rival Donald Trump’s increasing threats to impose a tyrannical form of government with mass deportation camps and arrests for his growing enemies list, including journalists.

Lewis’ utterly incoherent defense of the decision—ending a tradition of presidential endorsements the Post launched in 1976, the same year that All The President’s Men was released—did nothing to quell the rampant, informed speculation that his boss Bezos has killed the already-drafted editorial out of fear a revenge-minded Trump 47 could terminate the billionaire’s extensive business dealings with the federal government. It seemed all too fitting that Trump was in Austin meeting executives of Bezos’ space venture, Blue Horizon, at the same time as the endorsement kibosh.

If this looks like the latest saga of open corruption in a nation that’s become a billionaire kleptocracy, it is—but this moment is also so much more than that. America is witnessing the raw power of dictatorship some nine days before voters even decide if that will truly be our future path. The cowardly Bezos can spend billions to erect a manmade projectile that sends him into space, but he’ll never have the cojones of a Katharine Graham. He is obeying fascism in advance, and he is not alone.

Three thousand miles west, Bezos’ fellow billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong—owner of the Los Angeles Times since 2018—pulled essentially the same maneuver in killing his editorial board’s endorsement of Harris that had been in the works for weeks, and which followed months of editorials warning of the authoritarian dangers of a Trump presidency. Observers noted that Soon-Shiong is a longtime close friend to—you guessed it—another billionaire, Elon Musk, who is the world’s richest man and has thrown all his time and considerable dollars into getting Trump elected. (Soon-Shiong’s daughter insists the reason was both candidates’ failure to address the carnage in Gaza.)

While the moral center of the journalistic universe seemed to be collapsing, Trump told a rally in Tempe, Arizona that the media is “the enemy of the people, they are. I’ve been asked not to say it, I don’t want to say it. They’re the enemy of the people.” The Republican’s replay of this ominous language echoing dictators of the 1930s was quickly followed by a new threat to create licensing woes for CBS because Trump didn’t like its editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris, and a lengthy post on Truth Social threatening to prosecute his enemies.

The message here is clear. The cowardice of the news organizations controlled by Bezos and Soon-Shiong has already taught Trump—in the words of Yale’s Snyder, a leading U.S. expert on fascism—what power can do, and if he prevails in next week’s election, he plans to bring that hammer down in full force. What happened at the Post and the LA Times was a stunning betrayal of journalism’s moral values, but in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.

The endorsement cancellations came with a heaping side order of nuance. One irony, as some observers pointed out, is that the expected endorsements of Harris from both editorial boards would have been a tiny blip on the political radar, compared to the earthquake of the owners’ interference. What’s more, there’s an intellectual argument—I once made it myself in a long-vanished blog post—that newspapers shouldn’t endorse candidates. If the Post or Times had announced such a decision a year ago—and not under the heat of the election’s final days, under pressure from self-interested billionaires—there’d be little controversy.

But these reversals, coming now and coming from the poisoned heart of American oligarchy, have instead confirmed the worst fears among an anxiety-wracked electorate that the core institutions that once saved U.S. democracy under the life-or-death pressures of Watergate—the Supreme Court, Congress, and an aggressive media—have morally imploded into empty shells.

Even worse, readers’ sudden sense of betrayal seems to have greatly accelerated the already steep decline of public trust in American journalism, with reports that both the Post and the LA Times have been bombarded with thousands of canceled subscriptions. Some have switched to news organizations like The Philadelphia Inquirer, which published a long and compelling endorsement of Harris at almost the exact moment the Post’s capitulation went public. But many readers will be lost for good. This will create even more layoffs, which will lead to even less accountability journalism in a crumbling democracy, which will create even more cynicism—the tainted gasoline that fuels autocracy.

It’s also critical to note that this fish stinks mainly from the head. The vast majority of working journalists—most of whom weren’t born yet when Woodward and Bernstein stood on Bradlee’s lawn—are just as outraged as their readers frantically hitting the “cancel my subscription” button. Scores of reporters, columnists, and others in the two newsrooms have bravely condemned their bosses’ decisions in online posts and in open letters. The editorial-page editor of the LA Times, Mariel Garza, resigned in protest—despite the horrendous journalism job market—and at least two other colleagues have joined her.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” With the election little more than a week away, I hope that the brave actions of Garza and the words of those who are speaking out—a growing list that includes Woodward and Bernstein themselves—will be the ultimate takeaway, and not the craven corruption of a little man like Bezos.

This early sneak preview of what dictatorship actually looks like is also providing the most important lesson we could have right now, which is how to not obey in advance but stand up against strongmen and bullies. How all of us respond over the coming days and weeks will decide the fate of the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.

And if any of that matters.

It’s 2029. JD Vance has been president for six months following Donald Trump’s second term in office. You’re waking up in a storm shelter in Georgia. You cowered all night as Hurricane Don smashed its way across the state.

You open the door to utter devastation—buildings destroyed, whole communities washed away, hundreds of people dead or missing.

Despite its Category 5 strength, Hurricane Don hit the Atlantic coast with little warning. Several years earlier, following the Project 2025 blueprint, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was privatized. Hurricane hunter planes were scrapped because they were unprofitable. And satellite data was sold to the highest bidder.

Back here in the present day, just days before Election Day, we should be clear-eyed about the consequences of a second Trump term.

Without NOAA forecasts, countless people were caught unprepared. They chose not to evacuate and tried to protect their homes.

In the days and weeks that follow, you realize that the federal government is not coming to help.

In line with Project 2025, emergency response activities were transferred to state and local governments. Federal disaster preparation grants have been eliminated. And the National Flood Insurance Program was wound down, leaving only the rich and lucky few who have private insurance with the ability to rebuild.

This was the consequence of electing Donald Trump and the fruition of his Project 2025’s extreme anti-people, pro-polluter agenda.

But there was more. Following through on his campaign promise, Trump delivered an oil and gas development frenzy with more fracking, more pipelines, and a battle plan to “drill, drill, drill.”

And Trump made quick work following through on his promise to oil executives that he’d block or reverse any environmental law they wanted if they donated $1 billion to his campaign.

Between 2025 and 2028, President Trump appointed two more justices to the Supreme Court. With an 8-1 conservative hegemony, the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency had no authority at all to address greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the court rejected that climate change was even real.

As a result, all federal agencies were left unable to address any impact of climate change. Superstorms, extreme wildfires, category 5 hurricanes have become the new normal.

Back here in the present day, just days before Election Day, we should be clear-eyed about the consequences of a second Trump term.

We just saw Hurricane Milton intensify in the Gulf of Mexico at one of the fastest rates ever on record. It finally slammed into Florida as a powerful Category 3 storm, leaving at least 24 people dead, more than 3 million without power, spawning dozens of tornadoes and creating a once-in-a-thousand-year rain event.

Two weeks earlier, Hurricane Helene brought a 1,000-year rainfall event to North Carolina and Georgia. It was the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina, leaving at least 230 people dead across six states and carving a path of destruction as much as 500 miles from any coastline.

Milton’s rapid intensification and Helene’s immense rainfall surprised some observers but both storms exemplify the effects of global heating driven primarily by digging up and burning fossil fuels.

For decades, scientists have predicted the increasing strength of such storms as governments fail to stop fossil fuel expansion and the planet keeps getting hotter. Continuing to burn ever more oil, gas, and coal means warmer oceans and warmer air. Warmer oceans provide immense energy that intensifies storms. Warming air holds more moisture, bringing heavier rainfall.

Rolling back every shred of climate progress and propping up rich polluters is going to make matters much worse for Georgia, Florida, and every other state on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Storms of the century will increasingly become storms of every few years—same goes for heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods—with little relief or recovery in sight.

And Trump’s reckless plans to pull out of the Paris agreement again and throw sand in the gears of the international climate negotiations threatens world leaders’ long-overdue agreement last year to “transition away from fossil fuels.”

In a year of climate extremes, we’ve learned that nowhere is safe on a heating planet.

Hurricanes will keep happening, as they always have. But when you emerge after 2029’s Hurricane Don, do you want a government that acts on science to protect people and planet, making polluters pay for their destruction? Or one that sacrifices our lives and livelihoods to the highest bidder?

In August, climate activist and cellist John Mark Rozendaal was arrested and charged with criminal contempt for playing a few minutes of Bach outside Citibank’s headquarters in New York City. Rozendaal, 63, was prominent in the “Summer of Heat on Wall Street” campaign that targeted Citibank for its prolific financing of fossil-fuel projects. He and a co-defendant now face up to seven years imprisonment if convicted.

Meanwhile in Atlanta, more than 50 justice and environmental activists are awaiting trial on domestic terrorism and other charges arising from their years-long defense of the city’s South River Forest against the construction of an 85-acre police training center there. They are being prosecuted under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) law. Any of them found guilty of “racketeering” would have five to 20 years of imprisonment added to their sentences for the alleged underlying crimes.

Such situations are symptomatic of a grim trend in both the United States and Europe. Nonviolent, nondestructive climate protest is increasingly being subjected to criminal prosecution, while punishments are being ratcheted up to levels befitting violent and far more serious crimes.

The state abuses described in this article should be considered a preview of what is almost guaranteed to be even worse to come if Donald Trump does indeed retake the White House and the Republicans win majorities in the House and Senate.

Across the Global South, such environmental protests are all too often being met by corporate and state forces with extreme extrajudicial violence, especially in Indigenous communities. Here in the Global North, however, the clampdown on protest has largely been through legal action, at least so far. But that might—especially in an America with Donald Trump as its president again—only be a prelude to more violent kinds of suppression as global warming accelerates.

For embattled American climate activists, this trend further raises the stakes of the November 5 election. The crackdowns on climate protest are so far being carried out by state and local governments. But the state abuses described in this article should be considered a preview of what is almost guaranteed to be even worse to come if Donald Trump does indeed retake the White House and the Republicans win majorities in the House and Senate. As recently as October 13, in fact, Trump insisted that, once back in the White House, he’d call in the military to quash domestic dissent of any sort.

In addition, a Trumpian Congress would be likely to pass laws gutting federal climate policies and imposing extreme penalties on future climate protesters. Both prospects also feature prominently in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, produced in part by a gaggle of former Trump officials. That now-infamous blueprint for his possible second administration calls explicitly for—as the Center for American Progress describes it—“suppressing dissent and fomenting political violence.” Among other things, Project 2025 suggests that a future President Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would indeed allow him to use the military to punish lawful nonviolent protest. And count on it, he’s almost certain to exploit that act if he does indeed become president again.

Gas, Oil, and Cars Over People

Since 2016, 21 states have passed a total of 56 laws criminalizing protest or dramatically increasing the penalties for engaging in it. To be sure, John Mark Rozendaal was arrested in New York, a city located in a blue state, but all the states that have adopted new anti-protest laws are governed by Republican-majority legislatures. And the specific activity most frequently targeted for prosecution is protesting the construction or existence of oil and gas pipelines. (Note that all state laws mentioned below are described in detail in a recent report by the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, or ICNL.)

The state of Alabama, for example, can now punish a person who simply enters an area containing “critical infrastructure,” including such pipelines, with up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $6,000. If you go near a pipeline in Arkansas, you’re at significantly higher risk: imprisonment of up to six years and a $10,000 fine. Impeding access to a pipeline or a pipeline construction site in Mississippi carries a sentence of up to seven years. Do that in North Carolina as a member of a group and you’ve got even bigger problems. As the ICNL reports, “[A] group of people protesting the construction of a fossil fuel pipeline could face more than 15 years in prison and a mandatory $250,000 fine if they impede or impair the construction of a pipeline.”

Even as protest is being criminalized, assaulting protesters by car is, in effect, being decriminalized.

Many such sentences for protesting are wildly disproportionate to the severity of the act committed. In Florida, trespassing on property that contains pipelines can result in up to five years imprisonment, compared to only 60 days for trespassing just about anywhere else. Enter a pipeline facility in Ohio with the intention of tampering with it in any way and face a potential ten-year sentence. Simply spraying graffiti on an Ohio pipeline installation can carry a six-year sentence, while anyone who “conspires” with the person creating such graffiti could be fined an eye-popping $100,000.

Many climate marches or demonstrations involve walking or standing in roadways. Politicians have been exploiting the fact that “automobile supremacy is inscribed in law by every branch of government and at every level of authority” (in the words of law professor Gregory Shill) to pass highly punitive measures against street protests with little fear of having them overturned. In effect, the laws privilege fossil-fueled vehicles over the human beings who speak out against them.

In May, the Tennessee legislature passed a law that mandates a prison sentence of 2 to 12 years for protesters convicted of knowingly obstructing roadways. In Florida, groups of 25 or more protesters impeding traffic can be charged with “rioting” and face up to 15 years imprisonment. Anyone in Louisiana who does no more than help plan a protest that would impede traffic can be charged with conspiracy or with “aiding and abetting,” even if the protest ends up not hindering traffic or not occurring at all.

In Iowa, being on the street or sidewalk during a vociferous but nonviolent protest can cost you five years in prison, yet (believe it or not) a driver who runs into you during a protest, causing injury, is immune from civil liability if that driver can convince authorities that he or she had taken “due care.”

Laws that permit drivers to run into or over pedestrians engaged in protest have been passed in four states. Three of those laws hit the books in 2021 in the midst of a 16-month period during which American drivers deliberately rammed into groups of protesters a whopping 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims were killed and at least 100 injured. Drivers were criminally charged in fewer than half of the ramming incidents and in only four was a driver actually convicted of a felony. In other words, even as protest is being criminalized, assaulting protesters by car is, in effect, being decriminalized.

Finally, Louisiana can file RICO charges against people who, as part of a “tumultuous” demonstration, block roads or damage oil or gas pipelines. And protesters beware, since that state’s RICO law carries the possibility of 50 years in prison at hard labor and a $1 million fine. (And yes, you read that right!)

Fresh Legislation, Ready in Minutes!

Many laws that impose severe penalties for protest were passed in the wake of the Indigenous-led campaign against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in 2016-2017. Hundreds of people were arrested in that struggle. More than 700 protesters with the Indigenous Environment Network have been criminalized for their untiring efforts to impede or halt pipeline projects across North America.

If the dozens of state anti-protest laws display many suspicious similarities, that’s no coincidence. In response to pipeline protests, oil and gas companies teamed up with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which draws up “model legislation” for Republicans in statehouses across the country to use as templates for bills that push various corporate and hard-right priorities. Once this genre of legislation was directed toward on-site pipeline protests and passed in state after state, it was also seized upon to criminalize street marches and demonstrations, including those against racist violence, fossil fuels, and other ills—all with “traffic safety” as a pretext.

Following the lead of their kindred state legislators, Republicans in Congress have proposed their own raft of bills criminalizing protest. Fortunately, they haven’t succeeded in getting any of them passed—yet. Many of the bills were prompted by campus protests against U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza or over climate policy and against the fossil-fuel industry.

Some of the congressional bills amounted to less-than-serious grandstanding. One, for instance, would have required a person convicted of “unlawful activity” on a university campus at any time since last October 7 to perform six months of “community service” in Gaza. But there were also dead-serious bills like the one prescribing a prison sentence of up to 15 years for inhibiting traffic on an interstate highway. Other proposed bills would have withheld federal funding (in one case, even pandemic aid) from states that refused to prosecute people who took part in protests on public roadways.

Smashing Human Rights in Europe

Punitive measures against climate protest are reaching new extremes in Europe, too. Since the British Parliament passed harsh new anti-protest laws in 2022, more than 3,000 activists associated with the Just Stop Oil movement have been arrested. According to CNN, “Most of those arrests have been for planning or carrying out direct actions, including slow marching,” which impedes traffic.

In response to such repression, Michel Forst, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, wrote that under the Aarhus Convention (a 1998 agreement most European countries have signed but not the United States), “Whether intended or not, any disruptions that [environmental] actions may cause, such as traffic jams or disturbances to normal economic activity, does not remove the protection for the exercise of fundamental rights during such action under international human rights law.”

In defiance of that principle, the new British laws prescribe a sentence of up to 10 years imprisonment for those convicted of planning protests judged to be a “public nuisance” (which often means disrupting traffic). Such prison terms, noted CNN, are comparable to those for aggravated robbery or rape under British law.

When the climate change group Extinction Rebellion announced an action near The Hague in September 2023, more than 10,000 people of all ages showed up. They’d come to protest the more than $40 billion in subsidies that the Netherlands government gives fossil fuel companies annually. The police blasted the crowd with water cannons, then arrested and hauled away 2,400 protesters, including children.

The group Climate Rights International (CRI) reports that “some democratic countries are even taking measures designed to stop peaceful climate protests before they start.” In June 2023, for instance, German police detained an activist before he could even leave his home to join a climate protest. Five months earlier, a Dutch activist was held in custody for two days to keep him from an action by Extinction Rebellion. He ended up being convicted of sedition (yes, sedition!) for encouraging others to attend the protest. None of that sounds like something “democratic countries,” as CRI called them, should be doing.

Protest as Necessity

People charged with nonviolent protest often invoke the “necessity defense,” declaring that they committed a minor law violation to stop a far greater crime. Unfortunately, that defense almost never succeeds and judges often forbid defendants from even explaining their motives during a trial.

That’s what happened to members of the group Insulate Britain who stood trial this year for a climate protest that disrupted traffic by nonviolently occupying streets and climbing onto overpasses along a major London ring road in 2022. The judge presiding over their trials ordered the defendants not to mention climate change in court. Several of the activists defied that order, citing the climate emergency as their motivation, so the judge promptly held them in contempt of court and sent two of them to jail for seven weeks.

One of the protesters cited for contempt, Nick Till, told CRI that, while trying to bar him and the others from explaining the purpose of their actions, the judge allowed the prosecutors to depict the defendants as threats to society. “There’s an attempt to insinuate we’re a ‘cell,’” Till said, “which is language that implies some kind of revolutionary group. They had an expert in counterterrorism testify. They tried to portray us as dangerous extremists.”

Though also being threatened with increasing penalties under state laws, Americans have somewhat stronger protections under the First Amendment.

In July, four people who planned the London protests were convicted and sentenced to a draconian four years in prison. A fifth defendant, Roger Hallam, one of the most prominent British climate activists, was sentenced to five years even though, bizarrely enough, he was neither a planner of the protest nor a participant. He was charged instead for a speech he gave regarding civil disobedience as an effective form of climate action in a Zoom call with that protest’s planners.

In their trial, the five defendants represented themselves. Over the course of four days, with the judge repeatedly trying and failing to silence them, they presented what could be the most extensive and compelling version of the necessity defense ever heard in a courtroom. (Later, in his prison cell, Hallam wrote up an account of the trial. It’s well worth reading.)

On both sides of the Atlantic, volleys of laws threatening long-term imprisonment for nonviolent dissent are being put on the books to cow the climate movement into silence. So far, European protesters who dare to resist are getting hit hardest with convictions and sentences. Though also being threatened with increasing penalties under state laws, Americans have somewhat stronger protections under the First Amendment. But how long will dissent continue to enjoy such protections in this country? That largely depends on how we all vote between now and November 5.

The richest man in the world is trying to buy the U.S. presidential election in order to bestow it, like a burnt offering, upon his preferred candidate.

Multi-billionaire Elon Musk is not only pouring $75 million of his own money into Donald Trump’s campaign. He is now offering payments to voters in swing states in the form of a “lottery” that skirts, if not violates, U.S. election laws. What started out as $47 for registered voters in Pennsylvania who endorsed his on-line petition has become a million bucks a day from now until the election to some lucky signatory in a swing state. Federal law prohibits such incentives to register to vote, but the penalty is minimal (for Musk) and in any case wouldn’t be assessed until after the election.

A billionaire, in other words, has gone all in to support a billionaire on behalf of billionaires the world over.

This billionaires-for-billionaires approach certainly has precedents in the United States. Right-wing plutocrats famously rallied behind Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. But it’s Trump that billionaires have really glommed onto. For instance, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam were key donors in Trump’s earlier runs. Trump’s current transition co-chair, Howard Lutnick, is a billionaire financier.

A comparably blatant effort to buy an election has been on display in Moldova. In this tiny country sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, billionaire Ilan Shor sent $15 million to 130,000 citizens in exchange for their pledge to vote against pro-EU leader Maia Sandu and a referendum on enshrining the goal of EU membership in the country’s constitution. In a particularly unappetizing form of repatriation, some of that payola comes from the billion dollars that Shor stole from three Moldovan banks in 2014.

A “robbing hood,” indeed.

Half of Moldova turned out to vote in this critical election. Some showed up at the polls thinking that they’d be paid immediately, according to the BBC:

A BBC producer heard a woman who had just dropped her ballot in the transparent box ask an election monitor where she would get paid. When we asked directly whether she had been offered cash to vote, she admitted it without qualms. She was angry that a man who had sent her to the polling station was no longer answering her calls. “He tricked me!” she said.

Not only you, my dear.

The good news, in this out-and-out battle between billionaires and democracy, is that Shor failed. The referendum passed by the slenderest of margins (given the general popularity of the EU in that part of the world, the closeness of the vote was nonetheless sobering). And Sandu, the current president of the country, won the first round of voting convincingly with 41 percent, while Shor’s preferred candidate, the pro-Moscow Aleksandr Stoianoglo, garnered only 26 percent. Unfortunately, Sandu will face a united opposition in the second round.

Two elections this month in the former Soviet region—in Moldova and Georgia—showcase this war between wealth and commonwealth. The Russian-allied kleptocrats face off against the Europe-aligned democrats to see which way the post-Soviet space will turn. Ukraine, of course, is fighting an actual war along precisely those battle lines.

The Ukrainian scenario is the ultimate threat, even here in the United States. Democracy may well triumph over the billionaires in the U.S., Moldovan, and Georgian elections. But they will be Pyrrhic victories if the countries involved descend into the kind of armed conflict that Ukraine is currently experiencing.

Why Moldova Is Pivotal

Are you worried about how divided the United States is? It could be worse.

It could be Moldova.

In the early 1990s, a thin strip of the country tried to remain within the disintegrating Soviet Union, then launched a war of secession against the newly independent Moldovan government. The semi-autonomous “state” of Transnistria, where Russian is more commonly spoken than Romanian, emerged from a ceasefire agreement, and Russian “peacekeepers” are supposed to maintain the tenuous status quo. No UN member states recognize the “country” of Transnistria, and no legitimate governments appreciate the breakaway region’s anachronistic allegiance to a Soviet past and its current commitment to organized crime.

The Moldovan government faces another potential secessionist movement from the Gagauz, who speak a Turkic language and whose nationalism has brought them in alignment with the Kremlin. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has fostered close ties with Gagauz leader Evgenia Gutul to drive yet another wedge into Moldova.

In addition to supporting secessionist movements, the Kremlin has launched several other efforts to destabilize Moldova and bring it back into the Russian fold. In 2023, according to the Moldovan government, Russia directed cyberattacks and fake bomb threats at the country. Even as it was fighting in Ukraine, Russia plotted a coup to topple the EU-aligned government of Maia Sandu. Western governments have warned Sandu to expect more of the same if she wins reelection.

Ukraine is currently trying to prevent the expansion of the Russian empire and the consolidation of an illiberal zone on Europe’s edge. It has long wanted to join the European Union. Russia first seized Ukrainian territory to scuttle that bid back in 2014.

Now it’s Moldova’s turn to risk Russia’s ire by facing West. The future trajectory of Moldova will demonstrate whether Putin’s illiberalism or the EU’s liberalism has the upper hand in the region.

Meanwhile, in Georgia

Another country, another billionaire, another challenge to democracy.

In Georgia, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili is the country’s richest person and the founder of the current ruling party, Georgia Dream. As with Ilan Shor, Ivanishvili parrots the Kremlin line that voters shouldn’t push their country into war with Russia by moving closer to the EU. Toward that end, the Georgia Dream government—over the objections of its own dissenting president—pushed through legislation patterned on Russia’s foreign agent law to reduce the influence of outside (read: Western) organizations on the country’s politics. But what such laws really do is reduce the influence of independent and dissenting voices within the country. Iskra Kirova of Human Rights Watch explains:

By stigmatizing independent civil society, media and other dissenting voices as “trojan horses,” “foreign agent” laws have offered a convenient framing to delegitimize and isolate them. In addition, they have also helped to impose harsh monitoring and reporting requirements and shut critics out of public life. As the promotion of democratic practices and human rights threatens authoritarians’ grip on power, “foreign agent” laws offer a handy tool to discredit these activities by equating them with promoting the interests of a foreign power.

Laws like these halted Georgia’s EU accession process.

The electoral choice this upcoming weekend will be just as stark as the one in Moldova: will voters reject the Kremlin or reject the EU? Georgia, like Moldova, is a divided country, with two secessionist regions—South Ossetia and Abkhazia—that receive Russian support. It’s not difficult to imagine a Ukrainian scenario for this country as well.

Salome Zourabichvili, the current president, has been trying to unify the opposition against Ivanishvili’s Georgia Dream. Unlike Maia Sandu, however, she doesn’t have much power at her disposal to counter the money and the manipulation of a single wealthy man. It takes more than pretty words to beat back billionaires.

From Democracy to Oligarchy

Billionaires are a trump card that can disrupt democracy by exploiting the dreams of some people to acquire enormous wealth, become famous, and break the law with impunity. Once billionaires win, however, they become the law. As in Russia, the oligarchs collaborate with the ruling party to transform politics into patronage and economics into outright theft.

To do this, they don’t have to break the law: they make the law.

In the United States, such an oligarchy would look a lot like the state of affairs at the impishly named X. An administration bought and paid for by Musk—and that reciprocates with lucrative contracts and tax cuts—would impose its definition of “free speech” by de-platforming (or jailing) all impertinent journalists. It would deregulate government by firing much of the civil service, eliminating all constraints on power and accountability. And it would pretend to run the economy like a business all the while piling up debt.

That’s what happens when infantile oligarchs are allowed to give full vent to their ids. That has been the single “greatest” contribution to politics of the Muskites—to somehow transform the concept of “good governance” into the epithet of a “nanny state.” Freed of any superego guardrails, they would dispense with the rule of law like a band of Bolsheviks bent on imposing the will of a minority.

Before the rise of social media, the increased availability of sophisticated firearms, and the deregulation of finance, democracy could have held off against these wealthy gunslingers. It could have been saved by the equivalent of the Magnificent Seven—Edward R. Murrow, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fanny Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, Frank Church, Cesar Chavez, Marian Anderson or some other combination of heroes—riding into town and disarming the bad guys.

Today, seven is not enough. What’s needed now, at minimum, is the Magnificent Millions. To save democracy in Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere, only a boisterous majority of the voting population can effectively counter the handful of Bilious Billionaires.

Near dusk late last month, under an awning in Jackson, Mississippi, we bowed our heads in prayer. Our group was diverse: Black, white, women and men, Northerners, Southerners, Midwesterners, persons hailing from the Pacific Northwest.

An Attorney. A Pastor. A Hip-hop artist. Baby Boomers. Generation-Xers. Millennials. And there was blood beneath our feet. The bloodshed was not new. Yet, its presence heightened our urgency.

On June 12, 1963, around midnight, a bullet entered Medgar Evers’ back, ripped open his chest, and invaded his home. Despite his mortal wound, Evers attempted to reach his front door, dragging his body on the ground. Myrlie, his wife, found him dying near the front steps.

When juxtaposed, Medgar Evers’ life of service and sacrifice stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric and current ideas for America.

Evers’ blood painted the pavement red. Pools of blood left stains. Over 60 years later, as a group of us from the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good prayed, those stains remained visible on the pavement.

Evers once said, “You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.” While gathered amid bloodshed, it was painfully clear that we still have a long way to go to perfect our union. Still, Evers’ great hope, the idea that we can and that we must become a nation that makes the promise of democracy accessible to all, is an idea that lives on. It is the very idea that brought us to Evers’ doorstep earlier this fall.

While our journey to Medgar Evers’ home further heightened our sense of urgency to work to mobilize voters to vote for the common good in this general election, our urgency was already heightened as these are consequential times. America has a major decision to make. Either send Donald Trump, a man who does not respect the rule of law and who conspired to overturn our last election, back to the White House, or elect Vice President Kamala Harris, a proven public servant, who, when elected, would possess more day-one experience than any other president over the past three decades.

When juxtaposed, Medgar Evers’ life of service and sacrifice stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric and current ideas for America. After three years of distinguished service in the U.S. Army while fighting in during World War II, Evers returned home and graduated from Alcorn State, one of our nation's finest historically Black colleges and universities. Trump routinely diminishes the sacrifices of our military, labeling those who die in battle as “losers.” And Trump’s idea to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education would end federal student lending and crush the dreams of low-income students—especially Black and brown students—who seek a college education.

Evers fought to secure rights for and to protect and improve the lives of Black Americans. Trump’s nominated judges, including those now serving on our nation’s highest court, are rapidly overturning rights, from abortion rights (which since Roe v. Wade ended in 2022 has resulted in increased childbirth deaths per 100,000 Black women in Texas from 31.6 to 43.6) to affirmative action.

Tragically, during Evers’ funeral, Black mourners were beaten by police in the streets. Trump’s big idea for the police is to grant federal immunity from prosecution. Trump has also voiced support for returning to the days of stop-and-frisk, which terrorized Black and brown communities.

Conversely, Vice President Kamala Harris embodies many aspects of Evers’ life and ideas. Harris has already brought nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for almost 5 million borrowers. And Harris, an HBCU graduate, has provided significant support to HBCUs. Harris will sign the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to enshrine voting rights for all Americans as soon as it reaches her desk in the Oval Office. And it is important to remember that Sen. Harris introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act to reform policing in America.

For Black lives, for the survival of democracy, the decision could not be any clearer. Yet, some are still undecided. If only they could have journeyed with us to Jackson, Mississippi, to bear witness to Evers’ blood, I believe they would have a moment of clarity.

Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now…This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.” November 6 will be a critically important day for America. It will be the day after we saved democracy. Or it will be the day after we handed a match and gasoline to a madman to burn it down.

At the end of our prayer there in Jackon, I looked again at the blood. Then I turned to depart with my colleagues to do all we can to honor Evers’ sacrifice. Most assuredly, to do this: Turn out the vote.

And, most assuredly, we must ensure that Kamala Harris becomes the next president of the United States of America.