Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title) – “deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Launched from his TV program, “The Apprentice,” while a failed businessman, Trump, using the poisonous tusks of Elon Musk, has conveyed that exit phrase to hundreds of thousands of innocent public servants, performing crucial tasks, and their contractors since January 20, 2025.

Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people – red state and blue state – “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Trump, a corporation masquerading as a human must be unmasked by the following bill of particulars:

Because you’re first ‘presentation of self’ on January 20th was to declare that you are the law and that no constitution, statute or regulation was going to stop your issuance of scores of illegal Executive Order Dictates, “YOU’RE FIRED!” The Constitution does NOT provide for either a Monarch or a Dictator!

Because on and after January 20, 2025, you launched a major PURGE of lawfully acting civil servants, including 17 Inspector Generals mandated to root out criminal and fraudulent activities, and top officials in the Pentagon, Intelligence and Regulatory agencies without reason and notice, replacing them with sycophants, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are daily CENSORING and IMPERILLING people, protected by our First Amendment, with police state kidnappings, illegal imprisonment in foreign and domestic jails, threats, harassment, bigotry and outright criminal extortions for unlawful demands, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have repeatedly violated Congressional mandates, including the power of the purse and health/safety standards, and because you have illegally seized basic congressional authority under the Constitution, having defied over 125 Congressional subpoenas in your first term, destroying our federal checks and balances, “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, “ Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and me, published in 2020).

Because you are rampantly and unlawfully dismantling or closing down virtually all the long-established regulatory and scientific research, protections of the health, safety and economic well-being of the American people, families and children, within the areas of consumer, worker, environmental and community necessities – many life-saving, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you favor even greater power of large corporations to receive bloated contracts, subsidies, giveaways and with impunity defraud the government, as with Medicare and Medicaid and military contracts, take over more of the public lands, and see scores of existing federal enforcement cases against them halted or dismissed, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have destroyed more of the working civil service than all previous presidents combined, you have left the American people more defenseless against pandemics, climate violence, air and water pollution, hunger, infectious diseases and corporate crimes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are demanding Congress pass more tax cuts and tax escapes for the very under-taxed super-wealthy, like you and your family members, and giant corporations, and because you have turned the White House into a self-enrichment business for you and your cronies, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have extended your cruel and vicious destruction against innocents abroad receiving life-saving medicine, food and medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development that you unlawfully have closed down, millions of poor people are in jeopardy and many thousands already dying and starving. You are told about these tragedies you have caused but could care less. Your zigzagging on massive tariffs destabilizing U.S. businesses and their workers is leading more of your supporters to question your competence and wrongheaded policies. Because regarding the Israeli genocide/slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and casualties mounting in the West Bank, you have backed your master Netanyahu even more than Bibi-Biden, greenlighting breaking the truce, resuming mass murder/starvation, pushing for expulsion of the entire surviving population and approving annexation of the West Bank, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because every day you lie, and make false statements as a routine deceptive practice (over 35,000 lies and false statements listed by the Washington Post during your first term), you are creating harmful, false scenarios. Together with Musk enriching his corporate positions in Washington, you lie about each day’s realities such as the price of eggs being down 85 percent, our country now having a trade surplus, and your approval rating in polls “in the 60s and 70s,” “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because your erratic, wild and no-holds-barred fascist dictatorial corporate state “first” behavior proceeds from a dangerously unstable personality, driven by your insatiable vengeance as a megalomaniacal power freak, ignorant of or oblivious to circumstances and consequences, your continued wreckage in all directions is certain to worsen and shatter our Republic and its constitutional processes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Expanding numbers of Americans from all backgrounds who see the deadly months ahead of Dangerous Donald need to sum up their demands in the siren call “YOU’RE FIRED!” Just as was done to President Richard Nixon for far less serious transgressions in 1974.

Of all the epithets seething from the foul mouth of King Donald I (his preferred title)—“deranged,” “wacko,” “lunatic,” “crazy,” “crooked,” “loser,” “criminal,” “corrupt,” the most timely, functional one is his favorite: “YOU’RE FIRED.”

Launched from his TV program, The Apprentice, while a failed businessman, Trump, using the poisonous tusks of Elon Musk, has conveyed that exit phrase to hundreds of thousands of innocent public servants, performing crucial tasks, and their contractors since January 20, 2025.

Given his wreckage of lives, livelihoods, health, safety, and freedom of speech here and abroad in just 100 days, Trump invites daily the unifying command arising out of his declaration of war against the American people—red state and blue state—“YOU’RE FIRED!”

Trump, a corporation masquerading as a Human, must be unmasked by the following bill of particulars:

Because you’re first “presentation of self” on January 20 was to declare that you are the law and that no constitution, statute, or regulation was going to stop your issuance of scores of illegal Executive Order Dictates, “YOU’RE FIRED!” The Constitution does NOT provide for either a Monarch or a Dictator!

Because on and after January 20, 2025, you launched a major PURGE of lawfully acting civil servants, including 17 inspectors general mandated to root out criminal and fraudulent activities, and top officials in the Pentagon, Intelligence, and Regulatory agencies without reason and notice, replacing them with sycophants, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are daily CENSORING and IMPERILING people, protected by our First Amendment, with police state kidnappings, illegal imprisonment in foreign and domestic jails, threats, harassment, bigotry, and outright criminal extortions for unlawful demands, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have repeatedly violated congressional mandates, including the power of the purse and health and safety standards, and because you have illegally seized basic congressional authority under the Constitution, having defied over 125 congressional subpoenas in your first term, destroying our federal checks and balances, “YOU’RE FIRED!” (See, Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All by Mark Green and me, published in 2020).

Because you are rampantly and unlawfully dismantling or closing down virtually all the long-established regulatory and scientific research, protections of the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people, families, and children, within the areas of consumer, worker, environmental, and community necessities—many life-saving, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you favor even greater power of large corporations to receive bloated contracts, subsidies, and giveaways; with impunity defraud the government, as with Medicare and Medicaid and military contracts; take over more of the public lands; and see scores of existing federal enforcement cases against them halted or dismissed, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have destroyed more of the working civil service than all previous presidents combined, you have left the American people more defenseless against pandemics, climate violence, air and water pollution, hunger, infectious diseases, and corporate crimes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you are demanding Congress pass more tax cuts and tax escapes for the very under-taxed super-wealthy, like you and your family members, and giant corporations, and because you have turned the White House into a self-enrichment business for you and your cronies, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because you have extended your cruel and vicious destructions against innocents abroad receiving life-saving medicine, food, and medical supplies from the U.S. Agency for International Development that you unlawfully have closed down, millions of poor people are in jeopardy and many thousands already dying and starving. You are told about these tragedies you have caused but could care less. Your zigzagging on massive tariffs destabilizing U.S. businesses and their workers is leading more of your supporters to question your competence and wrongheaded policies. Because regarding the Israeli genocide and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and casualties mounting in the West Bank, you have backed your master Netanyahu even more than Bibi-Biden, greenlighting breaking the truce, resuming mass murder and starvation, pushing for expulsion of the entire surviving population, and approving annexation of the West Bank, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because every day you lie, and make false statements as a routine deceptive practice (over 35,000 lies and false statements listed by The Washington Post during your first term), you are creating harmful, false scenarios. Together with Musk enriching his corporate positions in Washington, you lie about each day’s realities such as the price of eggs being down 85%, our country now having a trade surplus, and your approval rating in polls “in the 60s and 70s,” “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Because your erratic, wild, and no-holds-barred fascist dictatorial corporate state “first” behavior proceeds from a dangerously unstable personality, driven by your insatiable vengeance as a megalomaniacal power freak, ignorant of or oblivious to circumstances and consequences, your continued wreckage in all directions is certain to worsen and shatter our Republic and its constitutional processes, “YOU’RE FIRED!”

Expanding numbers of Americans from all backgrounds who see the deadly months ahead of Dangerous Donald need to sum up their demands in the siren call “YOU’RE FIRED!” Just as was done to President Richard Nixon for far less serious transgressions in 1974.

U.S. President Donald Trump has turned a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land that spans three states on the southern border into a “military installation” to “address the emergency” he previously declared over unlawful immigration and drug trafficking. Trump’s memo authorizing this action seems designed to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, which normally bars federal armed forces from conducting domestic law enforcement. The apparent plan is to let the military act as a de facto border police force, with soldiers apprehending, searching, and detaining people who cross the border unlawfully.

This move could have alarming implications for democratic freedoms. Moreover, it continues a pattern of the president stretching his emergency powers past their limits to usurp the role of Congress and bypass legal rights. He has misused a law meant to address economic emergencies to set tariffs on every country in the world. He declared a fake “energy emergency” to promote fossil fuel production. And he dusted off a centuries-old wartime authority to deport Venezuelan immigrants, without due process, to a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights violations.

As presidential overreaches pile up, they underscore the urgent need for Congress and the courts to reassert their roles as checks on executive authority.

The Posse Comitatus Act and the Military Purpose Doctrine

Last week, the military announced that soldiers deployed on the New Mexico-Mexico border will have “enhanced authorities” because they are on land that has now been designated part of Fort Huachuca, Arizona—a military installation located more than 100 miles away. The new authorities include the power to “temporarily detain trespassers” on the “military installation” and “conduct cursory searches of trespassers... to ensure the safety of U.S. service members and Department of Defense (DOD) property.”

Searching and apprehending migrants would ordinarily run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal armed forces from directly participating in civilian law enforcement activities unless doing so is expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution. The law stems from an Anglo-American tradition, centuries older than the Constitution, of restraining military interference in civilian affairs. It serves as a critical check on presidential power and a vital safeguard for both personal liberty and democracy.

Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation.

Nonetheless, several exceptions exist. The most significant is the Insurrection Act—a law that Trump floated using to address unlawful migration (although for now, his secretaries of defense and homeland security are reportedly recommending against such a move). In authorizing soldiers to conduct apprehensions and detentions on lands that have been newly designated as a “military installation,” the president is relying on a lesser-known loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act known as the “military purpose doctrine.”

The doctrine, conceived by the executive branch and endorsed by the courts, holds that an action taken primarily to further a military purpose does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act even if it provides an incidental benefit to civilian law enforcement. A textbook example is the circumstance in which a person has driven drunk onto a military base. Soldiers may legally detain the intruder until civilian law enforcement arrives to take them into custody. This does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act because the primary purpose of the military’s activity is not to enforce the laws against driving while impaired, but to maintain order on the base and protect military assets and personnel.

Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation. Federal troops thus have a legitimate military reason, the argument goes, to apprehend, search, and detain migrants without violating the Posse Comitatus Act and without the president needing to invoke the Insurrection Act at all.

Evaluating the Legality of the Order

Using the military purpose doctrine to justify direct military involvement in immigration enforcement is a transparent ruse to evade the Posse Comitatus Act without congressional authorization. The doctrine is meant to apply only in cases where any law enforcement benefit is purely incidental. Here, the situation is the opposite.

The nominal justification for apprehending and detaining migrants who cross the border is protecting the installation. But the installation itself was created to apprehend and detain migrants, as well as to secure their removal. In the memo, this is described as “sealing the border” and “repelling the invasion” at the border. No matter how the Trump administration frames those activities, however, they are civilian law enforcement functions. He cannot turn them into military operations by misusing the language of war. These civilian law enforcement activities are not “incidental”—they are the reason for creating the installation. And apprehending migrants who “trespass” on the installation is the primary way in which this law enforcement mission will be furthered.

If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.

This use of the military is fundamentally different from the border deployments that have occurred in recent presidential administrations, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. The military’s role until now has been limited to logistical support, such as assisting border agents with surveillance, infrastructure construction, and transportation. Providing such support does not constitute direct participation in law enforcement, so it does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act. Having soldiers perform core law enforcement duties like apprehending or detaining people, however, steps over the legal boundary.

The move also skirts a separate statute requiring congressional approval of any Pentagon takeover of more than 5,000 acres of federal lands except “in time of war or national emergency.” Here, in order to transfer control of land from the Interior Department, Trump is relying on a declaration of national emergency he issued on January 20 to address the “invasion” at the southern border, in which he asserted that “our southern border is overrun.” But on March 2, Trump triumphantly posted on social media that “the Invasion of our Country is OVER,” adding that in the preceding month, “very few people came.” His administration continues to tout the fact that unlawful border crossings are now at their lowest level in decades. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from March confirms a 95% decline in monthly unauthorized crossings.

Leaving aside the question of whether an emergency, properly defined, existed on January 20 (it didn’t), the Trump administration has made a powerful case that there is no emergency now. Trump should be revoking the emergency declaration, not relying on it to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense.

Why It Matters

Aside from legal concerns, there are practical reasons why the U.S. armed forces shouldn’t be enforcing immigration law. Federal troops are trained to fight and destroy an enemy; they’re generally not trained for domestic law enforcement. Asking them to do law enforcement’s job creates risks to migrants, U.S. citizens who may inadvertently trespass on federal lands at the border, and the soldiers themselves. And it pulls our armed forces away from their core mission of protecting the United States from foreign adversaries at a time when the military is already stretched thin.

Using the military for border enforcement is also a slippery slope. If soldiers are allowed to take on domestic policing roles at the border, it may become easier to justify uses of the military in the U.S. interior in the future. Our nation’s founders warned against the dangers of an army turned inward, which can all too easily be turned into an instrument of tyranny.

Trump’s misuse of emergency powers similarly has larger implications. Emergency declarations unlock enhanced powers contained in 150 different provisions of law. Many of these are far more potent than the ability to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense. They include the authority to take over or shut down communications facilities, freeze Americans’ assets, and control domestic transportation. If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.

The Role of the Courts and Congress

Unfortunately, the president’s abuses could be difficult to check. The Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute, and those who violate it may be prosecuted. But it’s unclear whether violations may serve as a basis for migrants to challenge their detention. As for Trump’s misuse of emergency powers, courts generally are reluctant to probe a president’s decision that an emergency exists (although in this case, the administration’s own statements might be sufficient to overcome the presumption of deference). And as the law currently stands, it is very difficult for Congress to terminate a national emergency declaration or undo actions that presidents take using their emergency powers.

These challenges highlight the urgent need for Congress to establish meaningful checks on the use of emergency powers and domestic deployment authorities. Last year, legislation that would have made it much easier for Congress to terminate emergency declarations passed out of committees in the House and Senate with near-unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans. Similar legislation was introduced in January by Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The Brennan Center has also proposed several key changes to the Posse Comitatus Act that would close the loopholes that threaten to swallow the law.

It may not be possible to pass these reforms soon, but the fight against executive overreach is not just a short-term one. Understanding the ways in which Trump’s actions threaten the rule of law today can help build support for enacting reforms in the future.

It’s not a good time to be an American journalist. Or a consumer of American journalism. Or, for that matter, even a skimmer of the headlines crawling across American phones.

U.S. President Donald Trump is suing media corporations and targeting individual journalists on social media. The White House press office is playing musical chairs at its press conferences and withholding press pool reports it dislikes. Republicans in Congress have called on public broadcasters to defend themselves against “systemically biased content” and are trying to claw back their funding. Large newspapers are choosing to tailor what they write to stay in the government’s good graces and smaller ones are being forced to do the same. Sources are increasingly reluctant to go on the record and violence against journalists has become a punchline. Even student newspapers haven’t escaped the threats.

You’d think that, after all this time, journalists would have figured out how to cover Donald Trump. They haven’t.

In the how-petty-can-you-get category, White House officials have refused to answer questions from journalists who use identifying pronouns. “Any reporter who chooses to put their preferred pronouns in their bio clearly does not care about biological reality or truth and therefore cannot be trusted to write an honest story,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an email to The New York Times. (Sometimes I think that if I roll my eyes any more often, they’ll fall out of their sockets.)

It’s probably uncharitable to pick on journalists when they’re under attack from so many powerful and malign forces, but it’s still necessary to keep the news media true to their purpose.

Bad News

It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Scholars studying autocrats note that one of their first targets on gaining power is almost invariably an independent and open press. Trump made it all too clear during his second presidential campaign that he views journalists as his enemies and, now that he’s back in the White House, he continues to disparage, ignore, or run circles around traditional news outlets. What’s new is the willingness of all too many media corporations to cave in so cravenly.

Even before Trump won the election, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had set bad examples by squelching already-written editorial endorsements of then-Vice President Kamala Harris for president. I guess you might say that they were just hedging their bets if they hadn’t followed up by instituting distinctly dubious new editorial policies. Washington Post owner and billionaire Jeff Bezos, refocused his paper’s opinion section on defending “personal liberties and free markets,” while LA Times owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, fired his paper’s editorial board and instituted AI-generated “political ratings” for its opinion section. Both papers have been hemorrhaging subscribers and much-admired journalists ever since.

I’m not sure why anyone was surprised that Bezos betrayed the editorial independence of The Washington Post. Although he had previously exercised restraint there, he’s been rapacious in steering Amazon, his main hustle, which came under attack in the first Trump administration. The Post has essentially been a hobby, and hobbies are easily cast aside when they become inconvenient. Apparently, principles are, too.

It doesn’t help that other large media companies have recently capitulated to lawsuits that Trump, as one of his hobbies, filed or threatened to file. Last December, ABC News settled a defamation suit involving star anchor George Stephanopoulos’s description of Trump’s sexual abuse trial with an apology and $15 million for a Trump-related foundation. In January, Meta settled a lawsuit from 2021 over the company’s suspension of Trump’s social-media accounts in the wake of the January 6 assault on the Capitol. It agreed to pay him $25 million and, coincidentally (of course), tossed out all its DEI initiatives. Recently, CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, agreed to mediation for a lawsuit Trump brought over editorial decisions made when “60 Minutes” aired an interview with Kamala Harris. (He later upped his demand to a whopping $20 billion in damages.) In all three cases, Trump’s legal claims were widely seen as weak, yet the companies chose not to test them in court.

Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump wasn’t satisfied with such groveling. He never will be. (He recently renewed pressure on the Federal Communications Commission to pull CBS News’s license.) His need to dominate, which makes your average control freak look weak-kneed, keeps him demanding ever more obeisance. Take, for instance, his response to The Associated Press’ policy of continuing to call the body of water he renamed the “Gulf of America,” the “Gulf of Mexico.” He promptly banned AP reporters from covering most of his official events. Even after AP won a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds and the judge in the case, a Trump appointee no less, ordered the White House to lift all restrictions on the news agency, an AP reporter and photographer were still barred from a White House news conference on the very day the court order was to take effect.

AP, a 178-year-old cooperative, with four billion readers daily in nearly 100 countries, could afford to take the federal government to court. Many smaller news outlets can’t.

More Bad News

However much Donald Trump may overestimate his abilities, he is a pro at playing the media. His instinct, talent, skill—I don’t know exactly what to call it—is to read the room remarkably accurately, and his rooms are increasingly restricted to his boosters. He’s spent decades both courting and denigrating the press, all the while honing his innate sense of what makes news. You’d think that, after all this time, journalists would have figured out how to cover Donald Trump. They haven’t.

This is not for lack of trying. Back when newspapers delivered the news once or twice a day, reporters “worked a story,” filling in details to make it as complete as possible by deadline. Now, with our 24/7 news cycle, digitized news media, and myriad distractions, when news drops, reporters put up a quick placeholder—a few sentences on a website or live blog—and then add to it continually as the story and their understanding of it develop. The result is news dolloped out in bite-sized bits, digestible but seldom filling. Meanwhile, news outlets suffer from a journalistic version of FOMO (fear of missing out on a scoop), which can lead to their chasing dubious stories with sometimes unsettling consequences, as when multiple news outlets picked up a false report on X about Trump’s tariffs, which sent the stock market soaring and then erasing $2.4 trillion in value within half an hour.

Trump thrives in just such a context by carelessly creating chaos and a continuous loop of contradictory headlines. His former aide Steve Bannon seemed amused when he suggested in 2018 that the way to drive the media crazy was “to flood the zone with shit.” It’s a practice the humor-deficient Trump has ardently embraced.

Support your local and national outlets however you can and, as stakeholders, urge them to do better.

For a prime example, you need look no further than the staged unveiling of his tariff policies. Like a carnival barker calling out, “Step right up, ladies and gents, for the greatest tariff show on Earth!,” he teased for months about the tariffs to come, christening April 2 as “Liberation Day” and promising to divulge what they were then. That day dawned and percentages determined by a formula about as sophisticated as something scribbled on the back of an envelope were revealed to much fanfare and wall-to-wall press coverage. A few days later, some of the tariffs were imposed. A few days after that, many of them were paused, then some withdrawn, others left pending or threatened, and on (and on) it goes. With the policy changing by the hour, so did the rationales for it, leaving the media endlessly scurrying to catch up.

As the world economy tanked in response, news stories dutifully noted the justifications du jour, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s appraisal that it took “great courage” for Trump to “stay the course” as long as he did. (Most of the reciprocal tariffs lasted about 12 hours.) But the general tone of the reporting shifted, as if the media suddenly sensed that they could finally say out loud that the wannabe emperor had no clue. So I guess it is “the economy, stupid” (to cite President Bill Clinton’s aide James Carville), not civil liberties, healthcare, job security, historical accuracy, or any of the other basics, which I stupidly thought might tip the balance in reporting.

Some Good News

Tempting as it may be, the media can’t ignore what a president says. It’s unprofessional to abet the public’s ignorance. It’s also dangerous to democracy. An ill-informed populace is easily manipulated and, in regions without a local news source—in 2024, there were 206 “news deserts” in the United States, encompassing almost 55 million Americans—it’s hard to maintain a sense of community or organize to challenge bad governance. Still, amid all the chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration, the media are not defenseless. His endless efforts to undermine them attest to their continuing power and importance. Being of a practical turn of mind, I’ve culled some ideas for how to use that power from several sources and added a few of my own to come up with seven-and-a-half propositions for good journalism in the Age of Donald J. Trump.

1. Get the Story Right

If you think about it, the only thing journalists have going for them is that people believe them. Without that, their usefulness ceases to exist. So, it’s important (particularly in the Age of Trump) that they call out lies and flimflam in clear, accurate, precise, straightforward language, including in headlines. For example, Trump’s desire to turn Gaza into a golf course is ethnic cleansing, not a “plan to rebuild” Gaza, and tariffs are “import taxes,” not an incentive to reindustrialize America. It’s necessary also to keep repeating the truth in the face of lies: Immigrants, for instance, are considerably less likely to be imprisoned for crimes than U.S.-born people (though you certainly wouldn’t know that from listening to Trump and crew), and pulling funding from universities is as much about curbing antisemitism as Covid was about clearing our sinuses.

2. Supply Significance, Context, Proportion, and Consequences

Key tasks for reporters and analysts are to separate the substantial from the silly, the consequential from the sensational, and random musings from faits accomplis, then to report the hell out of the real issues, keep them prominent within the churn of news cycles, and explain why they matter. A place to begin is by giving less attention to Trump’s executive orders—aptly defined by a law professor as “just press releases with nicer stationery”—and more attention to the effects of his policies that get enacted. And while his ruminations may bear noting, they could appear, not in headlines, but on, say, page 11 (or its online equivalent), which is where The Boston Globe relegated its report of the local 100,000-strong Hands Off! protest.

3. Heed Framing

News stories are a snapshot of a specific, often fleeting moment during which reporters decide what to include, what to leave out, and what to emphasize. The problem arises when conventional thinking and herd instinct solidify those choices as the only choices. There may be just two dominant American political parties, for instance, but there are other political forces at work in the country and we’d all benefit if they weren’t covered primarily as nuisances or threats. And while gyrations of the stock market matter, they matter less to most people than gyrations in their rents or mortgages, grocery bills, or prospects for retirement.

4. Resist Euphemisms, Circumlocutions, and Normalizing the Abnormal

The term “sanewashing”—reporting Trump’s loony pronouncements as if they were lucid thoughts or comments—hasn’t been popping up much since the 2024 presidential campaign ended. It’s been replaced by the tendency of mainstream journalism to reinforce the status quo, as when the CEO of CNN instructed his staff to omit mention of Trump’s felonies and his two impeachments in their inauguration coverage. Or maybe it’s been folded into the journalistic task of trying to make sense of events—what The Atlantic‘s editor Jeffrey Goldberg called a “bias toward coherence”—which presented the schoolyard taunts about tariffs slung between Trump advisors Elon Musk and Peter Navarro as if they were serious policy discussions.

5. Lead With Empathy

They’re called news stories for a reason. As cheap as tug-the-heartstrings journalism can be, readers, listeners, and viewers pay attention to stories about people, especially when they’re like them. So, while USAID staff getting locked out of their offices by Elon Musk’s DOGE may not resonate with many Americans, parents whose kids are locked out of daycare because its funding was cut by Musk, a billionaire father of perhaps more children than he can keep track of, probably will.

6. Control the Message

Here’s the central messaging thing about Trump: He’s remarkably skilled at lassoing any discussion, any topic he brings up, and holding onto it. That means the media, whose relationship with politicians should be inherently adversarial, all too often starts out on the defensive if it tries to hold him accountable for his words and deeds. Of course, he never apologizes, never takes responsibility for anything, never rules anything out, and never admits to error or failure. Instead, when he says something outlandish and gets called on it, he doubles down and dispatches his minions to repeat and embellish it. The media then amplify and discuss it, as if it were actual governance, rather than gibberish, whim, or theatrics. Which means that we get stories about what Trump said and then stories about the stories about what he said, and on and on until he comes up with a new distraction.

7. Be Creative, Adventuresome, and Strategic, and Always, Always Stick up for Each Other

This is hardly the first time the press has faced government hostility, and the American news media have struggled for years to overcome skepticism and win over tough audiences. Trade publications, podcasts, newsletters, and other independent and niche outlets fill some gaps and help engage not-so-obvious audiences, but standing up to power can be a very lonely task. In a time when even Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski admits to being scared, self-censorship can seem like an all too appealing choice. So it’s essential for other journalists to unite to resist unfair restrictions on any journalist, as even Newsmax and Fox News did against Trump’s treatment of AP. Journalists can also highlight the courage of their colleagues to let them know they’re not alone.

Of course, just about all of the above costs money, so my final nudge is not to journalists but to those of us who value good journalism. Support your local and national outlets however you can and, as stakeholders, urge them to do better. For all the deserved criticism of the American media, they remain one of the strongest pillars propping up what’s left of democracy in a time that’s been anything but good for the First Amendment. We can’t afford to let them topple.

The Trump administration’s partial budget plan released Friday is just its latest repudiation of the Trump campaign’s promises to help people struggling at the margins of the economy—an economy that President Donald Trump’s misguided tariff policies are threatening to tank.

This partial budget does not discuss the president’s intended tax breaks—tilted to the well off—or policies he will include (like those he supports as part of the reconciliation bill) to take food assistance and health coverage away from people who need them to meet their basic needs and to make college more expensive. The full budget will come later. But while the administration’s partial plan is limited to the part of the budget that Congress funds through the annual appropriations process, its proposal to cut that funding by nearly one-quarter is plenty bad enough, harming people, communities, and the economy.

During the campaign, President Trump said, “As soon as I get to office, we will make housing much more affordable.” But his budget proposes a devastating cut to rental assistance—which makes rent affordable for 10 million people—reducing funding by $27 billion below the amount provided in 2025 across five programs. This would cause millions of people to lose assistance they need to pay the rent each month, placing them at risk of eviction and homelessness.

Policymakers of both parties in Congress need to see this budget, and this entire agenda, for what it is—a direct assault on people, communities, and the economy.

These cuts would likely grow even deeper over time, since the budget would also consolidate multiple rental assistance programs into to a block grant that would be more vulnerable to cuts in the future. The budget also would impose a two-year time limit on rental assistance (apparently except for seniors and people with disabilities), a policy that would abruptly evict or end assistance for many low-paid workers and others who aren’t able to afford market rents after that period.

In addition, the budget proposes severe cuts to other housing programs, such as sharply reducing funding for housing and other services for people experiencing homelessness, cutting housing resources for Indigenous people, and eliminating funding for local agencies protecting people from housing discrimination and other fair housing violations, and block grants that fund affordable housing and community development at the local level.

The president also said “your heating and air conditioning, electricity, gasoline—all can be cut down in half,” but this budget eliminates LIHEAP, the program that helps low-income households afford to heat and cool their homes; reduces availability of the most affordable sources of energy—solar and wind—by cutting efforts to bring these sources online and make them available in low-income communities; and cuts programs that reduce energy waste.

As the President’s ill-conceived trade policies threaten to tip the country into a recession later this year, the budget disinvests from key sources of long-run economic growth. The budget cuts the National Science Foundation (NSF) by more than half and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by about 40%. This is short-sighted: NSF and NIH funding supports foundational research that spurs innovation, leading to greater economic growth. The private sector will not support this work because there is no financial incentive to do so.

The budget also disinvests from America’s future workers, cutting $4.5 billion from K-12 education despite the Trump campaign’s statement that “we are going to keep spending our money” on education.

Most fundamentally, the budget fails to propose a serious agenda for the U.S. economy or for people who haven’t been included enough in the country’s overall prosperity. The budget presents no agenda for addressing housing or childcare affordability, improving educational outcomes for those our education system doesn’t serve well, maintaining and strengthening innovation, or broadening opportunity.

And today’s funding request again breaks President Trump’s repeated promises to protect Social Security, including “Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it.” On paper, the administration provides the same amount of funding next year as this year, but this is not enough to keep up with inflation, fixed expenses, and growing demand as the number of Social Security recipients grows as the population ages. The administration has already pushed out 7,000 Social Security Administration staff despite having the money to pay them, and it has already made it harder for seniors and people with disabilities to get the Social Security benefits they’ve earned. This is not what Congress intended when it passed this year’s budget.

The administration is claiming these massive cuts are necessary under the guise of fiscal responsibility, but the proposed $2.5 billion cut to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) funding—primarily for tax enforcement—reveals that any commitment to fiscal responsibility is limited. Funding for IRS enforcement pays for itself multiple times over: It provides the staff and technology to catch wealthy tax cheats and encourage everyone to pay the taxes they legally owe.

The administration justifies many cuts by saying that states are better positioned to cover the costs of various public services and infrastructure needs. This ignores the federal government’s important role in ensuring adequate investment nationwide, including in states and communities that face more economic challenges. The problems would be compounded by potentially large cost shifts in Medicaid and SNAP being considered in Congress. States would face even greater challenges—and the impacts on people and communities would grow—in a recession when state revenues fall but they still have to balance their budgets.

The president’s budget counts on funding in the emerging tax and budget bill for immigration enforcement. With that, it continues to prioritize a mass deportation apparatus that has gone too far already by disappearing people without due process and ending lawful immigration status for hundreds of thousands of people.

Since taking office, the Trump administration, often acting through DOGE, has unilaterally frozen congressionally approved funding, implemented large-scale staffing reductions that are harming public services, and threatened the security of people’s personal information. Having frozen funding in contradiction to enacted funding laws, the president’s budget now asks Congress to codify and continue these unilateral cuts next year, including through the proposed cuts to NIH, NSF, and the Department of Education. Codifying these cuts would make congressional supporters accomplices in this administration’s endeavor to make government less effective in finding cures for diseases, maintaining American technological leadership, and getting a good education.

The president’s harmful agenda goes well beyond what was released today. The president and his congressional allies are moving forward on a budget and tax bill that deeply cuts health coverage through Medicaid, food assistance through SNAP, and college aid to partially pay for expensive tax cuts skewed to the wealthy.

At the same time, the president’s chaotic, indiscriminate, and steep tariffs have sharply increased the risk of recession, which could lead to a rise in unemployment and the number of people who need help to afford the basics, just as those supports are slated for cuts.

Policymakers of both parties in Congress need to see this budget, and this entire agenda, for what it is—a direct assault on people, communities, and the economy—and plan a better course for the country.

What do powerful tech-nerds such as William MacAskill (the Oxford Professor), Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Land, and Elizier Yudkowski—among innumerable others—share across their minor differences? Well, according to Adam Becker in his fascinating and timely new book More Everything Forever, they share a commitment to ever more rapid capitalist growth managed by tech billionaires and exported to other planets. To these folks, current dislocations such as global climate wreckage, huge economic inequalities, the dangers of nuclear holocaust, the powers of a wealthy oligopoly, fascist movements, and the earthly legacies of racism and colonialism do not set the center of attention. These are second-order concerns (at best) to be resolved or left behind in a future dominated by the interminable expansion of cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, space travel, human brain uploads to computers, and colonization of distant planets.

These tech-bros, centered in Silicon Valley, form a constellation of either impossibly rich or extremely well-funded and self-certain “visionaries” of a Brave New World. They manufacture an endless supply of acronyms which, I think, helps to push numerous problems in their assumptions and ambitions into the rearview mirror as they press ahead. No worries about the massive new energy outputs that will be required by AI and cryptocurrency. Nevermind that the massive wealth generated and ever more sublime technologies created will either eventually resolve those problems on earth or allow "humanity" to escape them through new extra-terrestrial "colonization."

The AI Disalignment Ruse

Consider an initial example. Elizier Yudkowski, an apparent dissident in this constellation, seems to think that a hi-roller, tech world is the only agenda worth pursuing, but he also worries that advanced AI systems could well turn against humanity. He calls this the "alignment problem" in a way that reminds one of sci-fi stories such as Star Wars and Bladerunner. By keeping our eyes focused on the future danger of AI systems escaping control, in a world otherwise governed by techno-rationality, Yudkowski—intentionally or not—supports an existential shell game. You focus on that existential issue in the future and ignore or downplay the problems that hi-tech capitalism has created for the present and near future. Accelerate the pace of production and mastery over the earth now and then resolve the one (fictive?) problem it produces later. This is a temporal magnification of Donald Trump's everyday politics of deflection and diversion; it helps to explain how Trump and Musk found each other—even if that alliance may not hold much longer.

The Bezos/Musk Extra-Terrestrial Schemes

Let's turn now to the even more expansive distractions fueled by the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk space agendas. Bezos, talking about energy limits on earth: "We don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis, where you cap how much energy we get to us...Stasis would be really bad, I think ...But the solar system can easily support a trillion humans...That's the world I want my great-grand children's great-grand children to live in."

If accelerated growth and hyper inequality are not to be overturned now in the name of justice and planetary resilience, the only answer, apparently, is massive space exploration and new planetary occupations. For the options are only "stasis" or eternally accelerated growth overseen by multi-billionaire overlords. Keep your eyes on the space bauble shining from the future to distract attention from the present.

And Musk's interim plan for settlement on Mars? "We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization and extending life to other planets."

Again, no need to eliminate unprecedented multibillionaire fortunes, no hesitation about his own rigid mode of reasoning, no real case for planetary resilience now, no apparent concern for the devastating lives currently lived by so many humans, no care about the lives of other species. Rather, continue the same old course by accelerating its pace and expanding its range rapidly to other planets. Hence, the heavily state-subsidized Space X program which has already crashed twice. And the super-self confidence of those who call themselves "effective altruists." These are the men who either control inordinate wealth or, like William MacAskill in What We Owe The Future, have institutional access to it because they play by the rules of the hi-tech billionaires. They insist on being the ones who determine what altruism means and how it operates.

Counter Modes of Wisdom

There are several ways to counter the mad, mad cosmic visions of Bezos and Musk. Becker concentrates on the underlying terror of death that helps to fuel their visions, as well as the absence of care for others that fuels these late-adolescent modes of reasoning. There are, for instance, very few women, Native Americans or other minorities in this hi-tech bros club. Moreover, there are uncanny affinities and parallels between this vision of the future and the views of heaven and a second coming advanced by evangelicals. The evangelicals promise a second coming and eternal life after death; the hi-tech boys promise computer brain uploads to retain consciousness for centuries. Thus, it is not all that hard to switch from one to the other. That underlying affinity is also why it was rather easy to forge a white evangelical/neoliberal assemblage in the States during the 1980s, one that has been morphing toward fascism today as its effectiveness has faltered and its demands have escalated.

I respect Becker's responses to this madness and will merely amplify and adjust them here. The tech-bros accounts of brains as human computer systems that can be uploaded to human-manufactured computers is, well, an adolescent dream parading as science. Our brains are intimately connected to our bodies and cannot function without them. The gut-brain relays recently studied by neuroscientists, to take merely one instance, help to explain how our thought-oriented responses to the world are infused with affective prompts and emotional priorities. Don't try to "upload" your brain.

The simple, detached model of reasoning the tech bros embrace, treated as rationality itself by these cosmic dreamers, reflects distortions in their own modes of thought rather than sophisticated images of thinking and reasoning. Their oft-stated contempt for the humanities and the academy exposes and enacts that distorted image, as they join Donald Trump in trying to reshape the academy to reflect such cruel models of thinking, feeling, and reasoning.

Moreover, extended life on Mars is next to impossible—another flashy image to project onto the cosmos in an extension of old shell games. Besides, Mars settlement would be a horror story even if it were populated by humans who carried their bodies with them to its "colonization." Bracket for now the problems of the poisonous soil there, no stable supply of oxygen, material breakdowns, and internal wars or conflicts. Where, in this world far, far away, would be moonlight walks, mountain hikes, ocean views, and body surfing? What about traveling to another country? What about humanistic schools and universities, designed to educate the mind and body together? What about those essential ties to chimps, birds, elephants, horses, dogs, trees, fertile soil, platypuses, and cats that so enliven and educate human life?

The point is clear. The "long-termists," as they sometimes call themselves in contrast to those of us supposedly mired here on the earth, have either continued to buy an untenable adolescent boy's vision or have quietly outgrown it and now deploy it as a series of shiny baubles to deflect us from their callousness about the present and absence of wisdom about the future. For wisdom is neither a technique nor an algorithm. It involves mixing care for this world into an appreciation of how many things we do not know about it. Don't forget how Elon Musk has already displayed his willingness to participate in Big Lies, as he wreaks havoc on governmental programs for the poor, elderly, and sick—anything irrelevant to his immediate manufacturing interests. He recently insisted, for instance, that those who publicly protest the DOGE destruction rampage have been paid by its opponents to do so, projecting back onto them the cynical salesman approach he has adopted to sell Tesla and Space X and to entrance young men to vote for Trump in the most recent presidential election.

Entangled Humanists and the Academy

It is time for entangled humanists in the Academy—those who respect embodied human beings and other species as they explore and demand new modes of resilience today—to take on these hi-tech bros more directly and actively, as Adam Becker has started to do. We can, for instance, expose the fallacies in their space dreams as we undercut their child-like images of reason. We can expose the space subsidies they demand and receive, as they pretend to purge waste from the "deep state."

For the high-tech bros do not only distract and deflect too many from the dangers of today and the irrationalities their incredible wealth allows them to enact. They also seek to destroy the liberal arts academy—an essential institution that educates the youth, helps all of us better to discern dangers in such mad dreams, and helps us to forge wise responses to them.

They have worked hard to detach themselves from care for this world; now they want a larger cadre to join them. We must not allow them to succeed.

On April 8, 2010, the United States and Russia signed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), a landmark achievement that capped and reduced deployed nuclear arsenals, symbolizing hope for a safer, more stable world. Now, 15 years later, as the expiration of New START approaches in February 2026, the risks of a renewed nuclear arms race loom large. Over the past four years, repeated Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine have dramatically weakened the “nuclear taboo.” The risk of a potentially civilization-ending nuclear war has risen to levels some experts say is at least has high as during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Rather than turning back from the brink of nuclear war, nuclear armed states are accelerating nuclear weapons spending. The U.S. alone is estimated to spend $756 billion on nuclear weapons in the next ten years.

Amid this urgent landscape, the just introduced McGovern-Tokuda resolution - H.Res.317 provides a transformative framework to confront these challenges, offering a comprehensive roadmap toward a world free of nuclear weapons as a national security imperative. Reps. McGovern and Tokuda understand that the story of nuclear weapons will have an ending. It will either be the end of nuclear weapons or the end of human civilization. We have been incredibly fortunate throughout the nuclear weapons era. As Robert McNamara famously declared after the Cuban Missile Crisis, “We lucked out. It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”

Hoping for good luck is not an acceptable security policy and, sooner or later, our luck will run out.

The policies of the nuclear weapons states are essentially a hope that this luck will continue. But hoping for good luck is not an acceptable security policy and, sooner or later, our luck will run out. As William Perry has warned: “nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security, they endanger it.”

Comprehensive Roadmap Toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons

House Resolution 317 is not merely a legislative initiative; it is a bold declaration of humanity's collective determination to eliminate nuclear weapons and secure a future without weapons that risk the end of human civilization. This resolution encapsulates the vision of Back from the Brink, a grassroots movement unwavering in its mission to abolish the global nuclear threat. Building upon its steadfast advocacy, the coalition sees this legislation as a step forward in the fight for global disarmament and an unequivocal commitment to a nuclear-free future. Back from the Brink has supported initiatives to reduce nuclear risks, including the prior version of this resolution during the 118th Congress. Now leading efforts to rally support for the new resolution, the coalition recognizes this legislation as a vital step toward global disarmament.

The resolution complements the Foster resolution, H.Res.100, by calling for arms control negotiations with Russia and China while maintaining a focus on broader disarmament efforts. It explicitly opposes nuclear testing, supports theRadiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), to address the legacy of harm caused by nuclear weapons, and prioritizes a just economic transition for the nuclear labor force. Denise Duffield of Back from the Brink encapsulates the resolution’s importance: “The McGovern-Tokuda resolution is more than a statement—it’s a detailed, actionable roadmap to nuclear disarmament. It provides a clear strategy for reducing nuclear risks, ending outdated policies, championing justice for impacted communities, and advancing a future free from the threat of nuclear war.”

A Call for Leadership and Cooperation

The Arms Control Association and the Council for a Livable World are among the notable organizations supporting the McGovern-Tokuda resolution. Their endorsements underscore the resolution’s potential to restore U.S. leadership in reducing nuclear dangers. Daryl Kimball, Executive Director of the Arms Control Association, emphasizes, “This timely resolution outlines a practical plan for action to restore U.S. leadership to lead the world back from the nuclear brink and build a safer world for our children and generations to come.”

John Tierney, Executive Director of the Council for a Livable World, points out the pragmatic benefits of the resolution, stating, “We cannot risk letting nuclear threats increase. That is why Council for a Livable World supports Congressman McGovern’s H.Res.317 to lower nuclear risks and promote diplomacy to work toward a world free from nuclear threats.”

Addressing the Legacy of Harm

The resolution goes beyond arms control and disarmament negotiations—it addresses the devastating legacy of economic harm caused by nuclear weapons, both past and present. Today, the United States spends billions annually on nuclear weapons programs, diverting critical resources away from urgent human and community needs. According to this year'snuclear spending tax calculator, the U.S. allocated over $94 billion to nuclear weapons programs in FY 2024 alone. These funds could have been used to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program for seven years or fund HUD’s mandatory affordable housing programs for nine years. Instead, this spending perpetuates environmental contamination, denies justice to impacted communities, and undermines investments in education, healthcare, and sustainable development. The McGovern-Tokuda resolution offers a path to redirect these resources toward building a safer, more equitable future.

The United States spends billions annually on nuclear weapons programs, diverting critical resources away from urgent human and community needs.

It also addresses the devastating legacy of radiological impacts. From environmental contamination to human exposure, the communities and workers affected by nuclear weapons production and testing deserve justice, healthcare, and full remediation. Martha Dina Argüello of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles describes the resolution as “a truly comprehensive nuclear disarmament framework—one that addresses the past and current harm caused by nuclear weapons and the need to care for and provide a just economic transition for the people and communities whose livelihoods depend on nuclear weapons.”

The Time to Act Is Now

The 15th anniversary of New START is a powerful reminder of what can be achieved through bold leadership and collective action. As the treaty’s expiration looms and the threat of nuclear catastrophe grows, the stakes could not be higher. The McGovern-Tokuda resolution provides a clear and actionable path to eliminate these risks, but success depends on all of us. Now is the time to take a stand. Join theBack from the Brink campaign to amplify this critical call for nuclear disarmament. Get involved, raise your voice, and rally your community to support this transformative resolution. Together, we can build a future free of nuclear weapons—one that saves the world and imbues our lives with profound hope and meaning. Take action today—the world is counting on you.

In the early hours of May 2, the quiet of night was shattered aboard the Conscience, a civilian vessel anchored in international waters, 17 kilometers off the coast of Malta. Aboard were 18 crew members and passengers, jolted from sleep by the sound of two explosions. Flames and smoke filled the air. The ship had just been struck—by what the crew members say were drone attacks.

The very day of the attack, more passengers from 21 countries were waiting in Malta to be ferried out to join the Conscience. Among those slated to join the ship were world-renowned environmentalist Greta Thunberg, retired U.S. Army Colonel Ann Wright, and longtime CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry.

The Conscience is part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, a network of international activists that has been challenging Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza since 2008.

“The U.S. condemns the Houthis for stopping ships carrying weapons to Israel—and bombs Yemen mercilessly for it. But will they condemn Israel for attacking a peaceful ship on a humanitarian mission to Gaza?”

The group alleges that the attack came from Israel—an allegation bolstered by a CNN investigation. According to CNN, flight-tracking data from ADS-B Exchange showed that an Israeli Air Force C-130 Hercules aircraft departed from Israel early Thursday afternoon and flew at low altitude over eastern Malta for an extended period. While the Hercules did not land, its path brought it in proximity to the area where the Conscience was later attacked. The plane returned to Israel approximately seven hours later. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declined to comment on the flight data.

The ship suffered significant damage, but fortunately, no one was hurt. That was not the case when the Freedom Flotilla was attacked in 2010. This May 2 attack comes just weeks before the 15th anniversary of the infamous raid on the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish ship that led a previous flotilla to Gaza in 2010. On May 31 of that year, Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship in international waters, killing 10 people and injuring dozens. The Mavi Marmara had been carrying over 500 activists and humanitarian supplies. That attack drew condemnation from around the world and calls for an international investigation—calls that Israel dismissed.

One of this year’s flotilla organizers, Ismail Behesti, is the son of a man killed in the 2010 raid. In videos circulating after the recent strike, Behesti is seen walking through the damaged interior of the Conscience, his voice resolute as he condemns what he believes was another Israeli act of aggression against civilians on a humanitarian mission.

“People are asking how Israel can get away with attacking a civilian ship in international waters,” said Tighe Barry, speaking from the port in Malta. “But since October 8, 2024, Israel has shown complete disregard for international law—from bombing civilian neighborhoods to using starvation as a weapon by blocking food from entering Gaza. This is just one more example of its impunity.”

“Where is the outrage?” Barry continued. “The U.S. condemns the Houthis for stopping ships carrying weapons to Israel—and bombs Yemen mercilessly for it. But will they condemn Israel for attacking a peaceful ship on a humanitarian mission to Gaza?”

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition and activist groups such as CODEPINK are calling on governments and international bodies to speak out and take action.

The Conscience was carrying no weapons. It posed no threat. Its only crime was daring to challenge a brutal siege and slaughter that the United Nations itself has condemned as illegal and inhumane. That’s the real threat Israel fears—not the ship itself, but the global solidarity it represents.

So, will the world speak up about Israel’s latest outrage? Or will this, too, be quietly buried beneath the waves?

Late Thursday night, President Donald Trump issued an executive order aiming to eliminate federal funding for NPR and PBS. As a rationale for the move, the White House also released a so-called “fact sheet” detailing what it claims is evidence of “left-wing propaganda.”

Even if that were true—and it’s not—any government attempt to silence the press based on viewpoint is plainly unconstitutional. Expect this latest Trump order to face a comprehensive legal challenge, similar to other successful efforts in the courts to block illegal actions from the administration.

Trump’s ongoing attacks on public media are part of the administration’s concerted efforts to shut down journalism that displeases the president. Too often commercial outlets, including those controlled by conglomerates like Disney (ABC) and Paramount (CBS), are caving to official pressure, putting their profits before their democratic principles. This is why an independent, publicly funded noncommercial media system—one that holds power accountable—is essential to healthy democracies around the world.

If we care about democracy, we should spend more—not less—on public media.

Here are five ways this latest Trump order is an assault on democracy in the United States.

1. Serious First Amendment Concerns

The White House made it clear that it’s taking this action based on Trump’s unfounded claims about coverage from NPR and PBS. This most thin-skinned of presidents has made it his job—and that of his lapdog censor at the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Brendan Carr—to threaten and intimidate any news outlet that challenges, or even questions, his 100-day power grab. With this latest move, he’s taking it one step further, pushing to defund and destroy any public media outlet that doesn’t service his authoritarian agenda. Yet the First Amendment very clearly and succinctly prohibits the government from making any laws (and by extension, any executive orders) “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

2. Goes Against the Will of the American People

In poll after poll, people of all political stripes say that federal support for NPR and PBS is taxpayer money “well spent.” In other polling, Americans find PBS to be the most-trusted U.S. institution, with 63 percent of respondents expressing “a great deal of trust” or “some trust” in the network. The same survey found PBS is the “most-trusted news network” in the country. To eliminate funding for these media institutions clearly goes against the will of the majority of Americans—and that's not the way a democracy is supposed to function.

3. Undermines a Democratic Society

“Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the United States impoverishes its public media infrastructures,” writes professor Victor Pickard, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Media, Inequality, and Change Center (and Free Press' board chair). Pickard should know. In 2021, he co-authored a global survey with Professor Timothy Neff, which found that more robust funding for public media strengthens a given country’s democracy—with deeper public knowledge about civic affairs, more diverse media coverage and lower levels of extremist views. If we care about democracy, we should spend more—not less—on public media.

4. Expands Local “News Deserts,” Cutting Communities Off From Information They Need to Participate in Civic Life

As local newsrooms downsize or outright shut down, public-media stations fill a void. Penny Abernathy, at University of North Carolina's Center for Media Law and Policy, has extensively documented the spread of news deserts across the country. Local newspapers are closing at an exponential rate, and many local radio stations have hollowed out their newsrooms and replaced programming with nationally syndicated talk formats, often hosted by far-right figures. The expansion of news deserts across the country is a democratic issue with profound implications for our communities. Local NPR and PBS stations often provide the only local news in countless communities—and provide lifesaving information during emergencies.

The expansion of news deserts across the country is a democratic issue with profound implications for our communities.

5. An Attempted End-Run Around Congress

Congress—not the president—has the power to craft our federal budget. While the president makes spending proposals, Congress ultimately considers, amends and approves them. The nation’s founders created the system in this way to specifically put federal spending outside of this sort of control. With this executive order, Trump is attempting to short-circuit this long-established check against runaway executive power.

With the right-leaning composition of Congress, few expect GOP lawmakers to speak out against Trump's move. But past Republican-led efforts to zero out funding for public broadcasting have met fierce opposition from people across the country who are ready to pick up their phones, call their representatives and senators, and tell them to save public media.

“All of us who care about an independent press, an informed populace, a responsive government and a thriving democracy have a stake in the outcome of this fight,” says my colleague Craig Aaron, the co-CEO of Free Press. “If we unite to defend public media—and I believe we can and will prevail—then we might just save our democracy, too.”

He's exactly right.

Don’t look now, but the federal government just notched not one, but two, major antitrust victories against one of the biggest corporations on Earth.

In the past few decades, digital monopolists like Google have built far-reaching empires impacting almost every facet of our online lives. Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.

Back in 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google for illegally monopolizing the search market. In 2023, this was followed by a second suit over the company’s digital advertising monopoly. In the first case, federal Judge Amit Mehta stated the obvious in his ruling that when it comes to the search engine market, Google is a monopolist; in April, the DOJ pushed an ambitious remedy proposal to dismantle its search monopoly. Google was dealt another blow in April in the second case, where judge Leonie Brinkema agreed that Google has illegally monopolized online advertising.

Antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior.

There’s no question that Google’s monopoly is looking more fragile than ever. Even as Big Tech CEOs have bent over backwards to curry favor with the Trump administration, they’ve failed to stop antitrust efforts against them from continuing. And at a time when Meta is also in the antitrust hot seat in court, there’s real reason for optimism when it comes to finally taking Big Tech to task.

Nevertheless, when you consider the scale of Google’s empire, the search and digital advertising lawsuits should be seen as just the beginning of the battle. Sure, anyone who’s used a computer understands just how ubiquitous Google’s search engine is. But less obvious to most people is that it is set to control a media empire bigger than Disney, all while working to dominate the self-driving car market and gobble up promising startups. This doesn’t even get into the AI factor: As the DOJ noted in court, the rapid pace of AI development could further entrench Google’s monopoly if left unchecked.

Take YouTube, Google’s most powerful asset after search. As antitrust suits against Google in the U.S. and abroad have piled up in recent years, YouTube has often felt like a threat hidden in plain sight. Take the issue of advertising on YouTube, for example. The Information, a tech-focused publication, noted last year that Google has a policy of requiring would-be YouTube advertisers to use Google’s in-house DV360 tool. The impact of this rule has, predictably, been to put more money in Google’s pockets while deepening advertisers’ reliance on its services.

For $1.6 billion in 2006, Google was able to take control of what today is the world’s largest video platform, with the deal avoiding antitrust action. Almost 20 years later, there remains no real competitor to YouTube: Though TikTok and Instagram’s Reels compete with YouTube when it comes to short-form video, the service is without a peer in long-form, monetizable content.

In June 2024, a coalition of advocacy groups called on the DOJ to scrutinize YouTube. In their letter, they noted that the platform’s dominance is propped up by bundling practices that make it nearly impossible for rivals to compete. Of specific concern is that smart TVs emerging as a norm in U.S. households could allow Google and YouTube to cement its dominance in home entertainment.

Few moves better illustrate Google’s expansionist mindset (and arrogance in the face of antitrust lawsuits) than its bid to acquire Wiz. Though not a household name, there’s a reason that Google is intent on acquiring it, even after its initial bid was turned down. Despite launching just five years ago, Wiz has grown so fast that it is now used by roughly half of all Fortune 500 companies. By acquiring Wiz, Google will make other corporate giants even more dependent on its services, further fortifying its monopoly status.

Much of the coverage of the Wiz deal centers on its price tag, and for good reason. At $32 billion dollars, the Wiz acquisition stands to be the most expensive in Google’s history. This isn’t just notable because it is occurring in the face of multiple antitrust showdowns. But more unusual is that this figure is 30 times larger than Wiz’s expected revenue for 2025. While the math may seem peculiar at first, there’s likely more than meets the eye here.

Few have better insight into Google’s anti-competitive behavior than Jonathan Kanter, who took the company to court twice when he led the DOJ Antitrust Division under former President Joe Biden. In a recent CNBC interview, Kanter posited that the deal could be a “Trojan horse for Google to get access to data that is increasingly becoming out of its reach.”

In 2006, federal regulators fumbled the ball by allowing the acquisition of YouTube to go through unscathed. The next year, the Federal Trade Commission made the mistake of allowing Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, a deal that would help build and cement the company’s digital advertising dominance. But two decades later, antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior. As federal officials work to correct the mistakes of the past, they should continue taking a multifaceted approach to Google’s monopoly.

Yes, give us human beings credit. In our relatively brief history, it’s no small thing to have come up with two different ways of thoroughly devastating Planet Earth and its inhabitants. One of them, of course, is the long-term, slow-motion version of planetary destruction that we’ve come to call climate change. And yes, we can already feel it. In recent years, this planet has set record after record when it comes to heat, the last 10 years being the hottest in human history. Meanwhile, from the oceans to the continents, in heatwaves, floods, and devastating storms, this world of ours has been feeling the heat in an unprecedented fashion and, mind you, with far worse to come.

Given how obvious all of this has become, we should get full credit not just for creating such conditions but for—at least some of us—ignoring them or, in the case of Donald J. Trump, that pal of fossil-fuel billionaires, doing far worse than that. After all, my country, which has already played such a major role in intensifying climate change, thanks to its record-setting production of greenhouse-gas-producing crude oil—more than any country ever (yes, ever!)—and natural gas, has also managed to elect a climate-change-denying president for the second time. And he’s quite bluntly dismissed the phenomenon as a “scam” and a “hoax.”

Worse yet—I hate to use the word, so I’m putting it in quotation marks—“we” elected him on a platform of “drill, baby, drill!,” which was the very phrase he most wanted to be identified with in his third run for the presidency. You couldn’t be much blunter than that and still succeed, could you?

Yes, he may himself be a blowhard, but he certainly doesn’t want the wind to blow for the rest of us.

In truth, he undoubtedly should be called Apocalyptic Don, since his immediate needs and desires, his urge to be the number-one person in this country and possibly the world, have functionally been wedded to the ultimate slow-motion destruction of this planet. Consider it an irony of sorts that, in his second term in office, the president who is against immigrants—no matter that his mother was one—is already acting in a way that, by heating the planet further and driving ever more people from their increasingly devastated lands, will increase that phenomenon immeasurably.

Irony? Don’t even think it! Not with Donald Trump in the White House, not after we’ve just passed through Earth Day 2025 with a president who seems determined to un-Earth us all.

Honestly, that “drill, baby, drill” phrase of his couldn’t have been blunter, could it? And worse yet, unlike so much else that he’s said, he really meant it! Now that he’s back in the White House for a second time, he’s already doing his damnedest to increase drilling for oil and natural gas in the United States and globally, while he’s determined to bring back the worst of all greenhouse-gas producers, coal. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s been doing his damnedest as well to stop, if not humanity, then at least Americans from producing energy in ways that won’t pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Only his recent tariffs may stand in the way of his push to get oil companies to drill ever more.)

And hey, the president who hates “big, ugly windmills” has already been at work (if you don’t mind my using the word) torching wind-energy projects, including recently Empire Wind 1, which was to be the first major power project of its sort in a planned buildup of wind farms off the coast of New York State. Yes, he may himself be a blowhard, but he certainly doesn’t want the wind to blow for the rest of us, not if it in any way hurts the fossil-fuel industry (which put so many millions of dollars into his recent reelection campaign). And similarly, his administration is planning to place tariffs of up to 3,521% (no, that is not a misprint!) on solar panels imported from Southeast Asia. I mean, you get the idea, right?

Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up, could you? Or rather, once upon a time, if you had done so, no one would have believed you. And yet here we are, watching this planet on its way down, down, down, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion, with not just a single helping hand but at least two of them from the president of the United States. And if that isn’t apocalyptic, what is? In fact, it isn’t faintly unreasonable, when it comes to climate change, to call him (in Mafia terms) the Apocalyptic Don.

A World of Nukes

Of course, when you think about it, humanity could save itself from the long-term destructiveness of climate change in a remarkably easy fashion. All we would have to do is bring to bear on this planet the other form of ultimate destruction that has (in)humanity—that is, us—written all over it.

After all, when it comes to self-destruction, since August 6 and 9, 1945, when atomic bombs were dropped with devastating effect on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II, we humans have had the ability, then only potential but by the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis actual, to literally devastate this planet by creating what has come to be known as—forget global warming—a “nuclear winter.” We could by now destroy ourselves (or at least millions or even, over time, billions of us) with more or less the snap of a nuclear finger. Under the circumstances, consider it a largely unnoted and unmentioned miracle that, almost 80 years later, while such weaponry has spread far and wide, there has never been another Hiroshima- or Nagasaki-style catastrophe, no less one for Planet Earth itself (in terms of the potential destructiveness of such a nuclear winter and the large-scale global famine that would follow it).

Still, here’s the strange thing (or, in the age of Donald Trump, perhaps it would be safer to say, a strange thing): nuclear weapons and what they could do to this planet are distinctly not in the news anymore, with the sole exception not of the weaponry now possessed by nine countries—the United States, Russia, China, England, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—but of the possible future nuclear arsenal of a nonnuclear power, Iran. In 2018, if you remember, Donald Trump tore up the nuclear deal by which that country had agreed never to make such weaponry, but he’s now back in negotiations with its leaders on a similar agreement.

What might the creature who has already devised two methods for devastating this planet come up with, in the future, that could prove no less (or even more) devastating?

And here’s the even stranger thing, so let me mention it a second time. Consider it the unmentioned miracle—yes, a genuine miracle—of our era (one otherwise remarkably lacking in them): In the nearly 80 years since that second atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki, while nuclear weapons have proliferated and grown potentially ever more devastating on Planet Earth, not one has ever been used again.

Here’s what makes that strange indeed, even possibly miraculous: Nuclear weapons aside, it seems as if, at any moment, some of us humans are always at war. At this moment, in fact, at least three devastating wars are underway—in Ukraine, Gaza and associated areas of the Middle East, and Sudan, two of them involving nuclear powers (Russia and Israel).

Today, such world-ending weaponry can still be delivered by plane as in 1945, or by land-based missiles, or missiles on submarines and, according to the Federation of American Scientists, there are now an estimated 12,331 nukes in the arsenals of the nine nuclear powers, ranging from 5,449 in Russia’s and 5,277 in the American one to, at the other end of the scale, 90 for Israel and 50 for North Korea.

And don’t for a second assume that those nine will be the last countries to create nuclear arsenals.

Think, for instance, of South Korea, facing a nuclear-armed North Korea, or, yes, Iran, facing a nuclear-armed Israel. And yet, except for the years when such weaponry was tested in the open or underground (something the Trump administration has at least considered doing again), not one has ever been used.

Of course, recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said his country “reserved the right” to use what are now known as “tactical” nuclear weapons (most of which are significantly more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in his war on Ukraine, but so far at least that’s been an empty threat. And yes, China continues to build up its nuclear arsenal at a rapid pace, making it the third great nuclear power after the U.S. and Russia to have the fate of the Earth in its hands.

And when it comes to my own country, unlike with climate change, Donald Trump has long seemed distinctly anti-apocalyptic when it comes to such weaponry. As he once put it, “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and”—referring to Russia and China—“they’re building nuclear weapons.” In a 2018 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he even called such weaponry “the biggest problem in the world” and has long warned of the possibility of a devastating “World War III.”

But no matter, the country he now rules (more or less) is still spending $75 billion annually and, as of now, planning to spend $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years to update or—the term of the day—“modernize” the American nuclear arsenal, while Russia and China are both working to update or, in China’s case, vastly expand theirs.

If you stop to think about it for a moment, that our world has not been devastated by nuclear weapons should, under the circumstances, be considered little short of miraculous.

Nuclear Winter or Climate-Change Summer?

Oh, and in case you feel relieved that, after so many decades, humanity hasn’t destroyed itself, despite having the ability to do so, take a breath. After all, it’s increasingly possible that, at some future moment, this planet could be blown apart without human beings initially doing much of anything. Yes, I’m thinking about artificial intelligence (AI), or worse yet, artificial general intelligence (AGI). After all, American military commanders like Air Force General Anthony J. Cotton are already talking about how “AI will enhance our decision-making capabilities” when it comes to nuclear weaponry and, even though he also warns that we should never allow AI to make nuclear decisions for us, letting another “intelligence” loose in the nuclear realm seems anything but a safe or sound thing to do.

Indeed, who knows what a future independent intelligence might decide to do with such weaponry on this planet of ours?

And there’s another thing that’s seldom thought about: What might the creature who has already devised two methods for devastating this planet come up with, in the future, that could prove no less (or even more) devastating? After all, there’s no reason to believe that there are only two conceivable ways to do in a world like ours.

Consider all of this, after a fashion, both a story of epic failure and, at least in the case of nuclear weapons, strange success.

Still, isn’t it odd that, although we don’t often think about it, at any moment we live on the edge of ultimate destruction, whether immediately via a nuclear war or in a long-term fashion via a slow-motion version of the destruction of this planet, leading not to nuclear winter but to what might be thought of as climate-change summer? And yet, while the reality of climate change has at least led to major protests in recent times, the continued nuclear arming of this country and the planet has not.

Consider all of this a strange mixture of epic failure and eerie success in a world that—thank you, Donald Trump (but by no means just him)—is becoming more deadly by the month.

Whether in the short or long run, we, our children, and our grandchildren stand an all-too-unreasonable chance of living on a failed planet.

For nearly 90 years, the Social Security Administration has stood above the fray of partisan politics. The agency focused on its mission to deliver hard-earned benefits to every American, regardless of whom they voted for. Official communications channels, such as press releases, never endorsed or criticized a politician.

Indeed, the one time a president tried to politicize Social Security, he was forced to back down. Before benefits were automatically indexed to offset the rise in inflation, Congress would vote for increases that the president signed into law. Those benefits were accompanied by simple straightforward notices, stating that Congress had passed, and the president had signed into law, the enclosed increase.

Just prior to the 1972 election, President Richard Nixon explored the idea of substituting an insert with his signature and photo, hoping to imply that he alone was responsible for the increase (that, ironically, he in fact had opposed). The Social Security Commissioner threatened to publicly resign, and Nixon backed down.

Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are throwing that long-standing tradition of neutrality in the trash. The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced that it would be posting its official announcements on Elon Musk’s for-profit social media platform, alongside the platform’s paid advertisements. Consistent with that declaration, SSA’s official account posted a thread to Musk’s platform, X, that began “Former President Joe Biden is lying to Americans.”

This thread was filled with misleading information and used offensive, politically charged language, including “illegal aliens.” Contrary to the thread’s implications, undocumented immigrants do not and cannot receive Social Security. In fact, SSA has determined that undocumented workers have been subsidizing the rest of us to the tune of $25 billion a year, since many of them contribute (under fake Social Security numbers) but never receive a penny of their earned benefits.

This is a wildly inappropriate use of SSA’s resources. Like the rest of SSA, the agency’s official communications are paid for by the American people’s Social Security contributions. Normally, SSA is very efficient, spending less than a penny of every dollar contributed on administrative expenses. But now, some of that money is being wasted and misused on politics. Not only is the Trump-Musk regime lying to you, they are using your money to do it.

Unfortunately, this is just one of many ways the Trump-Musk regime is weaponizing Social Security. After the governor of Maine publicly challenged Trump, Social Security canceled two contracts with her state.

The contracts, which the federal government has with every state, are extremely efficient and important. One of them allows parents to register their newborns for Social Security cards at the hospital, instead of dragging their babies to overcrowded field offices. The other quickly transmits when anyone in the state has died, so benefits can be immediately terminated.

To punish the governor of Maine, the Trump administration decided to punish the parents of newborns. After massive public outrage, the Trump administration was forced to reinstate the contracts.

Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.

Leaked emails leave no doubt that the Trump-handpicked acting head of SSA, Leland Dudek, terminated the contracts as political revenge. An SSA employee told Dudek that terminating the contracts “would result in improper payments and potential for identity theft.” Dudek replied, “Please cancel the contracts. While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child,” by whom he meant Maine Gov. Janet Mills.

Most chillingly of all, the Trump-Musk regime is illegally falsifying government data by adding people to Social Security’s death master file—despite knowing that they are still alive. Their initial targets are thousands of legal migrants, who have Social Security numbers so that they can work in the U.S.

When Social Security wrongly declares a living person dead, it ruins their life. Financial institutions, health insurance companies, and many other entities rely on Social Security’s data, and they react quickly when someone is declared dead. Imagine, in one keystroke from “Big Balls” or another Musk henchman, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more. This is financial murder.

Legal migrants are the first victims, but if the Trump-Musk regime gets away with this, they will not be the last. Trump and Musk could declare people dead because they are political enemies, or members of a disfavored group. They could extort people by threatening to declare them dead.

All of this is particularly outrageous because Social Security is a nonpartisan program. Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike all value their Social Security benefits and want to see them expanded, not cut. There is no Democratic Social Security and Republican Social Security.

The American people’s message for Trump and Musk is simple: There is only one Social Security system that we all pay into and we all benefit from. Hands off.

Should Europe embark on rearmament? Should it seek to replace the U.S. as a global power? Political scientist, political economist, author, and journalist C. J. Polychroniou takes a stance on these critical issues in an interview with the independent French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. He argues that Europe’s priorities should be on the social and ecological dimensions—unless the aim of the continent is to experience in full the militarism, war mongering, and dysfunctional social order that have defined the contemporary United States.

Alexandra Boutri: During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump has shown hostility towards U.S.’ closest allies, even threatened some of them, and is bent on overturning the global order. In the process of doing so, he has weakened the nation’s strengths, making in fact a mockery of U.S. soft power. What is he after?

C. J. Polychroniou: It is not easy to offer a straightforward explanation for Trump’s actions. Doing so would suggest that this unstable wannabe dictator has an overarching global strategy. But nothing could be further from the truth. Trump is neither a thinker nor a strategist. Look at his on-again, off-again tariff policy. It was just a bet that went bad. That said, I also don’t think that he came to office with a strategy to upend the global order. He is not against global capitalism. He is just trying, but failing so far, to force a change in trade terms that would be overwhelmingly favorable to U.S. interests and in the way that international institutions behave. And he must be delusional to think that he runs the world. As we have seen, for instance, scores of countries retaliated against Trump’s tariffs and China forced the U.S. into retreat. Moreover, Trump’s ratings are very low not only in the U.S. but around the globe. Perhaps only in Israel, where a unique form of far-right extremism is prevalent, can Trump claim to be a popular leader. He is extremely unpopular in Europe, “even in countries with a strong far-right voter base,” as Jeremy Shapiro and Zsuzsanna Végh pointed out in a recent commentary in the European Council on Foreign Relations. But you are right in saying that he has already succeeded in making a mockery of U.S. soft power. No one trusts the U.S. anymore. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that the world sees Trump as an infantile narcissist, though a very dangerous one. Indeed, why U.S. voters opted to give Trump a second chance is one of the most mind-boggling political phenomena in the modern history of politics. Probably more irrational than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continuing to win elections in Israel.

Do we really want Europe in the 21st century to become yet another global empire?

Alexandra Boutri: One would have expected Europe’s far-right to be fully aligned with Trump and his MAGA movement. But that isn’t the case. Why not?

C. J. Polychroniou: Trumpists in the U.S. and European right-wing extremists do share certain common ideological traits. Both camps are against immigrants, (especially Muslim immigrants) and pro-climate policies and want to rollback LGBTQ+ rights. Nonetheless, there are some striking differences. America’s far-right is animated by white supremacy and anti-governmental extremism. The European far-right, on the other hand, emerged as a major political force only during the time of the euro crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis, both of which erupted in 2011. However, while European far-right parties see the European Union (E.U.) as a bureaucratic monster that undermines the national identity of a member state, they favor a strong national state with welfare benefits and healthcare services, but only for native citizens. Their view of the state has its roots in the history of fascism. Here, the state engages in a comprehensive takeover of economic and social life. A fascist state is an authoritarian state, but not all authoritarianisms are fascist. Of course, in today’s world, the extent to which far-right parties in Europe are committed to a fascist welfare state needs to be questioned as most of them are not simply pro-capital but have embraced the main tenets of neoliberalism. They may be opposing the consequences of neoliberalism but, as odd as this may sound, they do not reject neoliberalism itself.

That said, there are also clear differences among the different European far-right parties. Some of them, like Italy’s far-right party Brothers of Italy, are Euroskeptic rather than anti-E.U. Indeed, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has defended Italy’s fascist past but is a very calculating leader, has shown no interest in undermining the E.U. and has even positioned herself as a mediator between Europe and the United States. Meloni has also sided with Ukraine, is backing NATO, and described Trump’s tariffs as “a mistaken choice.”

Alexandra Boutri: Isn’t the E.U. a bureaucratic monster?

C. J. Polychroniou: There is a lot about the E.U. that deserves harsh criticism. But let’s not forget that some of the E.U.’s shortcomings and failures have been the result of the overwhelming influence exercised in decision-making processes by some powerful member states. Germany has dominated the E.U., and how this came to be the case is too long of a story to cover here. Suffice to say that while Germany may have been a driving force behind European integration, it has also been the principal stumbling block to a fiscal union and to the boosting of the E.U.’s social dimension. In fact, only just recently Germany eased off on its national fiscal rule, the “debt break.” But the irony here is that Germany may not be able to use its new national borrowing space under the E.U. fiscal rules that Germany itself had historically insisted on.

Alexandra Boutri: How likely is it that Europe will be able to replace the U.S. as a global power?

C. J. Polychroniou: It’s not expected to happen in the near future even with Trump’s disruptions of the global economy. A new E.U. needs to be built before Europe can become a global power in the true sense of the word, let alone replace the U.S. as a global hegemon. First, a fiscal union for the euro is a prerequisite for the E.U.’s ability in tackling future challenges and to foster convergence. Second, a standing common E.U. force is needed so Europe can not only defend itself without the U.S. but be a meaningful player in the global chessboard. As far as I can tell, there is no political determination among today’s European leaders for the successful realization of any such project. And I am not sure whether such a project is practical or desirable. The U.S. is a global empire, with some 750 overseas military bases costing $66 billion annually. Do we really want Europe in the 21st century to become yet another global empire? I am not even in support of Europe’s rearmament project, which will cost over 800 billion euros. European leaders really need to have their heads examined if they sincerely believe that their capitals are under threat by Putin’s Russia. This is Cold War mentality 2.0. Europe needs to spend more on its welfare states and make the green transition fast and fair, not boost military spending. Unless, of course, the ultimate goal of the continent is to experience in full the disastrous economic and social order that has taken hold across U.S. society and take pleasure in waging illegal and catastrophic wars.

If there was any doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump’s love of coal is driven by concern for coal companies’ profits rather than workers’ well-being, further proof came on April 8.

The same day he announced new measures to prop up the industry, his Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) paused a rule limiting silica dust in mines. Trump also plans to close dozens of MSHA field offices and gut the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which both play essential roles in protecting coal workers.

Since the paused rule would save thousands of mineworkers from death and illness, the unions representing them have sued the administration.

Lawsuits may reduce the damage from Trump’s mass-homicidal orgy. But they won’t reverse five decades of unchecked, unilateral class war by U.S. elites, nor stop polluters from destroying the habitability of our Earth.

Whatever the courts decide in this case, it’s clear that lawsuits won’t be enough to stop the Trump administration. Whether its targets are workers, children, refugees, patients, the millions of ill and starving people who will be killed by sadistic cuts to foreign aid, or the entire world, defeating the assaults will require additional weapons. Coal workers’ history here is instructive.

Coal workers have won their biggest victories not through lawsuits but by striking. In the 1950s a U.S. coal miner was killed on the job every 18 hours. In later decades that rate declined significantly, and not just because of downsizing. Mine safety was strongly correlated with workers’ collective action: More frequent strikes meant fewer injuries and fatalities.

Known deaths on the job don’t include the many thousands who died prematurely from pneumoconiosis, caused by inhaling coal dust. It took the historic “black lung” strikes of 1969 to impose limits on dust and methane levels and to win compensation for disabled workers.

A few months before, 78 workers had been killed in an explosion at Consolidation Coal’s mine outside Farmington, West Virginia. The accident brought national attention to miners’ plight. Yet similar accidents had resulted in toothless reforms to safety regulations.

That might have happened again in 1969. Coal companies opposed strong regulations, and other powerholders dutifully obeyed. West Virginia’s governor wrote off the explosion as just “one of the hazards of being a miner.” President Lyndon Johnson’s assistant secretary of the interior lauded Consolidation Coal’s efforts “to make this a safe mine.” The autocratic president of the United Mineworkers called Consolidation “one of the best companies to work with as far as cooperation and safety are concerned.”

It was rank-and-file coal miners, not the top union leaders, who pushed for legislative reform. They formed the West Virginia Black Lung Association in January 1969. Aided by a handful of physicians, they organized mass meetings to educate and rally coworkers. They quickly realized that lobbying wouldn’t be enough. On February 11, thousands of miners went to Charleston to demand a robust compensation law. Some carried signs threatening to strike: “No law, no work.”

When coal companies obstructed the bill’s passage, rank-and-file workers responded with a wave of strikes unsanctioned by the union leadership. Within two weeks some 30,000 were on strike, rising to 45,000 by early March. They “shut down virtually all coal mining operations in the state,” observed the Charleston Gazette. Some miners in Ohio and Pennsylvania struck in solidarity.

The legislature and governor got the message. The strike worked, and even strengthened the final legislation by requiring companies to pay compensation unless they could prove a worker’s lung illness was not caused by coal dust. The Gazette’s editors accused the workers of “lobbying with [a] club,” decrying that state legislators had “felt compelled to” vote for a strong compensation law. The worst fear of companies and politicians alike was that more workers would begin using strikes to influence government, not just their bosses.

The impact rippled outward from West Virginia. Several other coal-producing states soon passed similar laws. In December the U.S. Congress passed the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. The federal bill extended compensation for black lung victims across the country. It also mandated the world’s toughest coal dust standard.

President Richard Nixon initially refused to sign it. After a week and half of White House stalling, around 1,200 West Virginia mineworkers launched another wildcat strike. The coal barons warned that “a widespread work stoppage now could pose a serious threat to fuel supplies,” reported The New York Times. Nixon quickly changed his mind. He signed the bill within “a matter of hours.”

The law brought compensation for around half a million disabled mineworkers over the next decade. It also made a real contribution to workplace safety. Unfortunately black lung has since come roaring back in the neoliberal era, a sign of government’s unwillingness to hold coal companies accountable.

Beyond their direct impacts, the black lung strikes hold a lesson for today’s resistance. How can we beat back the Trump administration’s assaults on working people, the environment, and democratic rights? The coal miners of 1969 offer us a strategic proposal.

Lawsuits may reduce the damage from Trump’s mass-homicidal orgy. But they won’t reverse five decades of unchecked, unilateral class war by U.S. elites, nor stop polluters from destroying the habitability of our Earth.

We need more aggressive measures. As the heroes of the black lung strikes realized, those measures only become feasible if we embrace the daily work of organizing and educating the people around us.

You may not have heard but Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) planted a covert informant within a migrant rights organization, engaged in widespread electronic and physical surveillance of its members, and utilized other government agencies to collect information about them, which led to the detentions, and at times deportations, of some of its key members. They did this to freeze the organization’s political speech and put an end to their organizing.

You may or may not be surprised that this started during the Obama administration and ending during Trump’s first term—well before the onslaught of constitutional and human rights abuses against politically active immigrants (and others) that we have seen over the last several weeks.

The use of immigration enforcement to freeze political speech is not new; in fact, it’s a practice that dates far back in the country’s history.

However, it’s possible the current administration is pushing the practice to a breaking point and waking the U.S. public up to its gross and extreme injustices. And we just may have seen one of the first signs of this breaking point with the release of Palestinian rights activist and green card holder Mohsen Mahdawi on Wednesday.

To start, the organization mentioned above is a powerful and internationally recognized migrant rights group, Migrant Justice, which has been organizing migrant workers in the state of Vermont’s dairy industry since 2009. Migrant Justice is perhaps best known for its work improving conditions for migrant workers on farms sourced by the ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s (now owned by Unilever) but out of necessity expanded its organizing to include fighting for protections from police and ICE collaborations, winning access to drivers’ licenses for undocumented residents in Vermont, successfully organizing workers in the construction industry, expanding access to in-state tuition and financial aid for undocumented residents in the state, and fighting to keep many immigrants out of detention (among other ongoing campaigns and programs).

For its successes, however, the group garnered much attention from the country’s increasingly belligerent and internally focused immigration enforcement agencies.

“I've brought you a famous person,” an ICE officer boasted when he brought Enrique Balcazar, one of the organization’s lead organizers, into detention, mockingly referring to the national recognition Balcazar had gained for his work.

The depth to which ICE knew the details of Migrant Justice members’ lives, references to colleagues and friends and family, and a specific refusal for those detained to contact other Migrant Justice members, whom the officers specified by name, all revealed that ICE had been surveilling the group down to the minute details of their lives through what Migrant Justice has since shown were illegal means and reasons.

However, Migrant Justice, being who they are, sent the Trump administration back to their corner.

In a subsequent lawsuit filed by the group in 2018 against the Department of Homeland Security, they argued that ICE did not have probable cause to go after its members, and none of them fit the high priority ‘criminal’ profile of immigration cases that ICE claims to focus on. Instead, Migrant Justice argued, they had been targeted specifically for their successful organizing and that the federal government was attempting to retaliate and freeze their speech by harassing, intimidating, and deporting them. In so doing, ICE infringed on their First Amendment rights.

Migrant Justice went on to engage in an ongoing public campaign in support of their case, with large support in the state of Vermont including rallies at the Federal courthouses in Burlington, garnering national attention.

ICE eventually said uncle. By 2020 DHS settled outside of court with Migrant Justice. As a part of the stipulations of the settlement, ICE implemented a policy in which employees are obligated to act “in accordance with the First amendment, including its commitment to not profile, target on account of, or discriminate against any individual or group for exercising First Amendment rights.” This new wording clarified that all migrants (regardless of status) are protected under this constitutional right.

However, several years later, the Trump administration is at it again, as we have seen with the detention and attempted disappearance of Palestinian rights activists and other organizers of various backgrounds and immigration statuses. Once again, we see an executive branch using immigration enforcement in attempts to freeze speech. A few of those recently detained for their speech include Georgetown Professor Badar Khan Suri; Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, Tufts University Student Rumeysa Ozturk; Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil; Aditya Wahyu Harsono; Farmworker union leader Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino; and 37 workers at a roofing company in Washington state who had not too long ago attempted to unionize.

This is not to mention the more than 1,000 international students across 160 colleges that had their visas or legal status revoked or the countless others taken from their homes, places of worship, schools, vehicles, you name it, and detained or deported without due process—another constitutionally protected right.

And just last Monday evening, Border Patrol agents detained eight farmworkers associated with Migrant Justice on a dairy farm in Northern Vermont, in addition to one other who was on his way to deliver groceries to farm workers on that very same farm. Migrant Justice is now rallying for their release.

The connection between Migrant Justice’s ongoing struggle and what is happening to Palestinian rights activists today is not lost on the group.

In fact, these farmworkers were held in the same room as Mohsen Mahdawi prior to his release.

In an earlier speech at a rally for Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil, Balcazar, stated:

“…for this organizing, the struggle in which we find ourselves, we have faced persecution from immigration authorities. Immigration uses the threat of detention and deportation to keep us silent, just as they do with Mahmoud Khalil and all the immigrant students who are fighting against the genocide in Gaza.”

He continued:

“I went through what Mahmoud Khalil is going through today…but thanks to the brave and powerful solidarity of the community, [we] won back our freedom. We fought our case to stay in this country and denounced ICE’s abuse of power. It was a long fight, but we won. And we are going to win the freedom of Mahmoud Khalil. We demand that this government respect the constitutional right of freedom of expression! Free Mahmoud Khalil now!”

In their case, Migrant Justice and their legal representation (ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, and others) had followed in a long line of court cases that have proven that immigrants, of all statuses, are protected under the U.S. constitution; and thus the U.S. government cannot use immigration enforcement to retaliate for political reasons.

The history of case law in the U.S. is quite clear:

• Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) - Supreme Court unanimously ruled biased enforcement of the law against non-citizens is in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment
• Bridges v. Wixon (1945) - Supreme Court ruled in favor of an immigrant’s First Amendment right to free speech: “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country”
• Chew v. Colding (1953) - Supreme Court ruled in favor of an immigrant’s First and Fifth amendments
• Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973) - found that all persons accused of a crime on U.S. soil, no matter their immigration status, are guaranteed due process
• Zadvydas v. Davis (2001) - Supreme Court ruled due process, a Constitutional right, applies to everybody in the U.S. even if their presence is “unlawful, involuntary, or transitory”
• In 2014 several federal district courts found ICE detainer requests that kept noncitizens in custody longer than citizens was unconstitutional, e.g., Miranda-Olivares v. Clackamas Cty. (2014).
• For a more comprehensive review of this history check out Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal.

And Migrant Justice’s case influenced coinciding cases that had similarly dealt with the question of First Amendment rights for immigrant organizers. Notably, shortly after the settlement, migrant rights activists Maru Mora-Villalpando and Ravi Ragbir won their respective cases against ICE and the right to remain in the country.

The U.S. Department of Justice has, throughout history, repeatedly attempted to deny constitutional rights for documented and undocumented immigrants alike. And, of course, there are cases that have not fallen in favor of immigrant plaintiffs, often due to abstract (and arguably unconstitutional) legal practices such as the Plenary Power doctrine, in which the court has at times deferred jurisdictional authority over matters of immigration to the Executive branch.

Despite some legal setbacks for immigrant rights over time, however, the federal court system has increasingly taken up immigrant rights cases, and despite some cases to the contrary, have mostly shown in undeniable ways that immigrants are included within the U.S. Constitution’s protections. I argue that this has happened in tandem with public protest, immigrant rights campaigns, and a shift in public opinion.

At this point, any case against the federal government on the grounds of constitutional rights for immigrants in the U.S. should be cut and dry. But it’s painfully obvious we should not feel comfortable resting on those laurels. We know this administration is breaking the law – denying rights that they have no authority to take away. So, what is to be done?

As history has shown us, rights aren’t won or protected in the courts alone, in a vacuum. Any legal scholar will tell you; it is the timbre of public opinion, and protest, that the courts often react to when making these decisions. Public opinion, can certainly affect the way the federal courts lean, as was seen in the civil rights movement and its relationship to the massive gains made during the years of the Warren Court era (1953-1969). While rights won through civil rights movements are latent within the constitutional expression “we the people,” those words only come into fruition when people challenge the forms of power within American democracy that seek to border, territorialize, and limit inclusion of those rights to just a select few.

The same is possible for all persons present in this country regardless of immigration status. While mass public outrage increased during Trump’s first term, it is building arguably to new heights today, particularly against its most publicly visible acts like the disappearance of Palestinian rights activists and the mass deportation of immigrants to a prison known for its torturous conditions in El Salvador.

Last weekend saw another round of mass protests across the country against the Trump administration’s extra-judicial actions. Last weekend also saw the U.S. Supreme Court block the Trump administration from sending another group of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador with no due process. And we saw a federal judge order the Trump administration to transfer Rumeysa Ozturk to Vermont, stating, "The government cannot undermine the justice system and attempt to manipulate a case's jurisdiction by secretly transporting and imprisoning someone over a thousand miles from home." And after a considerable amount of pushback, including 65 lawsuits, the Trump administration appears to be reversing its attempts to strip thousands international students of their visas through the SEVIS system.

The Supreme Court is today stacked with judges implanted by Trump in his first term. And yet, today, they appear to be, in some cases, holding him accountable to the law, in what I might argue is in lockstep with immigrant rights activists and the supporting public opinion that is only made known by those growing crowds of protesters who dare to continue speaking out.

For the last two weeks I have attended morning rallies outside of the Federal courthouses in Burlington for the release of Mohsen, the same place we rallied for in support for Migrant Justice’s case against ICE almost 7 years ago. The crowd last Wednesday was big. The crowd Wednesday was even bigger. One can assume that the chants of “Free Mohsen!” and “Free them all!” could be heard inside the court room.

And the whole world heard that same crowd burst out when Mohsen walked free from building, peace signs in the air.

What history tells us is that we must continue showing up in protest in the streets, outside of court rooms, outside of detention centers, in our public spaces, and show the courts, and all of our branches of government for that matter, where our alliance lies: not with some rogue executive branch bent on ruling at will, but in the principles laid out in the U.S. constitution, those of equal dignity and rights for all.

As Mohsen said today: “From this place, in front of this court, me standing here with you, among you, it sends a message that is loud and clear not only to Vermont but to the rest of America: We the people will hold the constitution accountable to the principles and values we believe in.”

The Trump administration has shown it is willing to defy court orders, and has now detained a judge for refusing to comply with an extrajudicial action by the Trump administration. Mohsen has court dates ahead of him yet. And there is a long road ahead for any of the current cases mentioned here. As some have suggested, the country may by on the brink of a constitutional crisis.

That is one reason why we all need to continue to protest and make our voices heard. Today, at your local May 1 rally is a great time to do so.

Today we remember (again) that together, working in tandem and in support of migrant activists from all backgrounds, we can all actually affect these processes.

I write this from the chilly state of Vermont one month into Spring. If you listen closely, you can hear a great thawing, as protesters continue to speak out in favor of the inalienable human, civil, and constitutional rights of all persons in the U.S. As the movement grows, perhaps we could be witnessing an American Spring in the name of human dignity, at least if we continue to fight for it. Its mud season in Vermont. Our boots are still laced up, but the heavy coats are being put away for the year. There is still some snow in the mountains, but the ice is sure to melt.

*A small portion of this article is excerpted from my book, Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal, recently published by University of Georgia Press.

Dear “Cesar,”

This May Day, as I march with my union, the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, I will thank them for their role in making Berkeley Unified a sanctuary school district and Berkeley, a sanctuary city, but above all, I would like to thank you.

It’s been over 18 years since your last day in our second grade class—a heartbreaking Valentine’s Day in 2007—just before your family succumbed to a deportation order forcing you to leave the country, despite your U.S. citizenship.

This year, convicted felon and twice-impeached President Donald Trump’s Valentine’s Day present was to threaten all public schools and universities to desist in teaching about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or lose funding. He also issued executive orders illegally revoking visas, work permits, and even facilitating the arrest and detention of immigrants and their allies.

ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example.

Do you remember the now-censored “DEI” book about Cesar Chavez that I read to your class, Harvesting Hope by Kathleen Krull? She told the story of how the huge Chavez family lost their farm to the depression and drought that scourged Arizona in 1937. Some of you cried when you learned that the Chavez family was forced to trade their productive 80-acre finca for the life of migrant farm workers, developing lesions, blisters, knotted backs, and burning eyes and lungs.

But I reassured you: “No hay mal que por bien no venga.—There is nothing so bad that good can’t come of it.” Were it not for the Cesar family’s displacement, he might not have co-founded the United Farm Workers, a union that has saved countless farm workers’ lives, improved working conditions, and inspired multitudes internationally. Similarly, your family’s suffering gave birth to change and hope in the city you were forced to abandon and beyond.

For years I’ve waited until you were old enough to understand my recounting of the resistance leading to the safeguards you inspired. After you left, your classmates and I would tear up looking at your name on your mailbox and your empty seat. I fought against tears every time we said the Rosa Parks Pledge: “to make this world a better place for ALL people to enjoy freedom,” because ALL didn’t include you.

Your mother wrote from Mexico that you had transformed from my cheerful, round-cheeked model student into a sullen malnourished child who refused to do his school work or eat. I could not stop crying.

Inspired by the ironic letters of my parents’ close friend Blacklist-breaking screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, I wrote an Open Letter to an Immigration Judge:

Dear Honorable Immigration Judge,

…how can I go on teaching about equal rights and freedom of speech and all the things our Constitution is supposed to defend, and that the very name of our school is supposed to represent, when the father of my students is deported simply because his skin is darker? Both my Latine and white students are U.S. citizens. So how do I explain to the class that one has the right to a family in the United States and the other citizen does not?

The letter went viral. A community faith organization called BOCA helped my student teacher and me organize an informational event April 26 with cafeteria tables full of lawyers offering free advice. Rosa Parks’ families pressured the superintendent and police to protect immigrant students. With BOCA’s assistance, as a BFT union representative, I wrote and presented a resolution to the BFT executive board to make BUSD a sanctuary district and it passed overwhelmingly.

Meanwhile your classmates heroically transformed their grief into actions by writing their own “Without You” poems based on Los Panchos’ “Sin Ti” song and read them on an Univision TV special about you.

Next, my spouse and I pulled the best elements of sanctuary ordinances around the country together into a local ordinance and presented it to Berkeley’s Peace and Justice Commission. It won unanimous support and was recommended to the City Council. On May 22, 2007 we organized a rally outside city hall in favor of our beefed up sanctuary ordinance. Aided by the BFT, many of BFT’s Spanish two-way immersion teachers, KPFA host Larry Bensky, LeConte’s principal, and the Berkeley community, the rally reverberated through the City Council chambers. Berkeley Resolution City of Refuge 63711-N.S. was adopted that night (5-22-07) giving a previously symbolic resolution the teeth of law. Berkeley’s spark of an example ignited other cities that adopted similar ordinances throughout the nation. Months later, BFT president Cathy Campbell got our School Board to adopt our sanctuary District resolution as board policy.

Over the years, this work has only gained strength.This January 21, Berkeley School Board Member Jen Corn submitted an even stronger resolution to the City Council reaffirming Berkeley’s status as a sanctuary city and it passed overwhelmingly again. And in February, teachers, principals, office workers, and support staff received a two hour training on how to safeguard the rights of our immigrant students. This whole sequence of events began when you, “Cesar,” my polite, photogenic, straight-A, bilingual 7-year-old student, became the poster child of a renewed movement to protect immigrant rights in Berkeley.

So today, as Donald Trump outdoes predecessors in figuratively defiling our Statue of Liberty, Mother of Exiles, thanks to you,“Cesar,” so many more of us are able to defend her call for our “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” ICE tried to banish the family of one 7-year-old citizen, and the union and community came together in a powerful fist of defiance, protecting hundreds and inspiring other cities that followed our example. Fear feeds tyranny, but you and our union showed us how community and courage can construct democracy. And no matter what challenges we may face now, there is no going back.

As Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) said,

Once social change begins it cannot be reversed.
One cannot make illiterate those who have learned to read.
One cannot uneducate those who have learned to think.
One cannot humiliate those who feel pride.
One cannot oppress those who are no longer are afraid.

Thank you, to our Rosa Parks’ Cesar Chavez.

Love,

Maestra Margot

My student’s name has been changed to protect his privacy. He responded with a very moving note of gratitude, giving me permission to publish this letter.

It was a cold, gray morning in Oklahoma when the government came crashing through the wrong door.

Without warning, ICE agents clad in black tactical gear burst into a quiet family home. Guns drawn, boots pounding on hardwood, they moved like soldiers in hostile territory — except this wasn’t a war zone. It was a suburban neighborhood. A home where children did homework, parents made dinner, and everyone believed, until that moment, that living in America meant having rights.

They were wrong.

In the chaos, the teenage daughter — still in her underwear — was yanked from her bedroom and forced to stand, exposed and terrified, while armed strangers rifled through her belongings. Her screams went unanswered. The agents refused to let her or the rest of the family get dressed. They didn’t explain why they were there, didn’t ask questions, didn’t seem to care that the person they were looking for didn’t live at that address.

Then they started taking things: cell phones, tablets, laptops — anything that might contain information or, perhaps more to the point, value. They seized all the family’s cash, their passports, their children’s devices. When the family demanded answers, they were met with silence and threats. No warrant was ever shown. No charges were filed. No receipts left behind.

ICE simply vanished, leaving the family humiliated, traumatized, and stripped of the basic tools of modern life. The agency has since refused to return the electronics or the money. There has been no apology, no accountability, no restitution — just a void where justice is supposed to live.

What happened to that family wasn’t an accident. It was a symptom — a glimpse behind the curtain of what the Trump administration has built: an unaccountable, increasingly lawless deportation regime that functions more like a secret police force than a branch of a democratic government.

If we let this continue — if we fail to act — we are complicit in the unraveling of the very idea of America.

And the targets aren’t just undocumented immigrants or criminal suspects anymore. They’re legal residents. College students. People born and raised in this country. Their only “crime” is voicing dissent, having the wrong skin color, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But some are pushing back, bringing us big news from the ACLU on Tuesday:

“The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey ruled today that Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and recent Columbia graduate student, can move forward with his lawsuit claiming the government is unlawfully detaining him for his political views. The court rejected the government’s attempt to shut down Mr. Khalil’s case before it could be heard.”

Khalil has committed no crime. He was in the U.S. legally. His only offense — in the eyes of the Trump administration — was participating in peaceful protests criticizing Israeli policy in Gaza. For that, ICE agents stormed his university housing and locked him in a detention facility, citing a vague national security justification that amounts to little more than “we don’t like what he said.”

This is not how a constitutional republic behaves. It is how authoritarian regimes operate: by making examples out of those who speak up, and terrifying the rest into silence.

To understand how dangerous this moment is — how far we’ve drifted from our foundational values — we have to reach back nearly two centuries. Because this is not the first time American leaders have had to grapple with whether the protections of our laws apply to those without political power, to people who aren’t citizens but are still human beings.

In February 1841, 73-year-old former President John Quincy Adams stood before the Supreme Court to defend 53 African men who had been kidnapped from Sierra Leone, sold into slavery, and transported aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad. These men, having seized the ship and attempted to return home, were captured off the coast of Long Island and jailed as property, their fates debated not as individuals but as commodities.

Adams — the son of a founding father and one of the last living links to the American Revolution — didn’t argue their case as a matter of political favor or foreign diplomacy. He invoked something deeper: the principle that all people, regardless of citizenship, nationality, or status, are entitled to the protection of the law when they are on American soil.

“By what right was it denied to the men who had restored themselves to freedom,” Adams thundered, “and why was it extended to the perpetrators of those acts of violence themselves?”

He insisted that justice must be blind to nationality or legal status; that due process, as encoded in the Constitution, must apply to persons, not just citizens. If the government could arbitrarily decide who deserved rights and who didn’t, then no rights were truly secure.

It was a radical argument for the time, but the Supreme Court agreed. Adams won. And in doing so, he helped define a cornerstone of American jurisprudence: that the rule of law exists to constrain the state, not to be selectively applied at the whim of those in power.

Fast forward to 2025, and that principle is now under direct assault.

The Trump administration, enabled by allies in Congress and the judiciary, has weaponized immigration law and executive authority in ways that Adams would have recognized and condemned. They are now detaining legal permanent residents, like Mahmoud Khalil, not for crimes, but for speech. They are targeting foreign students and legal residents — often young people of color — for deportation based on political views, often under the thinnest pretexts of “national security.”

The administration’s justification in Khalil’s case? That his presence in the U.S. could cause “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” That’s the legal equivalent of saying, “We’re deporting him because we want to.” It’s not just unconstitutional: it’s tyrannical.

And this isn’t isolated. Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street by masked agents for writing an op-ed critical of Israeli policy in a student newspaper over a year ago. In both cases, there were no warrants, no hearings, no evidence of criminal activity. Just black-bag operations targeting people for using their First Amendment rights.

Meanwhile, pro-Netanyahu political groups — many with direct ties to Trumpworld — are openly compiling lists of student activists and professors to target for deportation. And the administration appears to be acting on those lists.

John Quincy Adams would be horrified, but not surprised.

Because once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

And sure enough, what began with undocumented immigrants is now creeping toward legal residents, foreign students, and even American citizens. The Trump administration recently floated the idea — with a straight face — of deporting certain American citizens to El Salvador.

Let that sink in.

The very notion should be constitutionally absurd. But like so many authoritarian moves, it’s being normalized through repetition.

First they came for the undocumented. Then they came for the legal immigrants. Then the student visa holders. Now, they’re signaling plans to come after naturalized citizens — and even people born here — if they hold the “wrong” political beliefs.

Trump’s January executive order made this shift brutally clear:

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you... I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”

But who gets to decide what constitutes a “pro-jihadist protest” or who counts as a “Hamas sympathizer”? The Trump administration does. No court. No jury. No evidence required. Just guilt by association — and punishment without due process.

This is precisely how autocrats consolidate power: they redefine dissent as treason, criminalize speech, and strip away rights piecemeal until there’s nothing left to defend. It happened in Turkey under Erdoğan. It happened in Hungary under Orbán. It happened in Putin’s Russia. And now it’s happening here.

The echoes of the Amistad case are unmistakable. Back then, the federal government sought to hand kidnapped Africans over to foreign governments to appease diplomatic partners. Today, we are handing peaceful student protesters over to ICE and DHS to appease political donors and right-wing pressure groups.

The same disregard for humanity. The same corruption of justice. The same weaponization of government to serve ideology instead of law.

But just as Adams turned the tide in 1841 by reminding America of its founding principles, we must do the same today.

Because this isn’t about immigration policy. It’s not about border security. It’s about the foundational principle that all people — all people — have the right to due process, the right to protest, and the right to be free from government persecution.

John Quincy Adams knew in 1841 what we must remember today: a government that can deny due process to anyone can eventually deny it to everyone. The rule of law either protects us all, or it ultimately protects none of us.

That family in Oklahoma, whose lives were shattered by an ICE raid on the wrong house? They weren’t caught in the gears of bureaucracy. They were deliberately crushed by a system designed to instill fear, to dehumanize, and to render justice optional.

Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk are not threats to national security; they’re reminders of what democracy is supposed to look like: people using their voices to speak uncomfortable truths. That’s what authoritarians fear most.

And if we let this continue — if we fail to act — we are complicit in the unraveling of the very idea of America.

We must fight this on every front:

First, we need immediate legal challenges to every deportation that lacks due process. Constitutional rights don’t depend on citizenship: they apply to every person on American soil.

Second, we need massive public protest against these policies. Universities should, within the law, refuse to cooperate with ICE and protect their students. Communities should establish sanctuary policies. Legal organizations should provide pro bono representation to those targeted.

And finally, we need to reclaim the narrative. This isn’t about immigration policy or national security; it’s about the most fundamental American principle: that all people possess inalienable rights, even those who aren’t citizens or are accused of a crime.

John Quincy Adams knew in 1841 what we must remember today: a government that can deny due process to anyone can eventually deny it to everyone. The rule of law either protects us all, or it ultimately protects none of us.

The time for action is now. Contact your representatives. Support legal defense funds. Share this story. Join the fight.

Because if we don’t stand up for them today, there may be no one left to stand up for us tomorrow.

May Day has two meanings, both of which are directly applicable to today. It commemorates the solidarity of the labor movement (139 years ago today, workers gathered in the streets of Chicago to demand an eight-hour day).

“Mayday!” is also a distress signal used by pilots to indicate imminent danger or a life-threatening emergency (derived from the French phrase “m’aider,” meaning “help me”).

That about sums it up: Our solidarity is necessary to overcome the imminent dangers we now face — all from Donald J. Trump.

I doubt we can wait until the midterm elections to contain him. Unless we stop the damage he’s doing to both our democracy and our economy before then, much of it will be irreversible. It’s not even clear what sort of election we’ll be able to have 18 months from now.

Demonstrations are planned today in more than 900 cities against both the Trump regime and the oligarchy that supports and benefits from it. The official banner under which people will march today is, appropriately, “For the Workers, Not the Billionaires.”

Our solidarity is necessary to overcome the imminent dangers we now face — all from Donald J. Trump.

Under Trump, Americans are relearning the lesson we learned about the oligarchy during the Gilded Age of the late 1890s, when robber barons ran the government and the economy for their own benefit: Oligarchy is incompatible with the common good.

The Republican Party and Elon Musk’s efforts to cut veterans’ benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, food safety, food stamps, and much else that Americans depend on — all to create room in the budget for another big tax cut mostly benefiting the wealthy — is the latest and clearest example of oligarchic muscle-flexing in the Trump regime.

This is forcing the Democratic Party to move toward economic populism. Despite recent discussion in The New York Times among former leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council attributing Bill Clinton’s electoral victories to his neoliberal stances, the energy in today’s Party lies in 83-year-old Bernie Sanders and 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who are explicitly taking on the oligarchy.

Meanwhile, Trump’s polls are plummeting. Almost all now show him underwater, with approval ratings hovering around 42 percent and disapprovals at over 55 percent.

Trump’s trade war is choking off supply chains and threatening to push up prices and create shortages of critical components and products.

It’s already causing the economy to contract — by 0.3 percent in the first quarter, according to a Commerce Department report out yesterday. That’s a huge reversal from the strong 2.4 percent expansion in the final full quarter of Biden’s presidency. Wall Street has chalked up the worst performance at the start of a new presidential term in almost half a century.

At the same time, Trump is edging ever closer to defying the Supreme Court. In a unanimous ruling on April 10, the court ordered Trump to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man the regime wrongly deported to El Salvador last month.

In a Tuesday interview on ABC, Trump acknowledged that he “could” secure Abrego Garcia’s release — contradicting Attorney General Bondi’s assertion that the U.S. doesn’t have the power to do so — but said he won’t. “If he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that, but he is not.”

Hopefully, today’s May Day demonstrations will lead to larger ones (I’m still counting on a “national civic uprising” that even conservatives like columnist David Brooks support).

But what’s the goal of such displays of solidarity? How do they fight the imminent dangers?

Mark my words: If the economy continues to deteriorate, if the regime cuts services that the public depends on in order to give the oligarchy a huge tax cut, and if Trump ever more openly defies the Supreme Court — the solidarity will pay off in such a huge outpouring of national anger that Congress impeaches and convicts the orange menace before the midterm elections.

Mayday! And Happy May Day.

It’s such a tempting storyline: UPS announces that it will lay off 20,000 workers, citing “changes in the global trade policy and new or increased tariffs.”

There you have it. A perfect example of how Trump’s tariffs are screwing working people, many of whom voted for him.

Or is it?

UPS, like every major U.S. corporation, is in business to extract as much wealth as possible and shovel it to its shareholders and top executives in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. And like every major corporation, UPS will pay for that wealth extraction by laying off as many workers as possible. That may reduce the production of goods and services, but so be it, if it generates more money for shareholders and executives. In big business today, wealth extraction always comes first.

This is not a company struggling to make ends meet.

Let’s look at some of UPS’s numbers. In 2023, the company authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks, starting in 2024 with $500 million and another $5.5 billion in dividends. In 2025, UPS plans to spend another $1 billion on stock buybacks, as well as $5.5 billion more in dividends. In 2024, not incidentally, UPS posted $8.5 billion in profits. This is not a company struggling to make ends meet.

(Stock buybacks are when a corporation uses its own funds to repurchase shares and thereby raise the price of those shares, which greatly pleases its largest shareholders. Before deregulation in 1982, a company buying its own shares was considered illegal stock manipulation.)

To maintain this wealth pump for its investors and top officers, who are primarily compensated with stock incentives, cash needs to be generated and replenished. The simplest way to do that without acquiring more debt is to lay off workers.

Before the deregulation of Wall Street that came with the Reagan and Clinton administrations, no corporate manager would dare to lay off workers during profitable periods. To do so was a sign of poor management, a blemish on the CEO and his/her team. Workers and their communities were considered corporate stakeholders, right along with shareholders.

But after deregulation, the only stakeholder that mattered was the shareholder. The hell with workers and their communities. Companies began moving corporate headquarters to the sites of the highest governmental bidders, and in short order layoffs during good times became a symbol of smart management. Greed is good reigned supreme. (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers for the gory details.)

Do not lend any credibility to corporate PR announcements. Their job is to do all they can to obscure how much they are shoveling to Wall Street.

The Teamsters union, which represents 300,000 UPS hourly workers, will fight these recently announced layoffs. Sean O’Brian, who spoke at the Republican national convention in 2024, sees any Teamsters layoffs as a violation of the contract:

United Parcel Service is contractually obligated to create 30,000 Teamsters jobs under our current national master agreement. If UPS wants to continue to downsize corporate management, the Teamsters won’t stand in its way. But if the company intends to violate our contract or makes any attempt to go after hard-fought, good-paying Teamsters jobs, UPS will be in for a hell of a fight.

We can be sure that the Teamsters will be looking closely at UPS’s finances, especially the large amounts going to stock buybacks and dividends. They will not sacrifice their members’ jobs on the altar of obscene wealth extraction.

Will the Trump tariffs have a major impact on UPS jobs?

We just don’t know that yet. But one thing we know for sure: Do not lend any credibility to corporate PR announcements. Their job is to do all they can to obscure how much they are shoveling to Wall Street. Their credo: The extent and consequences of the wealth extraction machine must never be revealed.

Blaming the Trump tariffs for every sin imaginable may be emotionally satisfying. But letting larger corporations and their Wall Street handlers off the hook when it comes to job destruction, which the Democrats have done for more than a generation, is in large part why we have Trump in the first place.

On April 24, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to fast-track deep-sea mining in U.S. and international waters that sidelines international law and puts fragile ocean ecosystems, Indigenous rights, and millions of lives that depend on a healthy ocean at risk.

While this is being sold to the American public as a bold move to secure America's mineral supply chain, address climate change, or boost the clean energy transition, science and the tech and auto industries have already debunked that ruse. In the current climate, it will surprise very few that this is instead another giveaway to well-heeled corporate interests that will gamble away the health of our oceans and future for the short-term profit of a few corporations.

Once destroyed, deep-sea ecosystems are likely gone forever, taking with them species and processes vital to planetary health.

The Broligarchy is not just burning fossil fuels and sending rockets into space or dismantling American institutions. They are also gearing up to mine the depths of our last great wilderness in the deep sea. And as we've seen, they won't let details like the well-founded concerns about the cost to people, the climate, or our shared future get in their way.

Breaking the Rules of the Global Commons

For decades, the international community has worked through the United Nation's International Seabed Authority (ISA) to regulate whether and how deep-sea mining might proceed, recognizing the deep sea as the "common heritage of humankind," not a resource to be plundered by any one country or corporation.

Trump's executive order tramples that principle of shared stewardship, reviving a Cold War-era U.S. law that bypasses the U.N. framework and green-lights corporate plunder of the seafloor. This reckless move undermines global legal norms, threatens to unravel international cooperation, and could trigger an unregulated race for the ocean's resources at a time when stronger protections are most needed. As ISA Secretary General Leticia Carvalho warns, dismantling multilateral ocean governance threatens the very foundations of global cooperation, setting a dangerous precedent for the future of all shared global commons.

A Business Model Built on Sand

The economic case for deep-sea mining is collapsing. There is no current shortage of minerals like cobalt or nickel, and advances in battery chemistry, recycling, circular economy models, and alternative materials are rapidly reducing projected future demands for deep-sea minerals. Even if mining started today, it would likely take more than a decade for the industry to bring deep-sea minerals to market at scale.

Early ventures like Nautilus Minerals and Loke Marine Minerals have already failed, exposing the financial risks. On Tuesday, The Metals Company (TMC) upped the ante on its risky bet to fast-track deep-sea mining when it submitted its application under the U.S. Seabed Mining Code to begin commercial mining in areas licensed by the International Seabed Authority. For the president, with his track record on casinos, backing a company like TMC is a gamble whose cost will be borne by coastal communities, Indigenous rights, and investors alike.

Americans already face $150 billion annually in costs from climate change. And our children and grandchildren born in 2024 may have to bear the weight of $500,000 over their lifetime. We can't afford to absorb the cost of another failed venture while the billionaire class does not even pay their fair share of taxes and does little to fix the problems their corporations have created.

A New Colonialism in the Pacific

Perhaps most shamefully, Trump's executive order green-lights a new wave of colonialism, opening the deep sea of Pacific waters to corporate plunder without the consent of Pacific Peoples—communities whose lives, cultures, and economies are deeply intertwined with the ocean.

Trump's executive order shows exactly why the world needs a strong, binding global moratorium on deep-sea mining.

The Pacific has already spoken: American Samoa, Hawai'i, and several Pacific Island nations have called for moratoriums to protect their fisheries and heritage. Indigenous leaders have made it clear—the deep sea is not a sacrifice zone. Yet TMC, which leveraged its partnership with Nauru to fast-track negotiations at the ISA, is now looking to shift its strategy and cut deals under U.S. law, sidelining Pacific voices.

By moving to open adjacent U.S. federal waters for mining, without meaningful consultation, the United States perpetuates a familiar and painful pattern of resource extraction without consent. We cannot allow history to repeat itself in the deep sea.

No Science. No Safeguards. No Justification.

Despite industry assurances, we still know remarkably little about the deep ocean. In mining target zones such as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, over 90% of species have yet to be formally described by science, and essential life-sustaining ecosystem functions like carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling are barely understood.

There is no credible scientific evidence demonstrating that deep-sea mining can be conducted without causing irreversible harm, nor any proven way to prevent, mitigate, or repair it. Once destroyed, deep-sea ecosystems are likely gone forever, taking with them species and processes vital to planetary health.

This week's congressional hearing on deep-sea mining underscores the urgent need for democratic oversight of an industry advancing without sufficient scientific, legal, or public scrutiny. Congress must act to protect the public interest, not hand over our oceans to private companies chasing speculative profits.

The Path Forward: A Global Moratorium

With a dearth of independent science, no enforceable global safeguards, and no justification, deep-sea mining isn't just risky--it's reckless.

Trump's executive order shows exactly why the world needs a strong, binding global moratorium on deep-sea mining.

We must defend international law. We must defend the oceans. And we must reject a broken economic model that gambles our planet's future for corporate gain.

The deep sea belongs to all of us, and we have a duty to protect it, not destroy it. The future of the oceans—and the future stability of global commons governance—demands nothing less.