On May 11, 2026, President Donald Trump spoke in a press conference, dismissing claims of a successful ceasefire deal with Iran, calling the most recent agreement “garbage” and describing the ceasefire agreement as “being on life support.” Trump's rejection of the ceasefire agreement reflects a common theme in his second term: favoring military aggression over diplomatic processes.

Trump has been acting through unilateral strategies as he has failed to work through international institutions (such as the United Nations or the United Arab Emirates) and to secure approval from Congress or the international community regarding going to war with Iran.

Instead, the US has joined hands with Israel, supporting Israel’s over 40-year-old goal to destabilize Iran while discarding their own diplomatic relations with Iran. But the question is, why? Why is it that the US can so quickly withdraw from Iran’s nuclear agreement when the Arms Control Association has reported: “The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released its quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear program June 6, and, unsurprisingly, the report found that Iran is complying with its commitments under the multilateral deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).”

These questions point to a growing issue: Multilateral diplomacy in the Middle East has been weakened and replaced by large-scale combat operations. Trump’s actions reflect a historical pattern in US foreign policy that has persisted since the post-Cold War Era, when the United States emerged as a global superpower. This trend of unilateral intervention by the United States was accelerated after the 9/11 attacks that resulted in the launch of the “War on Terror.”

Powerful leaders are bypassing systems of global cooperation and disregarding international law, undermining multilateral agreements while civilians die as a result.

Donald Trump’s unilateral approach to Iran reflects and intensifies these historical trends.

The partnership between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated that the United States’ foreign policy is not the result of international consensus but rather a bilateral political agreement between the two leaders, driven by their own self-interests rather than collective security. We are witnessing a dangerous shift away from multilateral decision-making and toward decision-making concentrated in the hands of a few leaders for their own personal and national interests. The dangers of this shift are already coming to fruition. According to Al Jazeera, Iranian civilians are being impacted by the war, with a deadly attack on school children ages 7-12 being one of the most notable of the war. Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns states, “This harrowing attack on a school, with classrooms full of children, is a sickening illustration of the catastrophic and entirely predictable price civilians are paying during this armed conflict.”

There are also negative impacts on Gulf States and their relationship to the US due to the military presence in these regions. Al Jazeera reports: “At their closest points, Israel and Iran are less than 1,000km (620 miles) apart. The distance from Tel-Aviv to Iran’s capital, Tehran, is about 1,600km (1,000 miles). Iran has retaliated by attacking US bases across the Middle East. Most of these attacks have been intercepted.” The United States is now contributing to the region’s instability, as they fear retaliatory attacks from Iran. Without a defined military objective, support from the United Nations, or any international coalition, the potential of another drawn-out and morally corrupt Middle Eastern conflict becomes a frightening reality.

Some of the most concerning aspects of this conflict are its ideological drivers. Trump claims that Iran poses an imminent threat to the United States because of its missiles and nuclear program. Trump also claims that he has entered this war to bring about regime change for the Iranian people. According to a video published by Channel 4 News, none of these “concerns” actually hold up. This source reports the US Defense Intelligence Agency saying, as of May 2025, Iran had no missiles capable of striking the US. It is also reported in an Associated Press article that there was no US intelligence indicating a preemptive strike by Iran. These so-called threats are unsupported by available intelligence, which leads us to believe that Trump had different reasons for starting this war, such as distracting the US public from his poor handling of the Epstein files. One speaker, Azadeh Moaveni, in the same Channel 4 News segment, hypothesizes that Trump is acting rashly in war because of his declining popularity in domestic politics. Trump’s disapproval ratings have continued to rise, and with the midterm elections nearing, he is acting out of desperation to gain popularity.

However, this hypothesis is critiqued, as many of his supporters are angered by the hypocrisy in his actions—claiming to put America first while initiating wars in other countries. So even though the war waged with Iran has garnered him even more disapproval, why won’t he stop it? Well, the same speaker hypothesizes that Donald Trump wants Ronald Reagan's political stature. “He wants to be remembered,” she says. The ego of Donald Trump and the United States’ enduring romance with Israel is proving to be a recipe for instability in the Middle East as unilateralism becomes more normalized, international law weakens, and civilians are left in cycles of prolonged violence.

Trump’s war on Iran has exposed how dangerous situations can get when the restraints of multilateralism are not utilized. We are currently living in a period in which the direction of many nations rests in the hands of a few powerful ones—who have proven themselves willing to disregard humanity, order, and the balance of power. This underscores the broader issue at hand, where multilateral diplomatic agreements in the Middle East are being weakened and disregarded in favor of ultimately resorting to military pressure.

Egotistical leaders like Donald Trump, who leads the administration of one of the world's most powerful countries, are proving disastrous for the Middle East. Powerful leaders are bypassing systems of global cooperation and disregarding international law, undermining multilateral agreements while civilians die as a result. The Middle East and other vulnerable regions face perpetual instability as systems of global cooperation are increasingly undermined in favor of powerful nations’ self-interests.

“Gerrymandering” is the historic term for politicians picking their voters by manipulating congressional and state electoral districts. Redistricting usually happens every 10 years. It is fair to say that most voters don’t want politicians rigging the system to help one party win elections.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties have played this partisan gerrymandering game for years. Recently, the Republicans have become more ruthlessly partisan and have outpaced the Democrats. That is why, for example, in Pennsylvania, Democrats substantially outvote the Republicans but have fewer seats in the House of Representatives.

In the past year, the gerrymandering race has run amok. It was ignited by Tyrant Trump, who told his buddy Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to break with the decennial tradition and get the GOP legislature this year to redistrict Texas to knock out four or five Democrats who are now in Congress.

Then came the tit for tat race. California Gov. Gavin Newsom led a voter referendum that authorized a redistricting that could gain the ruling Democrats an extra four or five seats now held by Republicans. Then more “red states” jumped in along with more “blue states.” The latter mostly did it by voter referendum, such as in Virginia, while the Republicans preferred to do it through GOP-dominated legislatures. Florida’s GOP even disregarded a 2010 state referendum that would have prohibited their recent actions.

The other day, Treacherous Trump emitted this turnoff, “I don’t care about the financial situations of Americans,” as he continues to use the White House to corruptly enrich himself, his family, and cronies.

In Virginia, the state Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 that the recent redistricting referendum was unconstitutional. The biggest blow came from the six gerrymandering Injustices of the US Supreme Court in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, further gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Their ruling, in effect, outlawed districts drawn to give minority voters a chance to have Black representatives in Congress and in state legislatures. Political pundits are predicting a dramatic decline, as soon as this November’s midterm elections, in the number of Black representatives in the House, presently 59, and Hispanic Representatives, presently 48.

They reflect empirically under-nourished certitude. A couple of them are declaring that the Democrats could win the House of Representatives popular vote by four percentage points and still lose the House to the Republicans in November!

I think these pompous predictors are wrong because they are ignoring too many factors.

First, they are not weighing the prospects of greater voter turnout by minorities due to the indignation they are expressing against the Supreme Court decision and the follow-up by red state legislatures. Many Black voters agree with their leaders that this decision, and others earlier by an unelected court, may drive them back to the Jim Crow years. A 10-20% greater turnout by Black voters could, however, make up for these redrawn districts that favor greater white majorities in the House and state legislatures.

The Hispanic vote was trending toward President Donald Trump because many Hispanic voters believed his lies and fake promises during the 2024 campaign (read the front-page article in The Washington Post, May 11, 2026, by Teo Armus titled “New Congressional Map Draws Ire Among Puerto Rican Voters in Florida.”) There are, however, millions of Latinos in central Florida alone. Many are expressing their anger by saying, “Our voice shouldn’t get diluted” or that their “community is being torn apart.”

Second, the pundits rarely talk about candidates and supporters highlighting long-overdue, highly-popular reforms, agendas, and social safety nets that improve the lives and livelihoods of all voters where they live, work, and raise their families. Mobilizing voters from the right and left around “common ground” advances, such as raising the minimum wage and unfreezing Social Security benefits or providing adequate child tax credits, could break millions of voters out of their knee-jerk attachment to political labels. I’m circulating, for example, a “Winning Compact for America” of 10 proposals backed by a majority of voters, in some cases, a huge majority of left-right voters.

The Winning Compact for America includes:

1. Raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to at least $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers.
2. Raising all the Social Security benefits, frozen for over 45 years, and paying for it by increasing the Social Security tax on the wealthy, benefiting over 60 million elderly. This was supported by about 200 House Democrats in 2022 but was blocked by the Democratic Speaker from going to the floor. Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.), the bill’s champion, can provide additional details.
3. Establishing a children’s tax credit, cutting child poverty in half, with over 60 million children benefiting. Very popular with parents regardless of their political party affiliations.
4. Instituting Medicare for All, safer, more efficient, and much less stressful than our current approach to healthcare.
5. Repealing Trump’s cuts in Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program programs that were benefiting tens of millions of Americans.
6. Cracking down on corporate crooks stealing consumer dollars, wages, and worker pensions.
7. Adopting social safety nets for families, long available in Western Europe and Canada.
8. Passing labor law and campaign finance reforms put forth decades ago.
9. Investing in crumbling public services and infrastructures.
10. Paying for the above by restoring taxes on the very under-taxed super rich and large corporations (85% approval) and by ending huge corporate welfare giveaways and debloating the runaway, unaudited military budget.

Perhaps the pundits ignore these appealing agendas because the Democratic Party has contracted out too much of their campaigns to corporate-conflicted consultants who subdue such progressive manifestos or "Compacts for America" to avoid upsetting corporate campaign donors.

Another understated factor hails from Trump himself, who every day fuels outrage even among many of his supporters who feel betrayed. The other day, Treacherous Trump emitted this turnoff, “I don’t care about the financial situations of Americans,” as he continues to use the White House to corruptly enrich himself, his family, and cronies. Moreover, going after Pope Leo twice with street language isn’t endearing him to many Catholics. Trump can’t control his fevered mind and mouth.

This entire madness of mega gerrymandering could be ended if members of the House ran at large from their state. Let’s say a state has 10 members of the House. They would run at large, and the top 10 vote-getters would be elected to the House. That is how the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, the great Jeanette Rankin from Montana, won her seat. The two House members ran statewide, and she came in second. Some cities have citywide or at-large elections.

Political scholar Lee Drutman called for Congress to enact a form of proportional representation, which is inherently race-neutral and is operational within other democracies in Western Europe. (See his Substack piece titled, “The Supreme Court Killed Voting Rights and Escalated the Gerrymandering Wars. Here’s What Congress Needs to Do in Response.” May 1, 2026). PR also helps to “break the two-party doom loop that’s driving our insane political death spiral,” he writes.

A more modest existing reform comes from states that have adopted non-partisan electoral commissions, e.g., Iowa and Michigan, by referendum. Voters like this approach better than the politicians’ slicing and dicing their voters to make districts safe for only one party.

Landslide elections—such as Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980—overwhelmed many gerrymandered districts. If the Democrats wake up, fire their profiteering consultants, and run on a specific "Compact for America," they could landslide the Trumpitized GOP this November.

The American public's patience with reckless federal agents has run out—but Congress has yet to act. While members of Congress debate funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, communities across the country remain at risk of further harm from lawless policing.

For months, polling has shown cratering support for ICE and the agency’s aggressive tactics, including a 30 point collapse in a single year. Recent YouGov and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) polling shows that Americans don’t think federal law enforcement should be above the law: 93% of voters—including 89% of Trump voters—believe that agents who violate people's rights must be held accountable. Former MAGA influencers have criticized ICE and compared the agency’s tactics to the Gestapo. Even current Department of Homeland Security agents have told reporters that they’re troubled by the agency’s tactics. And in cities across the country, the response has been unmistakable: massive demonstrations in response to violent raids and multiple fatal shootings by federal agents.

Americans have been demanding accountability because when agents can violently attack and kill community members without consequence, everyone is less safe.

Consider what happened to one ACLU client in Maine earlier this year.

When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected.

On the morning of January 22, Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz was abducted in broad daylight by federal agents. A civil engineer, Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was driving to his job when a dark SUV cut in front of his car, forcing it to stop. Three people approached his window and demanded to see his papers. He showed his driver’s license through the window, and the agents ordered him to get out of his car. When he reached for his phone to call for help and to record the interaction, agents violently smashed his car window, forced his car open, and dragged him out. Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz’s car was left running with the door open, and his phone was left lying on the street.

Mr. Carvajal-Muñoz was racially profiled and targeted as part of an immigration crackdown in Maine callously called “Operation Catch of the Day.” Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was caught, but for what? He was legally working in the United States on an H1-B visa, was not breaking a single law, and was simply driving as a Latino man. Mr. Carvajal-Munoz was able to sue for these constitutional violations under Maine’s Civil Rights Act, but people in most states cannot.

That’s because there’s an alarming accountability gap between federal and state officers. For example, after Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020, Mr. Floyd’s family sued the City of Minneapolis and police officers for violating his constitutional rights, ultimately securing a $27 million settlement. Federal law, however, does not allow the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good to file that type of lawsuit against the federal agents who shot and killed them just miles from where Mr. Floyd was murdered.

This illogical gap stems from a historical omission. After the Civil War, in response to pro-Confederate state and local officials’ widespread violations of the rights of Black people and Union sympathizers, the Reconstruction Congress passed a law allowing people to sue state and local officers for damages or other relief when their rights were violated. Unfortunately, that law, commonly known as Section 1983, did not cover federal officers.

In 1971, the Supreme Court filled that accountability gap, ruling in Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents that the logic of the Constitution demanded that federal officers could be sued for constitutional violations, too. For decades afterward, people sued federal agents over constitutional violations in what were known as Bivens actions. But in 2017, the Supreme Court severely limited when people can bring Bivens actions, and now it’s nearly impossible to sue federal officers for violating people’s rights. For example, in 2021, a federal court rejected Bivens claims against federal officers who were sued for attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a baton charge at Lafayette Square Park across the street from the White House. At the same time, the same court ruled that local officers could be sued for those same constitutional violations, which the court held “would have been clear to every reasonable officer.”

When federal agents face no consequences, that impunity invites more wrongdoing, turns our freedoms into empty promises, and leaves us all unprotected. US courts have long recognized the fundamental legal principle that where there is a right, there must be a remedy. In other words, a right that you can’t enforce is just a suggestion that government actors can ignore when it suits them. We are now seeing the very real results that follow when a right lacks remedies: Officers can terrorize and abuse people without repercussions.

Congress has the power to close this dangerous accountability gap and restore a basic promise: If a federal officer violates your rights, you can seek justice, just like you can when a state officer crosses the line. All Congress has to do is pass the Bivens Act, which would fix the historical omission by explicitly stating that, like state and local officials, federal officers can be sued when they violate our constitutional rights. As the Supreme Court pointed out in a 1980 case applying Bivens, “The ‘constitutional design’ would be stood on its head if federal officials did not face at least the same liability as state officials guilty of the same constitutional transgression.”

The weight of our constitutional rights is becoming clearer every day: None of us is safe when federal agents can harm people at will. Congress can and must pass the Bivens Act, a simple law that would restore accountability, compensate victims and their families, and deter the unchecked government violence that has become a hallmark of this administration.

Donald Trump can now claim a trifecta of restoring white privilege in a siege smoldering with all the grievance of George Wallace’s segregation now, tomorrow, and forever. While Trump has not brought us all the way back to “Whites Only” water fountains and packing Black folks in the back of buses, the ghost of Bull Connor floats above Trump’s vicious federal police crackdowns on Latino immigrants and the military occupations of racially diverse cities under lies that crime was out of control.

With both iron fist of police brutality and blunt leveraging of federal agencies and the Supreme Court, Trump has assured that for the foreseeable future, white folks will maintain a disproportionate share of front-row seats to orchestrate the future of this country.

The trifecta began with the 2023 Supreme Court ban on race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions. The court, packed into a conservative supermajority by Trump in his first term, said colleges must now be colorblind. That means willfully blind to the fact, as stated by dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the United States remains largely “an endemically segregated society.”

The effect of the ruling was immediate. A Hechinger Report analysis in February found that the nation’s 71 highly selective private universities and 14 public flagships had an overall 18% drop in Black first-year students in 2023, from about 10,000 down to 8,200. That jibes with a January study by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, which found that high-achieving students from underrepresented groups of color “cascaded” downward “into less selective colleges with lower graduation rates and earnings outcomes.”

At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.

Any patronizing notions that African Americans squeezed out of elite private colleges can still get a fine education at top state schools are not borne out by data. In analyses for Brookings and the Hechinger Report, University of Maryland education professor Julie Park said more than half of state flagships gained fewer than 10 Black students after the Supreme Court decision.To add salt to this wound, Park said many so-called “gains” of Black and Latino enrollment in public flagships were “illusory.” That is because many of the flagships claiming the most gains are the same ones that suffered massive drops in such enrollment years ago when their states banned affirmative action. Worse, Park noted that enrollment at for-profit colleges, notorious for low graduation rates and leaving students hanging high and dry in debt, were up by 15,000 Black students in 2024. That is nothing less than educational sharecropping.

Next in the trifecta is Trump’s bleaching the government of any concern about racial disparities. He has transformed divisions of government created to enforce civil rights into agencies to destroy Black advancement. It is no secret that in the richest nation in the world, Black people still suffer from grievous gaps in healthcare, housing discrimination, and proximity to pollution, just to name a few. A central accompaniment to the Trump administration’s termination of disparity data collection across agencies is his slew of executive orders, beginning on the first day back in office, that ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government.

He unleashed the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be on the witch hunt for companies and contractors that practice DEI and allegedly discriminate against white people. That, on top of the ban on collegiate affirmative action, triggered a national cowering on diversity that rendered to rubble any remaining reckoning about racial disparities in the wake of the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

According to the global law firm A&O Shearman, the percent of the top 100 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange that used the term “diversity” in their human capital management disclosures plummeted from 96% in 2024 to 36% last year. Similarly, the percentage of companies in the S&P 500 that used the term “diversity” crashed from 93% to 37%. Institutional investing giants such as BlackRock, Capital Group, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, State Street, Vanguard, and Morgan Stanley all removed language directing boards to consider race, ethnicity, or gender in board makeups, surrendering to Trump.

Whether by coincidence or direct effect, the disappearance of diversity is paralleled by the evaporation of jobs for Black people. Start with the federal government. It has long been an employment refuge from discrimination. In fiscal year 2021, Black women accounted for 12% of the federal workforce (compared with 6.6% of the civilian labor force). But Trump’s massive contraction of the federal government resulted in Black women accounting for 95,000—35%—of the 271,000 job losses, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Put another way, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research estimated that Black women lost more than 30% of their employment in the federal government last year, nearly three times more than women overall. In the overall workforce, that institute found that Black women, 14% of the nation’s workforce, accounted for nearly 55% of female job losses.

Inside and outside government, Black women suffered one of the highest shocks of unemployment in a quarter-century, with Black women with bachelor’s degrees suffering the greatest job losses. Valerie Wilson, the director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy, said in a February policy brief that the losses among educated Black women “were a direct consequence” of Trump’s federal layoffs and buyouts.

While not as dramatic, Black men are also experiencing lower employment. In February of 2025, Trump’s first full month back in office, Black unemployment was 6%, compared with 3.8% for white workers. Last month, Black unemployment was 7.3%, while white unemployment—despite all the economic chaos induced by Trump’s wars and tariffs—has remained relatively stable at 3.7%.

At one point in the Biden administration, which launched efforts at DEI as well as major jobs programs, the Black and white unemployment rates were, respectively, 4.8% and 3.1%. That was the only time the Black unemployment rate was under 5% since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking in the last 20 years, and represented the closest parity to white workers in that time.

Under Trump 2.0, Black unemployment has rocketed back to double that of white people.

The Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais finishes the trifecta. The high court has declared that it needs proof of “intentional” racism in allowing race to be considered in maps of legislative districts. That is ridiculously cynical since everyone knows that “Republican” in most states translates to lily-white. Southern states are tripping over themselves to redraw maps with a straight face that carve up Black urban districts to add Republican congressional seats, accelerating a process that has already happened in states like Texas. On Monday, the high court issued a subsequent decision that allows Alabama to use a new congressional map that will likely eliminate a majority-Black district.

The romantic notion by many Democrats that they can easily return the favor in blue states took a hit this week when the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a map that would have added four Democratic seats to Congress. Moreover, the Supreme Court has opened the door for white racial gerrymandering at all levels of local, county, and state governments, down to school boards.

The voting rights groups Black Voters Matter Fund and Fair Fight Action say the Supreme Court’s decision could result in 19 more safe Republican members of Congress and 191 seats in Southern state legislatures flipping to Republicans. The Brennan Center for Justice warns that representation for communities of color at the very local level “may be at even greater risk,” as they are more likely to “escape media attention.”

This is precisely the point of the Trump presidency. It is not about the issue Trump supporters claim was their top concern. In the 2024 election, 93% of Trump voters told a Pew survey that the economy was their top issue. Similarly, in a YouGov poll, 91% and 85% of Trump supporters said the economy and inflation were their respective first and second concerns.

That is betrayed by all the current major polls showing Trump tanking with the general populace on the economy, keeping inflation in check, and his war on Iran, which aggravated both of the former with soaring gasoline prices and shortages of industrial and agricultural commodities.

In RealClearPolling’s May 8 averaging of the latest major surveys, Trump 2.0 was down to an approval rating of 37% on his handling of the economy, 39% for his attack on Iran, and an atrocious 29% on inflation. In a Reuters-Ipsos poll, Trump was down to 22% approval for his handling of the cost of living.

Yet Trump’s overall job approval rating among his voters and Republicans remains in the sycophant stratosphere. He still holds an 80% job approval rating among his voters and 94% of those who identify as Make America Great Again voters in an Economist-You Gov poll. He still has an 86% job approval rating from Republicans in a Morning Consult survey and an 85% stamp of approval in a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

One reason has to be that Trump, when it comes to race, has already gotten the job done, fulfilling the actual wishes of his voters, even with more than two and a half years to go in his term. In a May 5 Economist-YouGov poll conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, respondents were asked about the importance of proportional Black congressional representation. While 83% of African Americans said representation was very important or somewhat important, only 25% of Republicans thought the same.

Closing the case even further is the fact that the issues most boosting his high overall approval ratings are not the economy or inflation, but immigration and crime, which have long been proxies for controlling people of color. Trump continues to get rave reviews from his base for his goon squads from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even though more than 6,200 children have been detained, according to the Marshall Project, and even though ICE bullets have killed white people (Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis).

Republicans gave Trump an 88% approval rating for his handling of immigration and 89% for his handling of the border in the Washington Post-ABC News poll. The highest Republican ratings for Trump on the issues in a Reuters-Ipsos poll were for immigration (80%) and crime (77%). Ditto for a Forbes-Harris poll (78% for both immigration and crime).

While only 38% of all Americans approved of Trump’s National Guard occupations of cities such as majority-Black Memphis and 43% Black Washington, D.C., 78% of Republicans cheered on this show of lethal force in an Ipsos-National Public Radio poll. That was despite the fact that crime was falling in most American cities, including Memphis and the nation’s capital.

Despite Trump’s economic chaos, his dismantling of public-health and environmental protections, his embrace of oligarchs and putting soldiers of all colors in harm’s way in an unprovoked war, white Republicans have made it a priority of maniacal proportions to cut off opportunity at every pass for Black and Latino people. Even though the richest universities and most powerful of corporations have capitulated to Trump on getting rid of DEI, the reverse discrimination lawsuits from conservative think tanks continue to fly and the Trump administration is still in overdrive in its witch hunt on “DEI discrimination.”

The witch hunt is so insane, the Trump administration has even canceled an effort by the Biden administration to provide septic tanks to residents in the poverty-stricken Black Belt of Alabama. The president who has used fecal references for African countries somehow finds a septic tank to be “illegal DEI,” consigning communities to literally wallow in feces.

Trump has succeeded like no other modern president in seducing his supporters to wallow in the illusion of superiority once expressed by Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1960. The future president told aide Bill Moyers: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Republicans would rather flee down the same historical rabbit hole that led up to the Civil War and the murderous decades of enforced segregation. They willfully ignore history and the warning of Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster.” At this teetering moment in our democracy, Republicans have substituted white power for solutions on the economy and everything else.

The only result can be social disaster.

The US military has been carrying out extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Pacific over the past nine months with impunity.

On May 8, the US military struck another boat in the eastern Pacific, killing two people and leaving one survivor. US Southern Command claimed “the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes” and “was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”

According to The Intercept, there have now been 58 such boat strikes since September that have killed at least 193 people. As with the May 8 attack, the names and nationalities of most of these victims remain unknown.

The Trump administration has accused civilian boats of transporting narcotics to the US and says its killing “narco-terrorists.” But the Pentagon has provided no evidence for these claims or any indication that the people killed posed an imminent threat.

The use of unlawful force will become more normalized at home and abroad unless the Trump administration is held accountable for these illegal killings and its blatant abuse of power.

International and US law do not allow the use of the military to kill civilians suspected of crimes. Boat bombing on the high seas is not a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nor is it curbing the flow of drugs into the United States, as President Donald Trump claims, or combating the root causes of drug use.

Even if the boats did carry drugs, the appropriate response would be to lawfully intercept and detain the suspects and afford them due process of law.

In a desperate attempt to provide legal cover for these murders, the Trump administration is asserting that the US is engaged in an “armed conflict” with unspecified drug cartels—the same kind of broad legal authority invoked by the George W. Bush administration in its post-9/11 “war on terror.”

But there is no armed conflict in the Caribbean or the Pacific. The people on those boats are civilians who are not legitimate military targets. “You just can’t call something war to give yourself war powers,” noted University of Pennsylvania professor Claire Finkelstein.

Legal and human rights experts agree.

Last October, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk condemned the boat strikes. “None of the individuals on the targeted boats appeared to pose an imminent threat to the lives of others or otherwise justified the use of lethal armed force against them under international law,” Türk said in his October 31 statement.

Despite the unsubstantiated, fearmongering claims pushed by the Trump administration, investigations have shown that several of those people killed were fishermen trying to make a living for their families. On January 20, the US attacked the Ecuadorian fishing boat La Fiorella. None of the eight fishermen aboard have been seen since.

Survivors have also endured abuse. In two separate Pacific attacks on Ecuadorian fishing boats in March, 36 survivors said they were “abducted and tortured by American forces and taken by boat all the way to El Salvador before being returned to Ecuador,” according to an investigation by Drop Site News.

“They handcuffed us, put hoods over our heads and pushed us around. We were terrified they were going to kill us,” recalled Jhonny Sebastián Palacios, one of the survivors, in an interview with The Guardian.

The US must immediately end these boat strikes and take accountability for the harms caused to the victims and their families. And Congress must do its job of conducting oversight to ensure transparent and independent investigations of these strikes.

The use of unlawful force will become more normalized at home and abroad unless the Trump administration is held accountable for these illegal killings and its blatant abuse of power.

When federal immigration agents killed American citizens earlier this year, we saw all too clearly the risks of letting the government shoot people and call them “terrorists.” It leaves all of us less secure, undermines the rule of law, and can’t be allowed to become routine.

Guns or butter. Butter or guns. Can we have both? If not, which should come first? Consider it one of those chicken-and-egg conundrums of modern society.

“Guns” is the stand-in for a well-funded military and “butter” for all the human goods, comforts, and needs of a society.

Economists, politicians, and generals have long considered the balance of guns and butter. Wage too many wars, produce too many arms, and there won’t be enough money to keep a nation decently fed and comfortable. Produce too many consumer goods, meet everyone’s needs, and a nation might find itself ill-prepared and vulnerable in the face of a possible attack or even invasion. Everyone from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has had something to say about the balance of guns and butter (or, more likely, the lack of it).

No surprise, but I like butter and don’t like guns. I have long been attracted to the graphics produced by groups like the National Priorities Project (NPP) and Brown University’s Costs of War Project that dramatize the opportunity costs of war investment in the United States. At some point, one of those groups created a pen that had a long scroll on a pull-out flap inside it. At parties, as you were discussing the military budget, you could take out that pen and unfurl a long bar graph comparing US military spending to the budgets for education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Neat trick, right?

Every war is bad, stupid, and represents a colossal failure of the imagination, but this one, with the Trump trademark on it, should be considered the ur-war to oppose, resist, and refuse to pay for.

These days, NPP has a new factsheet that offers a breakdown of how the cost (so far) of President Donald Trump’s Iran “escapade” could have been so much better spent:

• Covering Medicaid for all 14 million people at risk of losing their insurance,
• AND the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for all 4 million people at risk of losing food assistance, including 3.5 million due to new work requirements for older people and caregivers,
• AND expanding Medicaid to an additional 10.3 million people.

Those numbers are based on the Pentagon’s request for $200 billion in supplemental funding for the Iran war effort. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capitol Hill on April 30, supporting a lowball estimate of the war costs as a mere $25 billion (and worth every dollar!) and asking for support for an inconceivable $1.5 trillion for Trump’s war machine in fiscal year 2027. Guns vs. Butter? More like guns force-fed foie gras and caviar and sautéed in the world’s most expensive butter.

Every Warship Launched, Every Rocket Fired

If I ever got a tattoo, it would probably be of this line from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Eisenhower gave that speech 73 years ago (even as military budgets increased significantly while he was president) and yet the words ring truer than ever today. In reality, I’m unlikely to get a first tattoo at the age of 52, but I did see all of this up close and personal a couple of weeks ago at my Connecticut town’s school board meeting.

For months, school board members had been ringing an alarm bell about their budget. After years of scrimping and shaving, layoffs and early retirement packages, they were no longer able to economize their way to a balanced budget, and so were considering a “nuclear option”: closing one of our local schools.

Community members rallied, testified, and harangued. Busloads of kids joined our superintendent at the state capitol to ask for more support for our schools. For the last two months, everyone in my neighborhood has been talking about this, and on a Monday night a few weeks ago, the school board held a public meeting to make an ultimate decision about what to do.

I drove there over streets riddled with potholes, past new luxury apartments built as “workforce housing” for the engineers at General Dynamics Electric Boat, where a new class of nuclear submarines (12 boats for $132 billion) is now being designed. Those $2,200-a-month studio apartments overlook a gas station, train tracks, and a low block of struggling businesses in a flood zone.

A Theft from Those Who Hunger

The school budget gap (more than $7 million) is there for all the usual reasons, made more extreme because we’re living through what, in the age of President Donald J. Trump, can only be considered the cratering of imperial America globally and the volume is up to 11 on everything. In these years, the line items for staff health insurance, building utilities, and a host of other costs have skyrocketed. The contributions from the state of Connecticut aren’t even close to keeping pace. The whole enterprise is built on the backs of local property owners, and our taxes are already far too high.

The place most likely to be shuttered was CB Jennings School, right up the road from my house, which has (for the rest of this school year, anyway) 338 students. All but 30 of those students qualify for free or reduced-fare lunches, meaning they come from low-income households. The school population includes 149 “multi-language learners” and 66 special-education students.

The 338 kids there would be divided between the other two elementary schools in our neighborhood. The fifth graders would all go to the local middle school (which itself was to be consolidated from two buildings into one) and the eighth graders to the local high school.

Teachers and custodians, principals and paraprofessional educators, social workers and secretaries will all be moved around, too. Routines will be broken, friendships and collegial collaborations disrupted, teaching teams split up. There will be a great jostling for parking spaces, offices with windows, and classrooms that face out of (or into) the sun. September will be stressful indeed and no one is happy.

Who bears the brunt of all this disorder? The answer: the kids who pay no taxes and make no policies. The little ones who are already deemed behind when they show up for kindergarten and need all the help the professionals there can give them. The tween ones who just want to see their friends, show off their new braids, learn to play the trumpet, and get first place in the spelling bee. The older ones who need the breakfast, lunch, and snacks that are served at school. The ones who bring the light and the joy of learning with them every day.

The lives of those little ones and their slightly bigger siblings are all soon going to be subjected to massive disruptions.

A Theft from Those Who Are Cold

Of course, those “massive disruptions” are only so in relative terms. They’re but a minor hiccup compared to what’s happening in the lives of children throughout Iran during President Trump’s war on their country.

I cry about the war against Iran every day. (Truly!) The terror and the horror buzz through my head at the weirdest times: as I run errands, work in my garden, perform my school-crossing guard duties, and greet my young walkers. All this daily predictability and precious stability, the gorgeous ho-hum of the daily grind that has been stolen from the people of Iran by our war.

I look at pictures of Iranians cleaning up around buildings reduced to rubble and trying to go about their lives amid the catastrophe and I’m filled with awe. How would I ever begin again after surviving a rocket attack? Would I be able to extract the broom from the wreckage or ever brew tea again?

I tried to put such images aside when I went into the school board meeting that fateful night. When it was my turn to speak, I had three points to make—one minor, one secondhand, and one massive. I was nervous. My first point was easy. I argued that the school at the edge of the city should close instead of Jennings, which is more centrally located. My second point was awkward. My 12-year-old had written a speech, but then refused to read it and was whispering contradictory instructions to me as I got up for my turn to speak.

Finally, I got to my third point. Facing a semicircle of board members, I tried to channel the gravitas of President Eisenhower by pointing out that the Trump White House began its war against Iran by hitting a primary school with a Tomahawk cruise missile and killing 165 civilians, most of them schoolgirls. And I pointed out that decisions like the one to start a war with Iran ripple all the way to our coastline—destabilizing our local world and stealing from our kids, too. Closing an elementary school or having a massive budget hole are not our only two options, I said. We could instead be living in a society that prioritizes keeping elementary schools open and fully funded instead of bombing schools 6,700 miles away.

I tried not to think about the room full of parents and teachers behind me, but I still felt uncomfortably out on a limb making my geopolitical points during our local school board meeting. Despite my doubts, however, I continued, noting that between February 28—when my country started that terrible, illegal war—and March 27, the United States had fired 850 Tomahawk missiles at targets in Iran. And mind you, each one of those missiles comes at a cost to taxpayers of more than $3 million.

My three minutes of time were running out, so I rushed through the next part, mentioning that our senator, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), estimated at the beginning of April that Trump’s war is now costing US taxpayers $1 billion dollars a day! And that’s before we factor in the long-term economic consequences of oil and gas price rises, disruptions to the global supply chain, and the cratering of my country’s already teetering standing globally.

I finished up by saying that we all have to work so much harder to stop this war as well as fund our schools and that the two were connected. This budget gap would be a difficult dilemma under the best of circumstances, but against the backdrop of war and calamity, it feels indicative of a much deeper problem than a few-million-dollar local budget holes. As I concluded. I made eye contact with the school board members and thanked them for their time.

Making my way back to my seat, I noticed that I was a little sweaty and that my hands were trembling. Why was I so nervous? Why was that so hard?

The Hopes of Its Children

Eisenhower’s speech is a rhetorical master class, well worth revisiting in this age of imperial fiat by tweet. Ike went on to intone:

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities…. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

After some formalities and hearing from a handful more people, the school board voted to shutter the CB Jennings Elementary School, a remarkably modern school in the heart of our city with a new playground and a beautiful library. The vote was unanimous. The board members were sad but resigned. It was treated as an inevitable but unfortunate outcome or even as a forward-looking, resolute action. They were “doing something” in the face of a huge budget gap.

And indeed, the school budget will be back in the black—for now—once a $1.4 million shortfall is settled by cutting more positions, shaving costs, and looking for grants. Meanwhile, the local schools that remain are indeed closer to a balanced budget (at least until utility costs spike even higher and yet more global war-making costs hit home in this country).

Humanity Hanging from a Cross of Iron

The cost of the war against Iran is just one reason to be against it. The wanton violence, the indiscriminate death dealing, the gold-plated hubris, and the gargantuan stupidity of Trump and crew, as well as the massive long-term impacts of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, are something to try to take in.

Every war is bad, stupid, and represents a colossal failure of the imagination, but this one, with the Trump trademark on it, should be considered the ur-war to oppose, resist, and refuse to pay for. And sitting in that makeshift meeting room of the New London Board of Education, I felt like a tightly wound, somewhat muted Cassandra, requesting that people who are probably against the war, too, somehow consider it part of the reason we are being called upon to close a school and reduce the quality of our kids’ education.

We have a well-worn poster in the back hallway of our house. It’s an image of kids playing on a metal jungle gym alongside the words: “It will be a great day, when our schools get all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”

A bake sale to buy a bomber? A car wash to get a Tomahawk? A dime drive for the next generation of nuclear submarines? This administration’s officials aren’t even pretending to enlist the public in support of their latest war, nor did they even try to get Congress to rubber-stamp it. They care that little for democracy, the rule of law, or even our hearts and minds. This White House grows fat on our outrage, our protest gestures, and our well-mannered critiques. They are printing money and telling lies in a frenzy of impunity that will (hopefully) finally be checked by the November elections. But there is so much violence and scapegoating and scaremongering coming out of Donald Trump’s White House and his Florida compound that many people are checking out on all of it just to carry on with their lives. But nothing now is NORMAL and we can’t allow ourselves to normalize any of it.

How do we stop this war? How do we redirect the money being wasted into the schools and health centers, bike lanes and sustainable-energy infrastructures that we all so desperately need? How do we take care of those victimized, maimed, and orphaned by our military? How do we take care of those rendered homeless, stateless, limbless by our wars?

The answer: We do something to protest, undermine, and challenge militarism every day. We work to connect those faraway wars, framed as invisible or normal or too complicated for us to grasp, to our everyday lives. We make all the awkward speeches we can. We hold up homemade antiwar signs. We refuse to pay for the wars we oppose. We continue to demand that butter, not guns, schools, not heavy bombers, homes, not destroyers be the focus of our lives.

When the polls close next November, about half the country will flash red within seconds. That’s because there are more than 130 congressional districts where Democrats lose by 25 points or more.

So, what’s the strategy for changing that?

That question—and why so many of us seem unable or unwilling to answer it—is at the heart of my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.

There are only two options. The first is to dramatically reform the Democratic Party so that it once again speaks to and for working people. The second is to build a new independent party of working people, distinct from the two major parties.

Neither path is easy. But which one actually has a chance?

The road to reforming the Democratic Party is long—and incredibly steep

Take West Virginia. From 1948 to 1964, the state sat safely in the Democratic column. From 1968 through 1992, it swung back and forth. Bill Clinton still won 52 percent there in 1996. But after that, the Democratic vote collapsed—to 30 percent for Biden and 28 percent for Harris.

Can working-class candidates actually gain traction in red states? There’s evidence that they can—if they run as independents on a bold, progressive-populist economic platform.

The decline in state politics has been even worse. In 2024, Republicans held all but 11 of the 134 seats in the state legislature. In 49 races, Democrats didn’t even field a candidate.

What happened?

The Democrats came to be seen as the enemy of coal—and therefore the enemy of jobs. Worse still, they offered no serious replacement. Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” which meant the government would no longer create jobs directly. The era of New Deal-style public job creation was over too.

Into that vacuum stepped the private sector, helping turn West Virginia into the opioid capital of America, with the highest overdose death rate in the nation.

So how exactly is anyone supposed to reform the Democratic Party in West Virginia—or in any other deeply red state? It’s not happening. In these places there is no Mamdani movement, no Working Families Party, no Democratic Socialists of America rebuilding the party from the ground up. The reality is that red America is being written off. The progressive strategy now is to win primaries in blue and purple districts.

Build a New Working-Class Independent Movement?

Dan Osborn in Nebraska offers another path.

A former local union president who led a strike against Kellogg, Osborn is now running for Senate for the second time against what he calls the “two-party doom loop.” He lost by six points in 2024 but ran 15 points ahead of Harris. The Democrats did not run a candidate. Now, according to recent polls, he’s in a neck-and-neck race.

It will be an enormous battle. Because he’s running for Senate rather than the House, huge sums of money will pour in to defeat him. But he is still likely to perform far better than Nebraska Democrats—and that tells us something important about how to challenge power in ruby-red America.

Can working-class candidates actually gain traction in red states?

There’s evidence that they can—if they run as independents on a bold, progressive-populist economic platform.

In a YouGov survey we conducted of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we asked whether they would support a new “Independent Workers Political Association” (a name we invented) that would back independent candidates outside the two major parties.

We paired the question with a short but strongly progressive platform:

• The right to a job at a living wage, provided by the government if the private sector can’t
• No layoffs at corporations receiving government money
• Raising the minimum wage to a living wage
• Stopping price gouging by pharmaceutical and food companies

Overall, an astonishing 57 percent supported the fictional organization—including 40 percent of Trump voters and 70 percent of voters under 30.

When we isolated the most rural voters, we found:

Support for the Independent Workers Political Association

• Rural Republicans — 50%
• Rural Independents — 50%
• Rural Democrats — 77%

None of this guarantees success. Building a new political organization takes time, money, discipline, and enormous commitment. Right now, all we have are a handful of independents running here and there.

What we really need is for major labor unions to test this path seriously.

Over the next decade, it’s possible that a dozen working-class independents could make it to Congress and form a genuine working-class caucus. That alone would be a major breakthrough.

These are exactly the questions I take up in The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: why the Democrats collapsed across much of working-class America, why independent working-class politics keeps reemerging, and what it would actually take to build durable political power outside the two-party system. If we are serious about progressives competing in red America, we need more than protest votes and nostalgia. We need a strategy.

Over the next decade, it’s possible that a dozen working-class independents could make it to Congress and form a genuine working-class caucus. That alone would be a major breakthrough.

But what if we fail?

Let the late Tony Mazzocchi, founder of the Labor Party in the 1990s, faced up to that question:

“I just look at building the Labor Party as something that has got to be done. I think the chances of defeat are greater than the chances of success—appreciably greater… And not to have tried would have been more tragic than to have tried and been defeated.”

The question is no longer whether working people are angry. The question is how best they can build a political home of their own.

In recent weeks and months, Washington has intensified its long-running campaign of collective punishment against the Cuban people. Escalating sanctions have further tightened the noose of a punitive US blockade that has strangled the island for more than half a century. The resulting “energy starvation” has deepened a manufactured crisis, threatening Cubans’ access to food, water, healthcare, fuel, electricity, and other basic human rights and needs, while intensifying the broader assault on the island’s sovereignty and development.

Since 2017, when the first Trump administration began dismantling the limited normalization measures introduced under former President Barack Obama, Cuba has once again been subjected to a regime of “maximum pressure” economic warfare. The consequences have been severe. These policies have degraded material conditions across the island, accelerated the exodus of more than 1 million Cubans, and imposed disproportionate suffering on the country’s most vulnerable populations.

This economic weapon, wielded by the ruling elites of the world’s largest financial and military power, has exacted particularly devastating consequences on mothers and children. During this period, the infant mortality rate rose from 4 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2018 to 9.9 in 2025. Put plainly, an estimated 1,800 Cuban infants died during these years who would have survived absent Washington’s intensified criminal sanctions. This is but one stark measure of the blockade’s profound brutality and inhumanity.

The only “crime” of these children, like that of countless other Cubans, was being born in a country that continues to insist on its right to determine its own political and economic future outside the structures of hemispheric domination the United States has sought to impose across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the wider world. The infliction of such suffering has never been incidental to such policies. It has been, and remains, a central feature.

It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege.

The same has been true since 1959, as Washington has pursued a singular, near-fanatical obsession with reversing the Cuban Revolution and restoring the neocolonial shackles it once imposed on the island. Its aim has been not only to undermine Cuba’s social transformation and internationalist commitments, but to extinguish the example the revolution represented: that an alternative to US hegemony and capitalist underdevelopment was possible.

So despite recent threats to “take” Cuba, such rhetoric cannot be understood in isolation, nor should it obscure a fundamental reality: A US invasion would hardly inaugurate a new conflict. It would instead mark the bloodiest phase in a long, bipartisan war against Cuba for the “sin” of reclaiming national sovereignty from a Washington-backed lawless order that has sought to punish Cuba for its defiance and refusal to submit meekly to the dictates of empire.

Cuba Under the Shadow of US Empire

Cuba’s independence has long been imperiled by its proximity to and economic entanglement with the United States. Situated 90 miles off the coast of Florida, the island occupied a central place within the US imperial imagination. Throughout the 19th century, Washington elites viewed Cuba not as a to-be sovereign nation, but as an inevitable extension of their commercial and geopolitical ambitions, a “crown jewel” destined to be drawn into Washington’s orbit.

The opportunity arrived in 1898. Seizing upon Cuba’s nearly victorious war for independence from Spain, the US intervened not to end empire in the hemisphere, but rather to inherit it. Washington presented its action as a selfless mission to secure Cuban liberation. But for many across the region, the contradictions were unmistakable. The US, itself forged in the crucible of empire, with all the violence and exploitation that project entailed, went to Cuba not to secure freedom, but to replace Madrid with Washington as the imperial metropole of the Americas.

As early as 1829, Simón Bolívar warned that “the United States seemed destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom.” Decades later, Cuban revolutionary José Martí issued a similar denunciation. In his 1891 essay "Our America," he called for “common cause” among oppressed peoples and warned against the threat of subordination to the rising power to the north. Martí also championed self-sufficiency over integration into an unequal global capitalist system, insisting that Cuba must “make wine from plantains. It may be sour, but it is our wine!” Having spent years in exile in New York, Martí sharpened that critique shortly before his death in 1895, writing “I lived in the monster and I know its entrails.”

History would soon vindicate these words. As the United States extended its “Manifest Destiny” to foreign shores, it repeatedly intervened across the hemisphere, seeking to transform it into a de facto protectorate. In doing so, Washington consistently sided with the interests of capital and local elites over the demands for popular sovereignty. In the decades that followed, the US invaded countries throughout the region, overthrowing democratic governments, crushing revolutionary movements, and backing brutal dictatorships.

In Cuba, this took the form of three lengthy military occupations spanning half of the island’s first 24 years of “independence,” from 1898-1902, 1906-1909, and 1917-1922. In each case, the objective was to uphold the neocolonial order established during the first occupation and rooted in US economic interests. Under this restrictive framework, the Cuban government was denied control over its foreign relations and domestic economic policy, compelled to cede territory to the US military, and forced to accept Washington’s unilateral right of intervention.

By the 1920s, this relationship had produced a profound dependence on exports, mainly sugar, to the United States while fostering a deeply corrupt system incapable of responding to the needs and aspirations of the Cuban people. The island’s land remained concentrated in the hands of American corporations and a domestic collaborationist aristocracy, while the state invested more heavily in repression than social development, constructing more barracks than schools. With the onset of the Great Depression and the collapse of the sugar economy upon which the country had been made dependent, popular discontent only intensified.

By 1933, the government of Gerardo Machado, which promised to transform Cuba into an island of stability for American investment while violently suppressing nationalist and anti-imperialist currents in Cuban society, had become untenable. Amid mounting unrest, Machado was deposed, and a revolutionary coalition under Ramón Grau San Martín emerged, seeking to challenge Cuba’s semi-colonial status. But the United States refused to recognize it. The resulting instability created conditions for the rise of one of the more conservative figures within the anti-Machado coalition, army officer Fulgencio Batista, who in 1934 deposed the short-lived government and consolidated de facto power in his own hands with the backing of Washington.

The Roots of the Cuban Revolution

Batista would directly or indirectly pull the political strings in Cuba for much of the next quarter century. Though his earlier rule adopted a more populist posture, culminating in his election to the presidency from 1940 to 1944, life improved little for Cubans. Corruption and dependence on foreign capital remained entrenched. And by 1952, Batista had seized power outright in a military coup, inaugurating an authoritarian regime backed by increased state violence.

It was Batista’s rise, coupled with decades of economic disparities, political repression, and social neglect, that created conditions that were ripe for revolution. Among those preparing to contest the suspended elections that year was a young lawyer named Fidel Castro. Batista’s closure of even the limited avenues for democratic change lent weight to John F. Kennedy’s later observation that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around.

Castro’s first revolutionary assault came soon after, with the attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. Though the attack failed, Castro’s arrest and trial gave him the opportunity to defend not his innocence, but the legitimacy of and need for revolution, delivering a two-hour speech that condemned the island’s entrenched inequalities and the regime that sustained them.

The state imprisoned Castro and his fellow revolutionaries before commuting their sentences under popular pressure in 1955, after which they went into exile. From Mexico, joined by Che Guevara, they began plotting their return to Cuba and the overthrow of the regime. By late 1956, they had landed in Cuba and launched their insurgency from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Just two years later, Batista fled the country on New Year’s Day 1959, carrying with him as much as $300 million in siphoned state funds and ill-gotten gains amassed at the expense of the Cuban people, while leaving behind the ruins of a regime stained with the blood of as many as 20,000 Cubans.

Counterrevolution in the Caribbean

In 1959, the new leadership inherited a desiccated country picked over by the buzzards of foreign capital and a corrupted local elite. The Cuban revolutionaries set out to overcome these conditions and construct a more just social order, one capable of guaranteeing a basic standard of living long denied to the Cuban population through the misappropriation of the island’s wealth and resources.

The earliest measures included agrarian reform, universal education, a national literacy campaign, expanded healthcare, urban reforms that opened pathways to homeownership for working-class Cubans, and anti-discrimination laws aimed at dismantling entrenched racial hierarchies. Crucially for the trajectory of US-Cuban relations, the revolution also nationalized parasitic foreign-owned and privatized industries.

The new Cuban government was initially met with a degree of popular appeal and favorable media coverage in the United States, further amplified by Fidel Castro’s April 1959 visit to the country, during which he sought to explain the revolution to American audiences. While in Washington, Castro even met with Vice President Richard Nixon, but the Eisenhower administration quickly soured on the revolutionary government and soon resolved to see it fail.

The concern was not Cuba itself, but what the revolution might represent. As State Department official J.C. Hill warned that year, “there are indications that if the Cuban Revolution is successful other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model and we should decide whether or not we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.”

By October 1960, that decision had effectively been made with the imposition of a blockade on the island. The logic underpinning this economic declaration of war was made explicit in a memo by State Department official Lester Mallory. Recognizing that Castro retained widespread popular support, Mallory concluded that the most effective means of undermining him was the deliberate immiseration of the Cuban people. The memo called for the denial of “money and supplies” to the island in order to produce “hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”

In April 1961, Washington escalated its campaign by backing a direct military assault on the island. Yet the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion did little to temper the obsession with unseating Castro. In the aftermath, consensus hardened across the Kennedy administration that “US policy toward Cuba should aim at the downfall of Castro.” What followed was an expansive campaign of covert warfare involving sabotage, assassination plots, and support for anti-communist exiles.

Among the proposals considered were plans to manufacture consent for military escalation through false provocations. One suggestion was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area… pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States… [which] would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.” Other proposals called for false flag attacks on the US navy and the shooting down of a civilian airliner that would then be blamed on the Cuban government.

This single-minded fixation did little to advance US objectives. Instead, it pushed Cuba further toward the Soviet Union, which offered the island an economic and political lifeline in the face of Washington’s blockade and escalating campaign of destabilization. It was within this context that Castro declared the Marxist-Leninist character of the Cuban Revolution in 1961. The relentless threats to the island also fostered a profound and understandable sense of siege within the Cuban government itself.

Ultimately, Washington’s Cuba policy, combined with what Kennedy privately described as the “goddamned dangerous” deployment of US missiles in Turkey, helped create the conditions for the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust and revealing the extent to which the US was willing to risk a senseless, largely self-imposed global catastrophe in defense of the maintenance of its empire.

The Persistent “Threat” of Example

Despite this long war against Cuba, the Cuban government and people have not abandoned their revolutionary project. They have continued to build socialism and a new social order toward what Che Guevara described as the construction of “new [people]”: human beings whose motivations, commitments, and social relations are not governed by opportunistic self-interest at the expense of others, but by solidarity and a shared sense of collective humanity.

Cuba has consistently sought to demonstrate this commitment on the world stage. One of Fidel Castro’s earliest acts of foreign policy was the support of those seeking to liberate the Dominican Republic from the brutal US-backed dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. In the decades that followed, Cuban soldiers and advisers would play major roles in liberation struggles across Africa, including in Algeria, the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau.

For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name.

Cuba’s foreign interventions proved especially consequential in the struggle against South African apartheid and white minority rule in Southern Africa. It was this material solidarity that led Nelson Mandela to declare during his 1991 visit to Havana that “the Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the peoples of Africa,” traveling to Cuba shortly after his release from prison.

But Cuba’s principal export to the Third World has not been bombs to take lives, as in the case of the United States. It has sent doctors to provide life. Since 1960, Cuba has dispatched more than 600,000 medical professionals to over 160 countries. In doing so, Cuba has advanced not only the principle and practice that healthcare is a human right, but a vision of education and foreign policy rooted in both science and conscience.

For more than six decades then, Cuba has represented the “threat” of example: the possibility of building a more just and humane society in which the state serves the people and not the other way around. It is time to end the madness of US policy toward Cuba and recognize that Cuba is not a failed state, but a state subjected to a criminal siege. It is not a sponsor of terrorism, but the victim of sustained US aggression.

For those living in the belly of the beast, we bear a clear moral and political responsibility to stand alongside the Cuban people, those on the island, to oppose the violence being carried out in our name. Cuba, like all those confronting US empire, deserves not the “freedom” of the grave that Washington has so often offered the world, but a true freedom rooted in justice, self-determination, and respect for human life and dignity.

We must therefore demand an end to the blockade on Cuba. We must reject any further military escalation. We must call for Cuba’s removal from the state sponsors of terrorism list. And we must support the restoration of Cuban sovereignty over the occupied territory at Guantánamo Bay.

Rep. John Larson is the #1 champion of Social Security in the US House of Representatives. Over the last 15 years, he has played a pivotal role in uniting the Democratic caucus against any cuts to Social Security’s modest benefits. Thanks to Larson’s leadership, the vast majority of House Democrats support legislation that protects and expands Social Security, and pays for it by making the wealthy pay their fair share.

That makes him a threat to Wall Street billionaires like Stephen Mandel. Mandel, a hedge fund manager with a net worth of nearly $4 billion, is the main backer of a new group called The Bench. This group, along with the associated Majority Democrats PAC, is pouring millions into electing corporate-friendly Democrats.

Nearly all of the candidates that Mandel’s front groups back are running for either open seats or for seats currently held by Republicans. Often, these candidates are facing off against more progressive Democrats in a primary.

Luckily, the voters who will ultimately decide are looking for a relentless champion to take on Donald Trump and deliver results for Connecticut—not a corporate-funded centrist beholden to billionaire interests.

Of all the candidates endorsed by The Bench, Luke Bronin is the only one to primary an incumbent Democrat. The Democrat that Bronin is challenging? John Larson.

Bronin is a former corporate lawyer and the product of elite institutions like Phillips Exeter Academy. He’s the polar opposite of Larson, who grew up in a public housing project and worked as a High School history teacher before running for office.

Bronin has longstanding ties to the Mandels, which are well known in Connecticut political circles.

Now, the Mandels and other billionaires are backing Bronin’s US House campaign, in hopes of taking out Larson. They know that Larson is working closely with Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. If Democrats win control of the US House in November, Larson will bring a bill to protect and expand Social Security to the House floor.

If it becomes law, the Mandels and other billionaires will have to pay their fair share into Social Security, just like the rest of us—instead of only paying in on the first $184,500. That’s what they are most afraid of.

In Connecticut, political parties hold conventions months before the primary, where a small number of party insiders vote on who to endorse. At the recent Connecticut Democratic Party convention, Bronin was able to capitalize on this undemocratic process, which means he will have a higher ballot position in the August primary.

If Democrats win control of the US House in November, Larson will bring a bill to protect and expand Social Security to the House floor.

Luckily, the voters who will ultimately decide are looking for a relentless champion to take on Donald Trump and deliver results for Connecticut—not a corporate-funded centrist beholden to billionaire interests. And, a growing movement of labor, progressives, and local leaders has propelled John Larson to a decisive lead as he prepares for the upcoming August primary.

John Larson is a fighter. He is never more fierce than when he is fighting for the working class against the billionaire class. He will win the Democratic primary, and then the general election, and he will finish his fight to protect and expand Social Security for generations to come.

On May 6, 2026, the Trump administration released its latest conspiracy-laden attack on “the left,” this time in the form of a “counterterrorism strategy". While laughably lacking in evidence or regard for laws, the “strategy” will have serious, deadly consequences. It sets our country’s counterterror apparatus and racist, anti-Muslim goals against the Global South, Europe, and all those here at home who have the nerve to demand their rights and oppose full-fledged autocracy.

In this post, I will focus on the domestic implications, although the global impacts are both frightening and impossible to fully separate, as the strategy conflates everything from domestic resistance movements to people with disfavored ideologies to drug trafficking with international terrorism.

The strategy is authored by Sebastian Gorka, a known anti-Muslim bigot whom former counterterrorism officials pan as “ill-informed” and a “huckster.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this so-called “strategy” is basically a cocktail of fearmongering and post-9/11 playbook, but on steroids. It incorporates and expands on the president’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which casts a sweeping set of dissenting views as (domestic) terrorism, plays up fears of a “new alliance” between leftists and “Islamists,” and completely ignores the documented threats of right-wing and white supremacist extremists.

This is all hauntingly familiar. For generations, federal agencies have surveilled, monitored, and targeted Black, immigrant, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, and other people of color, using surveillance as a tool of intimidation and enforcement that deepens racial inequities instead of making people safer.

Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.

For example, the strategy promises to wield massive law enforcement, surveillance, and other counterterror powers to “map” and "neutralize" groups it describes as "anti‑American, radically pro‑transgender, and anarchist." In the post-9/11 era, the New York Police Department attempted to map all Muslims and their institutions in the Tri-State Area, for which Muslim Advocates, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gibbons P.C. successfully sued in 2012. We have long seen our community and sacred spaces violated by informants and oppressive surveillance.

The document also states that the US government will "[i]dentify terror actors and plots before they happen,” (emphasis added) which sounds dystopian, but is the same false logic underlying the notorious Countering Violent Extremism program that targeted American Muslims in the post-9/11 era.

In Gorka's reported comments to the press, he doubled down on targeting "ideology” and preventive policing: “We see a threat… we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals.”

These practices have caused lasting trauma and generational impact for Muslims, stifling our religious and political expression and wrecking intra-community trust. Now the government is wolfishly expanding while few seem to notice. Gorka himself said, “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”

A Sweeping Attack on Dissent

Indeed, the breadth of attacks on protesters, dissenters, and civil rights organizations is overwhelming. A few examples:

• This administration slandered Renee Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists after its own officers shot each of them dead in broad daylight, contravening overwhelming bystander and video evidence.
• Prairieland case: Eight anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protesters were convicted of material support for terrorism; raided; and had their flyers, zines, and use of encrypted chats cited in the indictment as evidence of their connection to terrorism.
• “Domestic terrorist” database: In January, an ICE officer told a legal observer, “[W]e have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist." When pressed at a congressional hearing, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons denied that a database of American “domestic terrorists” exists, but in a subsequent hearing, former Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to deny it.
• In late April, federal prosecutors indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has documented violent white supremacists for decades.

Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.

What can we do?

Make noise: Call attention to the harms of this counterterror “strategy.” Its release during congressional recess let it fly under the radar, although Ranking Member of House Homeland Security Committee Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) noted its lack of strategy and called again for a hearing with officials. Other elected officials should likewise take action to condemn this latest attack on dissent, demand transparency about its implementation and adherence to the Constitution, and protect our rights.

Congress also has an immediate opportunity to curb vast surveillance powers enabled by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702. Congressional leadership has so far blocked bipartisan efforts to pass a warrant requirement for searches of people in the US, and before accessing our intimate details through data-broker purchases. Lawmakers have until June 12 to enact basic protections for people in the US. This counterterror strategy—along with the recent whispers of its potential use against right-wing dissenters from Trumpism—shows exactly why we must urgently rein in the government's massive counterterror arsenal, starting with 702’s warrantless spy power.

Demand that local governments refuse to cooperate with the federal government, divest and remove surveillance technology, and withdraw from Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF’s), which deputize local law enforcement to do the feds’ bidding and share information pursuant to its permissive interpretations of federal law.

Collectively, we must continue to demand our rights: to protest, to speak, to commune, and to live free from Big Brother—especially Big Brother with a gun. Remember: The overwhelm we feel isn’t an accident; it’s tactical. Refuse to allow the administration’s intimidation tactics to succeed. Our mass, unapologetic refusal to comply, is what’s truly “delicious.”

As a Palestinian born in the 21st century, I am the generational product of Nakba survivors and the trauma that came with it. As distant as it may seem, I am only two generations removed from the 1948 Catastrophe of Palestine, where over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land, and thousands were massacred. Zionist militias backed by the British Empire razed Palestinian villages, killing, raping, displacing, and imprisoning anyone they could find, all to establish the brand new settler colonial project of Israel. This single day in Palestinian history would stain the soil with blood spilled and trauma gained for decades to come.

Both sets of my grandparents are older than the state of Israel, each born a few years before the Nakba. May 14, 1948, was probably a rather normal day in my grandparents' childhood. They would have been inside their homes with their families, or playing outside like any other day. The next day, everything changed. On May 15, Zionist militias stormed their hometowns, slaughtered their neighbors, and destroyed entire villages. My grandparents' childhoods were stripped away, and their entire lives uprooted.

After the Nakba, everything changed. The people of Palestine now live under the occupation of racists who despise and dehumanize them. These foreigners decided what rights they could and couldn't have in their own homelands, and the threat of violence was always present. My great-grandfather was shot in the head by a settler. The Palestinian education system was dramatically defunded, leading my mother's parents to leave for Europe for university. When they tried to come back home after the 1967 Naksa, foreign soldiers somehow had the authority to bar them from ever entering again. They had to move to Jordan and start a new life. They were only two hours away from their families, but they didn't know if they'd ever be allowed to make the short trip back. My grandmother has only been to Palestine once since then, and my grandfather twice.

My other set of grandparents remained on the land, but now had to live a life of heavy restriction and limited movement. It's hard for me to imagine what it was like to witness the plundering of our homeland by foreign invaders, but I can never truly understand the magnitude of seeing the gradual colonization that seemed to only get worse throughout the decades. I will never forget when my grandfather, who was a bus driver back in the day, told me that he was once able to drive to Beirut or Baghdad, and then return home on the same day. Now, such an idea is unfathomable.

In 1948, a time when news traveled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that "forever" territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide.

Ever since I was old enough to comprehend things, I knew Palestine was my homeland and that it was being hurt by something called Israel. Israel was the reason my mom was born in Jordan instead of Palestine, the driving force that led my parents to move to the US for better education and work. It is the thing that separates me from the rest of my extended family, preventing me from knowing them wholly and truly. Israel is why I only see my grandparents every few years, why I have to watch my younger cousins grow up through a phone screen. As a Palestinian who grew up in the States, I was immersed in Western culture and disconnected from my own, and Israel is the reason.

This was my norm, the reality I was born into. After a while, the daily reminders of being disenfranchised, the cruelty of it all, become something you just get used to. You begin to get settled with the unsettling feeling that this may be the fortune of a Palestinian in this world: a life of displacement and diaspora, with the occasional travesty, like the previous bombing campaigns of Gaza in 2008, 2012, and 2014. This process of desensitization is imprinted in my generational DNA; I was practically born already accustomed to the injustice of being Palestinian.

The brutal truth was that the Nakba never ended. We all instinctively knew this, but especially after the Oslo Accords' normalization efforts, a sense of false comfort plagued the Palestinian community for the two decades following its signing. The reality before October 2023 was the occasional protest and the occasional outrage, only to be quelled by half-hearted statements of sympathetic apathy by politicians. I became involved in student organizing for Palestine in 2021, and although we were constantly working, the landscape back then was much quieter and smaller.

Then, two and a half years ago, the current stage of genocide in Gaza began. I don't think I will ever experience life the way it happened that fall. I had gone to sleep on October 6, when everything was relatively "normal," then I woke up for my morning shift at 4:30 am to my phone practically blowing up with notifications. I remember going to my barista job with headphones in the whole time, watching Al Jazeera while I made coffee for people who had no idea what had just shifted in the world.

In the wake of October 7, the protests became consistent, the outrage became something so eternal that you felt like it could consume you and burn you to ash. What was once a few hundred people in the streets became thousands, and in some places, millions would turn out.

It was the beginning of a period of exhaustion, having something so important to organize for every single day, to the point that my studies didn't even matter anymore. It was tough, but what was happening to those in Gaza was far worse, and it became a matter of expending everything you have for those who have nothing. Millions felt the same all over the world, and this sparked the mass-education and mobilization of the Palestine solidarity movement we see today.

Since October 2023, the images out of Gaza resembling the Nakba have flooded our timelines. After nearly three years of the most inhumane, dehumanizing, genocidal campaign by the US and Israel, one might assume that a sense of hopelessness would take hold, as it did after the 1948 Nakba. But I see this moment as the catalyst for the exact opposite to happen.

Israel believes it can continue what it has always done. It can embark on an outright genocide with the intent of wiping Palestinians off the map, then agree to multiple ceasefires only to break every single one of them. After all, you cannot cease a genocide while the genocidal entity still operates with impunity. The difference this time around is that people around the world actually know what's going on. Israel, along with its benefactor, the US, has backed itself into a corner I doubt it will ever escape from.

And that's the fuel to my revolutionary optimism. Sometimes, it's hard to think liberation is near when faced with so much death and destruction. But it's even harder to ignore the cracks in the facade of the US and Israeli machine. They were both built on false foundations that were already rotten and cracked, and nothing built on the crushed livelihoods of millions will ever persevere. People are seeing the rot come up to the surface, and they are utterly disgusted with the state of our world that has perpetuated genocide, all held together by an ultra-wealthy ruling class, agonizing capitalism, and white supremacy.

When Israel was once known as the democracy of the Middle East, it's now the stain, the villain that has rained chaos, death, and destruction all over the region. When getting American Israel Pubic Affairs Committee money once meant you were a strong candidate, now it's a sure death sentence in local American elections. When American institutions like the American Medical Association once deemed it acceptable to stay silent on Palestine, they are now condemned for it. When our media and news outlets operated as tools of Israeli propaganda, they are now seen as tools of war and oppression. It is our work and dedication as activists that have changed the perception of all these things that were once deemed normal.

In 1948, a time when news traveled slowly, Israel and the West believed they had conquered a territory forever. In 2026, that "forever" territory is still fighting back against years of occupation and genocide. That's the difference: The struggle for Palestine was built on the sacrifice of our martyrs and revolutionaries, on principle, and on love for our land and people. It is a beautiful, rich foundation that can withstand whatever force attempts to tear it down.

Most of my family remains on the land, or near it in Jordan. I see this as a consistent win against the oppressor every day. As long as we keep our homes, livelihoods, and stories, the Palestinian identity will never die, and my family is fighting that battle every day. If desensitization has an imprint on my DNA, so does resilience and the steadfast faith that Palestine will be liberated soon.

It is an inspiring time to be a New Yorker. Over the last year, thousands have been mobilized by a vision for a more just city, where the interests of the people, not the 1%, are at the center of social and economic policies. Driving this vision is a city that is affordable, one where public infrastructures are not indicative of neglect, exclusion or harm, but are life-affirming institutions grounded in principles of participatory democracy: where everyday residents have a direct say over the public policies that govern their lives.

It is a beautiful vision, especially in a city that has long been plagued by corporate and private interests, and one that draws from models of what is termed new or radical municipalism and experiments with mass and co-governance in cities including Barcelona, Jackson, and Porto Alegre, among others.

Distinguishing New York City’s municipalist moment is its political geography: It is a global city, a center of global finance; a metropole in the Global North, at the center of the imperialist core, and the home of Wall Street; and it is an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity. The city with the highest concentration of wealth in the world runs on a workforce where only 33% of workers have “good jobs” (qualified by living wage pay, full-time, and year-round employment, employer sponsored health insurance, and safe working conditions). Over one-quarter of New Yorkers struggle with poverty, and nearly two-thirds are economically precarious. Adding to this context is intensified fascism, integral to which has been the bipartisan project of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has termed the anti-state state: The structured expansion of corporate interests and privatization schemes coupled with the shrinkage of the public infrastructures, entitlements, and services alongside the increased entanglement of policing, surveillance, and punishment into nearly every vestige of the public that remains.

Transforming Public and Civic Infrastructures

On one hand, the renewed interest in public infrastructures grounding radical municipalism signals an important turn from neoliberal consumer citizenship, exemplified recently by former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina’s description of parents as the Department of Education’s “clients.” On the other hand, New York’s wealth, part and parcel of its long-standing and structured class- and race-based inequity, presents a real challenge to the reinvigoration of civic and public life, to what kind of power, what kind of public, will be built and transformed—and to what ends. How do we ensure that the promise of a more just city is truly and actively guided (not just informed) by New Yorkers whose experience of the public has long been shaped by histories of organized abandonment (or the intentional divestment of state and private capital that shape particular places), by the harm, exclusion, and violence of the anti-state state?

Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.

The promise of radical municipalism to enliven deliberative spaces that build capacity for protagonism and expand practices of citizenship needs to be guided by what Celina Su understands as epistemic justice, “actively questioning what bodies of knowledge are counted as expert, rational, and valuable.” More than an advisory role, epistemic justice must actively structure deliberative spaces. In its absence, Su notes, deliberative spaces run the risk of perpetuating already existing inequities. The urgency of this approach is captured by the now infamous New York City District 3 CEC (Community Education Council) meeting, when City University of New York Professor Allyson Friedman’s racist remarks, in response to an eighth grade student who was speaking out against their school being closed, were captured by an open mic. As many recognize, Friedman’s remarks are not a unique case, but emblematic of the changing same in the district.

The district, among the most segregated and unequal in the city, is where I have worked with others to build power, organizing, and leadership among low-income families of color for just and equitable public schools. There have been countless occasions in which “concerned parents” broadcast their racism sometimes in official testimony, sometimes in unofficial remarks. Most often, these remarks have not captured headlines. And in that mix (which included CEC, district, Community Board, and school-site meetings) poor and working class families of color were regularly told that they didn’t “understand” or might be “confused” by their own experiences—their own stories—and dismissed. Friedman’s comments implied the same: that the student speaking out against their school being closed simply did not understand (and, according to Friedman’s racist analysis, could not understand) their own circumstances or the value of their school community. Yet students, teachers, parents, and school workers have long recognized and resisted school closures as a mechanism of dispossession, racist violence, encroachment, and displacement. Often, what people are fighting for is not a “failing school” but rather, a place through which they have grown community and practiced care, where they have made meaning and collective life despite and within state divestment.

In our municipalist moment, deliberative spaces need to be reinvigorated and also reassessed. Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Sumathy Kumar, and Celina Su write that New York City has an extensive infrastructure for civic participation (which includes CECs, community boards, the Civic Engagement Commission, and more). However, they assess, “much of it is shallow, uncoordinated, fragmented, and symbolic. New Yorkers are rightly skeptical of consultations that go nowhere.” They note the need for an audit of such structures with a goal of repurposing and revitalization, guided by the knowledge and experience of community organizers and organizations. As such, the question raised by the winter meeting that went viral is not only if such remarks should be tolerated, but rather, how to intentionally transform the CEC and other infrastructures that are supposed to enliven participatory democracy from places that too often confirm and perpetuate inequity into places where the long-standing violence enacted by austerity and mechanized through school closures is interrupted. To do so, the voices, experiences, and analyses of those who have experienced such violence need to be active, understood as credible, and prioritized.

Epistemic Justice, The Presence of Abolition, and the Remaking of Social Relations

The transformation of our public and civic infrastructures requires both deep local knowledge and an understanding that such spaces are not static. Bonnie Honig reminds us that public things—libraries, schools, healthcare, and housing—as well as civic infrastructures through which they are governed, are “holding environments.” That is, they are simultaneously containers through which life is reproduced in the everyday (including making sure that all students have warm winter coats, that access to ultrasound mammograms is universal, and that lighting and heat work in public and subsidized housing) and spaces of contestation over what democracy, citizenship, and our social relations—not yet determined—might be.

These holding environments have been contradictory at best. More often, they have been vehicles through which the silencing, exclusion, and disenfranchisement that liberalism relies upon are administered, and where scarcity engenders social relations of competition and individuation, where it is assumed that one’s needs are only confirmed in opposition to the security of others.

Radical municipalism offers the promise to shift that configuration, and actualize Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s insight that “abolition is not absence, it is presence.” This insight directs us to the need not just to dismantle, but to build practices, structures, institutions, and experiments that affirm life. The perspectives of structurally marginalized communities are essential to determining what kind of presence is necessary: to mapping not only how harm works, but also to what kinds of alternatives are needed and might be capable of transforming our social relations.

A good example of why this is true comes from Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) and the Public Science Project’s (CUNY) report, We Deserve to Be Safe. Rooted in Participatory Action-Research (PAR), the project’s leadership team included CPR member-led organizations in over-policed communities, was grounded in long-standing relationships and an understanding of the multi-layered harms of policing, and anchored by the shared principle that highly policed communities need to be at the center of how safety and harm are understood and re-imagined. As they note:

Our findings illuminate that people in highly policed New York neighborhoods often hold deeply complex beliefs, attitudes and proposals for community safety, supporting this report’s approach of presenting data about the multiple truths that communities hold. Notably, our findings suggest that while police officers have provided moments of successful intervention and important services for New Yorkers, for many respondents the police are also a constant threat to safety.

The perspectives and findings outlined by the report provide insight that, as the authors note, reach beyond an “overly simplistic duality of either decreased policing and lawlessness or increased policing and safety.” The stories and experiences outlined make painfully clear the violence of policing while also centering participants' complex personhood not simply as anecdote, but as analysis and insight to understanding what kinds of alternatives to policing—informed by place-based histories and realities—might actually be transformative. Bound up in the stories that the report documents is the sobering reality that understanding what “successful interventions and important services” have actually meant is integral to disentangling policing with the provision of social services.

Examples of radical municipalism in other cities show the meeting of our material and everyday needs is deeply connected to the transformation of our social relations, rooted in structures and practices that expand (rather than shrink) how we understand ourselves in relationship to one another, and how we value life, its reproduction, and sustainability. Drawing on her work with the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or Landless Workers' Movement (MST), Rebecca Tarlau terms this process contentious co-governance which “is not simply [about] more resources or policy changes but, rather, the prefiguration of alternative social and economic relations within… public institutions.” Importantly, in the case of the MST, Tarlau finds that prefiguration need not be outside of the state and that participation is not simply a means to an end, but rather invokes practices that expand and transform social relations through and within public and civic infrastructures, while also strengthening social movements.

New York City’s political geography—as a global city, as a metropole in the Global North and center of the imperialist core, and as an urban center long defined by uneven development and inequity—matters to how we navigate our current conjuncture. Chaumtoli Haq reminds us that in the context of the global city, radical municipalism presents a “powerful strategy for change… [that] enables communities, given their proximity to local governance, to mobilize for changes in law and policy.”

The strength of this strategy has already been demonstrated by the historic campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Rooted in strong partnerships with grassroots organizations including CAAAV Voice, DRUM Beats, and New York City Communities for Change, the material conditions of these organizations’ members shaped the policy platforms of the campaign. What kind of power and solidarity is built and transformed in New York City’s municipalist moment will depend on whether or not the remaking of public and civic infrastructures is guided by participatory democracy and deliberative spaces that are grounded in epistemic justice and contentious cogovernance: whose knowledge, experience, and know-how actively shapes those processes; what kind of protagonism and popular shared analysis propels momentum and movement; and what kinds of social relations are enlivened to expand political horizons and protracted struggle.

Perhaps I haven’t up kept as well as I should, but I can’t recall New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman coming out with such a spectacularly bad idea for some time now. But he’s certainly broken that streak—if ever streak it was‚ with his article, "NATO, Please Help. Trump Has No Strategy for Iran," in which he calls upon NATO to “get all your navies together and proceed to the Persian Gulf immediately to join the American armada.” And just so’s we’re clear here, polling tells us that the attack on Iran is the first war to be rejected—not later on but from its outset–by the American public, since before the Second World War—perhaps the first in 100 years. And Friedman thinks Europe should sail right in.

"This does not come out of nowhere; Friedman does have a serious history of sh*t-talking, the highlight of which might be his appeal to “Give war a chance” during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia in the Kosovo War (one of our country’s “little wars” that no one is expected to recall outside of an Advanced Placement History class.) What kind of chance did he propose to give man’s oldest profession at that time? “It should be lights out in Belgrade,” he wrote, “every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted,” Whatever it took, so that no one would be “holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides.”

It was understood, of course, that this advocacy of attacking civilian infrastructure—presumably including merry-go-rounds if need be—was legitimate if was done to “them.” If it were to be done to us it, would be called by its rightful name: terrorism—and you’d be able to read about that in a Friedman column. And, truth be told, this is the unspoken understanding underlying most public debate and discussion of our foreign policy—then and now—even if few choose to be quite so crude as Friedman.

But hey, Friedman didn’t last this long by not knowing just how stupid you’ve got to talk nowadays if you want to stand out for stupid during the second Trump administration. While allowing that “it would be a lot easier if either Trump or the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, would ever summon the integrity to apologize for launching this war,” he quite reasonably assumes that this will never happen. So, he reasons, if you can’t stop a war, what’s the next best thing to do? Well, join it—of course.

Here we have the nation’s most prominent newspaper proffering this argument as worth an estimated 8 minutes and 11 seconds of your reading time.

Friedman does allow that “Trump sounds more and more unhinged every day,” but he writes as if it hasn’t occurred to him that the surest way to divert people from noticing the hinges coming off would be to legitimize his war. All justification would then be retroactive: Trump and Netanyahu would have played a vanguard role in starting a war that “the West” ultimately realized was a just war—otherwise, why would they come aboard?

Now if this were just someone on the bus or train talking about how the best way to stop stupid stuff from happening was by doing more of it, you’d just move away—if it wasn’t rush hour—and that’d likely be that. But unfortunately here we have the nation’s most prominent newspaper proffering this argument as worth an estimated 8 minutes and 11 seconds of your reading time. And really, the problem goes much deeper than just the New York Times. Three years after assuming the mantle of the anti-John Lennon with his endorsement of destroying Serbian civilian infrastructure, Friedman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (one of three he’s won) for Commentary, cited "for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat." If there were a Pulitzer for Irony, the Committee would have little choice but to award it to itself.

Such are the blinders shared throughout the American journalism profession—and well beyond. Barack Obama is reported to have consulted Friedman during his presidency—this despite Friedman’s ardent support of the Iraq War, during which he wrote, “There is a lot about the Bush team's foreign policy I don't like, but their willingness to... be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right.” At the pinnacle of American power, neither “crazy,” nor supporting too many wars is disqualifying... as long as it’s happening to “them.”

It is only fair to note, however, that even Friedman may have limits. He does not favor the “extreme Christian nationalist beliefs” of Pete Hegseth who prays “for US troops to deliver ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy … in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.’” Friedman appears genuinely appalled by the Defense Secretary’s suggestion that “it’s now our religious warriors against Iran’s”—even as his writing continues to water the violent soil from which Hegseth grew.

Last week the Supreme Court gave a “two-fer” to white supremacists and proponents of Republican autocracy: First, six right-wing justices completed the erasure of the crowning achievement of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Voting Rights Act. Second, in the same case, Louisiana v. Callais, the right-winger judges approved of states shaping legislative districts that deny the opposing party any role in government.

In essence, the Supreme Court OK'd the destruction of Congress as an instrument of American democracy.

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted and ratified five years after the Civil War. The amendment confirmed—in principle—that African-American citizens have the right to vote and to have their votes count.

So said the Constitution. But for almost a century the former Confederate states negated African Americans’ right to vote.

The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.

The 15th Amendment also gave Congress the power to enforce its mandate. After years of struggle over civil rights—after peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham confronted snarling police dogs, mass arrests, and lethal bombing; after hundreds of nonviolent students worked for freedom in Mississippi in the face of murder, assaults, and the burning of Black churches; after peaceful marchers for voting rights returned to Selma after being clubbed by state troopers and ridden down by racist possemen—Congress tackled the white supremacist obstacles to African-American voting.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 put an end to the myriad legal schemes that Southern white politicians had used to disenfranchise Black Americans and terminated the ploys used to deny African Americans a fair opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

The outcome: Even as the segregationist white South moved to the Republican Party, African Americans gained substantial voting power and Black legislators were elected to Congress, state legislatures, and local government offices in meaningful numbers. The promise of the 15th Amendment, that all groups are entitled to a meaningful voting opportunity in a multiracial democracy, was mightily advanced.

But white supremacists and MAGA Republicans never accepted the new reality, so their right-wing agents on the Supreme Court finally throttled the Voting Rights Act for them. When the conservative justices threw out a congressional map that upheld Black voters’ right to have their votes count, they unleashed a new wave of state gerrymandering laws, enacted with extraordinary speed, and designed to make African-American voting futile.

To make things worse, the court justified its decision by affirming the power of states to deny meaningful representation to opposing party voters through gerrymandering.

As the right-wing justices explained, carving congressional districts for the purpose of denying representation to Black people may be forbidden (and good luck proving intent to discriminate, when Republican legislators don’t say so out loud). But doing precisely the same thing is fine when the stated purpose is denying representation to an opposing party’s voters.

Get that? The right-wingers of the United States Supreme Court say that judges must stand by and look, powerless to take action, if a state dominated by Republicans decides to manipulate congressional district maps to weaken or destroy the voting power of Democrats.

In practice it amounts to the same thing. The GOP can achieve its desired result by calling their gerrymandering by another name. Racial gerrymandering, not okay. Partisan gerrymandering (which just happens to negate Black voting power), just fine.

The GOP’s ultimate goal is the same either way: a Congress under MAGA Republican control regardless of voters. A nation in which African-American political influence is crushed.

What does this look like?

After the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature promptly redrew its congressional maps. They sliced up the one district held by a Black Democrat, with the intended outcome that all nine of Tennessee’s representatives will be Republican.

One-third of Tennessee citizens voted for Democrats in 2024. This year that one-third of the population—including the Black voters of Memphis—are to have zero representation in Congress.

South Carolina has begun the same process and anticipates a similar result. Republicans now hold 6 of 7 House seats, and intend to eliminate the one Democrat.

Forty percent of South Carolinians voted Democratic in 2024, and will have zero representation in Congress following redistricting. The one-quarter of South Carolina’s population that are Black will have no district in which their political voice will be heard.

US President Donald Trump has pressed for a similar outcome wherever Republicans control state government. In bright red Indiana (but 38% Democratic), Trump seeks to zero out Democratic representation in Congress.

GOP redistricting is only marginally less extreme elsewhere. In Missouri, for example, 38% of “Show me” state voters are blue, and their representation will be reduced from two to one of the state’s eight congressional seats (12%).

We have separate district elections for Congress so that the range of local communities, with their different racial and ethnic populations, different beliefs, interests, and occupations can have a fair opportunity for representatives of their choosing. Disenfranchisement by gerrymandering thwarts that purpose.

Even more disturbing, Trump’s gerrymandering offensive seeks to flout majority rule by creating a voter-proof Republican Congress.

American voters are increasingly seeing through the failures and the fakery of Donald Trump’s presidency, the broken promises, the corruption, the incompetence, the cruelty. And voters see the price they are paying for Trump’s senseless grandiosity, from inflation to healthcare costs to measles, war, and climate change.

But through it all, congressional Republicans have remained Trump’s loyal, submissive toadies.

Voters will certainly make Republicans pay the price this fall. But Trump—with a big assist from MAGA Justices John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—hopes to keep his hold on Congress, voters be damned. If a solid majority of voters cannot shake a would-be totalitarian’s hold on power, what will be left of our constitutional democracy?

Ten years ago, when reflecting on his signature legislative achievement, President Barack Obama famously encouraged Americans to think of the Affordable Care Act as a “starter home.” For as much good as the ACA did—expanding coverage to millions, offering policies to people with “preexisting” conditions—it is clear that the foundation of this starter home is starting to crack.

As an emergency medicine physician who has practiced throughout the Chicagoland area for nearly 50 years, I have seen these fault lines up close. Health insurance corporations like Blue Cross Blue Shield and UnitedHealthcare have strayed far from their nonprofit roots, and now routinely delay and deny care for everyday Americans. Put simply, these insurers have an incentive—and even a duty—to skim hundreds of billions of dollars off the top.

Earlier this year, the Chicago City Council recognized this dynamic when it passed a resolution calling for a single-payer national health program, also known as “Medicare for All.”

The resolution passed without objection from any of the city’s 50 aldermen, and concluded by saying council members “enthusiastically support the Medicare for All Act of 2025 and call on our federal legislators to work toward its swift enactment.”

Under a single-payer national health program, Americans would no longer need to worry about what treatments their insurance would cover, what doctors they would be allowed to see, and how much they would be charged out of pocket.

Every representative whose district includes Chicago has already co-sponsored the Medicare for All Act in the US House, and every likely replacement for retiring members of Congress has promised to do the same, with one exception. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), whose district includes parts of the Garfield Ridge and Clearing neighborhoods west of Midway Airport, has committed to staying in the “starter home,” even though it is coming apart at the seams.

The shortcomings of US healthcare are painfully apparent throughout Rep. Casten’s district, where more than 40,000 of his constituents lacked health insurance before the expiration of enhanced ACA subsidies and the implementation of federal Medicaid cuts. That’s to say nothing of his constituents with sky-high deductibles and limited provider networks who cannot afford to use the coverage they do have.

During my years in the emergency department, I have seen the awful impacts of delayed care. When I practiced at Michael Reese Hospital many years ago, it was distressingly common for me to treat young men with kidney failure. Why? Because their high blood pressure went untreated due to a lack of health coverage to pay for doctor visits and simple medications. They waited until their health issues became unbearable—and much more expensive to treat.

We can do so much better than this, and growing numbers of Americans—including 90% of Democrats in a recent Gallup poll—are starting to demand that we replace our “starter home” with a much more durable healthcare system.

Under a single-payer national health program, Americans would no longer need to worry about what treatments their insurance would cover, what doctors they would be allowed to see, and how much they would be charged out of pocket. I enjoyed a glimpse of this during my 20 years at the Captain James A. Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago, where I was able to care for veterans, active-duty members of the US military, and their families—without worrying about what their insurance would cover or whether they could afford to pursue treatment.

As Dr. Claudia Fegan, who recently retired as the chief medical officer of Cook County Health, testified before the Chicago City Council, a system like Medicare for All is well within our grasp.

“We already spend enough money on healthcare in this country,” Dr. Fegan said, “we just allow too many people who do none of the work of delivering healthcare to take profit from it. By eliminating the waste and greed of private insurance, we can afford to cover everyone in our country for all necessary care, and end the scourges of surprise bills, skipped medications, and medical bankruptcy.”

Rep. Casten has declined to co-sponsor the Medicare for All Act during his four terms in office, but his position has become increasingly lonely within the Democratic Party, the Illinois Congressional Delegation, and the US medical profession.

Thankfully, it is never too late to do the right thing.

It’s hard to avoid noticing, and internally screaming over, the Trump administration’s proposed military budget upgrade to $1.5 trillion annually—as though the present trillion-dollar annual gift to the end of the world weren’t enough.

It’s not just the proposed taxpayer bleed. It’s the collective assumption that “self-defense” requires an ever-present readiness to kill lots of people—and beyond that the utter certainty that we have soulless enemies out there who want what we have, hate our freedoms, and will take what they can the moment we relax. This is just the way it is. No questions allowed.

And our enemies aren’t pussycats. One of them, for instance, is China. Indeed, as Megan Russell of CODEPINK writes:

US lawmakers have been using China as a military budget increaser and ultimate policy-generator for years. Competition with Beijing is invoked to justify military expansion, new regional alliances, AI weapons development, semiconductor restrictions, and rising nuclear expenditures. In Washington, framing a policy as necessary to "counter China" has become one of the quickest ways to secure bipartisan support. As a result, the "China threat" rhetoric proliferates while the military budget skyrockets.

“A quick way to secure bipartisan support”—that says it all. Nothing holds a country together like a good enemy. This is who we are; this is the identity we’re stuck with. We unify when we fight. Apparently that’s at our political core, which is why any cries for peace—which is oh, so complex—are ignored, belittled, and virtually always voted down. All of which is to our own detriment, not to mention the world’s detriment.

As Russell notes:

...currently, the US and China are building their own tech ecosystems, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing. The US refers to this as a "strategic rivalry" with wider national security implications. This perspective only exists because China is considered a rival. China does not have to be considered a rival. China could just as easily be considered a development partner. And indeed it should, because cooperation on tech is the only potential avenue for ensuring the continued existence of the planet.

Uh, too bad, Planet Earth. Collective humanity refuses to think at that level. Technology serves only our belief in dominance. Consider President Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” nuclear defense system: thousands of satellites patrolling the planet, on the lookout for enemy nuclear missiles, a deeply flawed reincarnation of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative plan that went nowhere. The cost, though minimized by the Trump administration, could wind up, according to some estimates, amounting to well over $3 trillion.

And, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense:

Pursuing Golden Dome also poses serious strategic risks, including the potential to accelerate nuclear arms and space arms races and to undermine opportunities to secure verifiable arms control agreements that reduce the nuclear threat. The program has also raised troubling conflict-of-interest concerns involving individuals within the Trump administration and companies vying for Golden Dome contracts.

Wars. Sometimes you stop ’em, sometimes you start ’em, but they ain’t going away. The most powerful people on the planet are utterly committed to the limited nature of their thinking. That’s just how it goes. What about that do you not understand, Rep. Kucinich?

Remember US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and his Department of Peace legislation, which he introduced in Congress every year from 2001 to 2011? And it was introduced again in 2013 by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). It, uh, never passed.

Here’s how it was defined in 2001, as HR2458:

Establishes a Department of Peace, which shall be headed by a Secretary of Peace appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate. Sets forth the mission of the Department, including to: (1) hold peace as an organizing principle; (2) endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights; and (3) develop policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict.

Establishes in the Department the Intergovernmental Advisory Council on Peace, which shall provide assistance and make recommendations to the Secretary and the President concerning intergovernmental policies relating to peace and nonviolent conflict resolution.

Holding peace as an organizing principle? Developing policies that promote peaceful resolution of conflict? Can you imagine this at the core to the American government? With significant funding? As I read these words today, I feel compelled to help keep them alive. I want that level of sanity in my government—that level of commitment to something I believe in, with all my heart.

Instead:

Taken together, the Trump administration’s rhetoric and actions point to a clear conclusion about its recent request for a whopping $1.5 trillion in military spending: This is not a defense budget. It is a war budget, designed to enable a pattern of aggressive military action and escalating threats that are already imposing a devastating toll on civilians abroad, while the combination of spending cuts and rising costs imposed on Americans is deepening injustice at home.

This is Scott Paul, writing at The Hill. He goes on: “This budget is certainly not business as usual. It is a dramatic reordering of national priorities. Trump has made this shift explicit, arguing that the US cannot afford childcare, Medicaid or Medicare because, as he put it, ‘we’re fighting wars.’”

The CBS Sunday Morning program, “Next: Cuba?” which aired on April 26, presented a discussion of the recent intensification of sanctions on and threats against Cuba. I am disappointed that this program, and several other shorter recent segments on CBS News, did not cover some essential points that must be stated about what is happening in Cuba now. My own experience in Cuba, including the recent delivery of humanitarian aid directly to Cubans, contradicts some perspectives presented by CBS.

Fidel Castro is dead. And, he has been dead for a while. He was a fascinating character who still inspires polemic discussions. Stories of Fidel are legendary on the scale of Paul Bunyan. But we think the choice of focus of these eight minutes on Fidel’s legacy is unjust to the Cuban people. The news of the moment is that Cuba is underwater. The CBS Sunday Morning program, instead of engaging in a discussion of a crisis on the island, entertained us with old, mostly obsolete stories about Castro.

Cubans are suffering currently. The US sanctions on Cuba are enormous, by any measure. We find it remarkable that Cuba has withstood for decades sanctions that would bring down any other country of its size and reach within weeks. The recent fossil fuel blockade on the island, however, has placed the people of the island in a choke hold. Cuba’s economy, like those around the world, is dependent on petroleum products for most of its electricity generation, vehicle use, and cooking. Food is rotting in the fields because of a lack of fuel to connect products to markets, and it is rotting in homes because the refrigerators are disconnected.

The recent military blockade prohibiting oil shipments disrupted Cuba’s economy on a level that frightened people, in a way that we would compare to drowning; If something is not done quickly, disaster will occur. The blockade was challenged successfully by a Russian oil tanker, but the sabers from the US State Department continue to rattle loudly.

Cuba deserves to make its path without undue pressure from the US.

A health crisis is happening in real time. The impacts of the sanctions on health are huge. Cubans are accustomed to excellent health services, but hospitals are less able to provide services than ever. Infants who were once saved from preventable risks are now dying, even in the best hospitals. Surgeries are postponed, simply because there are not sufficient provisions, made acute by the recent oil blockade. Let’s be clear: The oil blockade has provoked an epidemiological disaster.

The current suffering has a psychological dimension. A refrigerator that won’t keep food fresh, a stove that won’t cook, darkness all day and night, no transport to the workplace or market, overflowing trash piles every few blocks because the garbage trucks have no fuel, no running water, are not the same as a fun camping trip. Cubans are humiliated as the system they depend on spiraled downward from weakly working to a horror show. The people of Cuba are frightened, in our opinion, not only by the capacity of the US government to cause mayhem, but by their own vulnerability. All Cubans heard President Donald Trump say that he will “take Cuba." Cubans know what happened in Iran, Gaza, and Venezuela, and these words are designed to make them think they are next. The psychological impact of this pressure compounds the physical hardship.

The intent of the current administration can’t be missing the mark—the effect of the fuel blockade, on top of so many, layered, sanctions and complications, is the same as waterboarding a person. By strengthening the intensity and increasing the duration, a waterboarded subject will eventually stop resisting and walk calmly to the next waterboarding session. That waterboarding may have occurred in Guantánamo, on the same island as the 10 million victims of these sanctions, is ironic. Even now, with a Russian tanker arriving to provide only a portion of the Cuban needs, the US government continues the horror of a tightened blockade to convert Cuba into a compliant state.

Cuban voices should be heard. The positions of Cuban Americans regarding the US sanctions on the island are not unanimous, as the news segment might lead one to believe. Americans should realize that Cuban Americans hold diverse positions on how representative the Cuban government is and how responsive it is to the changing situations regarding the needs of Cubans. This is not reflected in the mentioned segment.

More importantly, not a single Cuban citizen on the island spoke in the CBS Sunday Morning program. Even when including the other recent CBS News segments, very little expression of sentiment on the island is found. The viewers may be surprised, not only by the diversity of positions held among Cubans, but also by their sophistication in the analysis of the role of the Cuban government and the US government in their lives. Cubans don’t need to be represented by a few voices from inside Miami: They can speak for themselves, but the mentioned news item definitely cut them out of the conversation.

Cuba deserves sovereignty. The mentioned program made no mention of the overwhelming castigation of the US sanctions against Cuba that have occurred around the world. The United Nations votes against US sanctions have been occurring yearly for a few decades. Numerous countries are pushing back against the US line on Cuba. Russia dared the US to stop its fuel tankers from supplying the island. Small and large countries alike, ranging from Sri Lanka to Brazil, from Belgium to China, are speaking out against the US sanctions against Cuba. Many are putting their money where their mouth is, with donations and technical assistance, including many organizations and individuals from the US. Their message is simple: Cuba deserves self-determination, not intervention from abroad. They do not deserve the web of financial, travel, commercial, and diplomatic punishments imposed on Cuba and on any business or country that dares to conduct some kinds of business with Cuba.

Cuba is not a threat to any other country or people. It is amply evident that Cuba is not a danger to any group or people or nation outside its country. Even the most stridently anti-communist Cuban Americans travel to Cuba freely. The State Sponsor of Terrorism designation of Cuba, one of the pillars justifying US sanctions, is neither accurate nor helpful. Discussion of this was absent from the mentioned news article, leaving the viewer with a deficient view of why Cubans and their government face our collective wrath.

There are problems inside the country. There are serious problems in both Cuba and the US, both of which need sober, thoughtful discussions. Let’s all be clear: Discontent rages in the US, too. However, no yardstick exists that makes Cuba look like an outlier in either internal human rights or international threats. What does exist is the cry of “but they are communists,” coming from South Florida, and this has no place as a criterion for US foreign policy any longer. And recently, the Cuban government has called for frank discussions with the US government, hopefully, where all issues could be discussed in a framework of sovereignty and the intentions of being good neighbors.

Cubans are capable of handling their own problems, with our cooperation instead of imposition. We all would like to see Cubans happier. We have varying levels of knowledge about Cuba, ranging from first-time visitors to Cuba to citizens and former residents of the island. Our political opinions vary along a wide range, but we are unanimous in one aspect that was left out of the CBS Sunday Morning program: Cuba needs and deserves an end to the US-imposed sanctions.

Cuba deserves to make its path without undue pressure from the US. The CBS Sunday Morning article left out the voices of Cubans, which would have expressed their anxious desire for what now seems impossible: that Cubans be able to conduct their business without undue pressure from the US. Practically no Cuban alive is old enough to know what normal diplomacy from the US is. Let’s give them the most revolutionary present of all—a decent, respectful foreign policy, just like all the rest of the countries in the world.

Dear public figures, media folks, and journalists, please do not suggest that President Donald Trump is crazy. It is not helpful and, in fact, it is hurtful... not to him but the rest of us.

There are two main reasons for this request. First, calling Trump crazy is harmful to people who have a mental health condition or who have loved ones with a mental illness; second, it is inaccurate and leads to a serious misunderstanding of the man, his behavior, and it’s origins and consequences.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of unfair, hurtful, and false seterotypes of the mentally ill that are propagated and repeated over and over again in our society. For instance, media figures and journalists often describe perpetrators of violence as mentally ill. Generally speaking, this is not true. Study after study points out the the mentally ill, in fact, are not violent. Indeed, they are more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Most people with mental health diagnoses are law-abiding contributing members of society. Epidemiological research indicates that 97% of those with mental illness do not commit violent acts.

Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding. It is pretty common to hear or read that those whose behaviors are irrational, unpredictable, or erratic must have a mental health condition. This, also, is a harmful and erroneous stereotype. After all, irrational thinking is pretty common. We are all irrational some of the time and in some situations. and also rational and predictable in others. Irrational thoughts are completely normal. Researchers sometimes point out that some kinds of mental illness may include a deficit in common sense or deviations from social norms but not a deficit in logical thought or “reason.”

Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump.

Another common misconception about those with mental illnesses is that they are dysfunctional and unable to live as honest and contributing members of their communities. This, too, is not true. The majority of those with a mental illness are simply ordinary folks. In any given year 20% or more of the population has a mental health diagnosis. Therefore, at any given time, there are millions of people with a mental health condition making positive contributions to their communities.

So, why do so many of us hold these false and damaging steretypes about those with a mental health condition? Perhaps the most common communicator of these misconceptions are the media of mass communication, both fictional (television, movies, internet sites, etc) and nonfiction (talk shows, news media, politicians, etc).

This brings me to Donald Trump. Repeating time and time again that Donald Trump is crazy not only negatively affects the mentally ill but also seriously misunderstands the man and his policies.

Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.

The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel's raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world.

And, of course, actions of this president also have caused harmful and deadly damages within the United States. Consider: the terrible harms, injuries, and deaths caused by his orders to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), resulting in the detention of over 50,000 adults and children in dangerous and deadly detention centers; he also has deported millions of individuals, some to dangerous countries or to the very life-threatening situations they fled. In addition, he has empowered his ICE agents to injure and even murder US citizens who were exercising their political and personal rights; Trump’s defunding of federal programs in the areas of healthcare and the environment has stripped men, women, and children of their access to food and medical care, causing pain, injury, and death to many people; and his administration’s reductions of environmental protections and general disregard of climate change threatens the health of all living beings,

Finally, the dictionary defines evil as actions and ideas characterized by impending future misfortune. There has never been a president of the United States more ominous than Donald Trump. Nearly every day he posts messages that threaten his critics and opponents. He says he will use the power of the government to bring them down. He tells his supporters, “I am your retribution.” Time and time again, he threatens to destroy Iran, razing it to the ground and killing millions of Iranians. He announces planes to annex Greenland, Canada, and Venezuela. He hints that he is going to use force to change the political-economic system in Cuba. He says he will prosecute his political opponents for treason and has threatened to shoot those protesting in the streets. And, of course, he regularly declares that he will imprison immigrants and deport them to dangerous places. In just one year he has threatened to punish, invade, or take control of Canada, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Nigeria, and Iran.

So, dear news anchors and pundits, please stop suggesting that President Donald Trump is mentally ill. Doing so defames and insults those of us who have a mental illness and misunderstands the problem that is Donald Trump. He is not “crazy.” He is prejudiced, cruel, violent, hateful, uninformed, dangerous, and immoral. Our president is not mentally ill. Our president is evil.

On May 4, Zambian Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe announced that negotiations with the US regarding critical health services and minerals have been suspended due to the Trump administration’s “unacceptable” terms.

For Haimbe, this includes: first, the Trump administration’s proposed health memorandum of understanding (MOU) requires that Zambia turn over health data to the US “in violation of our citizen’s right to privacy.”

Second, the US demands “preferential treatment of US companies over Zambia’s critical minerals.” Haimbe rejects this. He contends, “the Zambian government rightfully takes the view, first and foremost, that Zambians must have a say on how her critical minerals are used, and second that no one strategic partner is to be treated preferentially to others.”

Third, and perhaps most crucially, is “the coupling of the two agreements and frameworks to one another such that the conclusion of the minerals agreement is made conditional to the conclusion of the Health MOU.” The US is effectively demanding privileged access to Zambia’s abundant supply of copper, lithium, and cobalt—all critical for the development of AI and modern technologies—in exchange for health funding.

The only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses.

This is not an isolated incident. As of March 2026, at least 24 African countries have agreed to similarly controversial health agreements with the US. Zambia, Ghana, and Zimbabwe are the only African nations thus far to reject the Trump administration’s coercive demands.

In those cases, concerns about data management and control similarly derailed negotiations. Arnold Kavaarpuo, executive director of Ghana’s Data Protection Commission, explained, “The proposed data sharing agreement looked at access not only to health data sets, but also to metadata, dashboards, reporting tools, data models, and data dictionaries.” It would have allowed up to 10 US entities access to this data without any prior approval from the Ghanese government.

Similarly, the US was demanding that Zimbabwe turn over any data it collects about pathogens causing outbreaks. Zimbabwe would not, however, be guaranteed access to any vaccines, treatments, diagnostics, or medical innovations that might result from this shared data. As Ndabaningi Nick Mangwana, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information, Publicity, and Broadcasting Services, remarked: “In essence, our nation would provide the raw materials for scientific discovery without any assurance that the end products would be accessible to our people should a future health crisis emerge. The United States, meanwhile, was not offering reciprocal sharing of its own epidemiological data with our health authorities.”

These kinds of take-it-or-leave-it proposals represent the Trump administration’s strong-arm approach to global health funding. Instead of foreign aid, President Donald Trump offers two options: a crooked deal or death.

This has been their goal from the start. Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has taken several measures aimed at weakening foreign aid and humanitarian programs. This includes: dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID); withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and 66 international organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund, which addresses sexual and reproductive health; as well as diverting funds away from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which supports HIV prevention, care, and treatment worldwide. Each of these actions deliberately endangers the lives of millions of people around the world—the cruelty really is the point.

From Ghana to South Africa, the Trump administration maliciously leverages human suffering to continue the centuries-long exploitation and systematic theft of Africa’s resources. Here, foreign aid has only one value: an exchange value.

Indeed, on April 27, at an event hosted at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and attended by major corporations including Google, Goldman Sachs, and Palantir, US Ambassador to the UN Michael Waltz formally announced the launch of the “Trade Over Aid” initiative. This is a self-described “international economic development vision built on free markets.” It is premised on the idea that, unlike capitalism, humanitarianism and providing direct aid only create “dependency, inefficiency, and corruption.” As Waltz remarked, “free market principles remain the best proven path to lasting prosperity with better and more permanent results than any of the alternatives.”

On April 30, outgoing US Ambassador to Zambia, Michael Gonzalez, echoed these remarks. He accused the Zambian government of widespread corruption and “nationwide theft of US provided medicines.” He contended that, “For decades, the US relationship with Zambia was one centered around aid.” This “unrequited relationship” is no longer tenable—“going forward, the benefits of our relationship must be mutual.” Gonzalez continued, “We know that while you pursue a Zambia First agenda and we pursue America First, we are still able together to achieve something notably better for our countries.”

This emphasis on market solutions overlooks that capitalist exchanges always produce winners and losers. Competition, not cooperation, is the ethos of the proverbial free market. There is no “together” when “America First” is pitted against “Zambia First.” Instead of “lasting prosperity,” the only “permanent results” are widening inequalities between the haves and the have-nots.

And to be clear, the winners here are neither Americans nor Africans. Americans will be forced to bear the social, economic, and environmental costs of more data centers, AI-driven layoffs, and AI-powered surveillance. Zambia and other African nations will see their natural resources stolen and the bodies of their citizens exploited.

No, the only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses. It is worth noting that Trump and his children have raked in billions from their investments in cryptocurrency, AI, and data centers.

What the Trump administration is offering is no more than colonialism dressed as humanitarianism. Foreign aid should never be manipulated for profit or political power. We must reject capitalist schemes like “Trade Over Aid.”

Instead, we must focus on building institutions that guarantee the right to healthcare for all. This is not simply an act of charity. As every pandemic makes patently clear, ensuring that everyone has access to health services benefits everyone. In the end, we must recognize that healthcare is a human right and a collective good. Ignoring this puts us all at risk.

The late 19th century was a dismal time in American politics. Corruption ran rampant. Congress was governed by staunch partisan loyalties and nail-biting majorities. And redistricting, instead of being confined to after the census every 10 years, was a tool of manipulation and partisan hardball. “From 1872 to 1896,” a political scientist reports, “at least one state redrew its congressional districts each year.”

Of course, that era was marred by another phenomenon—one too familiar to us today. It saw a swift rollback in voting rights and representation for the newly freed Black population of the South. In 1875, after the Civil War and the adoption of the 15th Amendment, seven Black men served in the House, and one sat as a senator. Terrorism, political cowardice, and racial backlash ended Reconstruction. By 1902, Congress was once again all white.

That status quo largely held until the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law ushered in the multiracial democracy we have taken for granted.

Nearly two weeks ago, the Supreme Court supermajority finished its project of demolishing the law. The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais convulsed American politics. Since then, we have seen an ugly frenzy in Southern states, a brutal redrawing of district lines that could, as scholar Rick Hasen put it, “bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils.”

Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.

Since the ruling, Louisiana has gone back to the drawing board to erase one of its majority-Black districts, even though early voting had already begun in the primary election that was set for May 16. Preparations are underway in Alabama and Mississippi for redrawing their maps. Just last week, Florida passed a new map, which had been in motion in anticipation of a favorable Supreme Court ruling. In some states, as in Tennessee, Black voters could be left without any effective congressional representation.

Blue states, too, are scrambling to redraw maps to help their party, though their success remains to be seen. In a surprise ruling last week, a closely divided Virginia Supreme Court struck down the just-passed constitutional amendment that gave the legislature the power to redraw the state’s congressional map, which would have likely handed several seats to Democrats.

While gerrymandering remains unpopular among voters at large, among the activists whose votes tend to control primaries, party loyalty rules. In Indiana, for instance, several legislative challengers backed by President Donald Trump defeated most of the incumbents who refused to get on board with the Republican redistricting agenda.

Pundits who tally up the wins for each party may be missing the bigger point: Soon, state congressional delegations will begin to resemble the Electoral College—all red or all blue. Recall that Trump won 1 in every 3 votes cast in Massachusetts, while Kamala Harris won a similar share of the votes cast in Tennessee, yet both states will have monolithic party delegations.

What can be done?

The raw power grabs on display may be just the kind of thing to rouse voters to anger. Yes, midterm elections in November will turn on issues such as affordability and the war in Iran. But when people feel something being wrested away from them, they can fight back.

And Congress must act. It can ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide, in red states and blue states alike.

It should enact legislation to make clear that American citizens can sue to protect their right to vote when it is infringed. Legislation should give voters of color a meaningful opportunity to prove intentional discrimination, and it should make sure that judges apply strict scrutiny to laws that impinge on the franchise.

And Congress should recognize the danger of an unelected Supreme Court—highly ideological, appointed for life—taking a hammer to laws that uphold political equality. This past month reinforces the need for court reform, including an 18-year term limit for justices.

Want more proof of the political role the court has assumed? Alabama took, as Brennan Center senior fellow Joyce Vance put it, a “nanosecond” to rush to the justices for permission to gain the “benefit” of Callais, even though primary voting starts in a week. The justices quickly agreed, even though the state’s map had already been found intentionally racially discriminatory by a lower court, allowing the state to eliminate one of the two districts represented by Black lawmakers. This contravenes years of the high court’s assurances that rules should not change too close to an election. Calling balls and strikes? The fix seems to be in.

Alabama, of course, is where Selma is located. Its history is more complex than you might imagine. Here’s what I wrote in my book The Fight to Vote:

Alabama previously had one of the most democratically robust systems in the country, including universal male suffrage and a bar against gerrymandering. But its new Jim Crow constitution gave county registrars great discretion in barring African American voters. White men could vote without anyone attesting to their good character, but Black men required the recommendation of a white voter. As a result Black voting rates fell from 180,000 to fewer than 3,000 between 1900 and 1903.

History emphatically does not move only in one direction.

Abandoning the solemn commitment America made to guarantee equal representation regardless of race is a grave threat to our system of governance. And the fact that the Supreme Court has done it to enable partisan gamesmanship offends that legacy.

The Brennan Center was named after Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a leading force in the brief but celebrated period when the court actually moved to ensure equality in our election system. He authored the opinion in Baker v. Carr, which established the willingness of the court to enforce what would become the “one person, one vote” rule. He also wrote Thornburg v. Gingles, which set national standards so that voters of color could go to court and seek remedies when officials unfairly limited their opportunity to elect candidates to Congress. That American achievement is what the Supreme Court has so casually tossed away. It may be a long time before the court will once again play a positive role in our democracy.

The stakes are high. Brennan put it well: “The Constitution will endure as a vital charter of human liberty as long as there are those with the courage to defend it, the vision to interpret it, and the fidelity to live by it.”