U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had one job: to stand between President Donald Trump and the complete dismantling of American democracy. Instead, he caved—again—handing Trump the power he craved without a fight, without a demand, without even a moment of real resistance. With every cowardly compromise, Schumer isn’t just failing Democrats—he’s enabling an autocrat in real time.

The question most Democrats want to ask of Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate appears to be, “How’s that ‘keeping the government open to hold Trump accountable’ thing working out for you?”

Everything Trump does now going forward, when people or the press complain, he will say was authorized by “bipartisan legislation” with “the full support of the Senate Democrats.”

Democrats in the Senate must stop playing defense, call out the authoritarian threat by name, use government shutdowns and the debt ceiling as leverage, and put democracy at the center of very negotiation.

In fact, just hours after Schumer and a handful of timid Senate Democrats voted to pass Trump’s Enabling Acts of 2025 legislation, the president issued an executive order gifting Russian President Vladimir Putin with the gutting of the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution.

He then assaulted civil service workers by shutting down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and attacked women and Black people by shutting down the Minority Business Development Agency, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, and the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund.

Meanwhile, the House and Senate are both in recess: Congress is shut down, but Trump sure isn’t. Thanks, Chuck.

And this cave-in to the Mango Mussolini has Democratic voters so furious they’re reconsidering donations and even voting in 2026.

Eight years ago, as Trump was starting his first term, NBC News reported that 59% of Democratic voters told pollsters they wanted Democrats in Congress to make compromises with Trump, and only a third (33%) said they should “stick to their positions even if that means not being able to get things done in Washington.”

But that was eight years ago (and apparently the era in which Schumer is still living). Today, Democratic voters have a completely different message for their elected representatives: Fight like hell!

Fully 65% of Democrats say even if it means shutting down the government, their representatives and senators should stick to their guns and fight on both issues and principles; only 32% still want Democrats to compromise with Republicans.

The result of Schumer’s caving in to the GOP is now a shocking 27% approval level for the Democratic Party.

Democratic voters get what Sens. Schumer, Kirsten Gilibrand (D-N.Y.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Schatz (D-Hawaii), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Angus King (I-Maine) did, and they hate it. Those senators had seen this GOP strategy coming ever since the election was called back in November, and they never bothered to inform Americans about what Republicans were up to.

As a result, Trump now has massively more power than he did last week, and Democrats won’t have another chance to force compromise or even stop him until this summer—probably late June—when the ability of the federal government to move money around collides with the debt ceiling (which we hit this past weekend).

Republicans are already planning to punk Schumer and his “peace-in-our-time” colleagues again. And it sure appears that Democrats have already ceded the rhetorical field to them by not letting Americans know—in a way as unmistakable as were the Tea Party protests against former President Barack Obama adding a Medicare buy-in to Obamacare—about what the stakes and Republican plan will be.

As a result, Indivisible, arguably the most powerful and influential Democratic group in the nation, just openly called for Chuck Schumer to step down:

“After weeks of constituents demanding that Democrats use this rare, precious point of leverage on the government funding bill, Schumer did the opposite,” co-executive director Ezra Levin wrote. “He led the charge to wave the white flag of surrender. But Indivisible has no intention of surrendering to Trump, Elon Musk, and congressional Republicans.”

Leadership of the group reached out to their 1,600 local Indivisible groups nationwide with two emergency meetings; 82% of group leaders in New York state (Schumer’s state) and 91% of Indivisible leaders nationwide voted to demand Schumer step down from his position as Senate minority leader.

“We thank him for his service,” the Indivisible press release says, “but we need new leadership in this moment and we understand to get there we need a chorus of support for change… Our democracy is in danger. The path ahead will be hard. Indivisibles are ready to do the work—it’s time for a Senate Democratic leader who is too.”

American political observers who’ve been wondering for years what Putin has on Trump are beginning to alter their perspective, based on how he’s ignoring court orders, using the Justice Department as his own instrument for revenge, and crushing any Republican who dares speak up or stand up against him.

Instead of fearing Putin, there’s a growing consensus that Trump simply sees Putin as his role model, a situation that’s actually even more dangerous.

He, too, lusts for absolute, unquestioned power in a major nation, democracy be damned. He’s already taking steps to enrich his friends and imprison his enemies, regardless of the legality of either. He’s laying the foundation to shut up or break any opposition, be it in the media, in Congress, or in the streets.

This is how democracies die, from the end of the Roman republic to Germany in the 1930s to modern-day Russia and Hungary. In every case, there were opponents of the wannabe dictator who tried to warn the people, and in each of those cases they were ignored (even though they reflected majority public opinion).

Both Russia and Hungary show how democracies don’t collapse overnight—they erode step by step. Institutions are undermined, dissent is crushed, elections are rigged, and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a corrupt elite. Once these three pillars—governance, civil liberties, and economic fairness—are dismantled, reversing the slide into tyranny becomes increasingly difficult.

Last week, Trump snatched three students from their homes and is detaining them—in defiance of our nation’s First Amendment—pending deportation simply because they said things that pissed off him and his fellow criminally corrupt autocrat, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

He’s been in defiance of multiple court orders to restore funding and hiring to federal agencies, and just defied a federal judge who ordered his deportation planes to turn around in midair (they didn’t).

And now his Justice Department is investigating green organizations like Habitat for Humanity (having frozen their checking account) as well as people involved in movements like Black Lives Matter. It’s just a matter of time before they go after groups like Indivisible and FiftyFifty.one, commentators on TV (he said MSNBC and CNN are “illegal” on Friday), and writers on Substack (they’ve already sued Jim Stewartson for over $1 million).

Trump is punishing prosecutors for investigating his crimes, politically destroying Republicans who dared challenge him, and trashing American media and allies who don’t suck up to him sufficiently. His cabinet meetings resemble something out of North Korea (or the old Apprentice show), with his underlings engaging in effusive, slobbering, over-the-top praise of Dear Leader’s brilliance, charisma, and manliness.

He is, in other words, following Putin’s template from the late 1990s and early 2000s as if it were a checklist. Which is, in part, why Schumer’s betrayal was so destructive, both to the Democratic Party and the country.

The U.S. still has time to rescue our democracy, but only if our elected Democrats will explicitly recognize the warning signs and act decisively.

Schumer and his colleagues could have demanded Republicans fund election security (Trump just shut down that agency), reinstate ethics laws, get big money (Elon Musk, et al) out of politics, expose disinformation in media and social media (Trump shut that agency down, too), and restore accountability for the traitors who killed three police officers and smeared literal shit all over the offices of Democrats in the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Even if he got none of it, the demands and negotiations would have gotten all of them into the media.

Instead, Schumer gave it all away. He gave Trump exactly what he wanted, without even the smallest glimmer of a fight.

This is no way to run a political party or the Democratic faction in the Senate.

It’s time for new leadership that understands how communication works in the 21st century, is committed to defeating Trump and Trumpism, and can effectively tour the media and the country to galvanize the people.

Democratic decline doesn’t spontaneously stop itself; it must be fought tooth-and-nail at every level. Every time Democrats hand Republicans a win without even exacting a symbolic concession, it strengthens the GOP’s hand both in public opinion and future negotiations.

While Democrats play by the old rules, Republicans have fully abandoned them, and, so far, they’ve suffered no consequence whatever for attacking our democracy. They won’t stop until it’s too late to prevent the authoritarian slide.

Democrats in the Senate must stop playing defense, call out the authoritarian threat by name, use government shutdowns and the debt ceiling as leverage, and put democracy at the center of very negotiation. Every budget fight, every bill, every debate must include protections for our democracy.

It’s too late to screw around any more; Vladimir Putin, fossil fuel billionaires, and their neofascist and white male supremacist buddies have declared open war on our democracy, and we need a warrior, not a backroom dealer, at the front of our movement if we are to rescue this nation.

There is no more room for weak leadership, no more time for calculated political inaction. Schumer must go, and Democrats must replace him with a leader who understands the existential stakes of this moment.

If we don’t mobilize now—if we don’t demand real resistance—we won’t just lose another election. We’ll lose our democracy.

St. Patrick's Day is celebrated by millions of Americans every year.

It's a recognition of the shared heritage of two great countries.

But the meaning of St. Patrick is something most Americans get exactly wrong.

This misunderstanding reveals why these two nations—once so similar—are now worlds apart.

Here's what Americans need to know.

***

[Sound of a bullet chambered, waves breaking in indifference.]

Venice Beach, twilight.

I'm minding my own business when—

[Flash]

A gun is pointed at my face.

Random violence. Pointless. American.

But this isn't just about crime. It's deeper.

In America, violence isn't a national crisis—it's a block-by-block lottery. You're safe until you're suddenly not.

I grew up in Ireland, and we simply don't live this way.

Why?

Because violence isn't just about guns—it's about trust.

The Real Heist

[Cut to marble floors, quiet handshakes, silent theft.]

While Americans are busy fighting each other—left vs. right, immigrants, tariffs—the real robbery happens quietly:

• Trust gutted—institutions hollowed until safety nets snap.
• Inequality weaponized—the rich feast; everyone else fights each other over crumbs.
• Desperation manufactured—crime, addiction, despair—all intentional side-effects of profit-driven division.

Ireland is no saint. But this desperation doesn't dominate, because trust—even when imperfect—remains intact. Arguments rarely become instant death sentences. Less inequality means fewer people forced into despair. Institutions still hold, even when they falter.

The difference? People in Ireland still expect their institutions to function. Americans expect them to fail.

Trust itself is being deliberately dismantled, turning neighbors into threats instead of allies.

And when trust collapses, what and who fills the void?

Manufactured Chaos

[Cut to your uncle, veins bulging, shouting about "libtards!"]

Left vs. Right: the puppet show you can't stop watching.

• Two-party spectacle: a staged distraction from real theft.
• Media outrage: addictive scrolling keeping you blind to what's really happening.
• Global chaos: Siding with dictators, up is down, bad is good.

Your neighbor isn't robbing you.

They are. Slashing the federal government, agencies, medicaid, SNAP under the guise of efficiency and long-term good to turn billionaires into trillionaires while consolidating power. All the while…

Pulling your strings.

Carjacking your anger.

They aren't just feeding your fear—they're refining it into a weapon.

St. Patrick's Fire: A Moral Inferno

[Cut to 433 AD. Hilltop. A forbidden flame.]

The Irish High King had one rule: No fire before mine.

Then Patrick lit his fire—a flame of open defiance.

The Druids warned: "If that fire isn't put out, it'll never be extinguished."

They were right. It burned through an empire for 800 years.

So, what's America's fire?

• It's not partisan warfare.
• It's not scapegoating migrants.
• It's a moral stand against those profiting from fear—against those robbing your fundamental right to live without fear.

Who Are the Real Snakes?

Patrick banished snakes from Ireland—but there were no snakes. They were poisoners of trust, hope, and community.

America's snakes?

• Social media owners who profit from, and shape, fear.
• Politicians who weaponize division.
• Corporate interests dismantling your safety to line their pockets.

President Donald Trump isn't fighting snakes—he is the snake. But he's not alone. They're everywhere, wearing different skins, exploiting the fear they manufacture.

The Only Question That Matters This St. Patrick's Day

Forget distractions. Forget the puppet show.

Ask yourself this:

Do I feel safe?

Not just from violence—

• Safe from losing healthcare overnight?
• Safe from sudden joblessness?
• Safe enough to trust your community, your future?

America doesn't have to be this way.

They built it like this.

Which means you can unbuild it. And trust can be rebuilt.

But you must see the snakes. If you don't, you'll never fight the right battle—you'll fight each other while they watch and profit.

***

St. Patrick was a slave. He defied a corrupt king. He lit a fire.

That fire was truth—a moral truth against injustice. And it can't be put out.

It burned through 800 years of oppression, famine, and war.

He didn't just bring religion—he brought something far more powerful.

St. Patrick's Day isn't about shamrocks or beer.

It's about your resistance.

This year, don't just celebrate.

Act.

Light. Your. Fire.

When I was 10 or 11, I joined up with a group of girls at summer camp to single out a tall, gawky campmate who had reached puberty much earlier than the rest of us. Ganging up on Ilene was a way to bond with the other girls, to reassure myself that I wasn’t an undesirable outsider like her. There was a brief, intoxicating sense of power in it that quickly curdled into guilt when her mom came to speak to the camp counselor about her daughter’s misery.

While I’m embarrassed by this memory, I think under the right circumstances almost all of us are capable of being cruel. It often arises when we’re repulsed by our own insecurity or weakness. We then project it onto others so we can avoid feeling bad about ourselves.

Cruelty is also a tool of power. From authoritarian rulers to internet trolls, cruelty is often disguised as strength, when instead it reveals a profound weakness—an inability to engage with others in good faith. Right now we see it playing out in the White House, as U.S. President Donald Trump tries to assert his control through fear, modeling the dictators he coddles. “Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president,” explains journalist Ezra Klein. Terrorists use terror because they know it’s the only tool they have.

When cruelty becomes fashionable—when it is seen as strength rather than a moral failing—societies descend into darkness.

As a child of Holocaust survivors, the president’s public displays of callousness chill me. His proud, unapologetic heartlessness reminds me how humans are capable of unspeakable brutality. Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom describes cruelty as even worse than dehumanization. Dehumanization is what enables soldiers to enter into battle and kill without moral paralysis. By contrast, Bloom writes, “Cruelty is when you act fully aware of the humanity of the persons you are mistreating or humiliating. In fact, that’s the whole point.”

This sadistic streak was fully evident when Trump and Vice President JD Vance ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, making him grovel for an empty deal and publicly humiliating him for being insufficiently submissive. That the meeting was even televised made it feel like a gladiator fight in the Colosseum. Red meat for the masses. A signal that cruelty is not only acceptable, but to be celebrated. “This is going to be great television,” said Trump, smiling at the cameras as the meeting ended.

And that's what really makes this so dangerous. Because history shows us that cruelty has a seductive pull. The Nazis weren’t an anomaly; they were an extreme manifestation of a tendency that has existed throughout human history. When cruelty becomes fashionable—when it is seen as strength rather than a moral failing—societies descend into darkness. And cruelty, when normalized, begets more cruelty. One sees it in how families often pass down abusive behavior over generations or how everyday Germans behaved under Hitler during World War II. “If you and I were in Nazi Germany,” says Bloom, “we’d like to think we’d be the righteous ones, we’d be the heroes. But we might just be regular old Nazis.”

Ultimately though, while cruelty can be contagious, tyrants fall not just because people oppose them, but because, deep down, most of us long for a world where respect is earned through decency, not domination. Through every dark time in history, there is always a counterforce—a fundamental human longing for justice and decency—that helps bring down oppressive regimes. In the end, cruelty is a learned behavior, but it’s also a choice. It’s easy to be an asshole, especially under duress, while compassion takes practice and intention. If we recognize our own capacity to be cruel, we can opt to counter it or at least refuse to nourish it.

But it’s not that easy. When I hear about the slashing of programs that will result in the death and suffering of millions or how trans people and immigrants are being scapegoated to serve as distractions from billionaire plunder or when Musk says that “empathy will be the downfall of western civilization,” I feel murderous. It makes me feel cruel and stirs a desire for retribution. Yet, if I let the rage take over, I have fallen right into Elon’s trap.

Recently, I was talking with my best friend from high school about Israel when she told me that Muslims aren’t like us, that you couldn’t think of them as people. My gut response was to berate and shame her. But instead, I chose to hold back until I could give more thought to my response. Two days later she called me to tell me that her partner was gravely ill. We still haven't been able to talk about her troubling words, but now I have a better idea of what I will say. I will ask her to share the pain behind her anger. I’m not sure what made her utter the words she used, but I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with Muslims.

When we do talk, I hope she can acknowledge her misplaced resentment and that we can repair our relationship. I hope I’m able to extend her some compassion and not lash out. I will remind myself that the world won’t get better by giving in to my worst instincts. If we are to defy the power of cruelty, we must choose—again and again—to respond with something better.

In May of 1986, I received a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. That degree has been a proud part of my resume in the many years since.

As Columbia rushes to appease the Trump administration by expelling, suspending, and revoking the degrees of a growing number of students accused of peaceful protest and exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly, I unequivocally renounce my degree and any affiliation with the university. I charge Columbia with complicity in the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and with terrorizing its anti-genocide, pro-Palestine students, faculty, and staff. I charge Columbia with appeasement of and partnership with fascist governments (Biden and Trump) in Washington.

The shameless capitulation of Columbia to government pressure is reflective of the corporate, neoliberal selling-out of academia. Academia, exemplified by Columbia University, has surrendered its proclaimed mission of intellectual independence and endeavor, and the academic pursuit of knowledge and social advancement.

Today, I renounce my 1986 master’s degree from SIPA. I renounce it in the name of Mahmoud Khalil, of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, of Hind Rajab, of Shaban al-Dalou, of all those who are names and not numbers.

In Gaza today, during this holy month of Ramadan, more than 2 million people suffered through the 14th day of a criminal siege imposed by Israel. No food, no water, no electricity for light, heat, desalination, or medical equipment, and no humanitarian aid or supplies have been permitted into the decimated Gaza Strip for two weeks. The people, who continue to experience a genocide conducted by the United States and Israel, are dying of hunger, of thirst, of disease. They are dying from their untreated wounds, from hypothermia, from shelling, sniping, and drone attacks. They are dying from causes too numerous to count.

In the West Bank today, Palestinians continue to be driven from the Jenin, Tulkarm, and Nur Shams refugee camps—camps established because the Nakba of 1948 made them refugees in their own land. Today, the Israel Defense Forces (let’s call it what it is—the IOF—Israel Occupation Forces) continued to tear up roads, wells, and infrastructure across the West Bank, deny Palestinians their supposedly inalienable right to return, take selfies amid the rubble of homes and schools, shoot children, and defecate on the floors and furniture of the emptied buildings.

In other words, this was an ordinary day in the lives of Israeli soldiers and decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C. And yet, in this world that fascism and genocide turn upside down, it is not the perpetrators of these historic crimes who are in the dock. Instead, peacefully protesting students are targeted by their own schools and government.

On March 13, the Zionist administration of Columbia University (recall that Zionism is a racist, supremacist, settler colonial political ideology), rushed to cooperate with the Trump administration after it received an extraordinary letter listing nine demands Columbia must meet to avoid having $400 million in federal funding denied. Eager to comply with this extortion, university officials announced that an additional 22 students were expelled, suspended, or had their degrees revoked.

The next day, the U.S. Department of “Homeland Security” (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) followed up on their abduction and rendition to Louisiana of Columbia graduate and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil with the arrest of a second student, who is also Palestinian. Evoking the “Commie sympathizers” trope of the Red Scare, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem referred to the students as “terrorist sympathizers.” Meanwhile, Columbia allowed federal agents to search dorm rooms at Columbia University. At the request of Columbia University “Public Safety” officers, the New York Police Department (NYPD) entered Butler Library to investigate graffiti in a men’s restroom.

On March 14, I drove from my home in western Massachusetts to W. 116th Street and Broadway in Manhattan to stand with pro-Palestine students of Columbia and Barnard, and leaders of Within Our Lifetime. As an alumna, I felt compelled to be in the presence of their humanity, their courage, and their uncompromising, untiring dedication to Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea.

To Dr. Keren Yarhi-Milo, dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and former officer and intelligence analyst of the IOF: We see who you are. We see the role you have played in calling in the NYPD on the peaceful students of last spring’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. We see your hosting of former Israeli prime minister and war criminal Naftali Bennett (“I’ve killed many Arabs in my life and there’s nothing wrong with that”), who joked about distributing exploding pagers to anti-genocide students at Harvard a few days ago.

Today, I renounce my 1986 master’s degree from SIPA. I renounce it in the name of Mahmoud Khalil, of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, of Hind Rajab, of Shaban al-Dalou, of all those who are names and not numbers. I denounce the terrorism of Columbia University, and of all the U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican, that have supported and partnered in the decades-long dehumanization and genocide of the Palestinian people. I denounce Columbia’s and the U.S. government’s monstrous conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that puts Jews in the way of true danger and is, in itself, anti-Semitic.

Each day of the deepening fascism of the U.S. is another day of starvation, displacement, and terror for Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. But in renouncing my degree and burning my diploma, I say: I will never stop talking about Palestine.

Following the example of the protesters who burned their draft cards during the Vietnam war, I call on all CU alumni to join me in publicly burning our Columbia diplomas.

Many alumni can give firsthand accounts of the 1968 anti-Vietnam war protests at Columbia that led to nonviolent occupation of campus buildings. When campus negotiations failed, Columbia called in 1,000 police, resulting in the arrest of over 700 students and the shutdown of the university. True to corporate, neo-liberal and neo-fascist form. But the protests on Columbia’s campus and campuses across the U.S. contributed to ending the largest U.S. colonial war of the 20th century.

No symbolic gesture such as burning diplomas can atone for the suffering that Zionist institutions like Columbia and Barnard cause and are complicit in. Each day of the deepening fascism of the U.S. is another day of starvation, displacement, and terror for Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. But in renouncing my degree and burning my diploma, I say: I will never stop talking about Palestine. The repression of Columbia University and the U.S. government, as with all historic repression, lights the flame of deepening and widening resistance and change.

The people will teach the Zionist authorities a long overdue lesson. As the students of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) explained, in responding to CU administration anger over “Free them all” graffiti spray painted on the President’s House on March 14, “The people will not stand for Columbia University’s shameless complicity in genocide. The University’s repression has only bred more resistance and Columbia has lit a flame it can’t control.”

“Free them all” refers not just to Mahmoud Khalil. Not just to all pro-Palestine students persecuted by Columbia and by DHS, ICE, President Donald Trump, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It refers to all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli torture prisons. It refers to the Palestinian people, past, present, and future. And ultimately, it refers to us all, since ultimately, we are all Palestinian. I hope that the flames of burning Columbia diplomas will help light the way toward this freedom.

Back in 2021, Donald Trump called cryptocurrency “a disaster waiting to happen” and a “scam.” Takes one to know one, right?

As he got closer to regaining the White House, however, Trump changed his mind about this “scam,” probably as a result of the millions of dollars that flowed into his campaign coffers from industry donors. To the delight of these donors, Trump promised to make the United States the cryptocurrency capital of the world. He also talked about creating a strategic reserve of Bitcoin.

After he won the election, Trump received over $11 million in contributions to his inaugural committee from the crypto industry. It’s a hallmark of pyramid scams that only the people at the top reap the benefits, and Trump has put himself at the very apex of the ziggurat in order to rake in millions for his posse and for himself.

Consider the saga of $TRUMP.

When the inmates take over the asylum, the currency becomes a way of consolidating power in the hands of oligarchs.

Three days before his inauguration, the $TRUMP meme coin debuted. Meme coins are usually based on an internet meme and are “typically characterized by their volatile nature.” Well, that sounds like a good fit for Trump! Indeed, after he promoted the coin on his social media accounts, its value surged astronomically.

Some of the biggest winners in this naked money grab were the firms that launched the coin and profited from the transaction fees, which netted them as much as $100 million in the first two weeks. One of those firms was CIC Digital, which is owned by…Trump himself.

Like all financial operations characterized by irrational exuberance, the value of $TRUMP soon plummeted. Indeed, over 800,000 investor accounts lost a total of $2 billion. Of course, they’re not the only Trump supporters who are suffering from buyer’s remorse. Even the stock market, which initially cheered Trump’s election, is having a serious hangover, a swing in mood not very different from $TRUMP’s trajectory.

$TRUMP’s deep dive notwithstanding—or perhaps because of the success of this scam—crypto remains an essential part of Trump’s economic plans. And Trump is not the only far-right leader who has dabbled in scamming the population with crypto. Argentina’s Javier Milei is now dealing with the aftermath of a corruption scandal associated with $LIBRA, a meme coin he initially supported and which left 10,000 investors over $250 million poorer. El Salvador is still reeling from Nayib Bukele’s crypto obsession, which cost his country $60 million when Bitcoin tanked a couple years ago—not to mention all the Salvadoran energy and natural resources that Bitcoin mining has absorbed.

Two years ago, I explained how cryptocurrencies function like pyramid scams. Last year, I discussed the environmental consequences of crypto.

Now I want to dig a little deeper into the politics of crypto: how Trump and his far-right allies are using these digital currencies as a strategy to rig the rules of the game in their favor.

The Mechanisms of Theft

To understand how crypto scams work, you need to know about “sniping” and “rug-pulling.”

When a new crypto product is launched, whether it’s a meme coin or a non-fungible token, a select group of speculators place a big buy to push the value higher. If enough of these “snipers” exit at the same time, the value drops, providing the snipers with short-term profits and leaving a lot of other investors holding the (empty) bag.

Of course, it helps to know in advance about a new product launch so that you can line up your bots and your AI to execute high-volume and high-speed trades—and your coordinated exit from the stage. In another context, you might call this “insider trading.”

The orchestrated sale of the crypto product is known as the “rug pull.” It can be sudden, as was the case with $TRUMP. Or it can take place over a longer period of time in what used to be known as the “long con.”

The rug pull sometimes relies on the services of a celebrity. Let’s take a brief look at the case of Javier Milei in Argentina to understand how this works.

Enter Milei

Argentine President Javier Milei is, to say the least, a heterodox economist. He pledged to cut government spending as a way of reining in inflation. He fired 30,000 government workers, eliminated government subsidies, and halted many public works projects. No surprise that Milei and his infamous chainsaw served as the inspiration for Musk and DOGE.

Inflation in Argentina has indeed fallen, from nearly 300% to around 85% in January. But the costs have been immense to the poor. More than half of Argentines now live below the poverty line, and they are dealing with increased costs for food and basic services. The economy has contracted as a not-very-surprising result of Milei’s chainsaw approach to government.

Among his many economic enthusiasms, Milei has relentlessly attacked the country’s central bank and advocated for the adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency. During his first year in office, he didn’t put crypto at the heart of his economic platform. But his efforts to displace the central bank has been accompanied by a push to lift restrictions on currency exchange, which would give cryptocurrencies a big boost. Argentinians are already leading adopters of crypto, largely as a hedge against the volatility of the Argentine peso (frankly, they might as well buy lottery tickets or play slots at the casino).

As for Milei, the real purpose of his economic program has been starkly revealed by this scandal: a transfer of money from the poor to the rich.

But that’s changing as a result of the $LIBRA scandal.

At the instigation of several fast-talking meme coin boosters, Milei endorsed $LIBRA when it was released on Valentine’s Day this year. But the value of the meme coin tanked within mere hours as top investors pulled the rug out from under it. As “Cryptogate” spread, Milei scrambled to deny any connection to the fiasco.

But that was hard to do given the evidence of several tweets showing Milei, with his trademark glower and two thumbs up, posing with those boosters, including an American named Hayden Davis.

Davis runs Kelsier Ventures, which was part of the sniping and rug-pulling around $MELANIA, the spousal counterpart to $TRUMP, which followed a similar trajectory of jumping high off the diving board and then plunging into the empty pool below. Davis did the same thing with $LIBRA, making off with around $100 million. He has promised to refund some of that money to the people who lost big. Don’t hold your breath.

“This is an insider’s game,” Davis has said about these meme coins. “This is like an unregulated casino.”

As for Milei, the real purpose of his economic program has been starkly revealed by this scandal: a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. His popularity was already on a downward trajectory in early February before the scandal, with 53% of the population disapproving of his policies (compared to 43% in favor). Cryptogate could be an anchor that pulls Milei down to the bottom of the sea.

Trump Also Goes Big

It’s no accident that the administration’s government-cutting initiative, DOGE, shares a name with a leading cryptocurrency. Cutting government oversight, eliminating regulations, and empowering the already-powerful private sector all benefit the crypto industry. But Trump is not just cutting government—he is putting his own people into positions of power.

That includes right-wing financier David Sacks, who’s in charge of both crypto and AI in the Trump administration. Sacks comes out of the same political milieu as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (with whom he led PayPal). As with so many of Trump’s appointees, the opportunities for corruption abound. As MSNBC reported at the end of last year, “Sacks launched an artificial intelligence company called Glue this year and is known to be a major investor in cryptocurrencies, which would seem likely to create some conflicts of interest if he’s steering the administration’s AI and crypto policies.”

Trump is also staffing the Securities and Exchange Commission with crypto loyalists who have already begun to deconstruct the oversight of the crypto sector. As The New York Times notes:

Federal officials declared that so-called memecoins would not be subject to strict oversight. A series of investigations into major cryptocurrency firms were halted. And the Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to pause a fraud case against a top crypto entrepreneur. Just over a month since President Trump’s inauguration, U.S. regulators have almost entirely dismantled a yearslong government crackdown on the crypto industry, a volatile sector rife with fraud, scams and theft.

Meme coins, of course, are the $TRUMP and $MELANIA scams that have already bilked thousands of investors. The reduction of oversight on crypto, meanwhile, is likely to increase the pool of victims. Burwick Law is the firm trying to claw back money for those who were scammed by $HAWK (promoted by influencer Haliey Welch) and also 200 clients from various countries who lost money in the $LIBRA scandal. Dubbed the “ambulance chaser of crypto,” Max Burwick is going to face a deregulatory headwind coming from the Trump administration.

But the biggest crypto project of the Trump administration is its crypto strategic reserve, an idea promoted hard by the crypto industry. It’s the culmination of the right-wing’s push for U.S. businesses to invest in crypto and also state governments buy up the currency. A strategic reserve of crypto makes no sense. Such reserves are meant for valuable assets like oil and gold. Why doesn’t Trump consider a strategic reserve of Amway products or Tupperware?

For the time being, the two reserves (one for Bitcoin, the second for other digital assets) will contain only crypto seized in criminal or civil forfeitures. The crypto industry was disappointed that Trump didn’t mandate federal purchases of the currencies. But that will probably happen in the future. The new initiative calls on federal agencies to come up with strategies to buy more Bitcoin. And there’s now a bill in Congress calling on the government to buy a million Bitcoin.

So, basically, such a reserve is just a gift to all the crypto loyalists who have supported Trump. Let’s call it what it is: a first step toward state capture by crypto oligarchs.

Why Does the Far-Right Love Crypto?

Crypto appeals to the far-right for several reasons. It promises to undermine the state’s central authority. It offers a degree of anonymity, which can facilitate tax evasion, asset parking overseas, and plain old money laundering. And its volatility allows for the profiteering that sometimes goes by the name of entrepreneurialism.

Meanwhile, for extremist organizations that need to stay under the radar to evade surveillance, crypto is the monetary equivalent of an encrypted messaging service. According to the Anti-Defamation League, “15 white supremacist and antisemitic groups and individuals, as well as their donors, that collectively moved $142,546 worth of cryptocurrency to and/or from 22 different cryptocurrency service providers.” The European far-right is also beginning to trade in these currencies.

In countries with conventional governance—that is, not lunatics like Trump and locos like Milei—crypto functions as a right-wing weapon against the state. But when the inmates take over the asylum, the currency becomes a way of consolidating power in the hands of oligarchs.

Meme coins like $TRUMP and $LIBRA are just the side hustles by opportunists who want some of the crumbs that fall off the oligarchs’ tables. The real money is in the “legitimate” trade in crypto, the speculation in Bitcoin and Dogecoin. This is where far-right politicians create “positive synergies” between government deregulation on one side and campaign contributions on the other.

This institutional corruption is at the center of the Trump-Milei enterprise: the wholesale looting of the public sector and the grotesque enrichment of the already rich.

When the powerful speak, mushroom clouds emerge—oh so easily. Power is about conquest; winning the war, getting what you want no matter the cost.

For instance, Israel should nuke Gaza. “Do whatever you have to do.” Thus declared Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) last year in a “Meet the Press” interview, comparing the current genocide in Palestine to the U.S. decision to end World War II by A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “That was the right decision,” he said, spewing out the historical abstraction that still rules the world.

Nothing is more sacred than self-defense! And nothing is more necessary for that than nuclear weapons, at least for the countries that possess them. To think beyond this abstraction—to cry out against the pain of the victims and declare their use is potential human suicide—violates the political norm of the powerful and is easily categorized by the media, often sarcastically, as naïve.

“I realized my pain was not only my pain but other people’s pain.”

And thus we’re stuck in a MAD world, apparently: a world under unending threat of mutually assured destruction. If you have a problem with that, you’re probably a weakling singing “Kumbaya.”

Or so the global war machine wants us to believe, reducing humanity’s anti-nuke—antiwar—sanity to a hollow hope.

It is in this context that I heard Sim Jintae and Han Jeong-Soon speak at a small event the other day in suburban Chicago, sponsored by an organization called—brace yourself—The International People’s Tribunal to hold the U.S. accountable for dropping A-bombs. The two speakers (via translator) are Korean victims of the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima nearly eight decades ago. Sim Jintae is a first-generation survivor: He was two-years-old when the bomb was dropped. Han Jeong-Soon is a second-generation survivor—the child of survivors of the inferno, who has suffered throughout her life from the aftereffects of the bombing. Their message: Nuclear war lasts forever!

Well, that’s part of their message. Note: The movement they represent is Korean. A little known fact about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that thousands of Koreans were what you might call doubly victimized by the horror. This was during an era when Japan had colonial control over Korea, and some 100,000 Koreans had been forcibly moved to Japan to do wartime labor. Many of them, including Sim Jintae’s parents, had been working in a munitions factory in Hiroshima.

About 40,000 Koreans died in the bombings. Those who survived suffered the aftereffects in silence... until they reclaimed one another and found a collective voice. This is the voice I heard last week at the event I attended, and it resonated as loud as—perhaps louder than—the pro-nuke media and their supplicants. Their collective voice emerges from reality, not abstraction. My God, I hope it’s louder than that of Lindsey Graham, and so many other politicians.

Here is the voice of Han Jeong-Soon. Born in Korea 14 years after the destruction of Hiroshima—her parents had also been forced laborers there, living a few kilometers from the epicenter of the bomb blast—she suffered all her life from birth defects: heart problems, chest pain, lung issues. She had multiple surgeries. She suffered on her own... until she saw a film about the bombing in 2004. Then:

“I realized my pain was not only my pain but other people’s pain,” she told us. She began organizing other second-generation survivors, and began telling the world: “My war has not ended. No war should be allowed or tolerated. No to all war.”

Is this the voice that will drown out the military-industrial complex? The People’s Tribunal is demanding, as the starting point of the human journey beyond war, for the United States to apologize for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was an action that instantly expanded the scope of hell the human race could inflict on itself.

When I heard that word, “apologize,” in the context of first- and second-generation Korean A-bomb victims—victims who were denied necessary healthcare, by both Japan and the United States—what I heard was a soul scream: a demand that the perpetrator grasp and acknowledge the full extent of the harm it caused, and in so grasping, vow never to use such a monstrous weapon again... and, indeed, vow to transcend war itself.

The International People’s Tribunal put it this way:

The A-Bomb Tribunal aims to establish the illegality of the U.S. atomic bombings in 1945 to secure the basis for condemning all nuclear threats and use as illegal today. The fact that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illegal under the international laws in 1945 means that the use and threat of nuclear weapons today are also illegal.

The A-Bomb Tribunal aims to overcome the nuclear deterrence theory that justifies the use and threat of nuclear weapons by nuclear-weapon states, and contribute to the realization of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and a nuclear-free world.

Let us listen to those who have suffered the most. Let us hear the cry of their throbbing souls and begin to understand that the time has come for us to create a world beyond dominance and war. Indeed, let us begin listening to one another and, in so doing, learn that we all matter. This is the true nature of power.

Empathy is weakness, asserts a man, who views the world through ego-inflated grandiosity not the grandeur that is spread before him in the form of the living Earth.

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”—Elon Musk

When the dismal, life-defying ways of humankind (embodied by the aforementioned tech billionaire grifter) cause life to seem unbearable to my sight, I’m compelled to turn my grief-darkened vision inward; therein, I am, in moments of grace, greeted by a type of internal dawn. The first light of inner day touches my mind. The warmth of its touch stays with me as night winds howl, the ignorant gibber and rage, and foul men ascend to power.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”―Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

How does authoritarian rule come to be? First and foremost, because the mark has been swindled out of the ability to endure the incomprehensible—thus to endure the anxiety inherent to freedom.

There are moments, despair-pummeling hours during long, rest-deprived nights that I, pressed down by the crush of events, feel as though I simply can’t go on. Held in the thrall of grief, I cannot manage to write another word. Yet I continue to, word by word, sentence by sentence. Somehow I bear up. It remains a mystery as to how. I suspect, if I had to speculate as to the reason, the mystery in itself is exhilarating.

The rude rifting delivered by an insult comic, ridiculing vanity and human folly, is, most likely, less offensive to God (or even human sensibility) than religious fundamentalists praying for the end of the world or tech bros insisting they will deliver us to a “posthuman” paradise, wherein the serpent is empathy.

The world does not need a savior to die—or become transhuman—for our sins. At every sunrise, inner or extant, rebirth is possible.

Before we can access our humanity, we must first genuflect before the grandeur of earthworm and galaxy. From my empathy-ridden perspective sin is committed by refusing to notice the terrible beauty of it all and allow the worst among us to do all the talking and claim the world as their entitlement. A voice resounds within me: Defy the lie; resist soullessness. Because we are mortal human beings, defeat will come—but choose to be wounded by beauty.

Peter Paul Rubens, "Saint Sebastian Tended by Two Angels" (c. 1630)

Only when I admit life is incomprehensible can I discern the cretinous lies passed off as truths by those who seek to gain power. Under the perpetual and pummeling uncertainty of a capitalist system, the contrived confidence of grifters will hold those who crave certainty in the thrall of tales promising false hope. Removal of dangerous outsiders is a time-tested go-to of the ruthless. Thus the mark has been provided with provisional relief from anxiety, as, all the while, relieved of his money; and from the realm of political grifters, eventually, freedom of choice.

How does authoritarian rule come to be? First and foremost, because the mark has been swindled out of the ability to endure the incomprehensible—thus to endure the anxiety inherent to freedom. Hence, the calling of writers is to ask uncomfortable questions. Demagogues and grifters claim they have solutions. They have cures for all ills at hand, they lie. They will bring deliverance from troubles. Don’t question them; just fall in and be swept along in the parade of true believers.

Gabriel Pomerande, from "Saint Ghetto of the Loans" (1950)

Enveloped, as we are, within the present media simulacrum and building AI panopticon, a landscape of lies extends to the ends of the mind. Events, terrible in nature, unfold with the illusion of weightlessness as everything seems to be giving way and flying apart. A center made of nothing cannot hold.

Empathy is crucial as a centering principle. Set yourself in the direction of liberation by defending the dignity of the unfairly shunned. Freedom can be gained by resistance to falling into authoritarianism’s manic, joyless parade of mass conformity; many join authoritarian movements to relieve the anxiety inherent to uncertainty and the elation—albeit illusionary—experienced by (shallow in nature) acceptance within the mass.

In a just world, those deserving of shunning are the power seeking types of shitheels who attempt to gain authority by retailing in hatred and fear. Demagogues, inherently devoid of empathy, inflict division. In soul-making contrast, resisting their lies can serve to unite those possessed of viable hearts and dreaming souls..

Where words leave off, music begins. Poetry, the closest a verbal form can come to music insofar as revealing visions not perceptible to the temporal-locked mind. See if you recognize this Bronze Age classic:

I will search for my lost ones who strayed away, and I will bring them safely home again. I will bandage the injured and strengthen the weak. But I will destroy those who are fat and powerful. I will feed them, yes—feed them justice!—Ezekiel 34:16

First, the ineffable vision; then stranded in a valley of dry, rattling bones; then a rain from Heaven came, and the army known as flesh was restored. Then came a trickle of a stream rising from the heart of a hidden, desert temple… that makes fecund the arid land and restores life to a salt-poisoned sea.

Ezekiel is not promulgating prophecy about real estate—he was referring to the heart of humanity.

We will be lost in a valley of bones until repentance enters and brings to restoration the dry hearts of a worldview that permits genocide and ethnic cleansing and regards empathy as a weakness of character.

Gustave Doré, "The Vision of The Valley of The Dry Bones" (1866)

Ezekiel’s vision unfolds as poetry. Hence it is true… in the lexicon of the heart.

A devotee of literalism would sneer at the assertion, “So, you’re saying, an acrid valley strewn with sun-bleached skeletal remains, upon hearing the voice of God, was restored then rose as an army of flesh? Have you over-indulged in edibles? How can you pretend that is even possible?”

No, the edibles remain untouched, and yes, from the numinous perspective of poetic vision, it is possible. A transformation of vision has come to be. Poems are reflections of the human psyche, our hub of Anima Mundi i.e., The Soul Of The World. Remember, a poet does not create a poem; the poem creates the poet. In this way, poetry begets the flesh of essential being.

Therefore from the perspective of the psyche it is not only possible but a vital aspect of human existence. Deliverance from dry despair can be remedied by a flowing stream of hope. The heart, revitalized, will soldier forth as the army of your living flesh.

Yet, a culture dominated by crackpot realists insist you are the sum total of your bank account, that your persona is defined by your car and place of dwelling. Is it not a mystery as to why people are depressed and desperate. Why, in a consumer culture, the citizenry become hapless marks of grifters retailing in sleight-of-hand corporatism and bait-and-switch politics. And empathy is scorned as an enemy of the state and a threat to the common good.

Antithetical to the storylines of the grift, from the poetic imagination, enigmatic visions glide into the minds as wheels within wheels of fire; the thoughts of the heart flow forth and restore to living abundance the Dead Sea within you.

Crazy talk, huh? From the vantage point of my internal Ezekiel, my ragged, defrocked, enslaved-by-empire seer within, the anguish of the times is being inflicted by capitalist con men—not by poets chanting of the anguish felt in the heart witnessing the hideous mess created by crackpot realism. To wit, transitioning from prose to verse, a dispatch from the landscape of visions and renewal:

A ravine in my heart;
nocturnal creatures slink and prowl.
Moonlight issues forth from my mouth;
reflected on cold city steel—I tremble.
The sky is the dark blood of the redeemer’s wounds;
the rain-renewed creek wails out the birth cries of newborns.
March winds buffet my thoughts—night spirit, what are you demanding?
With every year, sustained eye contact is made with the inscrutable gaze of my dead.

(Postscript: A poem, a comedy routine, a parcel of prose achieves to be a prayer of communion dispatched toward the greater world from inner terrains of loneliness. Yet, once sent, the missive has forgotten the name of its author. Living force that it is, it seeks connection and merges with the living force that is the reader. At that point, its creator might not recognize it in passing while amid the clamor within the agora of the imaginal. This kind of loneliness is inconsolable. It is lonely as the Moon; the Sun’s caress will never reach her dark side. Yet her borrowed luminosity bestows night here on Earth with the ache inflicted by beauty.)

Living day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute can unfold in meaning, with purpose, even beauty. Convinced otherwise, one is diminished; one’s essences become fragmented to shards. Yes, the times are ugly—yet there exists a possibility of surrendering to the beauty that is bestowed, odd as it seems, by lamentation or the humor of knowing what has been lost to folly. Existence is laughing near you—not at you. Thus a crack opens in persona where ensoulment can enter and take up long-term residence.

Enchantment beckons; blunder toward its scintillation and caress; insist reluctant types come along for the ride. Yes, all concerned can be brought to ruin—but, as is the case with a fine piece of clothing, what good is persona that is never worn outside of the house?

After your inevitable downfall make the soul your bed of recovery.

Moments of fulfillment and wisdom do not give themselves over into companionship with those who, by reflex, reject life out of fear of losing a type of vanity revealing itself as a forced innocence, evinced far too long into life. Moreover, the compulsive pursuit of happiness is the stuff of vacationing on one of those crass cruise ships sloshing between hyper-commodified port cities.

“You lose your grip, and then you slip into the masterpiece.” —Leonard Cohen, “A Thousand Kisses Deep”

There is a force within driving you to be used by life. Ignore it and you will bore yourself and others blind.

The woundings incurred by living life on life’s terms are a crucial aspect of it all.

The scars inflicted will heal into a braille by which you will tell your life’s tale.

Frida Kahlo, "The Broken Column" (1944)

In every struggle for human dignity and freedom, certain voices consistently speak out against oppression—except when it is Israel oppressing Palestinians. This selective moral calculus, in which universal human rights suddenly become conditional, exposes a glaring hypocrisy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the discourse surrounding Israel's war in Gaza, where the moral and legal principles upheld in other conflicts are selectively disregarded to justify Israeli and Zionist exceptionalism

The debate is not just about facts; it is about the fundamental inconsistency in how people—particularly those who otherwise champion human rights—respond when the victims are Palestinians, and the perpetrator is Israel. The contradictions expose how Zionism, in its modern form, necessitates a moral blind spot that demands impunity for Israeli actions while vilifying those who dare to apply the same legal and ethical standards to its conduct as they would to any other state.

The Moral Double Standard on Genocide

The word "genocide" carries profound legal and moral weight, and its application is strictly defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The convention specifies acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The standard is not whether a government claims to be targeting "terrorists" but whether, in reality, its actions exhibit intent to systematically destroy a group.

Israel's war on Gaza meets this threshold, as numerous legal scholars and human rights organizations have pointed out. The systematic targeting of hospitals, the deliberate starvation of civilians through a blockade, the bombing of "safe zones" after civilians were ordered to flee there, the shooting of scores of children execution style in the head, the killing of reporters and health workers, and the explicit statements from Israeli officials about making Gaza "disappear" all point to intent—one of the key elements of genocide. Yet, for some, acknowledging this reality is impossible, because to do so would mean confronting the full moral implications of their ideological commitments.

There is still a choice: to embrace a vision of justice that applies universally, or to cling to an exceptionalism that demands that one people's suffering be acknowledged while another's is erased.

Instead of reckoning with the overwhelming evidence, many deflect with rhetorical maneuvers. Some claim that genocide cannot be occurring because Israel's actions are a response to Hamas' attack on October 7. But self-defense, even if claimed, does not justify the deliberate and disproportionate slaughter of civilians, the destruction of an entire society's infrastructure, and the intentional infliction of conditions that make survival impossible.

Others shift the conversation to casualty counts, suggesting that unless there is evidence that every person killed was a civilian, genocide cannot be occurring. This is an absurd distortion of international law. The intent to destroy a population does not require the murder of every individual, nor does it hinge on whether some of the dead were combatants. The question is whether a group is being targeted as a group—and in Gaza, the reality is unmistakable.

Weaponizing Victimhood, Erasing Palestinian Suffering

A particularly insidious aspect of Zionist exceptionalism is its demand for exclusive victimhood. The suffering of Jews throughout history—especially in the Holocaust—is invoked to justify Israel's actions, yet Palestinians are not permitted to speak of their own suffering in equivalent terms. Any attempt to compare apartheid South Africa's brutality to Israel's treatment of Palestinians is dismissed as "anti-Israel propaganda." Any recognition of the Nakba—the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948—is treated as an attack on Israel's right to exist. And when Palestinians use the language of genocide to describe the systematic destruction of their people, they are accused of exaggeration, even as entire neighborhoods are leveled, families are wiped out, and civilians are starved.

This double standard is not accidental; it is foundational to Zionism's modern ideological framework. By positioning Jewish suffering as unique and beyond historical parallel, Zionist narratives demand unconditional sympathy for Israel while actively erasing Palestinian suffering. In this framework, Palestinians are expected to endure oppression in silence, and any resistance—whether military, political, or even rhetorical—is condemned as terrorism or propaganda.

Exceptionalism and the Refusal to Engage

When confronted with these contradictions, those who defend Israeli policies often claim their critics "don't understand the conflict"—a patronizing assertion that implies that only Zionist perspectives hold legitimacy. They dismiss human rights reports, legal findings, and international consensus as "propaganda," refusing to engage with the evidence because doing so would require acknowledging Israel's culpability.

This intellectual cowardice manifests in another telling way: a readiness to condemn oppression globally—except when it involves Israel. Those who were outspoken against apartheid in South Africa, who championed human rights for Black South Africans, who decried police brutality in the United States, and who condemned the persecution of Sudanese civilians and Uyghurs in China often fall conspicuously silent or become defensive when Israel is the oppressor. Their commitment to justice has an asterisk: "Only when it doesn't challenge Zionism."

This is the core hypocrisy. If apartheid was wrong in South Africa, it is wrong in Israel. If ethnic cleansing was wrong in Bosnia, it is wrong in Palestine. If genocide was wrong in Rwanda, it is wrong in Gaza. There is no principled way to support human rights in one context while excusing their violation in another.

The Consequences of Moral Cowardice

The refusal to confront Zionism's racism and exceptionalism does not just erode the credibility of those who engage in these double standards—it actively enables Israel's impunity. When genocide is denied despite overwhelming evidence, when Palestinian suffering is dismissed as "exaggeration," and when international law is selectively applied, the result is the continued legitimization of crimes against humanity.

The stark reality of this selective conscience becomes even more apparent when considering the sheer scale of atrocities. Since the Gaza war began in October 2023, Israeli forces have killed over 46,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are children, women, and the elderly. Nearly 1,000 Palestinian health workers have been killed, and between 116 and 193 journalists have lost their lives—figures meticulously documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Such staggering numbers, which would undoubtedly provoke global outrage if attributed to a geopolitical adversary of the West, are instead met with silence, deflection, or, at best, muted concern. When Palestinian journalists are assassinated, there is no global solidarity movement akin to "Je Suis Charlie." The war crimes in Gaza fail to elicit even a fraction of the performative outrage that has been mustered against far less egregious actions by other states.

This is not a failure of awareness—it is a deliberate and ideological refusal to apply the same human rights standards to allies as to adversaries. It is not that these activists, intellectuals, and liberal media are incapable of identifying war crimes; they simply refuse to acknowledge them when the perpetrators are "one of their own" or enmeshed in Western alliances. Their silence, or at best, their tepid responses, betray an ugly truth: For many in the human rights community, justice is not universal, but contingent on political expediency.

At its core, this selective conscience erodes the credibility of human rights advocacy itself. If principles are only defended when they align with Western strategic interests, then they are not principles at all—they are tools of power, wielded to bludgeon adversaries and protect allies. This moral inconsistency is precisely why human rights discourse has been increasingly met with cynicism in the Global South, where people see through the thin veneer of universalism and recognize it for what it is: a weaponized, politicized, and deeply selective enterprise.

The crisis in Gaza has exposed the stark reality that, for many self-proclaimed defenders of human rights, the value of human life is not universal but conditional. And that, in itself, is an indictment not just of Israel's enablers, but of an entire industry that has long pretended to stand above the fray, when in reality, it is deeply complicit in perpetuating injustice.

History will remember this moment. Just as those who defended South African apartheid were later forced to reckon with their complicity, those who today defend Zionism's brutal repression will eventually face the weight of history's judgment. The question is whether they will continue to evade reality until that moment arrives or whether they will have the courage to confront it now.

There is still a choice: to embrace a vision of justice that applies universally, or to cling to an exceptionalism that demands that one people's suffering be acknowledged while another's is erased. But let there be no illusions—one path leads to justice, the other to complicity. And history does not forget.

Listening to Supertramp’s album Crime of the Century in 2025 is like dusting off an old diary and realizing you were right about everything.

Supertramp’s 1974 prog-rock anthem was not meant to be trapped in a decade drowning in idealism. Rather, it was a collection of elegies that resonate with me more now, in our current nightmare, than when I first listened to it. The mournful melodies and plaintive lyrics (by Richard Davies and Roger Hodgson) speak of the crises of vague spiritual thirst, self-loathing, money culture, schools churning out compliant citizens, and unabashed corruption.

It came to a head in the 2025 inauguration of an American president with the grand unveiling of a well-worn power system but with a staggering level of audacity. Near the president and out of the shadows, there stood magnates of seemingly incurable hubris who reached their bliss points, invited to take reign of sensitive policy and firing authority and gain access to the country’s secrets and public money. A new administration wasted no time unveiling a “billionaires’ row” of insatiable elites who aren’t just playing the game. They own it. Collectively worth $1.35 trillion, they have become brands in human flesh, more recognizable than the corporate empires they built.

The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture.

And somehow, it’s all there… in the album.

Four years after its release, I came across Crime of the Century in a used album store on the main strip of Carbondale, Illinois, during my undergraduate years at Southern Illinois University. Every other week or so, I’d walk to the music store that always smelled like stale cannabis and was managed by a large man with cannabis-stained teeth and a lot of opinions. He was clearheaded enough to have promised me that he’d keep an eye out for Supertramp cassettes and vinyls.

Back in the apartment, I had Crime on repeat for longer than I will confess. Somewhere in the silage of existential angst, I decrypted the pangs that augured the coming of a novel strain of corruption and indifference capable of shaking the moral foundations of anything in its path, including a nuked-up, power-bloated country, exulting in its hegemonic dominance, yet hanging on to conceits of global moral leadership.

There were plenty of suspects to point fingers at back in the 70s, but the hardest part—which the album still dares us to do—was staring down ourselves, we the self-satisfied searchers, critics, and activists with bell-bottoms, inebriated by our magical thinking of independence and convincing ourselves that we were above the detritus and contributed nothing to the collective rot. You’ll find this indictment in the concluding lines of the title track, “Crime of the Century”:

Who are these men of lust, greed, and glory?
Rip off the masks and let’s see
But that's not right, oh no, what’s the story?
Look, there’s you and there's me

I can’t say I saw today’s condition coming when I was 20. But it does seem close to a kind of Bayesian reasoning, where you have an initial, under-substantiated certitude about something and then see new evidence that confirms your most primitive claims and worries.

The new administration did not emerge out of a vacuum. It is more of a political continuum than a rupture. Former President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and Vice President Kamala Harris have exited the stage, but their hollow-point scruples remain contagious, repurposed by their successors. What we are witnessing is not a change in direction but a seamless handoff, a continuation of the same imperial prerogatives, now dressed in different rhetoric.

The Oval Office openly covets resources and land that belong to other people. The perverse logic of supremacy and strange level of entitlement (epistemic assumptions of Empire) are rubber-stamped by compromised elected and appointed men and women of Pharaonic arrogance, who have narcissistic visions of taking Gaza’s seashore and gas fields, Greenland’s minerals, Canada’s lumber and oil, Ukraine’s massive rare earth reserves, and Panama’s canal.

So do we need more proof of active colonial appetites?

The existential dread of Crime of the Century should have shown us an imp squatting on the chest of a defeated counterculture that my generation thoughtlessly held on to. The costumes and performance of rebellion ultimately became products themselves, mass-packaged and sold back to consumers, as the edited book Commodify Your Dissent painfully argued a bit too late in 1997. To identify with grunge or goth moods, for example, subsequent generations purchased the look from fashion brands who created inventories, price points, and a market that preyed on real feelings of alienation and disillusionment in youth culture.

At the heart of Crime of the Century is a troubling accusation: We’re complicit in the corruption we claim to despise. It’s easy to cast blame on political elites, but the rot runs deeper. Media personalities, especially the high-profile journalists of broadcast celebrity and late-night comics, make their careers selectively criticizing these very figures and what they represent—only to rub shoulders with them at off-camera galas, clink wine glasses, invite them onto their shows, and turn critique into entertainment.

Each day, the celebrity reporters and broadcasters spew hundreds of thousands of words to demonstrate their erudition, apparently depleting their allotment of verbiage for the day, leaving no room for “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”

The oligarchs of influence thrive because, in part, we fund them. We engage the platforms, consume and share the storylines, and chase virality. We freely give away the inventories of our privacy. We do this knowing that the details of our inner sanctums are the products that social media giants are trafficking for great profit. The hard truth is, no one’s fully off the grid. We’re entangled in the wires we trip over and then curse at them like podcasters.

So, what do we do? Keep spinning the album and nervously thumb prayer beads (misbaha, in colloquial Arabic), cowering in the album’s pastel and gloomy brilliance?

With the exception of those who dared to speak truth to power (mainly through alternative presses that captured the right kind of radical), my generation watered the tillage that sprouted our current conundrum. One of the tracks of Crime exposed many for what they were: “For we dreamed a lot / And we schemed a lot / And we tried to sing of love before the stage fell apart.” That’s right, we were cantors of phantom ideals that were about to fall apart early in the 1980s, when John Lennon was murdered in New York City and Ronald Regan sired trickle down economics, which “foolishly trusted the collective greed of a people” to care for the needy and marginalized.

Songwriters like Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, and Rick Davies, along with scholars like Christopher Lasch, sounded the alarm early, but most of us dismissed it, assuming the warning had to be for someone else. In his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch saw through the cracks of idiot-proof idealism and noticed the shape of social and psychological narcissism that soon enough would be given the key to the Oval Office.

My generation’s surviving tenants need to stop lecturing and stop recounting imagined glories of the past. It’s time to move out of the way, especially for the generation of young people now whom we bitterly complain about, but who actually are better positioned to succeed where we failed. They have ideals but are not idealists, and they are jaded, but not overly so, just enough. Former and current students of mine, they are not content with just listening. With hunger and the right kind of impatience, they will write new songs. Can’t wait to hear them, for if we’re still noticing the crimes of 1974 in 2025, it can only mean the crime never stopped. It just learned to dress better.

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise President Donald Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable former President George W. Bush is very proud of his administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

The Trump-Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

Then there are the Clintons and former President Barack Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump and Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

What about former Vice President Kamala Harris—the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market, and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic well-being, health, and safety.

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under former President Joe Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

These and many other former government officials all have their own circles—in some cases, millions of people—who need to hear from them.

They can take some courage of the seven former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioners—from Republican and Democratic administrations—who condemned slicing the IRS staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former secretaries of defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

Illinois Go. JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings—he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

She writes:

The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth], fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear, are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.

To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-eds and editorials) is not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat, and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the 1930s.

The Trump-Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!

n late February, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a budget resolution that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion in federal spending cuts. This resolution provides a framework for a more detailed budget bill to come, mandating certain House committees to reduce spending over the next decade on government programs under their purview—for instance, calling on the Committee on Energy and Commerce to find $880 billion in cuts, $230 billion for the Agriculture Committee, and $1 billion for the Committee on Financial Services, among others. These committees will have to make difficult decisions about where to reduce federal spending and by how much as they draft their actual budgets in the coming weeks.

The implications of their decisions will be far reaching. Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and housing assistance programs are all at risk because they fall under the jurisdiction of the committees subject to large spending cuts and comprise a major share of those committees’ spending. Cutting back on these social infrastructure programs would come at a huge cost for the well-being of U.S. families, given the well-documented benefits these programs bring to the health, education, and financial stability of participating households.

The Impact of Cutting Medicaid

The U.S. private health insurance system does not cover large groups of people—for instance, low-income elderly people who need assistance for expensive long-term care, people with disabilities, and low-income children and adults—all of whom turn to Medicaid for healthcare coverage. The Medicaid program is the second-largest program under the jurisdiction of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and appears to be a bigger target for federal spending cuts than Medicare, the largest program in their portfolio. More than half of Medicaid spending supports seniors or people with disabilities, and approximately a quarter supports low-income children and their parents, making these groups particularly vulnerable to Medicaid spending cuts.

Several decades of research show a wide range of positive impacts of past Medicaid coverage expansions. After Medicaid expansions in the 1990s, for example, the uninsurance rate decreased by approximately 11 percentage points to 12 percentage points for low-income children and their parents; it also dropped by 3 percentage points to 5 percentage points for low-income adults after the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act of 2010. These expansions also reduced the probability of personal bankruptcy by 8% and the amount of debt collection balances by an average of $1,140.

If the House Committee on Energy and Commerce turns to Medicaid to satisfy their obligation to cut spending by $880 billion over 10 years, it would reverse these improvements in the well-being of low-income Americans.

In terms of health outcomes, Medicaid expansions have reduced infant mortality by 8.5%, the incidence of low birth weight by 2.6% to 5%, and teen mortality, too. Research even shows that Medicaid coverage for children has positive health effects into adulthood, reducing the presence of chronic conditions later in life by 0.03 standard deviations. Even the health of second-generation children—that is, the offspring of those exposed to Medicaid in utero—has been shown to be positively affected.

Medicaid coverage for children also improves non-health outcomes later in life. For instance, Medicaid expansions to cover children reduced the probability of being incarcerated by 5% and improved high school graduation rates and adult income—which, together, result in higher taxes paid in adulthood. In fact, research shows that a large fraction, including possibly the entire amount, of the cost of child Medicaid coverage is recaptured by the government in terms of higher taxes paid as adults.

If the House Committee on Energy and Commerce turns to Medicaid to satisfy their obligation to cut spending by $880 billion over 10 years, it would reverse these improvements in the well-being of low-income Americans.

The Impact of Cutting Nutrition Assistance

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is a joint-run federal and state program that covers 40 million low-income U.S. families per month, with each state setting eligibility requirements based on resource or income constraints of applicants. It is by far the largest spending outlay for the House Committee on Agriculture, with federal spending totaling approximately $112 billion in 2023. As a result, funding for the program is at risk as the committee looks for ways to achieve its target of $230 billion in cuts over 10 years.

Research shows that not only does nutrition assistance dramatically reduce food insecurity—by 12% to 30%—but it also has large benefits for the health, education, and long-term well-being of children in SNAP families. For example, SNAP benefits lower the probability of having a low birth-weight child by 5% to 11% and improve standardized test scores in both reading and math by about 2% of a standard deviation. The long-run impacts of receiving SNAP benefits as a child include a 3% of a standard deviation improvement in economic self-sufficiency, a 1.2-year increase in life expectancy, and a 0.5 percentage point decrease in the probability of being incarcerated.

As a result, a decision by the House Committee on Agriculture to reduce spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program risks increased food insecurity in the short run, while also risking long-term effects for health, education, and economic outcomes of low-income U.S. children.

The Impact of Cutting Housing Assistance

The budget resolution requires the House Committee on Financial Services, which oversees housing assistance programs, to reduce spending by $1 billion over the next 10 years. Federal spending on housing assistance was $67 billion in 2023, with $32.1 billion going toward the Housing Choice Voucher program that provides subsidies for very low-income families to find housing in the private market.

Unaffordable housing is already a serious and well-known issue in the United States, with even minimally adequate housing out of reach for millions of people. Housing vouchers have been shown to reduce the percent of income paid on rent from 58% to 27%, which is within the general definition of affordable housing (no more than 30% of family income). By relieving the financial strain of high housing costs, research shows that the housing assistance program has positive effects in other dimensions as well. Housing vouchers reduce parental stress by 7% and hypertension by 50%, as well as reducing behavioral problems in children and increasing child test scores in school.

If the House Committee on Financial Services decides to reduce spending on housing assistance, many low-income families would not be able to afford decent, safe, and sanitary housing, which would have a negative impact on the overall well-being of parents and children alike.

Conclusion

A number of large social programs that provide support to millions of Americans may get cut as a result of the House-passed budget resolution, with Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and housing assistance particularly at risk. This would have a profound negative impact on the health, education, and financial stability of many low-income Americans—those who need this assistance the most.

Members of these House committees must carefully consider the benefits that these programs deliver to U.S. families before making decisions about where and how to make the required spending cuts. There are no doubt inefficiencies in social programs, just as in all government programs. But across-the-board cuts of this magnitude would inevitably hurt the vulnerable groups receiving these benefits across the United States.

On February 25, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, one of the most prestigious educational institutions in global affairs and an intellectual vanguard of the liberal order, held an event with former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo. The theme: “Democratic Backsliding in Latin America.”

What the event crucially withheld is that Zedillo himself is responsible for crimes against humanity and the destruction of his country’s democratic system under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s “Perfect Dictatorship,” a period of uninterrupted 71-year rule.

Zedillo served as president from 1994 to 2000; he was the last heir of that era, during which the PRI kept rigging elections, threatening opposition parties, buying votes, and deploying security forces against opposition to hold on to power.

If Zedillo is lecturing on democratic backsliding, can we really expect him to acknowledge his own role in it?

Failing to mention his crimes was not an accident—it epitomized a broader, deliberate pattern of whitewashing of Latin American leaders responsible for horrendous crimes by U.S.-led, liberal institutions.

Within days of assuming office, Zedillo provoked the worst economic crisis in the country’s history, better known as the Peso Crisis, when he immediately devalued the peso by 15% and converted private banking debt to public debt, causing enormous economic strife, inequality, poverty, and death.

Zedillo also targeted political opponents including in his own party, and repeatedly used the state’s power against peaceful protesters. After years of calling Indigenous protesters demanding further autonomy “terrorists,” state security forces committed the Aguas Blancas and Acteal massacres under his watch. He attempted to suppress reporting on the massacres (only acknowledged decades later) and accelerated conflict with the Zapatistas, while categorically refusing to negotiate with the group despite its popular support against legitimate grievances.

Silence means access, and access bolsters the institution’s connections, at the cost of truth and progress. Voicing any concern over Zedillo’s blacklist of abuses might lead to Zedillo refusing to give the talk, which would affect SAIS’s prestigious image, no matter how it might pervert the school’s supposed educational mandate.

There are countless examples of this corrupt system at work. Former President of Colombia Iván Duque, who is largely responsible for purposefully tanking the Peace Accords and perpetuating civil conflict, as well as repeatedly using the military to kill peaceful protesters, was given a Global Fellowship with the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program and another at Cornell, and frequently visits prestigious think tanks and universities, including Georgetown, to lecture about democracy.

Alejandro Toledo, the disgraced former president of Peru now in jail for his role in the Odebrecht corruption scandal, has held positions at Stanford and Brookings. Álvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia who exacerbated the War on Drugs and allegedly supported the far-right paramilitary death squads (now the largest drug producers in the country), was also given a fellowship at Georgetown. These are just a few examples of a long list of criminal Latin American leaders in prominent positions in liberal circles in Washington and beyond.

Former Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, who suspended constitutional rights to deploy the military against protesters and drug cartels, and called an election to prevent Congress from holding him accountable for his corruption, was also given a column in the Wilson Center’s magazine (while he was being impeached), prompting my own resignation from the program. He was also offered a Senior Leadership Fellowship at the Florida International University, along with Juan Guiadó, Álvaro Uribe, and others.

To cite one last ongoing example, Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa has also been parading around various universities and think tanks, particularly in Washington and Miami, allegedly earning significant cash and gifts despite Ecuadorian law preventing large foreign donations. Noboa has maintained a “state of exception” for more than 13 months, expanding state powers and suspending constitutional rights. Thousands have been arrested without trial, and the ensuing conflict has resulted in thousands more deaths, as the state feeds a worsening cycle of violence, disproportionately targeting marginalized populations, that shows little sign of letting up in the long-term. That includes four Afro-Ecuadorian boys, 15 years old and younger, who were murdered by military forces in Guayaquil late last year. Barring a major shift, it is expected that Noboa will be offered a cushy fellowship or consulting golden parachute in the United States after leaving office.

Their crimes seem to cause no pain for the American liberal intelligentsia, who are supposed to uphold an order based on “rules and norms.” Rather, they seem to be applied selectively based on naked national interest.

As long as these leaders pledge allegiance to the neoliberal order and the Washington Consensus, their authoritarian abuses are ignored, and they are embraced by elites. Attendees, organizers, and institutions enable this whitewashing to protect their geopolitical and economic interests—whether to uphold liberal order or, more cynically, to maintain U.S. control over Latin American sovereignty.

This revolving door extends beyond think tanks and universities—many of these disgraced leaders secure high-paying consulting roles with American firms, advising on the very legal and political systems they once manipulated. Zedillo, beyond his talk at SAIS (and his fellowship at Yale), is also a consultant with various American companies including Citigroup and Coca-Cola, for which he manages multi-million-dollar portfolios.

Evidently, this system has permeated through all institutions belonging to the old liberal order, whether they be think tanks, educational institutions, development organizations, or multilateral regional organizations, all of which have repeatedly provided cover, and even support, to criminal leaders from the region, in the name, supposedly, of “democracy and freedom.”

This incestuous system, consequently, rewards terrible leaders who pay lip service to liberalism, contributing to the perpetuation of institutionalized corruption, human rights abuses, and democratic backsliding in Latin America.

For those consuming these institutions' output—events, speeches, research, and courses—this corrupt cycle distorts the truth, obscuring the crucial historical and political context behind future policy decisions. If Zedillo is lecturing on democratic backsliding, can we really expect him to acknowledge his own role in it?

Having these bad actors as messengers also incentivizes the next generation to participate in the corrupt system themselves, having the leaders as mentors. The leaders, coming from a very powerful position with immense connections and social and economic capital, can provide internships, fellowships, and other opportunities, often with financial reward (and thus ownership). Mentees will then become part of the sociopolitical caste that birthed the corrupt leaders, be fed revisionist history, and perpetuate the cycle further, damaging progress for generations.

This incestuous system rewarding corruption and loyalty to the American-led liberal order should be called out at every turn. Certain heterodox analysts, scholars, journalists, and activists, have themselves been critical, incurring significant professional risks to speak truth to power. Some of these events and appointments, for instance, Uribe’s appointment to Georgetown, have been widely protested.

These critical debates are not “grey areas” or a “game,” they are part of a broader, centuries-long effort for independence, sovereignty, and popular rule, despite very well-funded colonial efforts, including by liberal elites in Washington, against self-determination.

As Eduardo Galeano wrote in his iconic The Open Veins of Latin America, “History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.’” The weaponization of democracy and freedom by liberal elite institutions to cover up pro-American regional leaders’ crimes for imperial interests is a mere repackaging of Monroe Doctrine dogma, and it won’t go away until it is gutted inside and out.

In Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, set in the French Algerian town of Oran, rats one day begin showing up dead on residents’ doorsteps, dying with violent spasms and blood pouring from their mouths.

At first, the rats’ death agonies are only a curiosity to the townspeople. But then the rats begin dying in greater numbers, their corpses piling up in the streets. “The staircase from the cellar to the attics was strewn with dead rats, 10 or a dozen of them. The garbage bins of all the houses in the street were full of rats.”

When Dr. Rieux, a physician, remarks upon the strange phenomenon to his mother, she replies vaguely, “It’s like that sometimes.”

The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.

By the time Rieux realizes what is happening, it is too late. Bubonic plague has come to Oran. Soon it is the townspeople themselves who are dying in agony, their bodies heaping up in mounds—like the rats whose suffering, and fates, they had only days before viewed with indifference...

Lately, I have been thinking of Camus’ novel, as we ourselves teeter on the brink of a new deadly plague—avian flu. Like the people in the story, we too have remained indifferent to the suffering, and shared collective fate, of our fellow creatures. And we continue to do so at our own peril.

For more than a year, I have followed news reports of the H5N1 virus that causes bird flu, or highly pathogenic avian influenza, as it has torn across the world, infecting hundreds of species and killing millions of animals, from storks and snowy owls to cranes and harbor seals, from foxes and herons to finches and lions. Geese have fallen from the skies dead over Kansas City. House cats have died from violent seizures in Iceland and Texas. The virus has decimated colonies of Adélie penguins in Antarctica, wiped out albatross fledglings on the remote South African island of Marion, killed dolphins and manatees off the Florida coast.

Never have scientists seen a virus infect so many species all at once, nor spread so quickly or with such devastating effect. It is the first observed panzootic—a pandemic of “all” animals. Researchers are now calling avian flu an “existential threat” to planetary biodiversity.

While droves of our fellow beings were dying in agony in far-away places, however, few people seemed to notice or care. Even today, we resist acknowledging our own role in the catastrophe—the fact that it is we ourselves, by imprisoning billions of animals in the food system, then allowing the virus to run rampant inside it, who have turned H5N1 into a trans-species bioweapon. And now that bioweapon is turning toward us.

While the H5N1 virus is naturally occurring, it emerged as a global problem only when it became concentrated in the Asian poultry industry in the late 1990s. Farmers at the time killed hundreds of millions of chickens and other birds to try to contain the virus—in many cases, by burying them alive or setting them on fire. Since then, H5N1 has resurfaced again and again on animal farms, leading to the deaths of poultry and humans alike.

For years, epidemiologists have warned that the animal agriculture system was a time bomb waiting to go off. Most of the deadly diseases ever to have afflicted our own species, including cholera, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS, and influenza, have been caused by our exploitation of animals for food. Today, three-quarters of all emerging infectious diseases are in fact zoonotic in origin—a consequence chiefly of the modern animal food system.

That system has increased our vulnerability to animal-borne diseases in two ways. First, raising cattle and other ruminants for slaughter requires staggering anounts of land, which destroys animal habitat and crowds species together, thus enabling viruses to find new hosts who lack natural immunity to them. (More than half the surface of the Earth has been turned into farmland, and 80% of that is devoted to raising animals for slaughter.) Second, we have created a permanent source of new plagues by concentrating sick and traumatized animals together in industrialized conditions.

Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention.

Few people are aware of the sheer scale of the global animal food system. But each year, 80,000,000,000 land animals and up to 2,700,000,000,000 marine animals die violently to satisfy growing human demand for animal products. This system is now the most ecologically destructive force on our planet—the leading cause of the mass extinction crisis and the second-leading source of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the main cause of freshwater system loss, algal blooms, and land degradation.

The animal food system is also a moral and epidemiological calamity. Billions of sensitive chickens, pigs, cows, and others are forced into miserable, fetid conditions of intensive confinement, where they are beaten, tormented with electric prods, and then brutally killed at a fraction of their lifespans. Our prisoners suffer such psychological and physiological stress and trauma that millions die even before they can reach a slaughterhouse. So to keep them alive, farmers pump them full of antibiotics. Seventy percent of antibiotics worldwide are fed to farmed animals, a practice which, in turn, is fueling deadly new strains of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs.”

Natural ecosystems constrain the virulence of pathogens like H5N1, by selecting out the most lethal traits that would otherwise keep a virus from spreading by killing its host prematurely. As science writer Brandon Keim observes, however, the “constraints on virulence” ordinarily found in nature are absent on industrialized poultry farms, where birds are killed at a tiny fraction of their normal lifespans. In fact, virulence is selected for.

It was only a matter of time, thus, before the horrific and unjust conditions in the animal agriculture system became the proving ground for a pathogen capable of igniting a dangerous pandemic. Now our luck may have run out.

Last year, the H5N1 virus crossed a crucial threshold, when wild birds exposed to concentrations of the virus on animal farms contracted the disease and spread it to other species along their migration routes. Meanwhile, the Biden administration, deferring to powerful agricultural interests—and seeking to avoid antagonizing rural voters in an election year—squandered every opportunity to track and contain the deadly disease. For months, the U.S. government effectively stood by and did nothing. As a result, H5N1 has now become endemic throughout the U.S. animal agriculture system. And the longer it remains there, the more likely is it to mutate into a form transmissable between humans.

How bad would that be? In 2005, David Nabarro, then the United Nations system coordinator for avian and human influenza, warned that a bird flu pandemic could kill up to 150 million people. That may be a conservative estimate, however, since the known past mortality rate from avian flu in humans has been over 50%, making H5N1 up to 100 times deadlier than Covid-19. Unlike Covid-19 furthermore, a bird flu pandemic would not primarily target older adults or people with underlying conditions, but would kill indiscriminately.

The H5N1 virus is neuropathic, meaning that it attacks the brain, causing conditions ranging from mild encaphalitis to seizures, coma, and death. Children and pregnant women would be especially vulnerable to the virus. When a Canadian teen contracted the H5N1 virus last year, she suffered multiple organ failure and had to be placed on a respirator for months before she recovered. Avian flu has meanwhile killed 90% of the pregnant women who, in past decades, contracted it. “We are in a terrible situation and going into a worse situation,” Angela Rasmussen, a Canadian virologist, recently warned. “I don’t know if the bird flu will become a pandemic, but if it does, we are screwed.”

So far, we have been extremely lucky. The dozens of farm workers who have fallen ill from avian flu this last year, most from exposure to infected dairy cows, appear to have contracted a mild version of the virus. Most have now recovered. Last month, however, the far deadlier D1.1 variant of the virus was discovered in a herd of cattle in Nevada. Should such a lethal variant mutate into a transmissable form, and become capable of binding to receptors in our lungs, the resulting pandemic could lead to societal chaos and mass mortality.

For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value.

Just before leaving office, then-President Joe Biden transferred $590 million to Moderna to accelerate development of a bird flu vaccine. Other companies are also working on vaccines. But it’s anyone’s guess if they will be ready in time. Even with a vaccine, Americans can expect little help from their government should a bird flu pandemic materialize, since President Donald Trump is eviscerating the federal agencies responsible for public health and disease prevention. The new administration has slashed the budgets and staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FEMA, suppressed CDC updates on bird flu, and taken the U.S. out of the World Health Organization—the international agency responsible for monitoring and providing guidance on global public health threats, including pandemics.

Worsening matters, any federal response to an avian flu pandemic would be in the hands of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of Health and Human Services—a notorious vaccine skeptic. President Trump himself would likely respond to a new pandemic not by protecting the most vulnerable Americans, but by using the crisis to expand his own powers, if not to impose martial law.

Perhaps our luck will hold, and we will somehow all avoid getting avian flu. But we can’t count on it. Nor can we afford to go on ignoring the inextricable links between our oppression of nonhuman animals and growing pandemic risk.

The best way to prevent zoonotic pathogens from making us sick in future is to begin transitioning to an all plant-based diet. In doing so, we would not only spare billions of animals further suffering, but also mitigate a great deal of environmental damage to our planet. And we ourselves would be healthier for it. Scientists have shown that vegans have lower rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and type 2 diabetes than meat-eaters. One study in JAMA found that vegans may even live longer than “omnivores” who consume animal products.

Tragically, however, rather than rethink our dietary choices, we continue to cling to the animal system, and to its vast cruelties, against the better claims of reason and conscience. Few people indeed seem aware of the violence and suffering that attend even “ordinary” animal production. To produce eggs, for example, tens of millions of chickens are jammed into cages so small that they cannot extend even a single wing. The birds’ beaks are painfully cut off to keep them from pecking at their cell mates in distress. Then the chickens are repeatedly starved to shock their systems into producing more eggs. Finally, they are violently grabbed and thrown into a truck, and brought to the slaughterhouse. There, they are shackled upside down by their legs and have their throats cut, often while still conscious. Many are boiled alive in feather removal tanks. Billions of male baby chicks—of no use to industry—are meanwhile ground up alive or are simply tossed away in dumpsters, to suffocate or die from dehydration.

These and other barbaric practices have no place in society today. Even now, however, Americans are concerned only about soaring egg prices, not about the suffering of the tens of millions of animals being killed in ventilator shutdowns across the country. The idea that we should simply stop eating eggs—for the birds’ well-being as much as for our own safety—appears not to have occurred to anyone.

As an ethicist who has spent decades lecturing and publishing on animal rights, hoping to convince people that there is a better way to live a human life than by imprisoning and killing our fellow beings, I find it beyond discouraging how little progress has been made toward ending our violence against animals in the food economy. The avian flu threat, however, has now given us an opportunity to rethink our existential and ethical relations with the other animals of our planet, and to recognize how closely our fates are bound together.

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls—it tolls for thee.” When the poet John Donne wrote these words, centuries ago, it was customary for churches in England to toll their bells to announce the death of someone in the community. We are deeply connected to one another, Donne was saying, and what happens to one, happens to all.

“No man is an island entire of itself,” Donne wrote. Each of us “is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Every death therefore “diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

Donne’s poem has taken on new significance, as avian influenza now closes in around us. Our species is not alone on the Earth, but part of the biotic main, a “piece of a continent” teeming with myriad other suffering, mortal beings. And what we do to the other animals, we do also to ourselves.

For too long, we have behaved as if our species were “an island entire of itself,” and we were the only beings whose lives mattered or had value. Now, after long treating our fellow creatures with violence and contempt, as mere “things” to be exploited and killed for our purposes, our karmic debt is coming due, in a ruined Earth and escalating pandemic risks. The tolling of the bell today is avian flu, and it tolls for us.

“Mom, there’s smoke coming from the Palisades!” Those were the words my 15-year-old son yelled to me last fall as he gazed out our apartment window in Upper Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Looking over, there was indeed a plume of smoke rising across the river. By the next day, our apartment building smelled like a campfire. Over the following week, I read urgent social media posts from neighbors about brush fires in nearby Inwood Hill and Fort Tryon Parks. It felt dystopian, out of place for New York. The experience reminded me of talking with my young niece in the Bay Area, who once matter-of-factly told me that she couldn’t play outside because the air quality was bad. That wasn’t so unusual for California. But experiencing it here in New York? That was something entirely new.

Those fires of November 2024 made clear something we as New Yorkers have been largely ignoring since Superstorm Sandy: The frontlines of the climate crisis have reached the Big Apple. Given that urgency, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision in January to delay the implementation of New York’s Cap-Trade-and-Invest Program (NYCI) is deeply misguided. It’s a shortsighted decision with no political upside that ignores the connection between the climate crisis and our city’s affordability crisis. It is imperative that the governor quickly reverse course.

Back in 2019, New York leapt to the fore in setting ambitious benchmarks for greenhouse gas reduction and a just transition to a renewable economy. New York’s landmark Climate Law set out a process for this transition, and the law is now a model for other states and helped inspire former President Joe Biden’s climate policy.

Just as planting a tree is an act of faith in the continuity of community, investing in a livable, sustainable future for all New Yorkers is keeping a promise to our children, who will reap the benefits for generations to come.

But now we’re playing catch-up: Our state is failing to hit its emissions targets. Add to that a hostile presidential administration that largely denies the existence of the climate crisis, and is resolutely committed to investing in polluting fossil fuels, and you’d think the governor would step up to the plate. But instead, Gov. Hochul is retreating into a corner at the worst time.

Cap-and-invest policies are popular and effective. As recently as this past November, voters in Washington State voted overwhelmingly to continue their state’s cap-and-invest program. Why? Because Washingtonians saw the benefits of cap-and-invest in their everyday lives: greater access to affordable and free public transit; cleaner air in and around schools with zero-emissions school buses and efficient HVAC systems; and lower energy bills for low-income households and small businesses, who receive support for upgrading their gas furnaces to efficient electric alternatives. California, whose cap-and-invest program has been in place for over a decade, has seen even greater benefits thanks to the more than $26 billion that the law has generated.

New York has been part of a regional cap-and-invest program since 2009 called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). RGGI has cut power plant pollution by 50% in participating states and generated over $2 billion in revenue in New York alone. The proceeds funded job creation, air pollution monitoring in affected communities, and the installation of over 4,000 electric vehicle charging ports.

By refusing to implement NYCI, Governor Hochul is depriving our state of at least $2 billion in additional annual revenue. NYCI would support thousands of new jobs. It would facilitate new efficient electric heat pumps for homes across the state, which would save the average household $1,000 per year in energy bills. It would enable the buildout of EV infrastructure and empower communities to develop and implement a range of local clean energy initiatives. And at a time when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is facing a severe budget shortfall, NYCI would help make public transit more efficient, accessible, and reliable. All of that would reduce pollution—meaning a cleaner future for all.

NYCI isn’t free. But the costs of the program pale in comparison to the price we pay for climate-fueled extreme weather events and the health effects of fossil fuel pollution. We also know that the costs of inaction in New York State far outpace the costs of meeting our 2030 and 2050 emissions targets—by $115 billion.

Implementing NYCI isn’t just a financial issue, it’s a moral one. As someone organizing for climate action within my Jewish community, I often turn to Jewish tradition for inspiration. I think about a Jewish folk tale, about an old man planting a fig tree. When a passerby skeptically asks him if he expects to live long enough to consume the fruits of his labor, the old man replies, “My ancestors planted for me, and now I plant for my children.” Just as planting a tree is an act of faith in the continuity of community, investing in a livable, sustainable future for all New Yorkers is keeping a promise to our children, who will reap the benefits for generations to come.

It’s time for Gov. Hochul to avoid further inaction and implement the NYCI. At a time when the costs of climate action have never been higher, Gov. Hochul should take responsibility and lead New York toward a just transition toward a cleaner future.

Just five years after Covid-19 struck New York City, we’ve almost forgotten the early days of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, when refrigerator trucks were filled with dead bodies and 800 people a day were dying from Covid-19. We may remember the lockdowns and disputes over masking and vaccines that persist to this day, but we fail to remember what actually kept the city running and helped it survive: the labor of essential workers in our hospitals, grocery stores, transit system, police precincts, and firehouses.

The desire to forget the traumas of the pandemic is perfectly human, but forgetting the labor that saved the city would be a dangerous mistake. In a world where the avian flu hovers near us, measles is reemerging, and viruses are mutating daily, we need the example of essential workers’ courage and solidarity to strengthen us for the next public health emergency.

When then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ”New York On Pause” plan took effect on March 22 of 2020, it divided the state’s workforce into essential workers (who were expected to go out to do their jobs) and the rest of us who could labor from home.

Maintaining public health requires setting aside private interest to serve the public good. When a communicable disease attacks, it becomes clear that the health of each of us is bound up with the health of all of us.

Essential workers drew strength from many sources—from socially conscious professionalism to ideals of courage to the support of workmates to the knowledge that their families needed their paycheck to survive.

For some essential workers—above all police and firefighters—facing danger is part of the job. And transit workers toil in a system of buses, subways, and repair shops where hazards are common.

Others faced danger on their jobs for the first time. Healthcare professionals expect to confront dangerous illnesses, but the communicability of Covid-19 was unusual. Cashiers in supermarkets and drug stores were surprised to find themselves facing a deadly disease transmitted by customers and coworkers.

It was a scary time. Police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians went into the homes of the sick to provide support, care, and—when all else failed—transportation to a hospital. Nurses learned new skills overnight to meet the demands of Covid-19, then held cellphones next to their dying patients so they could hear the voices of their loved ones. Doctors improvised new forms of communication and treatment. Cashiers and food service workers provided meals and emotional support for customers.

For all their bravery, many essential workers faced terrible working conditions. Bicycle couriers who delivered meals for restaurants confronted poor pay, bad weather, and the galling fact that the restaurants they served would not let them use their toilets. Health care professionals grappled with shortages of protective gear and medical supplies.

Transit workers had to deal with passengers who ignored rules on social distancing. One bus driver was knocked unconscious by a passenger after he asked him to put on a mask to cover his chronic cough.

Still, for a brief time, the city seemed united. Every night at 7:00 pm, New Yorkers learned from their windows or stood on the sidewalk to cheer their essential workers. For precious minutes we broke out of our isolation, saluted the best in us, and strengthened each other. Working together, putting the common good first, the city managed to “bend the curve.” Stay-at-home orders, social distancing, and masking brought the number of infections down.

By June, the Covid-19 surge of spring 2020 was over and deaths were down to a much-reduced level of less than 50 a day.

But the spirit of solidarity proved to be short-lived. Ironically, after vaccines against Covid-19 were introduced in December 2020 and danger eased, the city was gripped by a sour mood, starting with negative reactions to a computerized system of registration for vaccines that was glitchy and inefficient. Restaurant operators had to contend with both changing municipal guidelines and customers who flouted masking requirements. Old currents of hatred, especially antisemitism and racism against Asians, gained new strength. Over time, the value of the vaccines themselves became a subject of debate and disinformation.

One of the great lessons of the pandemic is that solidarity is hard to maintain. When the interest of public health and personal interest aligned, as they did in the spring of 2020, people were willing to wear masks and engage in social distancing to save themselves. Once the vaccines made them feel safe, they were reluctant to accept limitations on their individual lives.

Maintaining public health requires setting aside private interest to serve the public good. When a communicable disease attacks, it becomes clear that the health of each of us is bound up with the health of all of us.

In the grim days of the pandemic, essential workers were their brothers and sisters’ keepers. For all the divisions in our city and country over the pandemic and so much else, the courage of essential workers is something we all can admire. We need to learn from it if we are to build a better future.

By the Trump administration’s haphazard design, the federal government is in chaos.

Federal workers are being fired without cause or due process, most of them recent hires and many working jobs not easily found—if found at all—in the private sector. Those losing their jobs are being told that they have failed to show that their employment would be in the public interest. The effects are widespread. Medical professionals joining the already-understaffed Department of Veterans Affairs are having their job offers rescinded, while the capacity of the Internal Revenue Service to collect revenue is being hampered by layoffs mid tax season. Funding critical to biomedical research is being withheld—perhaps illegally. Without this funding, many less-resourced institutions, including historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), will be priced out of conducting research.

It is unclear as to what gains in efficiency are to be made from cutting agencies defending consumers from financial fraud or firing nuclear weapons workers so essential that they immediately need to be rehired.

This state of chaos has been intentionally crafted by Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and his administration’s efforts to dismantle government programs by slashing the federal workforce.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) has been a central target of the purge, with the administration terminating related offices and programs while revoking anti-discriminatory executive orders. It should be no surprise then that the administration’s mass firings will disproportionately hurt minority populations within the federal government. This is a feature of the cuts, not a bug; what is being sold as a meritocratic endeavor is in reality an effort to demolish a bridge to economic opportunity for thousands of minorities, and to end programs that millions rely on.

(Source: Data obtained from the Office of Personnel Management via FedScope. Postal Workers are not included. Graphic: CEPR.)

Figure 1 displays the makeup of the federal government workforce by race and ethnicity in September of 2024, calculated using employment numbers from FedScope. Note that FedScope does not report all federal employees; it does not include the over 600,000 people who work for the U.S. Postal Service. Unless stated otherwise, all numbers in this paper reference the group of federal workers reported by FedScope.

Non-Hispanic Black people comprise over 18% of the federal workforce, despite comprising just over 12% of the population and the labor force in 2023 according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Federal work has long been a road to middle class wealth and stability for Black workers, a population facing higher rates of joblessness and increased obstacles to entering the private sector. According to a 2020 report by the Center for American Progress, the federal government has hired Black workers at higher rates than the private sector for over a century.

The Non-Hispanic white and Asian populations closely match their labor force share. Hispanic workers, though underrepresented relative to their share of the population, have seen the highest growth in representation within the federal government; FedScope data shows them going from 7.82% of the workforce in 2010 to 10.94% in 2024. Slashing the size of the federal workforce is thus bound to disproportionately hurt Black workers, while freezing the acquisition of new workers is bound to stem the growth in opportunity that Hispanic workers were achieving through the federal workforce.

With the Trump administration reportedly targeting a 10% cut in the federal workforce, 230,000 workers face the prospect of sudden joblessness. The number of federal workers is arguably already too small to handle the tasks of the federal government. The size of the federal workforce has hovered consistently around 2 million since 1950, a relic of a twice-repealed cap on the federal workforce introduced in 1950. Looking at year-over-year change in January federal employment via BLS data and excluding temporary Census workers, the federal government has never seen more than a 5% cut since 1995. Removing 230,000 workers would nearly obliterate all federal jobs added between January of 2010 and November of 2024.

Alongside the path to economic stability it has traditionally provided to minorities, the federal government provides work to over 640,000 veterans. The BLS reports that, in 2023, 11% of all veterans and 19% of veterans with service-connected disabilities worked for the federal government. A uniform 10% cut would mean 64,000 veterans directly losing their jobs, their income, and their benefits.

(Source: Data on savings receipts taken from ABC News analysis of receipts on DOGE website. Cost of extending Trump Tax Cuts obtained from analysis by Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Revised data analysis by NPR. Graphic: CEPR.)

The goal of the attack on the federal workforce is not “efficiency.” What is being sold to the people as an exercise in efficiency is no more than the deliberate erosion of state capacity. It is unclear as to what gains in efficiency are to be made from cutting agencies defending consumers from financial fraud or firing nuclear weapons workers so essential that they immediately need to be rehired. The savings claimed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have been wildly overstated; in February they claimed to have saved $65 billion, but an NPR calculation that corrected DOGE’s error-ridden tally put the actual number at $2.3 billion. Extending the Trump tax cuts of 2017, meanwhile, is estimated to reduce government revenue by at least $3.9 trillion over 10 years.

Depriving traditionally underserved communities of a route to economic security for themselves and their families.

Destroying the federal government’s ability to properly serve the hundreds of millions that depend on it, whether they know it or not.

All of this, a hundred times over, to pay for another round of tax cuts for the wealthy.

Is the cruelty worth it?

I spent part of the morning reading the Powell memo—the famous document written by the future Supreme Court justice in August of 1971 arguing that American business and industry had to get its act together so it could dominate the country’s political life and prevent the threats to “the American system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”

In the short run, Justice Lewis Powell was unsuccessful—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been formed a few months before his memo, the Clean Water Act passed a few months after. As William Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA (and a Republican appointed by a Republican president) said, the agency “has no obligation to promote agriculture or commerce; only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.” Over the next years the agency enacted a critical series of rules that—with surprising speed—cleaned America’s air, rivers, and lakes, and became the template for similar laws around the world.

The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality.

But the forces Powell helped set in motion with his memo to the Chamber of Commerce never accepted the premise that American business should be regulated—as he had recommended, they built a powerful set of institutions—think tanks, tv stations, publishers, and above all political lobbies—and now, 54 years later, they would appear, on the surface, to have won their final victory. Lee Zeldin, a distant successor to Ruckelshaus as EPA head, announced what he called the “greatest day of deregulation in American history.”

As the Times explained, under Zeldin’s plan the agency

would unwind more than two dozen protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.

In addition, when the agency creates environmental policy, it would no longer consider the costs to society from wildfires, droughts, storms, and other disasters that might be made worse by pollution connected to that policy, Mr. Zeldin said.

In perhaps its most consequential act, the agency said it would work to erase the EPA’s legal authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by reconsidering decades of science that show global warming is endangering humanity. In his video, Mr. Zeldin derisively referred to that legal underpinning as “the holy grail of the climate change religion.”

The reason, he said, was to help the president “usher in a golden age of American success.”

It was language echoed in a second extraordinary speech, this one by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, speaking to fellow oilmen in Houston, who promised to “unleash human potential” mostly through the use of artificial intelligence, which would require “unlimited energy.” Yes, he said, we’ve already increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by 50%, but climate change is simply “a global physical phenomenon that is a side effect of building the modern world.” (That is a phrase that will live in infamy)

The triumphalism of those speeches is in some ways well founded—as the Trump administration ravages university budgets, as its allies turn once-great newspapers into mouthpieces, and as the GOP Congress marches in complete lockstep threatening even to impeach those judges who might rule against this crusade, it’s hard to see precisely how they’ll be stopped. Yes, there will be widespread resistance (join us at Third Act and many other groups on April 5, for the next big round of rallies), and yes there will be lots and lots of court cases. (Some good news on that front this week, as the Supreme Court denied an industry request to keep states and cities from suing them for climate damages). But for the moment these hard-faced men with greed as their compass occupy the political high ground. For the moment they can do much of what they will.

And yet and yet and yet. There are some forces they can’t control. One is physics. You can prattle all you want, as Zeldin did, about how ending efforts to address climate change will “decrease the cost of living for American families,” but thanks to global warming the price of insurance is going through the roof—the latest data I’ve seen from, say, Summit County, Utah shows premiums doubling, and in some cases going up 300%. That’s if you can get it at all—in the wake of the LA fires, California’s largest insurer said this week that “writing new policies doesn’t make any sense at this time.”

And if you can’t control physics, you also can’t control—at least completely—engineering and economics, the disciplines that have led in recent years to the breakout of renewable energy. On the same day as Wright’s speech belittling clean power, these numbers emerged from the consultant Wood MacKenzie:

The U.S. installed 50 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in 2024, the largest single year of new capacity added to the grid by any energy technology in over two decades. That’s enough to power 8.5 million households.

Why do you think the energy industry spent record amounts on Trump’s election? (Fracking baron Wright and his wife gave $475,000). It’s precisely because of the size of this threat.

As Abby Hopper, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association put it: “Solar and storage can be built faster and more affordably than any other technology, ensuring the United States has the power needed to compete in the global economy and meet rising electricity demand. America’s solar and storage industry set historic deployment and manufacturing records in 2024, creating jobs and driving economic growth.”

As the CEO of NextEra Energy (which builds both gas and renewable plants) explained at the same conference that Wright addressed:

The cost of gas turbines and the skilled labor to install them are both up threefold from just two years ago, and new gas infrastructure faces years-long delivery backlogs. Renewables plus batteries, he said, are the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to meet the surging power demand from data centers driven by the acceleration in artificial intelligence.

“We’ve got to be really careful here, from an affordability standpoint, about the choices that we’re making. What we don’t want to do is drive ourselves to only one solution—that being a gas-fired solution—that’s now more expensive than it ever has been in its history,” he said. “It just so happens that the most economic solution comes with clean energy benefits, as well.”

And as the technology keeps getting better, so do the numbers—a U.K. study released today found that rooftop solar alone could supply two-thirds of the world’s electricity.

Zeldin, Wright, Trump—they want to take us back to the glory days before 1970, when rivers caught on fire. And to do so they’ll try to take us back to the days before 1958—word came yesterday that the federal government was planning to break the lease on the Hawaii facility that supports the carbon observatory on Mauna Loa.

“It would be terrible if this office was closed,” atmospheric scientist Marc Alessi, a fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group, said.

“Not only does it provide the measurement of CO2 that we so desperately need to track climate change, but it also informs climate model simulations.”

Others said the Trump administration had already made their work harder, after the White House froze credit cards held by agency employees for a 30-day period under DOGE’S “cost efficiency initiative.”

“It has already become very difficult to continue our global greenhouse gas monitoring network,” an atmospheric scientist involved in NOAA’s measurements said, asking not to be named.

“It requires continuous shipping of sampling equipment black and forth all over the world. Suddenly, we cannot use our government-issued credit cards anymore… It looks like our monitoring program will soon be dead,” the scientist said.

But even if they stop monitoring carbon it will continue accumulating—in fact, the instrument at Mauna Loa showed that CO2 passed the 430 parts per million mark for the first time this week. And even if the federal government does all that it can to shut down renewable energy, the embarrassing numbers will keep piling up—Texas, world capital of hydrocarbons, set remarkable records this week for renewable energy generation.

In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 megawatts), most solar production (24,818 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 megawatts). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 megawatts. Now the battery fleet is providing nearly as much instantaneous power as Texas nuclear power plants, which contribute around 5,000 megawatts.

The job for those of us who care about the future is to continue insisting on reality (hats off to those Texans who rallied outside the conference that Wright addressed, and that’s why you’re supposed to set aside Sept 20-21 for Sun Day). Wright, Zeldin, Musk, Trump—they have powerful sticks to try and beat reality into submission. But reality has a way of biting back.

What happens when free speech is only free for those in power? JD Vance and the Trump administration claim to champion the First Amendment, but in practice, their version of free speech comes with a condition: It protects those who uphold their agenda and punishes those who challenge it.

This was on full display at the National League of Cities conference when Vance, now vice president, blamed the housing crisis on undocumented immigrants. "You see a very consistent relationship between a massive increase in immigration and a massive increase in housing prices," Vance argued. According to him, the rising cost of housing wasn't due to corporate greed or predatory real estate practices, but to migrants. It was a textbook case of scapegoating—shifting blame onto the powerless to distract from the true culprits.

Enter Mary Lupien, a Rochester, New York city councilmember and mayoral candidate, who wasn't having it. In a moment of raw defiance, she interrupted Vance's speech, cutting through the lies with a simple truth:

Vance and his allies claim to be warriors for free expression, yet their administration is actively working to silence those who challenge their narrative.

"We're competing against corporations, not immigrants. Give us back our funding!"

It was a flash of courage in a political landscape where too many sit silently while bad-faith actors rewrite reality.

Lupien, a progressive leader and longtime advocate for social justice, has represented Rochester's East District on City Council since January 2020. A resident of the Beechwood neighborhood, she has built her career around economic justice, housing rights, and community empowerment. Even those who don't align with her politically cannot deny her commitment, bravery, and willingness to challenge power.

Her advocacy has consistently centered on issues of housing insecurity, systemic inequality, and corporate accountability. And while some might dismiss her tactics as disruptive, history favors those who refuse to stay silent in the face of injustice.

Scapegoating is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Governments throughout history have blamed the most vulnerable groups—immigrants, minorities, the poor—to divert attention from systemic failures. It's a strategy designed to stoke fear, deepen divisions, and deflect accountability.

Vance's rhetoric is a classic example. Instead of addressing the real causes of America's housing crisis—corporate landlords, speculative real estate, stagnant wages, and decades of underinvestment in affordable housing—he chose to point the finger at immigrants.

Lupien's response was a direct rejection of this deceitful narrative. She reminded the room, and the nation, that the real enemies of affordable housing are not desperate families seeking a better life but corporations and policies designed to prioritize profit over people.

JD Vance and the Trump administration love to talk about free speech—until it's used against them. Their version of free speech is selective: It defends those who reinforce their ideology while crushing those who dissent.

Look no further than the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and legal U.S. resident, who was detained by federal immigration officials after helping lead student protests at Columbia University against the war in Gaza. President Donald Trump called Khalil's apprehension the "first arrest of many" in his administration's crackdown on campus opposition. Though a federal judge has temporarily blocked his deportation, the message was clear: Speak out against power, and you will pay the price.

The hypocrisy is glaring. Vance and his allies claim to be warriors for free expression, yet their administration is actively working to silence those who challenge their narrative. Khalil's arrest wasn't about enforcing immigration laws—it was about punishing dissent.

This is what makes Lupien's defiance so important. She wasn't just correcting a falsehood; she was defending the fundamental right to challenge power. In an era where dissent is increasingly met with retaliation, her voice was an act of resistance.

George Orwell once wrote:

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Lupien exercised that right—not for personal gain, not for applause, but because someone had to.

There will be those who call Lupien's interruption disrespectful. There will be cynics who claim she was chasing a viral moment to boost her mayoral campaign. But both arguments ignore the stakes.

Trump's agenda isn't just about silencing opposition—it's about annihilating it. His administration has worked tirelessly to discredit institutions, suppress dissent, and consolidate power. Any act of civil disobedience that disrupts this effort—no matter how small—is an essential defense of democracy.

Moments like this come and go in the 24-hour news cycle. In a few days, most people will forget. But the slow erosion of democracy doesn't happen overnight—it happens in the moments when people choose to stay silent instead of speaking out.

Lupien made her choice. Will the rest of us?

Not even two months since Inauguration Day and it’s already been quite a trip. Ping-ponging between vindictive pettiness and unconstitutional overreach while using everything in his power (and much that isn’t), U.S. President Donald Trump has served up a goulash of dubious orders with a slathering of venom on top. He’s been abetted in the upheaval he promised on the campaign trail by the richest man on Earth, a cabal of lickspittles, and a cabinet filled with people who appear to have answered job ads stipulating, “Only the unqualified may apply.” As it became clearer what the battles to come would be, a friend wrote me: “I feel now like we’re watching it all happen. It being that thing that can’t happen here.”

There would be something strangely exhilarating about the frenzy of activity in Washington, if only it weren’t so careless, mean, dishonest, and destructive. Some of the most egregious actions have indeed been temporarily halted by the courts, but there’s no guarantee that trend will hold up—if, of course, Donald Trump and crew even pay attention to court decisions—especially when cases arrive at what’s potentially “his” Supreme Court. Meanwhile, insidious ideological purges encourage citizens to rat out their neighbors and coworkers, as leaders of industry, the media, and other institutions rush to appease the president before he dissolves into a hissy fit of revenge. (The speed with which many corporations complied with the order to axe DEI programs illuminates how shallow their commitment to that effort really was.)

In the months after the election, I mourned, ranted, resorted to magic thinking. I reminded myself that, while Trump did (barely) win the popular vote, democracy isn’t something that only happens every four years. Then, after my umpteenth conversation diagnosing how the hell we got into this mess, I had had enough. Okay, I said to my friends (who didn’t deserve my impatience), now what are we going to do about it?

Bedlam or Bust

Of course, I’m anything but the only person to ask that question. My inbox is crammed with notices of newsletters, podcasts, videos, and Zoom meetings full of rallying cries and, increasingly, suggested responses like the growing “economic blackouts.” With the executive branch already a kleptocracy, congressional Republicans in a state of amnesia when it comes to the Constitution’s separation of powers, most congressional Democrats waiting all too quietly (with the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders (-Vt.) and a few others) for the midterm elections or for Trump to screw up irremediably, and the courts tied up in rounds of Whac-A-Mole, it falls to civil society—that’s us—to try to check the slash-and-smash rampage of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the rest of that crew, while offering a different vision for the country.

Such responses will undoubtedly involve a variety of approaches. These are likely to range from the immediate to the long haul; from small, local acts to ease individual lives—accompanying immigrants through the legal process when their residency is imperiled, for example—to more traditional activities like lobbying, petitioning, and supporting civil liberties organizations, or even movement-building and large-scale actions aimed at challenging the power of Trump and changing our very political situation.

When I allow myself to dream big and boldly, I envision a nation of Bartlebys, the title character in a Herman Melville story who replies to all work assignments with the impenetrable refrain, “I would prefer not to.”

We’ve already seen individual acts of principle, along with small communal acts of subversion. When someone in the Air Force took the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion purge literally and cut a video about World War II’s Black Tuskegee Airmen from a training course, a senator decried it as “malicious compliance.” In Silicon Valley, there was a “quiet rebellion” when Meta workers brought in certain sanitary products to replace those removed from men’s bathrooms by order of their boss, Mark Zuckerberg. A DOGE hiring site was besieged by mock applications from well-qualified Hitlers, Mussolinis, Francos, and a Cruella De Vil. Then there was that World War II anti-fascism Simple Sabotage Field Manual, downloaded at least 230,000 times since 404Media made it accessible online. Ways to gum up the works suggested there include, “Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks,” and my fave, “Act stupid.”

Traditional forms of lobbying—emails, phone calls, petitions, or attending town hall meetings—have also proved to be important options, but in one of the kinks in democratic representation, the legislators we most seek to influence are often the ones with the least reason or desire to listen to us. My representatives are all outspoken, progressive Democrats, so all I can say is, thanks or try even harder. Meanwhile, good luck getting through to swamped legislative offices, which generally accept messages only from their constituents.

And finally, marches and performative protests are photogenic and build solidarity, but because they seldom disrupt much of anything, they are often all too easy to ignore. Moreover, in Donald Trump’s topsy-turvy world, it’s hard to know not just where to direct your protest, but even at whom to direct it. On February 5 and again on a frigid Presidents’ Day, sizable demonstrations against Trump, Musk, and their policies took place across the country. If you didn’t notice, no surprise there since they barely made a blip in what passes for the news these days (and apparently not even that in Donald Trump’s consciousness).

May I Have Your Attention!

“Attention, not money, is now the fuel of American politics,” writes New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. MSNBC host Chris Hayes, whose most recent book is about attention as a valuable and endangered commodity, has called Trump’s skill at commanding it a “feral instinct.” He noted that, while the president excels at getting the public’s attention, he’s not all that great at holding it. Still, give Trump credit for his remarkably relentless pace of presidential threats, orders, and mind lint to keep our synapses sparking and, while he’s at it, overwhelming any opposition with the enormity—and folly—of resisting him or his administration.

Always leading with his chin, Trump employs a variety of tactics, including:

• Stating something as fact when it isn’t. He did not win a mandate last November with just 49.7% of the vote; Panama did not agree to a freebie for U.S. ships in its canal; and Ukraine did not start a war with Russia.
• Repeating and embellishing half-baked ideas—including annexing the Panama Canal and Greenland, turning Canada into the 51st state and Gaza into a golf resort—until they become articles of faith or at least possibilities worth considering. By then, of course, he’s already corralled the discussion.
• Drowning us in verbiage, belligerence, and hollow proclamations—or, as Steve Bannon put it, “flooding the zone”—until it’s impossible to respond. In his first week in office, Trump typically talked so much that even official stenographers scrambled to keep up.
• Confusing everyone (probably himself included). Take the inherently illegal directive that froze massive amounts of federal funds already appropriated by Congress. Except it was utterly unclear what money was being frozen and, according to the White House press secretary in her first press briefing, it was legal because the relevant Office of Management and Budget memo said it was. Oh, and then came that other directive rescinding the first one. Except it turned out to apply only to the memo announcing the other directive, not the directive itself. Except… no, wait! That non-rescission applied to previous executive orders. Except… oh, never mind.
• Whining about “unfairness” to the United States and—yes, of course—him (he often conflates the two) as a cover for bullying people, organizations, and countries into submission.
• Not giving a damn if he’s caught in a lie or an error or simply sounds nuts as long as the focus remains on him or, these days, on his stand-in, Elon the Enforcer.

Ultimately, the last of these may be Trump’s greatest menace, but also his greatest weakness, because what he does give a damn about is his image. It doesn’t take an armchair psychologist to recognize why Trump preens and puffs himself up or a master strategist to know how easy it would be to make him lose his cool (which may be the only time the words “Trump” and “cool” appear in the same sentence). And boy, can he not take—or make—a joke!

So, one simple way we could resist is by denying him our full attention. Of course, we can’t ignore him completely, since willful ignorance is self-defeating and, like an adolescent testing parental limits, he’ll just keep upping the ante to see what he can get away with. But it’s necessary not to be derailed by every inanity or outrage. I’m choosing to concentrate my attention on two or three areas I know something about, while counting on my fellow outragees to attend to other issues.

Not that I think Trump cares what I do, but if enough of us focus less on what he says and more on his actions that have discernable policy outcomes, we might indeed be able to cover all the bases and have enough energy and attention left over to push back more quickly and effectively.

Disrupt the Disruption

As for the longer range, I’m tired of being told resistance is futile, not to mention a bad strategy. The Democratic Party may be in disarray and protests probably were more impressive during Trump’s first term, but enough already! It’s time to focus on the majority of the electorate who didn’t vote for Trump and who still think democracy is worth working toward.

Which leads me to Gene Sharp, an unsung but influential theorist of nonviolent resistance, whose pragmatic ideas about peaceful protest were picked up by popular liberation movements around the world in this century. He argued that the power of governments depends on the cooperation and obedience of those they govern, which means the governed can undermine the power of the governors by withdrawing their consent. “When people refuse their cooperation, withhold help, and persist in their disobedience and defiance,” he wrote, “they are denying their opponent the basic human assistance and cooperation that any government or hierarchical system requires.” While his suggestions for challenging power included individual resistance, he advocated a nonviolent insurgency big enough and sustained enough to make a country ungovernable and so force the governors to truly pay attention to the governed.

How big? Political scientist Erica Chenoweth has suggested that about 3.5% of a country’s population participating actively in nonviolent protest can bring about significant political change. If that’s accurate, an effective resistance would need about 12 million Americans taking to the streets. And yes, that’s a lot, but keep in mind that the women’s protest march early in Trump’s first term gathered more than 5 million Americans on a single day, many of whom were part of a political protest for the first time.

Imagining change is a crucial step to achieving change.

When I allow myself to dream big and boldly, I envision a nation of Bartlebys, the title character in a Herman Melville story who replies to all work assignments with the impenetrable refrain, “I would prefer not to.” We Bartlebys, then, would withhold our cooperation by staging a massive national strike. For a day, a week, or as a rolling walkout, we could shut down the economy and most governmental functions and bring the country to a standstill. But unlike the systemic disruption going on now in Washington, the change would be at the will of millions of Americans cooperating with each other.

The United States hasn’t seen a major general strike since 1946, when workers from multiple unions shut down Oakland, California for 54 hours, but there have been recent, small-scale versions, notably, A Day Without Immigrants this February, when businesses across the U.S. closed in solidarity with the approximately 8.1 million undocumented immigrant workers in this country.

Recent actions of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are reportedly driving more workers to unions and, well before the last election, the United Auto Workers invited other unions to align their contract expiration dates in preparation for a giant general strike planned for May Day 2028. But 2028 is a long way off and a lot of damage will be done in the meantime. What I’m envisioning would go beyond organized labor to include anyone who contributes to the economy and civil society, be they employees, managers, owners, government workers, freelancers, independent contractors, retirees, students, homemakers, volunteers, or whomever I’ve missed.

Pie in the sky? Probably. I can easily envision 20 things that could go wrong. For starters, even the most grassroots of actions require coordination and a means of communication beyond the capacity of TikTok, while preserving the requisite element of surprise. And some work can’t be safely left undone, even for a day. Worse yet, those in power tend to respond harshly to challenges from below, so it’s not without risk. But there is some safety in numbers and Sharp believed protesters could turn retaliation to their advantage by continuing to struggle nonviolently—he called it “political jiu-jitsu”—only increasing sympathy and support for their cause.

Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, organizing millions of people across the country could prove a breeze compared to getting them to agree on a set of demands or even a central goal. But recent polls show that, in what should be Trump’s honeymoon period, his approval rating is 15 points below the historical average for presidents since 1953, when Gallup started keeping track. Overall, the polls indicate that the majority of Americans are not okay with much of what’s going down in Washington now and there are signs that some who voted for Trump are already starting to feel betrayed, if not by him directly, then by Musk, who excels at pissing people off.

Twenty years ago, a young veteran who had fought in Iraq and then turned against the war there explained to me why he became involved in the anti-war movement of that time. As he put it, “Someone sees [me] and says, I agree with that guy, I just didn’t have the courage to do it alone. So now he comes and stands next to me. I’m not alone, he’s not alone, and more people come. It just takes one person to start a movement.”

To which I would add that imagining change is a crucial step to achieving change. Without it, we’re stuck with Donald Trump and Elon Musk in an untenable present.

Imagine being sentenced to prison as a juvenile. You enter a world not designed to rehabilitate you, but to warehouse you alongside adults who have long since given up hope. The promise of education and job training is nonexistent, or at best, a fleeting privilege reserved for a select few.

You serve your time, only to return to a society that has already made up its mind about your worth. You are ready to rebuild your life, but the structures necessary to support that transition—education, employment, and rehabilitation programs—are crumbling around you.

With recent cuts to the federal workforce and over $600 million slashed from vital teacher training grants, that already fragile path to redemption is further dismantled. The reality for those reentering society after incarceration is bleak.

The stakes are clear: Either invest in people, ensuring they have the tools needed to succeed post-incarceration, or continue to sabotage their futures before they even have a chance to rebuild.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2021, there were 2,250 juveniles 17 and younger held in adult jails and prisons. That number has been declining as the Prison Policy Initiative states that as of 2019, on any day there were 48,000 youth detained.

There are distinct disparities in detention as the Sentencing Project reports that in 2021, the white placement rate in juvenile facilities was 49 per 100,000 youth. The Black youth placement rate was 228 per 100,000, tribal youth were at a rate of 181 per 100,000, and Latino youth were a rate of 57 per 100,000.

A steady job is the cornerstone of successful reintegration, yet the opportunities available to newly-released youth are scarce. “The latest available data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that 20% of reentering young people born between 1980 and 1984 were unemployed in the first year following their release” the Center for American Progress found.

“In the 12th full year after release, that number grew to 26%. According to further analysis of these data, young adults with criminal legal histories worked an average of only 35.8 weeks in the first full year after their release,” the survey shows.

Many young people report they are met with application questions that force them to disclose their past, immediately placing them at a disadvantage. For those who manage to find employment, wages are often low, and the stigma of their past follows them like a shadow.

Nonprofit organizations such as The Doe Fund, Homeboy Industries, and Defy Ventures that work tirelessly to provide job training, legal aid, and mentorship are facing funding cuts that threaten their survival. Without these crucial programs, the cycle of recidivism tightens its grip, and the promise of a second chance fades further from reach.

These grants help create educators who specialize in reaching marginalized communities, including those affected by incarceration. Without these resources, the pipeline to education, a key factor in breaking the cycle of incarceration, is severely weakened. If education is the key to opportunity, then these cuts are slamming the door shut on those who need it most.

A recent report on predictions for youth justice funding programs says, “One major hurdle is the inconsistent allocation of funds across different states and communities. Disparities in funding can lead to unequal access to essential services, leaving some youth without the support they need to succeed.”

With federal cuts prompted by an executive order to end all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives, youth justice funding may be on the chopping block.

But this issue of resources for youth extends beyond those directly impacted by incarceration. A society that fails to rehabilitate and reintegrate its formerly incarcerated citizens is a society that fosters instability.

Families remain fractured, communities suffer from economic stagnation, and the cost of recidivism far outweighs the investment in successful reintegration. When policymakers strip away funding for education and job training, it is not just setting up individuals for failure—it is ensuring a future where entire communities remain trapped in cycles of poverty and incarceration.

When the pillars necessary for reentry—education, employment, and support—are removed, research shows the fear, anxiety, and hopelessness experienced by those returning home are not just personal struggles; they are systemic failures.

Instead of pulling away crucial funding, policymakers, elected officials, nonprofit funders, philanthropists, advocates, and community leaders must expand access to education and workforce development, particularly for those who have served their time and are ready to contribute to society.

The stakes are clear: Either invest in people, ensuring they have the tools needed to succeed post-incarceration, or continue to sabotage their futures before they even have a chance to rebuild. It’s time to reject policies that leave the most vulnerable behind and instead fight for a future where second chances are more than just empty promises.