Recently, I had the opportunity to stand in a friend’s kitchen eating pupusas, the Salvadoran national food, while listening to an update on conditions in Central America from Cristosal’s Noah Bullock. Cristosal is a key Central American human rights organization engaged in legal advocacy, forensic investigation, and amplifying the voices of people who are experiencing—and resisting—repression in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. Noah offered considerable detail on the conditions in those countries, but his basic message for us living so far away was simple: No matter how dark the road gets, we keep on walking. We know the sun will rise again.

So, while most of the world (and the media) is all too reasonably focused on the ever-evolving, increasingly disastrous conflicts in Iran and Lebanon, I found myself instead thinking about the countries to our south.

Benign Neglect?

During the years when our main political work involved opposing US aggression in Latin America, my partner and I used to believe that the whole region would be better off if the imperial eye were focused on other parts of the world. Most Central American countries may be poor, but they’re more likely to prosper during times when Washington isn’t treating them as backyard gold mines, or pawns in a global conflict.

Take Nicaragua, for example. US Marines first occupied that country early in the last century and, by the 1920s, had helped establish a dynastic dictatorship there that would last until 1979. During that time, US companies profited endlessly from various forms of resource extraction, including the gold of the Las Minas (The Mines) area, comprised of the towns of Siuna, Rosita, and Bonanza; lumber from various parts of the country; and palm oil from its Atlantic coast.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States used its Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union as a pretext for directly meddling in the lives and politics of countries across Latin America. Bogus threats of a communist takeover, for instance, excused the CIA’s 1954 overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. Carlos Castillo Armas was then installed as president, the first of a long series of dictators, much to the satisfaction of that US commercial giant, the United Fruit Company, which proceeded to treat the country as its own private orchard.

When Chilean President Salvador Allende supported nationalizing his country’s two biggest copper mines, their US owners benefited from a 1973 CIA-backed coup that overthrew him. The newly installed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet then launched a campaign of terror, torture, disappearances, and the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans over his 17 years in power.

Similarly, the United States supported right-wing, repressive governments in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, and Uruguay during those Cold War decades. However, beginning with the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979, most of those countries managed to rid themselves of their repressive rulers in the last two decades of the 20th century.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States began to push Latin America aside and focus elsewhere, sending its “Harvard boys” off to Russia and points east. Like the Chicago Boys of the 1970s, who remade Chile’s economy as a model of laissez-faire capitalism, those young Harvard economists sought to offer similar “benefits” to the benighted former Soviet Socialist Republics. Their efforts led to a fire sale of state industries and birthed a class of oligarchs whose successors still rule Russia and various former Soviet republics.

Then, beginning with the first Gulf War against Iraq (also in 1991), and especially after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, the US acquired a new, if amorphous, “enemy” and launched the Global War on Terror. Washington’s geographic focus then turned to Central Asia, the Middle East, and northern Africa, as the US began what would prove to be disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now (with as-yet-unknown consequences) in Iran. Meanwhile, Latin America experienced a bit of what (in entirely different circumstances) President Richard Nixon’s adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed “benign neglect.”

An Evil Harvest

As it happened, however, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States planted seeds in Central America that would eventually bloom as twin disasters for the region: the rise of international gangs and the ravages of climate change. While Mexico’s gangs are largely homegrown affairs, those in El Salvador began as US imports. During the dictatorships and guerrilla wars of the 1980s, numerous Salvadorans, fleeing government repression, sought asylum in the United States. Thousands would settle in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Once the war in El Salvador ended in 1992, many of them headed home again, some bringing the gang culture of California with them, including Mara Salvatrucha (also known as MS-13) and the 18th Street gang, both from the Los Angeles area. I got a glimpse of that form of migration in 1993, when I spent a few days in El Salvador. On a wall in the capital city, San Salvador, I saw the tag of a gang from my very own neighborhood in San Francisco, the XXII-B, or “Twenty-two-B” crew. That stood for the corner of 22nd and Bryant streets, the very corner of San Francisco where my partner and I were then living. We’d watched them grow up on our block. They were never a big deal in San Francisco, nor did they really become so in El Salvador, unlike MS-13 and the 18th Street crew.

As for climate change, we obviously can’t pin all the blame for that on the United States alone, although our current president is doing his best to drive us in that direction. (Fond as he is of fake awards, perhaps someday he’ll get one for the World’s Most Devastating Climate Changer.) Until 20 years ago, however, the US was the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and, though now leapfrogged by China, it remains historically by far the world’s largest user of fossil fuels.

One result of the intensifying global climate emergency is a series of devastating droughts in Central America, which lies within the “Dry Corridor,” running from southern Mexico to Panama. That region, inhabited in many places by subsistence farmers, has historically experienced cycles of wetness and drought, corresponding in part to the El Niño oscillation, which periodically warms the Pacific Ocean’s surface, bringing fierce rainfall to the West Coast of the United States and severe drought further south. In recent decades, climate change has been lengthening the drought periods and multiplying their effects. Increased heat reduces soil moisture, while rising seas contaminate estuaries and aquifers, leaving less water available for farming. A new round of droughts began in 2014 and, in 2018 and 2019, farmers across Central America would lose 75% to 100% of their main food crop, corn.

Worse yet, on our ever-hotter planet in this era of ever-more-intense climate change, the strongest El Niño in 140 years is predicted to begin later this year.

It turns out that not only has the US historically treated Central America terribly, but its neglect of the region in our era has hardly been benign. Under such circumstances, it shouldn’t be a surprise that, by the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, the combination of US “exports”—murderous gang violence, political repression, and drought—had led record numbers of migrants to our southern border, desperately seeking asylum in this country. And that brings us to Donald J. Trump, and his new best friend, Nayib Bukele.

In El Salvador: Trump’s BFF Nayib Bukele

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.” He’s young, handsome, and extremely popular in his own country. Originally a man of the left, while mayor of the capital, San Salvador, from 2015 to 2019, he succeeded in reducing the murder rate there not through repression but by mending the “tejido social”—the social fabric. He rebuilt the city center, providing streetlights and surveillance cameras, thereby creating a safer central area for street vendors. He also opened up educational and recreational opportunities for the city’s youth. In addition, he made cosmetic changes symbolic of progressive politics like renaming Roberto D’Aubuisson Street, so-called in honor of a death-squad leader.

Bukele claimed that such measures alone had produced a genuine decline in the city’s disturbing murder rate. But investigations have since shown that he also followed in the footsteps of previous Salvadoran presidents by making pacts with the gangs to reduce visible violence. (For an exploration of Bukele’s agreements with them and later with Donald Trump, don’t miss the PBS Frontline film on the subject.)

In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

His 2019 election to the presidency began his full-scale shift to the right and toward what has now become full-on authoritarian rule. In 2020, he ordered soldiers into El Salvador’s congress to force it to accept a $103 million loan from the United States to underwrite the US-El Salvador anti-gang Plan Vulcan, which involved the massive incarceration of accused gang members (along with many innocents). At the same time, Bukele made an agreement with MS-13 to spare some of its key members in return for a reduction in the capital’s murder rate, which did indeed drop steeply during the first years of his first term as president. But in 2022, some MS-13 members who were supposed to be protected were mistakenly caught up in a sweep and, in retribution, murders spiked once again. As Cristosal’s Noah Bullock explained in that talk I listened to recently, the gangs have the power to dial visible street violence up or down. They use violence as a way to communicate with both El Salvador’s citizenry and its government. A display of corpses on street corners is a way of sending messages to both of them.

In 2021, having captured a majority in the legislature, President Bukele took control of the judiciary, too, by ordering an increasingly supine congress to oust the five members of the Supreme Court of Justice. Then, following a landslide reelection victory in 2024, he rewrote the constitution so that he could serve consecutive terms as president ad infinitum, while also building the now-notorious CECOT “terrorism confinement” prison, where torture and sexual abuse have become daily occurrences.

When Bukele met with President Trump at the White House during his first term, it was clear that the admiration was mutual. Trump could, of course, only dream of exercising the kind of control Bukele by then wielded over all three branches of the Salvadoran government. In 2025, after Trump’s second inauguration, he and Bukele met again and struck a deal: The United States would pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison 250 mostly Venezuelan immigrants to this country in the CECOT mega prison. The transfer of those men (over the objections of a US federal judge) was chronicled in carefully-produced videos of Salvadoran soldiers frog-marching their shackled captives into CECOT, pushing them to their knees, and forcibly shaving their heads.

As investigations would later reveal, those men were not, as claimed by the Trump administration, members of Venezuela’s quasi-gang Tren de Aragua, but ordinary citizens caught up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups. Except for a few Salvadoran citizens, who remain in CECOT to this day, they were eventually freed. Those who were released, however, described weeks of torture and sexual abuse in, among other places, a CBS "60 Minutes" report that was, for a time, spiked by the new editor-in-chief of CBS News, Trump admirer Bari Weiss.

In truth, though, $6 million was chump change to a Salvadoran government used to hundreds of millions of dollars of largesse from Washington. In this case, however, Bukele got something he wanted a lot more than money. The US was holding a group of nine extradited MS-13 leaders, and MS-13 wanted them returned to El Salvador. Hoping to keep the retributive killing in his country down, Bukele wanted them back, too. There was, as The Washington Post reported in October 2025, only one problem: Some of those prisoners were US informants, who had assisted the FBI in disrupting MS-13 activity in this country. Federal law prohibited turning them over to El Salvador, but Trump assigned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to work things out with Bukele. According to the Post:

To deport them to El Salvador, Attorney General Pam Bondi would need to terminate the Justice Department’s arrangements with those men, Rubio said. He assured Bukele that Bondi would complete that process and Washington would hand over the MS-13 leaders.

Rubio’s extraordinary pledge illustrates the extent to which the Trump administration was willing to meet Bukele’s demands as it negotiated what would become one of the signature agreements of President Donald Trump’s early months in office.

Not surprisingly, repression against the press and civil society continues in El Salvador to this day. Many opposition journalists have had to flee the country. In May 2025, human rights attorney Ruth López Alfaro, head of Cristosal’s Anti-Corruption and Justice unit, was arrested. She remains in prison as of this writing. Shortly after that, Cristosal made the difficult decision to move its offices to Guatemala in order to continue its human rights work in greater safety.

Eyes on El Salvador

These days, it’s all eyes on Iran. But while President Trump is ever more desperately focused on the Middle East, maybe some of us should still be focusing on El Salvador. President Bukele (elected democratically like Donald Trump) is following the same strongman handbook that Trump has been using. The steps are the same for aspiring autocrats around the world, whether in Hungary, Russia, or the United States. Here are a few bits of guidance from that metaphorical manual:

• Attack the judiciary, as Trump & Company have done every time they get an adverse federal ruling;
• Capture the legislature and make it do your will, whatever gerrymandering or electoral finagling it takes in Trump’s case;
• Attack the press and civil society organizations, labeling them, as Trump has, “enemies of the people” and “domestic terrorists”; and
• Plan to rule indefinitely, as Trump repeatedly hints he’d like to do.

Oh, and it doesn’t matter how evil your partners in crime turn out to be, whether it’s Bibi Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Nayib Bukele. In his eagerness to play the strongman, Donald Trump has climbed into bed with the world’s coolest dictator—and the criminals of Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

But, as Noah from Cristosal told our little gathering the other day, we have to keep on walking through the dark, knowing that every act of solidarity and resistance brings the dawn that much closer.

On May 6, 1866, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago today, Thaddeus Stevens, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and the leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, rose to introduce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution on the floor of the. Stevens, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was also co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction set up by Congress, in late 1865, to promote a radical Reconstruction, a program advanced over the consistent objections of President Andrew Johnson.

Here is how Stevens introduced the Amendment:

Congress tasked the committee with reconstructing the nation and setting new constitutional baselines for post-Civil War America; this is difficult work; above all, we are trying to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution. But I beg gentlemen to consider the magnitude of the task which was imposed upon the committee. They were expected to suggest a plan for rebuilding a shattered nation—a nation which though not dissevered was yet shaken and riven by the gigantic and persistent efforts of six million able and ardent men; of bitter rebels striving through four years of bloody war. It cannot be denied that this terrible struggle sprang from the vicious principles incorporated into the institutions of our country. Our fathers had been compelled to postpone the principles of their great Declaration, and wait for the full establishment till a more propitious time. That time ought to be present now. But the public mind has been educated in error for a century. How difficult in a day to unlearn it. In rebuilding, it is necessary to clear away the rotten and defective portions of the old foundations, and to sink deep and found the repaired edifice upon the firm foundation of eternal justice. If, perchance, the accumulated quicksands render it impossible to reach in every part so firm a basis, then it becomes our duty to drive deep and solid the substituted piles on which to build. It would not be wise to prevent the raising of the structure because some corner of it might be founded upon materials subject to the inevitable laws of mortal decay. It were better to shelter the household and trust to the advancing progress of a higher morality and a purer and more intelligent principle to underpin the defective corner.

The Amendment passed in the House on June 13, by a vote of 138 in favor and 36 opposed, having passed in the Senate five days earlier, on June 8, by a vote of 33 in favor and 11 opposed. In other words, roughly a quarter of US Representatives and Senators, serving in houses of Congress that did not include representatives from the seceded Confederate states, voted against the amendment.

It is tempting to imagine that the establishment of egalitarian citizenship in the aftermath of a bloody Civil War fought in its name proceeded as a matter of course. But it did not. It was bitterly contested, by everyone aligned with the Confederacy, but also by many Northern Democrats, who rallied behind Andrew Johnson’s efforts to quickly reincorporate the eleven defeated Southern states without substantially empowering emancipated formerly enslaved people or enforcing any form of retributive justice. And it is been bitterly contested ever since.

Stevens and his Radical Republican allies in Congress understood the strength of the opposition to their vision of a multi-racial and non-racist democracy, and they fought a decade-long battle on its behalf, centered on both enforceable legal and civic equality and land reform designed to empower formerly-enslaved agricultural laborers. They succeeded in many ways, passing numerous bills designed to support the civil rights and economic opportunities of emancipated Blacks, and securing passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Yet the gains were short-lived, betrayed by the infamous Compromise of 1877 that placed Republican Rutherford Hayes in the White House and ending the final remnants of the Union’s military occupation of the South, leading in short order to the reinstitution of Black subordination via the new Jim Crow system of racial segregation and extortionate share-cropping. (While there have been many fine histories of this period, to my mind the best is Eric Foner’s award-winning Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.)

The Fourteenth Amendment was the cornerstone of the effort to truly reconstruct the postwar nation on the foundations of non-racial citizenship. In the words of historian T.J. Stiles, it was “The Constitutional Amendment That Reinvented Freedom”: “It established birthright citizenship, required ‘due process’ and ‘equal protection’ of the law for everyone, and put the federal government in the business of policing liberty. It removed race and ethnicity from the legal definition of American identity.”

Stevens was one of the principal legislative proponents of the Amendment. And, as President Johnson consistently sought to obstruct such efforts, he was one of the ring leaders of the 1868 effort to impeach Johnson. Indeed, he succeeded in this effort—Johnson was famously impeached by the House on February 24, 1868, by a vote of 126-47-- though Johnson was eventually acquitted in the Senate by the narrow margin of 35-19, one short of the 2/3 majority necessary to convict.

As Bruce Levine notes in his terrific 2021 political biography, Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, Stevens was reviled and calumnied by opponents of Reconstruction, both in his lifetime and long into the 20th century. William A. Dunning, the dean of “Lost Cause” historians, described Stevens in 1907 as “truculent, vindictive, and cynical.” Writing in 1931, James Truslow Adams called Stevens “the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to power in America.” James G, Randall, writing in his influential 1937 The Civil War and Reconstruction, similarly described him as “filled with ‘vindictive ugliness, unfairness, intolerance, and hatefulness,’” a view carried over into the 1969 edition of the book, co-edited with David Donald, the textbook assigned in the Civil War class I took at Queens College in 1976. The most enduring image of Stevens was produced not in a book but in a film, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “Birth of a Nation,” one of whose chief protagonists, Austin Stoneman—an ugly, club-footed, lecherous hypocrite—was clearly modeled on Stevens.

Woodrow Wilson was only slightly less harsh, writing on “The Reconstruction of the Southern States” in The Atlantic in 1901: “He had no timidity, no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy, no regard or thought for the sensibilities of the minority, — being rough-hewn and without embarrassing sensibilities himself, — an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”

It is true that Stevens seemed to have little timidity, and appears to have been something of a pit bull in his refusal to let the cause of Reconstruction go. It is also true that he had “no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy,” but only in this sense: he sought, with his colleagues, to revolutionize the “constitutional lines of policy” that had already been decimated by a Civil War, and to use the Constitution’s own Article V process to amend the Constitution. Stevens was a constitutional revolutionary—the point of Levine’s brilliant book--and thus “an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”

Like everything about the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment was hardly self-enforcing. This was understood by its drafters, which is why they included the language of Section 5: “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article” (both the Thirteen and the Fifteenth Amendments contain similar language). Every aspect of the Amendment remained hotly contested for a century after its passage. But in the 1960’s, after decades of intense struggle by a civil rights movement that faced daily attacks on life and limb, Congress finally passed two pieces of legislation designed to enforce the 14th and the 15th Amendments—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like the above-mentioned amendments, these landmark pieces of legislation faced strong opposition, and did not pass without legislative battle. The first passed in the House by a vote of 290-130 and in the Senate by a vote of 73-27; the second passed the House by a vote of 328-74 and the Senate by a vote of 79-18. And as is well known, the passage of these laws helped to generate a powerful backlash against any form of racial liberalism.

That said, both the basic intent behind the acts, and the federal bureaucracies established to enforce them, became more or less settled features of US law for the past half-century—until now.

To be fair, the Voting Rights Act has been besieged ever since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision. The Court’s 6-3 decision this week in Louisiana v. Callais further eviscerated the Act.

At the same time, we are currently witnessing a wholesale assault on the 14th Amendment, and the entire legal system established to enforce it, by the Trump administration. The examples are loud and clear: the outright attack on birthright citizenship, which is currently before the Court; the obvious suspension of due process by the DHS-ICE regime of arrest, detention, and deportation that in the past year has swept up well over 500,000 Americans; and the use of the Justice Department—first established in 1870 to oversee the rule of law in the formerly-Confederate states—to threaten and punish “political enemies.”

Perhaps nothing better symbolizes this Trumpist rejection of the 14th Amendment than the second Trump presidency itself. We should not forget that very powerful arguments were advanced, by numerous reputable conservative legal scholars, including J. Michael Luttig, to justify keeping Trump off several state ballots in 2024, on the grounds that his incitement of the January 6, 2021 insurrection violated the 14th Amendment’s Section 3. In spite of these arguments, the Supreme Court ruled against such moves in March 2024, holding that only Congress could attempt such a maneuver. Trump, his candidacy bolstered, went on to win the 2024 election, and then proceeded, on day one of his second term, to pardon or commute the sentences of every one of the over 1200 people who had been convicted of crimes on for their role in the January 6 insurrection.

Under Trump 20.0, even the barest lip service to the notion of equal justice under the law has been abandoned with contempt.

It is a sad irony of history that this is all happening as the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and that Trump goes about the task of destroying constitutional democracy even as he makes extravagant plans to celebrate “America 250.”

And it is simply sad, and outrageous, that 160 years after Thaddeus Stevens announced the intention “to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution,” Donald Trump is doing his best to trample on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the very idea of liberal democracy.

In the span of a month, two stories have laid bare an uncomfortable truth about progressive politics: Too many people will protect powerful men at the expense of the women they harm, whether to protect a movement, a party, or because they’ve been conditioned to believe this is how power works.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) announced his resignation from Congress last Month after multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment and assault. March’s revelation by Dolores Huerta that iconic labor leader Cesar Chavez sexually abused girls and women for decades is still reverberating through communities that revered him. In both cases, the pattern is the same: Whisper networks carried warnings for years, but survivors who came forward were silenced or discredited for the sake of the “greater good.”

Why? Because Swalwell was seen as a rising Democratic star, a useful weapon against President Donald Trump. Because Chavez was a civil rights icon whose legacy anchored an entire movement. Because people convinced themselves that exposing the truth would do more damage than burying it.

They were wrong. Silence doesn’t protect movements, it protects oppressors. It tells every woman who has been harassed, groped, or assaulted by a powerful man on “our side” that her pain is an acceptable cost of doing business.

Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.

We have seen this calculation before—the quiet bargain where accountability is sacrificed on the altar of political convenience. It never works. The truth always surfaces. And when it does, the cover-up inflicts its own damage, compounding the harm to survivors and eroding the moral authority these movements depend on.

Consider the moment we’re in. We have a president who was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing a woman, and accused by at least 28 others, and has faced no meaningful consequences for it. A president who has made clear, through word and policy, that he believes powerful men can do whatever they want. His administration is rolling back decades of progress on combatting sexual harassment and assault in workplaces and schools; gutting protections against discrimination; and dismantling the legal infrastructure women depend on for safe, equitable workplaces. The Supreme Court, made up of one-third of Trump appointees, is the first since the 1950s to rule against women and people of color in a majority of civil rights cases.

This is the landscape women are navigating right now. And into this landscape, we are supposed to accept that the men or other abusers on “our side” get a pass? No.

If we are serious about building a world where women have equal power—economic, political, and personal—then we have to be serious about accountability within our own ranks. Not because it’s easy, but because the alternative is corrosive. Every time we look the other way, we tell the next generation that a woman’s safety matters less than a man’s career. We weaken the very movements we claim to be protecting.

The women who came forward about Swalwell, including content creators who had no institutional backing, no legal team—just their own platforms and conviction—showed extraordinary courage. So did the survivors who finally broke decades of silence about Chavez. They did what the political establishment was unwilling to do. They chose the truth.

The lesson here is not that our movements are broken. It’s that they are only as strong as our willingness to hold everyone in them accountable. Letting people in power abuse women is never acceptable, regardless of party, regardless of legacy, regardless of how inconvenient the timing might feel.

We are in a fight for women’s futures in this country. That fight requires moral clarity. It requires us to stop treating accountability as a threat and start treating it as the foundation. Good things, lasting things, come from doing what is right, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

When I stepped into leadership as co-executive director of Popular Democracy in Action alongside Analilia Mejia in 2021, the central question we both set out to answer was not whether the far-right was consolidating power. That much was obvious. The question, as leaders of the largest progressive networks of base-building organizations in the country, was whether we could scale our power to meet it.

How do you build enough base and narrative power to confront a coordinated, well-funded, disciplined right-wing shift? How do you move beyond reactive mobilization and build durable organizing infrastructure? How do you prepare communities not just to resist authoritarianism, but to win governing power?

For years, our organization invested in answering those questions. We refined our organizing model through practice, experimentation, and hard-earned lessons. So when the opportunity arose last November for one of our own, Analilia Mejía, to run for the open seat in New Jersey’s 11th District left vacant by Mikie Sherrill’s successful gubernatorial bid, I understood it as more than a campaign. It was an opportunity to test our theory of change.

On Monday, as Analilia was sworn into the House of Representatives as New Jersey’s newest congresswoman, there were many reasons to celebrate. She beat her opponent by at least 20 points, running a whopping 12 points ahead of 2024 presidential margins, underscoring the strength of a people-powered campaign. Not only did our movement succeed in sending a champion for the working class to Congress, but we have proven that our organizing model could hold up under today’s political conditions and win.

Building Up Guardians of Democracy

Organizers often inherit an electoral culture built on urgency and amnesia. Consultants arrive late. Mailers flood inboxes. Relentless text and phone calls. Volunteers are recruited weeks before Election Day. Then everyone disappears until the next crisis.

We grew tired of repeating a cycle that left our people feeling mobilized in the moment and abandoned afterward. So we chose a different path.

This victory in NJ-11 required deep relationship building; message discipline; and courage from organizers, volunteers, and voters alike.

We built the Guardians of Democracy program, and through it Popular Democracy in Action and our affiliates invested in leadership development rooted in political education and hyperlocal relational organizing. At its core, Guardians is a civic infrastructure strategy—one that can be replicated, scaled, and paired with other leadership pipelines to deliver material wins for Black, brown, and working-class communities.

Participants ground themselves in a worker-centered history of America—from the Reconstruction Amendments to the Civil Rights Movement—connecting neighborhood organizing to a longer arc of struggle over who counts and who governs. After a series of trainings, they practice organizing where they live. Each participant receives a list of 100 of their closest neighbors, often on their own block. They learn to initiate organizing conversations, sustain relationships, and bring more people into their local campaigns.

The goal is simple and ambitious: Build neighborhood-based leaders during non-election years who could be activated when it matters most.

Over the last few years, we've trained 12,430 leaders across the country. We've mapped strategic geographies and have worked closely with our affiliates to refine the model: Train members deeply, anchor them locally, and maintain consistent outreach long before ballots are even printed.

This is the kind of quiet, patient, disciplined organizing infrastructure that can become an organization’s secret weapon.

Moment of Truth: Organizing to Elect One of Our Own

In a crowded field of 13 candidates in NJ-11, with virtually no district-wide name recognition and a firm commitment to reject corporate PAC money, Analilia entered the race as a clear underdog. From the moment the seat opened, colleagues, movement peers, elected officials, and community leaders urged her to step forward. For me, her candidacy represented a proving ground. Could our organizing infrastructure pass this stress test?

As one of the first races of the 2026 midterm cycle, the outcome in NJ-11 carries significant weight in the broader narrative wars shaping this political moment. Would voters in a district long represented by establishment figures choose a movement candidate running unapologetically on Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and taxing the wealthiest individuals and corporations?

Then there was the question on building power in strategic geographies: Could long-term relational organizing—rooted in political education and neighborhood leadership—overcome the gravitational pull of big money and name recognition?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Success Story: Make the Road Action New Jersey

Analilia’s victory in NJ-11 was powered by more than any single organization. Labor unions, local and national movement organizations, progressive elected leaders, and grassroots networks across the district consolidated quickly and decisively around her candidacy. Organizers who have been fighting for housing, healthcare, immigrant rights, and worker power recognized the stakes of this race and pulled their weight, aligning people and resources behind a shared vision.

But any honest accounting of this victory would be remiss to not center the extraordinary organizing efforts of Make the Road Action New Jersey (MRANJ).

For years, MRANJ has built deep relationships with working-class voters, immigrants, and communities of color across NJ-11. Their members are not seasonal volunteers. They are leaders formed through a common fight for housing, economic, and immigrant justice.

When Analilia’s campaign began, the organizing muscle was already there.

Over the course of the campaign, Make the Road Action NJ led a relentless, people-powered field operation—knocking 25,100 doors in freezing winter and spring sun alike, making 154,430 calls to voters across the district, and organizing 1,078 volunteer canvass shifts. Popular Democracy in Action supported this work by mobilizing our national network, deploying staff to coordinate volunteer operations in the district, hosting national phone banks, and aligning resources with the strategy on the ground. In the lead-up to the primary on February 5, we helped fund targeted outreach, including mobile billboards in key areas and a free party bus to the polls in Belleville to boost turnout.

But numbers alone do not tell the story.

What mattered was that many of the people knocking those doors were Guardians—leaders trained in prior years to organize their own neighborhoods. They were not strangers coming into the turf. They were familiar faces. They were neighbors.

Relational organizing is often dismissed as a buzzword. In practice, it is slow, trust-based work. It means your neighbor opens the door because they know you. It means you can have a conversation about rent hikes, losing your healthcare, or fear of ICE raids because of shared lived realities.

This is what years of investment in people looks like, and it went a long way in this campaign.

Organizing Gets the Goods

This victory in NJ-11 required deep relationship building; message discipline; and courage from organizers, volunteers, and voters alike. It required labor partners, grassroots organizations, and national networks pulling in the same direction. And it required the steady leadership of Make the Road Action New Jersey, whose long-term base building anchored the work on the ground.

During these last few months, I have seen firsthand the unique power of our network.

We proved that investing in hyperlocal leaders during non-election years must come first. We proved that narrative power and base building, developed patiently over time, can withstand the test of a competitive race. Most importantly, we proved that organized people can defeat better-funded opponents without surrendering their values.

In an era defined by authoritarian escalation and billionaire consolidation, many ask whether democracy can defend itself.

No, it cannot.

But organized neighbors can.

Analilia’s victory in NJ-11 is not the end of a story. It is evidence of what becomes possible when movements invest in long-term organizing models. For organizers across the country, the lesson is clear: If we want material gains—universal healthcare, immigrant rights, wages that keep up with inflation—we must invest in leadership, relationships, and narrative power long before the next fight reaches the ballot box.

I’m old enough to have been politically cognizant, admittedly less so for a couple of the earliest, of 13 presidents (14 if you count one of them twice). Through all of those decades and all of those administrations nothing comes close to the way the current regime takes up ALL THE AIR IN THE ROOM! In fact, dare I say, no one has ever seen anything like it. The fire hose is so voluminous, ubiquitous, and inescapable that it literally takes one’s breath away.

How is this gargantuan enterprise sustained? I have a theory that President Donald Trump (or whoever are the real masters puling the strings on the public puppet) has at least two teams at work constantly. One team is in charge of producing the daily (or hourly or minute-to-minute) outrage and distraction. This is the team that has given us the Gulf of America, the takeover of Greenland, the cancer-causing windmills, the never-ending toilet flushing and never-working showers, the fight with the pope, etc., and then the really crazy stuff like the current war.

While we’re kept dizzy and disoriented by this onslaught, the other team, which consists of players like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the tech broletariat, and other bastions of the oligarchic overlords, are quietly busy with the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (as Steve Bannon put it so aptly early on). At least those parts of the administrative state that serve the more general public interests. The parts that serve elite interests, however, like the military and their domestic adjuncts in the militarized police, the repressive courts and “justice” system, and the subservient elements of the media, are richly endowed and strengthened.

For just a moment, I’d like to dwell on the central role of the media (in its legacy and social forms) both in amplifying and downplaying the crazy as well as ignoring, minimizing, or trivializing the serious. Right now, both of these outcomes are accomplished through one certain mechanism, which I’ll name presently. One way that I try to keep up with the sometimes subtle changes in the inflections in the news cycle is by maintaining an evolving and revolving list of key words or phrases that become especially annoying, but through their (over)use capture an essential dominant characterization of events. Over the course of the past several months, and particularly at the height of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement invasions, the phrase du jour was “appears to contradict,” almost always in the circumstance of video footage putting the lie to the lies of administrative officials.

What might happen if serious journalists finally said enough is enough with the spectacle and distraction?

In a similar vein, and most often in the context of displaying the utter incompetence and buffoonery of administrative nominees or officials facing congressional “oversight,” we were repeatedly subjected to the slight variant phrase, “And he (or sometimes she) brought the receipts.” And finally, along these same lines, the now ubiquitous, “He (and again, sometimes she) said the quiet part out loud.”

What all of these anodyne formulations have in common is that they all highlight the crazy or horrendous without really calling them out explicitly. Which brings me to the current term of art, which because of its complete inadequacy is the most dangerous and enabling of all: sanewashing. This flaccid, hand-wringing, bland lament is now so easily deployed that those uttering it seem completely oblivious to its actual implications. Here the more “conscious” in the media have the opportunity to lodge a complaint against their less aware colleagues or competitors without themselves then having the obligation to call things out as they really are.

But do things have to be this way? I understand the exigencies that accompany access-requiring reporting, and I also understand the necessity for profit maximization for “news” organizations. But what might happen if serious journalists finally said enough is enough with the spectacle and distraction, and stopped covering the non-stop shit show that Team One puts out, and instead started to provide in-depth, relentless coverage of the activities of Team Two. The outrage and tantrums that would come from the main inhabitant of the White House at not being given constant attention, which could be covered as the lunacy they are, would produce enough controversy to guarantee viewer- and readership and healthy profits. And we could all use this breath of fresh air.

You’ve spent 25 years working for a company. You’re proud of your work. Your wages and benefits are good, and you’ve put together a decent life. Then your CEO says the company is heading for some tough times, and that everyone from the executive suite to the shop floor will need to make some sacrifices. You are willing to join with others to help the company survive. You feel part of it. It’s your identity. You will sacrifice if that’s what you and your company need to survive.

But when the sacrifice comes, the price paid is far from equal. You, along with hundreds of other workers, are laid off and are replaced with low-wage sub-contractors.

How would you feel?

I found out when a similar scenario was foisted on 114 food service and maintenance workers at Oberlin College in 2020. Many of them had been there longer than any of the administrators and most of the faculty. Their work for the college was their life, their identity. They cared for the students. They were proud to be associated with this elite liberal institution, wokeness and all. It was by far the best employer in northeastern Ohio, which has had its industrial base decimated over the last four decades.

In 2018, Oberlin’s administration had come up with a PR program called “One Oberlin” to secure the school’s finances, upgrade facilities, and prepare for the college’s third century. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic the Oberlin community was asked to pull together to make ends meet. But while the financial stress was real, it turned out “One Oberlin” was not: It failed to include the college’s unionized blue-collar workers. They were summarily dismissed, dispatched with a little severance and little else. They were devastated.

We know how they felt because a group of Oberlin student interns interviewed many of the laid off workers. These workers were hurt and they were angry. They saw this very liberal institution as hypocritical, as betraying its values, and as uncaring and cruel.

As an Oberlin alumnus, this was a wake-up call. Although a group of us did all we could to call out the college’s hypocrisy and compel it to save these jobs, we couldn’t get them to consider the workers as part of “One Oberlin.” (We were able to raise about $180,000 from alumni for these workers to cushion the blow.)

That led me to conduct a larger study of the impact of mass layoffs on politics. It didn’t take much of a leap to see that Oberlin’s liberal establishment was very similar to that of the Democratic Party. A declared ethos of caring and positive social values seemed always to stop when budgetary restraints forced a choice between the interests of workers and those of the party’s elites and their wealthy allies.

That turned out to be the case throughout the Midwest, where the Democratic Party’s fortunes have flagged over the past few decades as their “Blue Wall” crumbled. We used demographic and mass layoff data in conjunction with election results and found a statistically solid causal relationship: As the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote went down between 1996 and 2020. Year by year, voters in areas hard hit by mass layoffs were abandoning the Democratic Party.

Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio who is trying to reclaim his job this year, found that the Democrats are still being blamed for the job destruction caused by NAFTA. After his loss in the 2024 campaign, he said:

The national Democratic brand has suffered, again, starting with NAFTA. My first term in the House [was] when NAFTA was voted on. I led the freshman class of 160 Democrats, and 40 Republicans, give or take, in opposition to NAFTA. I was in all the strategy meetings, all the vote counts. So, more Democrats voted against NAFTA than for it. More Republicans voted for it than against it. But it was seen [as a mark against Democrats], because we had a Democratic president, even though it was negotiated by a Republican, but that’s all background noise now. But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign, about NAFTA.I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers]. They expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to support the rich. But we don’t expect that from my party…

Our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that 70 percent of the respondents have negative opinions of the Democrats. That’s what happens when the Democrats, like Oberlin, bastions of liberal good will, become so cavalier about job destruction.

Can the Democrats Recover?

Everyone who wants to stop MAGA this coming fall, as well as in 2028, sure hopes so. But in the 130 congressional districts where the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more, the odds are slim. In those districts, the Democratic Party’s presence is so diminished it might as well not even exist. And it’s in those districts we need something new, starting with working-class candidates like Dan Osborn, who is running as an independent in Nebraska for the US Senate.

Are voters in red areas ready for working-class independents? Our YouGov survey shows they are. Looking only at rural county data in those four states (the reddest areas), there is strong support for a new party, independent of the two parties, that would run on a progressive populist working-class platform:

Voter Support for the New Independent Workers’ Political Association

• Rural Republicans: 50%
• Rural Independents: 50%
• Rural Democrats” 77%

(For more data and analysis please see my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.)

A Policy Hail Mary?

If the Democrats want to reconnect with working people, they need to put job security front and center. They need to stop relying on public-private partnerships, which use public funds to encourage corporate job creation that too often fails to materialize. And the Dems need to purge vacuous language, like the phrase “the opportunity society,” which promotes corporate-first thinking that adds to, rather than reduces, job precarity. In fact, they should replace their corporate-first thinking, with people-first thinking.

To do so the Democrats should call for federal job guarantees. They would do well to read Jared Abbot’s review of a compendium of poll data that shows massive support for the government serving as the employer of last resort. People don’t want handouts; they want a chance to earn a fair living. (Even the new “Working Families Guarantee” agenda, put forward by the Working Families Party, guarantees just about everything but stops short of a federal job guarantee.)

But a shift to ensuring people-first job security will not come easily to a party dominated by wealthy donors, millionaire politicians, lobbyists, pollsters, and consultants. Corporate leaders will rail against the prospect of workers having access to federal jobs and thereby forcing the company to bid up wages and benefits to retain and attract employees. Heaven forbid that direct government support go to workers instead of corporations!

Until the party supports job guarantees and runs hundreds of working-class candidates, we can expect more working people to reject the Democratic establishment (and the liberal college administrators) who care so little about working-class job security.

That leaves us with a dangerous political vacuum that is pulling the working class both away from politics and towards demagogues who claim they will trash a system that has neglected so many for so long. But most working people know that genuine positive change is better than destructive change and they would welcome a new working-class party, especially in red areas. They have told us so.

They know that billionaires are in control of both parties, and that they really do need a party of their own.

As Trump’s War shambles on with no end in sight, President Trump asks us to put his “little excursion” “in perspective.” Compared to Vietnam and Iraq, Trump says, the Iran conflict has lasted “not very long at all.”

Does anyone find comfort in comparing the Iran disaster with two of America’s previous catastrophic wars?

Once, US forces had been in Vietnam for only two months. Then our involvement became unlimited and the war did not end until millions were dead, over ten years later.

The Iraq war was just a few days shy of two months old when Bush proclaimed: “Mission Accomplished!” Years of chaos, mass death and wasted trillions of dollars followed.

But neither the Vietnam war nor the Iraq war revealed its calamitous stupidity as swiftly as Trump’s war. Two months in, the American people and our standard of living, along with the entire world economy, have taken body blows.

Gasoline costs half again as much. Diesel has risen even more. Aviation gas has doubled. Food prices will soon follow because of shortages of key fertilizer ingredients – on top of Trump’s tariffs and the shortage of farm workers because of deportations.

Trump insists, however, that all will soon be well. Gas prices will “drop like a rock” after the war ends, says the president.

Can there be anyone left in America who believes Donald Trump’s promises on prices? This is the man who vowed in 2024 that if he were elected, “prices will come down and they’ll come down fast, with everything.” “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”

The same man who last year kept saying prices were down when everyone knew from their own experience that prices were up.

Can there be anyone left in America who believes Donald Trump’s promises on prices?

Two problems with his latest promise: First, Trump has no plan to end the war other than demanding Iran “cry uncle” and “give up.” But the Iranians are not convinced they lost, and few owners of $100 million dollar oil tankers, carrying up to $200 million worth of petroleum, are prepared to rely on Trump’s assurances of safety.

Second, the previous level of oil exports from the Persian Gulf will not resume when hostilities do end, and prices will not promptly drop. As economists say, oil prices “go up like a rocket and fall like a feather.”

World-wide oil inventories will have to be refilled, and oil industry experts point out that “high demand caused by replenishing the lost oil stock will keep prices elevated.”

Persian Gulf oil production suspended during the conflict will not immediately resume when it does end. Qatar, for example, provided 20% of the world’s supply of liquid natural gas. Their export facility was damaged by Iranian missiles, and will take three to five years to be fully brought back. Refineries throughout the region have been damaged and oil wells that have been shut down will take months to ramp back up

When will gas prices go back to pre-Trump War levels? Likely not any time this year. It will require two years to recover lost energy output, says the head of the International Energy Agency. And the rise in energy costs will ripple through the rest of the economy, pumping up inflation.

How did we get here?

Donald Trump and his government of feckless amateurs believed the US military would easily compel Iran’s unconditional surrender, as easily as American soldiers kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Since Trump surrounds himself with pretenders who know they must tell him only what he wants to hear, he launched his war without weighing the actual risks.

“President Trump and his aides were caught unprepared,” The Atlantic magazine reported, “when Iran . . . retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. . . The Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not make provisions for a closure” of Hormuz.

Iran struck back after being attacked? Who could have guessed?

Iran had been a major source of military drones to Russia, and Ukrainian and Russian drones had transformed the war in Ukraine. Hormuz was a known point of leverage. Still it did not occur to Trump or to War Secretary Pete “Lethality” Hegseth that American naval and air power might not suppress Iran’s drones and mines, giving Iran a choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz.

The perspective of Vietnam and Iraq has taught Trump nothing. But the American people have learned from those experiences, and are not swallowing Trump’s lies. Sixty-one percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict and sixty-one percent believe he made the wrong decision in deciding to use military force in Iran.

Can public opinion and political reality force Trump to reverse course? Trump’s need to call his debacle a success make that difficult, and Trump may yet turn to committing war crimes in a desperate effort to make Iran capitulate.

If members of his own party will not join in attempts to restrain an increasingly frantic, erratic and likely impaired president, America’s military may be forced to confront their duty to defy Donald Trump’s illegal and immoral orders.

If you haven’t heard the argument that civilization is about to collapse because women aren’t having enough babies, you haven’t been consuming much media.

“The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse,” announced The Atlantic (6/30/25). Business Insider (8/21/25) ran a piece titled “America’s Great People Shortage,” which opened, “America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff.” And NPR‘s Brian Mann warned on PBS (4/10/26) that, as a result of the birth rate decline, “many people say” that the US soon “will be unrecognizable.”

It’s repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has called the US birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls, and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.

Elon Musk, who regularly posts on the subject and has fathered at least 14 children, has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” “There will be no West if this continues,” he said. And President Donald Trump has called for a new “baby boom.”

It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.

The story generally goes like this: Fewer babies being born in the US leads to fewer working-age adults relative to retired adults, which means—as The Atlantic piece put it—”higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.”

But there’s a lot more to the story, and ignoring it masks the white nationalism, regressive gender ideals, and economic inequality driving the narrative.

Hidden Xenophobia

The numbers might look striking on the surface: As news reports pointed out (e.g., CNN, 4/9/26), the number of births and the fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) in the US have dropped to record lows. Both decreased by 1% from 2024 to 2025; the fertility rate has fallen by about 20% over the past 20 years.

In terms of births per woman, that’s about 1.6—well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1, which would be required to maintain a population without migration.

But that last detail is key. If you believe we need a certain number of working-age adults to support an aging population of retirees, there are—or at least were, until Trump’s brutal immigration regime—millions of people willing and eager to come to this country and help make up that deficit. Even with the declining birth rate, the US population grew by more in 2023-24 than it did in 2003-04.

Even so, immigration was conspicuously missing from too much of the birth rate coverage. For instance, in a long piece on Trump contemplating a “baby bonus,” CBS (4/25/25) reported:

A declining birth rate can spell long-term economic problems, including a shrinking labor force that’s financially strapped to pay for medical services and retirement benefits for an aging population.

It managed to go in depth on why the birth rate might be declining, what a baby bonus might look like, how much it would cost, and whether it could work. But it never mentioned immigration policy.

On CNN (4/18/26), anchor Michael Smerconish explored the falling birth rate with economist Melissa Kearney, who told him:

We’re now looking at, you know, being a society that’s aging, with fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce. This poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward.

They discussed the “threat posed in terms of the sustainability of Social Security” and ways to address the problem, but neither ever raised the impact of immigration.

When news outlets ignore that obvious facet of the issue, they hide the xenophobic assumptions underlying the claims of “crisis.”

‘To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism’

And then there’s the misogyny. Right-wing media are quick to blame women for this impending “crisis.”

A New York Post column (9/9/25) by Rikki Schlott, for instance, drummed up the “fear of a baby bust,” blaming it in particular on Gen Z (which is having fewer kids than previous generations at the same age) lacking “positive, empowering messaging that teaches you can prioritize marriage, family, and children while also valuing independence, career, and financial stability”:

“I don’t need a spouse” (or, for that matter, children) feminism has told left-leaning young women that pretty much everything else is more important than family.

That’s a very sad development.

Columnist Victor Joecks, syndicated from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (8/2/25; reposted in Daily Signal, 8/10/25), took things even further in a piece headlined “To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism and Honor Mother.” He opened by declaring, “The triumph of modern feminism has put society on the path to demographic collapse.”

Joecks further opined:

Society applauds women for becoming executives, not moms with kids. Reports on the mythical [sic] gender pay gap describe motherhood with the word “penalty.”… Modern feminism has left many women lonely and depressed. It has put the globe into a demographic downward spiral that’s going to be hard to reverse.‘National Motherhood Medal’

Women-blaming in right-wing media is no surprise, particularly given the surge of pronatalism on the right. But centrist media coverage of that movement also sometimes boosts it.

The New York Times (4/21/25) ran an article on the pronatalist groups pushing the Trump administration on increasing birth rates, noting that “advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda.” Among their ideas: a “National Motherhood Medal” awarded to women with six or more children, and tax credits to married—but not unmarried—couples with children that increase with successive children.

The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.

It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.

While the misogyny embedded in the pronatalist movement generally comes through loud and clear in the Times article, the paper insisted on normalizing it, calling the coalition “broad and diverse,” including both “Christian conservatives” who see a “cultural crisis” in need of more marriage and gender inequality, as well as those who “are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.”

‘Collapse of our civilization’

The New York Times repeated the economic collapse narrative in its description of the pronatalist movement’s

warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birth rate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.

By making no effort to analyze that narrative, the Times lent it legitimacy.

Similarly, in a USA Today piece (3/10/26) on whether Trump’s effort to be known as the “fertilization president” was sparking a baby boom (“that question is complicated,” the paper concluded), reporter Madeline Mitchell quoted a pronatalist podcaster saying that the declining birth rate “is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization.”

That piece was part of a package that interviewed many women of varying ages to understand why they were or were not having children; those pieces included perspectives about the financial and existential struggles facing women who want to have children and feel they can’t afford to, or don’t feel the world is stable enough to bring children into.

It’s an important perspective, and interviewing women on this subject is something all outlets should be doing. But without addressing the question of whether a falling birth rate will, in fact, bring about imminent civilizational collapse, as the widely disseminated right-wing narrative claims, the framing pits women’s feelings and choices against the survival of civilization—hardly a fair contest.

Since birth rate is not a significant problem for the US in the foreseeable future unless you prevent immigration, the idea repeated in these pieces that “civilization” will collapse from a falling birth rate actually means “white civilization.” Pronatalists, you see, tend to share a lot in common with Christian white nationalists.

‘The Problem Is Teens’

Another New York Times article (2/27/26) headlined “The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing,” pointed out that the drop in the US is mostly among teens and women in their early 20s, and reminded readers that

30 years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.

It is indeed whiplash-inducing to hear today’s right-wing mouthpieces, like Fox News‘ senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26; Media Matters, 4/10/26), saying:

The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.

In any case, despite its better gender framing, the Times still pushed the “not enough workers” economic narrative—and downplayed the administration’s xenophobia with euphemism:

If the birthrate drops too far for too long, it could eventually present problems, as the country needs workers to support an aging population. The population can grow through immigration too, but that issue has become politically sensitive, with numbers falling sharply under the Trump administration.Vanishing Productivity

The economic doomsday argument being spread applies both in the US and globally. Declining fertility isn’t just happening in the US—it’s a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, the US’ “demographic cliff” is much less dramatic than in many countries. China, for instance, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and that nation’s population is already beginning to shrink.

While some might think this slowdown (and even potential reversal, many decades from now) in global human population growth could be a positive development, there are plenty of media outlets looking to fearmonger about it. “The demographic cliff will end us, unless we act quickly,” declared Forbes‘ Alexander Puutio (6/9/25).

The Atlantic‘s Marc Novicoff (6/30/25) presaged that within a few decades “rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging.” After arguing that United Nations population growth projections are overly optimistic, he addressed those who remain skeptical of doomsday warnings:

If you’re not sure why this is all so alarming, consider Japan, the canonical example of the threat that low fertility poses to a country’s economic prospects. At its peak in 1994, the Japanese economy made up 18% of world GDP, but eventually, the country’s demographics caught up with it. Now Japan’s median age is 50 years old, and the country’s GDP makes up just 4% of the global economy. Measured per hours worked, Japan’s economic growth has always been strong, but at some point, you just don’t have enough workers.

Who cares what percentage of world GDP a country produces? If you’re a resident of Japan, what you care about is your quality of life. As Novicoff acknowledges, Japan’s productivity hasn’t weakened. And if you look at the human development index, which measures gross national income per capita, years of schooling, and life expectancy, Japan continues to improve over time. So it’s entirely unclear on what basis he makes his claim that Japan doesn’t “have enough workers.”

But it is clear what readers are being primed for: Governments and companies cutting retirement benefits. As The Atlantic piece concludes:

If the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.Productivity Swamps Demographics

That neoliberal push for austerity is the third ideological agenda that lurks behind many of these population crisis stories. Even those news outlets that acknowledged the role of immigration in a country’s economy often took it as further evidence that the economic outlook is bleak. NPR (4/9/26), for instance, told its audience that

many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force, especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.

What such economic warnings hide is that, just as population size isn’t solely dependent on the native fertility rate, economic growth isn’t solely dependent on the working-age population.

It’s true that increasing life expectancies mean that the ratio of the US working-age population to the retired population is slowly decreasing, even with a growing population. That can put pressure on things like Social Security, which operates like a social insurance program in which taxes from current workers go into a fund for current retirees. A shrinking, aging population does require some policy adjustments. But it doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 1/11/19) explains:

Even pulling out the impact of immigrants, the reality is that we have been seeing a fall in the ratio of workers to retirees pretty much forever. Life expectancies have been rising as people have better living standards and better healthcare. (Recent years have been an exception, where life expectancies have stagnated.) In 1950 there were 7.2 people between the ages of 20 and 65 for every person over the age of 65. This ratio now stands at just 3.6 to 1.
Over this 70-year period, we have seen huge increases in living standards for both workers and retirees. The key has been the growth in productivity, which allows workers to produce much more in each hour of work. (We also have a much higher rate of employment among workers between the ages of 20 and 65, as tens of millions of women have entered the labor force.) The impact of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics.Not enough babies? Too many billionaires

The US has experienced an average of over 2% annual productivity growth in the nonfarm business sector since World War II, and there’s no reason to expect that to end. The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.

Look at Social Security, which is frequently pointed to as being in peril because of the aging population and decreasing birth rate. An op-ed in USA Today (8/21/25), advocating for “killing” Social Security, claimed that, “due to a collapse of the American birth rate, the program is expected to be unable to pay the full promised benefits to retirees within the decade.”

There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have.

An CNBC article (5/30/25) told readers that “fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare, which rely on a healthy worker-to-retiree ratio.” (That idea was supported with a quote from the director of the “Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies”—a right-wing think tank that recently launched a “Pronatalism Initiative.”)

But none other than the Chief Actuary at the Social Security Administration, Karen Glenn, testified to Congress (3/25/26) that birth rate has nothing to do with impending shortfalls in the program. Instead, one of the biggest factors imperiling Social Security is the problem of greater-than-expected income inequality.

Since 1980, when income inequality began to increase sharply, the amount of wage income that exceeds the cap for Social Security tax has doubled. The vast majority of us—those who make up to $184,500 a year—pay Social Security tax on all of our income; those who make more pay nothing above that cap. Simply removing the cap would eliminate three-quarters of the Social Security fund’s long-term projected shortfall.

Economic Value Judgments

And, of course, there are all the other ways the rich avoid paying their fair share in our economy, whether it’s through low capital gains rates, or simply through the fancy accounting that lets the super rich—including those who own the news outlets reporting on such things—pay next to nothing in federal taxes. Jeff Bezos, for instance, owner of The Washington Post, paid an effective income tax rate of under 1% on the over $4 billion he amassed from 2014-18 (ProPublica, 6/8/21).

So when The New York Times (3/26/26) tells you in its reporting on US population change that “the country needs a population of young workers and taxpayers large enough to finance infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and healthcare for older residents,” understand that they’re making a value judgement about taxation. The more objective statement would be that the country needs an economic output large enough to finance these things, which is certainly true.

There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have. Many Americans have fewer children than they want because of financial limitations—like lack of affordable childcare or housing—or concerns about the state of the world or the environment. News outlets can and should be addressing these issues.

But reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms, and economic inequality masks the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.

At a campaign-like rally at The Villages, a retirement community near Orlando, Florida, President Donald Trump continued his campaign of deception about his record on Social Security. As he has many times in the last several months, Trump falsely claimed that his “One Big Beautiful Bill” eliminated taxes. This time however Trump took his campaign of deception to a higher level. The background for Trump included the words “Golden Age for Your Golden Years” and “No Tax on Social Security.”

Unfortunately, many in the mainstream media simply ignore Trump’s continued falsehoods on Social Security. Let’s look at the facts. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” did not eliminate taxes on Social Security. Indeed, the legislative process, “reconciliation,” which the Republicans used to pass the legislation, prohibits these types of changes in Social Security.

Rather than eliminate taxes on Social Security, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” according to CNN included some temporary tax cuts for certain Social Security beneficiaries:

Instead [of eliminating taxes on Social Security], the legislation will provide senior citizens with a $6,000 boost to their standard deduction from 2025 through 2028. The benefit will start to phase out for individuals with incomes of more than $75,000 and married couples with incomes of more than $150,000.Trump, GOP lawmakers, and administration officials have repeatedly claimed the package eliminates taxes on Social Security benefits. But that is not in the legislation, and the enhanced deduction would not be available to everyone who receives monthly payments from the agency—like people who elect to start receiving benefits at 62 but who are not yet 65.

The Bipartisan Policy Center points out that the Social Security changes in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” will not help lower-income older Americans:

The additional $6,000 tax deduction for seniors will not benefit households with taxable income below the enhanced standard deduction. Because Social Security benefits—a major source of income for older Americans—are not counted in taxable income (see below) for approximately half of beneficiaries (and only partially counted in taxable income for the other half), the increased standard deduction in OBBB means that many older Americans with low income will not receive any benefit from the additional deduction.

While the benefits of the Social Security changes in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” have been grossly overestimated, not nearly enough attention has been focused on the damage it did to the Social Security program. The fact is that the bill increased Social Security’s fiscal problems. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reported last year that:

The Social Security and Medicare Trustees estimated in their 2025 annual reports on the programs that the retirement and hospital trust funds will become insolvent in 2033—only eight years from today. We estimate the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) would accelerate Social Security and Medicare insolvency by a year, to 2032. That’s when today’s 60-year-olds reach the full retirement age and when today’s youngest retirees turn 69.

Social Security can be a difficult topic to cover. However, it is the federal program that impacts the most Americans. Literally millions of Americans depend on the program. According to the Social Security Administration (SSA), “Among Social Security beneficiaries age 65 and older, 39% of men and 44% of women receive 50% or more of their income from Social Security. and 12% of men and 15% of women rely on Social Security for 90% or more of their income.”

I understand the mainstream media’s reluctance to continually report on Trump’s continued falsehoods about Social Security. However, the media has an obligation to call out Trump when he gets it wrong on Social Security. Millions of older Americans and their families are counting on the media to hold Trump accountable. As citizens, we have an obligation to hold our elected officials accountable as well.

I live in the very heart of Atlanta, Georgia, affectionately called the "city in a forest." From my desk, where I work most days, I look out onto a stand of trees. Right at canopy height, it is the perfect view for getting distracted, especially by our resident red-tailed hawk, who is strikingly visible in the loose thatching of bare winter limbs.

Sudden squirrel scatter, and she alights on the branch of a maple tree to scan for potential prey. Her fleet perch and keen watch, her grandeur of feather and hunt—it breaks through the primacy of my screen and shakes me from the fathomless digital world. Interruption gladly received.

Each time the hawk stops through these trees, I am struck by the sudden proximity of a taloned huntress to me, encased in my condo-version of captivity. More than once, I have grabbed my phone to quickly frame the hawk and catch ill-focused evidence that I too am alert and alive. Enraptured by a raptor, I have "Slacked" the flattened scene to my colleagues: “Afternoon visitor!” With a feather and a heart emoji afterword. (As if icons in miniature could limn her.)

But I am struck by another proximity, too, between what the hawk does and who the hawk seems to be. Her doingness and her beingness are so close as to become one.

What might open up for us if we shift the question ever so slightly—from What can I do? to Who can I be? Or, Who am I already?

I suspect this hawk has never once felt the nag of the question, “What can I do?” Not about the climate crisis. Perhaps not about anything. What to do is something other animals seem to know innately and intimately, or perhaps don't need to know at all.

Evolution has made things more complicated for us Homo sapiens, who ponder and puzzle. As essayist and author Margaret Renkl writes, "Every living thing—every bird and mammal and reptile and amphibian, every tree and shrub and flower and moss—is pursuing its own vital purpose, a purpose that sets my human concerns in a larger context." As I watch the hawk's wings lift and lower and propel her back into the air, I marvel and muse whether life itself might offer another way in.

What might open up for us if we shift the question ever so slightly—from What can I do? to Who can I be? Or, Who am I already?

The hawk, like all of us existing on this planet, is an inheritor of a 3.8-billion-year history: From single-celled organisms to plants and vertebrates, life has continued to move forward toward more life, overcoming unthinkable odds. Weighty and unwavering and in so many ways impenetrable—this dynamic defines Earth as a living planet. When we think about a hive of honeybees gathering their ingredients from flowers, or black corals siphoning plankton over centuries, or the sudden emergence of mushrooms from a shrouded fungal network, we can see this dynamic in action. Even kudzu offers testimony with its rampant return, however unwelcome, each spring.

Who can we be? One thing we already are: an expression of Earth's life force, right here, right now, made possible by a series of miracles that have blossomed over eons. This is true simply by virtue of breathing.

Life force unfurls through each of us in such beautifully different ways. We explore the unknown and document our discoveries. We design new things and give them form. We expose what's ruptured and source the means to mend it. We reflect, wonder, and imagine. We craft stories and art and shows. We make ritual. We convene people and foster conversation and collaboration. We care for one another. We strategize, organize, and orchestrate. We engineer and implement. We manage the details. We show up, stand up, and speak up. We share wisdom and tell jokes. We cook and sing and clean and plant and build and nap. And all of that is just the briefest inventory of human beings' doings.

There are things we do that are so wholly connected with who we are—that spring up from within us in such an organic way—that the space between our doing and our being shrinks or even vanishes. In those moments, our small expression of the vast life force we've inherited and embody is especially effervescent. We may find ourselves buzzing, flowing, or sensing a particular warmth. We may be especially porous and focused both.

It is a radical act to believe in our ability to thrive, both individually and as a planet, by being who we are.

I imagine this is how the hawk might feel as she swoops into the circle of life. It's how I wish many more of us to feel as we take wing to heal the climate crisis.

In Climate Wayfinding, we think of the ways we each express life force as our unique talents, gifts, or superpowers—all of which are so very needed in this era of change. Two lenses help illuminate them: authentic power and deep joy.

Authentic power is something that rises up from within us—internal and genuine, not gained at others' expense or expended upon them. It's a feeling of ability, capacity, strength, weight, energy, vigor. It aligns what swells within us with how we move in the world.

Deep joy is a feeling of great pleasure, happiness, delight, exhilaration, radiance, bliss. It, too, rises from within and spills out, intermingling with the world around us. It is often the emotional glow of meaning or connection. Joy may also feel out of place in the face of the climate crisis. Who are we to taste joy when so much is hurting? But joy is all the more necessary, and all the more holy, in difficult times.

As Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass: "Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift."

In my own experience, moving at the nexus of authentic power and deep joy might be our closest approximation to life force itself. When I have strayed far into zones of not-power and not-joy—most often for employment or another hard-tugging should—I have found myself in struggle, disconnection, and even depression. Stubborn is the soul, intent on a space where it belongs.

It is a radical act to believe in our ability to thrive, both individually and as a planet, by being who we are. I mean radical in the fullest sense: from the root, fundamental, and far-reaching. A person anchored and aglow—that is the kind of revolutionary that's called for in this time.

Looking inward to shape our outward contributions—this, I think, is a form of courage. When we refuse to lose touch with our sources of authentic power and deep joy, and when we dare to center them somehow in our lives, we reach toward calling. Whether loudly or in a whisper, these things summon us, insisting that our lives can be alive—sprouting and blooming, swooping and flying high—and that we can be part of making it so.

Just now, the red-tailed hawk draws my eye. It's a beautiful, bewitching thing to behold a being in the fullness of herself. But I realize, watching her in motion, that I am rapt by more than the solitary bird. At the edges of the self, there is a zone, almost an aura, of arising. We find there, at the periphery, a space populated by all that is emergent with, and only with, the world around us.

For the hawk, that emergent edge exists in the remarkable everyday interplay of hunger and wing and wind. And perhaps it is so for all of us, along our own edges, as we muster skill and strength for a planet in want, in wish.

Perhaps you, too, can feel the vibration at the eager verge of doingness and beingness and the wide, long, insistent breath of life.

This piece was adapted from Climate Wayfinding: Healing Ourselves and the Planet We Call Home by Katharine K. Wilkinson (Andrews McMeel, 2026). Used with permission of the publisher. Do not republish.

As the US-Israel war in Iran drags on, here at home, the billions spent on the war and the spiking gas prices drive the political conversation. The impacts on world food supplies could be far more consequential, though, raising questions about our dependence on globally traded chemical fertilizers—and about the alternatives.

Depending on Industrial Agriculture

The global food system relies on massive applications of petrochemicals, and up to 30% of fertilizer trade comes through the Strait of Hormuz. With the exception of pre-industrial and organic or regenerative practices, the world’s agriculture relies on these chemicals, making them vulnerable to price shocks and supply constraints.

Nitrogen fertilizer prices have climbed by 30% since the initial attack on Iran on February 28; urea prices have increased by 47%. Seventy percent of farmers responding to an American Farm Bureau survey say they are unable to afford all the fertilizer they need. Meanwhile, farm diesel prices have increased 46% since the end of February.

The effects of these price shocks take time to ripple through the planting and harvesting season, but they will likely show up as higher prices, along with empty store shelves, and—especially in impoverished regions—hungry children. Farmers are already making tough choices about what, and if, to plant given the colliding impacts of tariffs, extreme weather related to climate change, and the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iran war’s fertilizer choke hold is just one reason regenerative agriculture deserves our active support.

“Every fossil fuel crisis reminds us how vulnerable conventional agriculture is,” says Gabrielle Taus, managing director of the nonprofit group Commonland. "Farmers tied to synthetic fertilisers are exposed to price shocks they cannot control.”

Converging Shocks

These price spikes come just at a time when farmers are also being squeezed by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and by a chaotic climate. Much of the West and Southeast US is under drought emergency conditions. The Midwest has been hit by storms and extreme temperature fluctuations. The journal Nature Climate Change estimates that human-caused climate change has already reduced agricultural productivity by 20%.

These converging shocks are adding to interest in regenerative agriculture. While the definition of this form of agriculture varies—and the term can sometimes be used for greenwashing—regenerative agriculture relies on the resources at hand (or under foot) to nourish the soil, instead of purchasing fertilizer from global petrochemical corporations. By combining age-old techniques of cover crops and crop rotation, compost, and animal husbandry, the soil is nourished, not depleted, and it is better able to retain moisture. Unlike corporate farming, this form of agriculture offers a buffer from global conflicts and trade wars and the impacts of climate change. And the farmers who adopt this approach develop an understanding of how to best manage farms that can thrive in a particular place. And their practices could contribute to revitalizing not only fresh water sources and ecosystems but also the vitality of hollowed-out rural communities.

A Different Relationship to the Land

Many experts question whether regenerative agriculture can actually take the place of industrial agriculture. A decades-long study by the Rodale Institute, which advocates for organic methods, suggests that with skill and persistence, these techniques work. Their side-by-side plots in Kutztown, Pennsylvania compared regenerative practices, including cover cropping, crop rotation, and composting, with conventional agriculture. The result was yields up to 30% higher for sustainable methods during extreme weather, profits that were 3-6 times higher overall, the use of 45% less energy—and 40% lower carbon emissions.

The work of the farmers also shifts, from using massive machinery and one-size-fits-all industrial farming methods, to the sort of deep knowledge that comes from knowing the microclimate, soil conditions, and water supplies of a particular place.

Regenerative farms become a productive and integrated part of not only the natural ecosystem but the social system.

Among young farmers, regenerative practices are already taking hold. According to the National Young Farmers Coalition's 2022 survey of more than 10,000 farmers age 40 and younger, 86% already describe their practices as regenerative. With the average age of today’s farmers at 58 years old, a new generation of farmers will have a major say in how tomorrow’s crops are raised.

Matt Turino, who manages the Sustainable Farm at the University of Illinois campus in Champaign Urbana, works with students who are learning the skills of sustainable and regenerative farming. “They talk a lot about growing food in their communities, resilient food production, changing the food systems so they’re not relying on international markets and big international disruptions like the Strait of Hormuz situation,” he said. They want a more ecologically minded food system, he added, that is healthy for their families and for the environment.

These practices could offer the next generation a livelihood that artificial intelligence cannot replace and that distant wars and blockades cannot upend.

The Alternative Already Underway

Soil health is key to any farming. Regenerative practices enhance the microorganisms, organic content, and nutrients that comprise a healthy soil ecosystem. These practices not only result in higher yields, crops that are better able to resist disease and pests, and better water retention—they also enable soil to pull carbon out of the air and form it into a healthy part of the soil ecosystem.

Agriculture is responsible for about a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Addition of nitrogen fertilizer to croplands is a powerful source of climate pollution, but regenerative approaches can actually store carbon deep in the soil, reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And these approaches avoid the fish-killing algae blooms and cancer clusters suspected to be caused by nitrogen fertilizer runoff.

At a time when fresh water is becoming scarce as a result of overuse and drought, regenerative approaches increase the capacity of soils to hold water and to prevent the erosion and flooding that results from compacted soils. For every 1% increase in soil organic matter, soil is able to hold 20,000 gallons more per acre, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

Many regenerative farmers raise animals along with crops. Rotational grazing and the use of manure helps build soil health. This is a marked contrast to today’s giant animal factory farms, where workers are poorly paid and at risk of injury, and animals are penned up inhumane conditions, while overflows of manure threaten fresh water supplies.

Regenerative farms become a productive and integrated part of not only the natural ecosystem but the social system.

Knowledge Is the Foundation

Regenerative farming offers the intriguing possibility of ecosystem recovery and the recovery of rural communities.

For decades, the growth of industrial farming has pushed out small and medium-sized farms. Especially hard hit are farms owned by African American and Latino families. As a few giant landowners manage farms that once provided livelihoods to many smaller farm families, rural communities across the United States have been hollowed out. As farms are sold off, the local farm supply stores, mechanics, veterinarians, insurance brokers, schools, and restaurants that once served farm families closed up.

The competitive advantage of a regenerative farmer is their deep knowledge—not the adoption of one-size-fits-all chemical regimes and expensive technology. They learn the sorts of skills and wisdom our farming ancestors had. Regenerative practices require an understanding of particular microclimates, water availability, and soil conditions. The farmer must learn to choose seed varieties and to implement practices that optimize for human and ecological health as well as for economics.

If anything positive emerges from the war in Iran, it could be the expanded awareness that we do have choices about the future of agriculture.

“The particular knowledge of particular places is beyond the competence of any centralized power or authority,” writes Kentucky farmer and poet Wendell Berry in his book, What Are People For? (Counterpoint Press 1990) “Farmers must tend farms that they know and love… using tools and methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.”

“We uplift the honor and dignity of labor,” say the creators of Soulfire Farm, an Afro-Indigenous community farm and training center located in upstate New York. “We center the sharing of practical, tangible, land-based skills that contribute to community self-provisioning and self-determination. With wise effort, our work is our love made visible.”

The Iran war’s fertilizer choke hold is just one reason regenerative agriculture deserves our active support. Regenerative farming can prevent the pollution of increasingly scarce fresh water resources, rebuild depleted soil, and slow climate change. These practices are more resilient and able to adapt to weather shocks, and they provide a source of stable employment at a time when jobs of all sorts are being displaced by AI. And with permanent farm employment come the opportunities for families to once again inhabit and rebuild hollowed-out rural communities.

It is hard work, and unlikely to make anyone rich. But regenerative farmers and ranchers say “their notion of ‘success’ goes beyond yield and farm size,” according to Lara Bryant, at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “It includes things like joy and happiness, the number of families they feed, watching how the land regenerates and flourishes, the money saved from not purchasing chemical inputs, the debt avoided by repurposing old equipment, and the relationships built with community members.”

If anything positive emerges from the war in Iran, it could be the expanded awareness that we do have choices about the future of agriculture.

Unlike every other column of mine, this one won’t be broken up with section titles for a simple reason. It’s all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break.

In that context, here’s my advice to you: Don’t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that’s all over now and I’m increasingly an old man. In fact, I’m not quite two years older than Donald J. Trump. I was born on July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing, and he was born on June 14, 1946, in the peacetime that followed but would all too soon become the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

And let me tell you something else: these days it’s hard enough to keep the website I still run, TomDispatch, in some kind of reasonable shape, while also keeping track of our ever-stranger, more confusing, all-too-Trumpian world. But keeping track of things nationally and globally as an 80-year-old president of the United States (with another two-and-a-half years to go) in a world that seems to be coming apart at the — whoops, sorry, I can’t help it! — seams? I simply can’t imagine that. Of course, I couldn’t imagine it for Joe Biden either, and yet he left the presidency when he was a staggering 82 years and 61 days old and will still have been younger than Trump if he truly makes it to January 20, 2029. (And both of them will have beaten the oldest Roman Emperor, Gordian I, who at 81 only lasted a few weeks in power.)

It’s hardly news that Donald Trump is now the oldest president ever to take the oath of office (twice!) and, in that sense, he’s been both record-setting and, in his own strange way, remarkable. But in case you hadn’t noticed, while he’s always had his odd moments, they are indeed getting ever odder and more frequent. After all, how many times has this country had a president who mistook himself for (or do I mean confused himself with) Jesus Christ? Oh, wait, how could I be so confused? That image wasn’t of Jesus but (as “our” president insisted) of a lookalike medical doctor. (“I thought it was me as a doctor,” the president said. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”)

And meanwhile, of course, in his own ever stranger fashion, “our” president took out after Leo, the American pope, himself a veritable youth at 70 years old, calling him of all things, “WEAK on crime” and, of course, “catering to the Radical Left.” Oh, and while he was at it, Trump also posted an image of himself being hugged by (yes, of course!) Jesus. And Leo responded to the president’s abuse by all too accurately deploring a world being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” (including, of course, You Know Exactly Whom).

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, as an imperial power (even, historically speaking, the imperial power, the only one at its height to control quite so much of the planet in one fashion or another), this country, too, is growing ever older and (again) in its own strange fashion going down (as, of course, all great imperial powers do sooner or later). Phew! That was a long sentence for this old guy, but you can’t get too long and complicated (or do I mean confused?) when it comes to the world of Donald J. Trump. In electing him a second time in 2024, 49.8% of American voters clearly opted to go down in style by giving imperial oldness a startling new meaning.

These days, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump’s approval ratings are heading for the planetary basement. As I was writing this piece, for instance, only 31% of Americans approved of how he was handling the economy. (Of course, you might wonder, at this point, why it wasn’t 11% or even 0%.) Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance’s approval ratings, too, have been hitting historic lows.

Mind you, Donald Trump has always given unpredictability new meaning, but these days, a constant version of unpredictability is his aging middle name. Remember the president who was against “warmongers and America-last globalists” and was going to remove them from office in his second term in the White House? Remember the president who was going to “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars”? Hmmm, well, think again (and again and again!) now that he’s gone to war (or is it to peace, or even to pieces?) with Iran in an all too strikingly destructive fashion. But that’s today’s news and, in the era of the aging Donald Trump, who knows what tomorrow might hold for any of us (or, for that matter, what might happen an hour from now)? Count on one thing, though: “our” president sure doesn’t know and so, sadly, neither can we.

(Phew! Without section breaks, I’m already exhausted, but who can truly take a break when it comes to Donald Trump?)

And here’s what might be the saddest thing of all (not that all of it isn’t sad as hell, and potentially leading the rest of us all too literally into a hell on earth): given this country’s military machine, which “the peace president” seems eager to feed an extra $500 billion (and no, that’s not a typo!), which would raise the Pentagon budget by an exceedingly modest 50%, the United States still has the power to turn this planet into a hell on Earth in a fashion no other imperial power in decline has ever been able to do. (And I’m not even thinking about this country’s vast nuclear arsenal.)

So, here’s our horrifying reality: in the next two and a half years, if, of course, he doesn’t either keel over tomorrow or somehow grab even more time as president — remember that, last year in Iowa, which he won in all three of his election campaigns, he asked an audience ominously, “Should we do it a fourth time?” — Donald J. Trump is genuinely capable of preparing to take not just this country but the planet down with him. Phew again!

And I’m not just thinking about his ability (if that’s faintly the word for it) with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come and the president who has called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green scam,” and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling point. (And keep in mind that the U.S. military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, even in peacetime, on Planet Earth.)

Honestly, I still find it hard to imagine that a near majority of American voters elected such a distinctly disturbed old man as president yet again, one seemingly intent on squashing green energy of any sort and potentially taking this planet down with him the second time around. Consider it truly strange, in fact (or do I mean: consider it unstrange beyond words) that the two oldest presidents in our history (Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and, yes!, Donald Trump again) have occupied the White House consecutively for the last decade, given that this country is now distinctly an aging, even potentially, fading power on a planet that may itself be aging and fading all too rapidly.

I’m old enough to have experienced 15 presidents in my lifetime so far (and that’s not even counting Trump the second time around) and yet he is distinctly, day by day, month by month, year by year, one of a kind in the worst sense imaginable. Consider it odd, in fact, that, as a con artist first class, he may himself turn out to be the greatest con job ever perpetrated on this world of ours and, in his own eerie fashion, a world-ending figure. Worse yet, whether we like it or not, it seems as if we are all now his apprentices.

Imagine as well that making war and “unleashing” ever more coal, oil, and natural gas are the two things he seems to be specializing in during his second term in office, even if, thanks to his conflict with Iran, he actually put a sudden limit on the global distribution of oil and gas via the Strait of Hormuz and helped (in his own fashion) and with a distinct hand from Iran to clobber the big oil producers of the Middle East.

(Whew! If only I could put a section break up right here and take a break myself! Facing such a world and such a president, this old writer finds himself increasingly out of breath!)

You know, if, when I was young and when, in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the youthful John F. Kennedy was president, you had even tried to describe Donald Trump’s version of the world to me, I would have thought you not just literally mad, but one of the worst creators of fiction around. Can there be the slightest doubt, in fact, that President Trump has indeed turned out to be among the worst creations of a planet that couldn’t be in deeper trouble?

I wanted to write “fictional creations” there. If only this were indeed a grim dystopian novel, rather than the actual world, and if Donald Trump himself were indeed some mad fictional creation. What a thrill that would be! After all, such a weird and wild version of a Philip Roth noveI would once have seemed to readers like a mad laugh-a-thon.

If only…

But when the voters of your very own country decide to make just such a fiction our reality a second time around in this all too real world, you know that something is truly wrong on Planet Earth.

In a sense, Donald Trump could be thought of as the way, after this country’s endless decades of imperial war-making from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, and now to Iran (and that’s leaving out plenty of our warring activities), we Americans decided not just to make war on the rest of the world but on ourselves as well. And by reelecting a man who proudly insists that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetuated” and a total “green new scam,” we’re obviously involving ourselves in a big-time fashion in what might be thought of as World War III, the ultimate war on planet Earth itself.

I mean, you have to feel anxious when you only have to put “Donald Trump, climate change” into your computer search window and up come endless disturbing pieces, including, for me just now, Maxine Joselow of the New York Times writing an article headlined (rather mildly under the circumstances) “Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington.” It began this way:

“Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist politicians.’ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless. These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general.”

Tell that, of course, to all of us in New York City, who only recently lived through record-breaking 90-degree July weather in early April. Consider it strange indeed that, in response to the never-ending news that we humans have long been turning this planet into a fossil-fuelized hothouse, a near majority of us would indeed opt to again elect a president who makes climate-change denial seem like a far too mild term.

Of all the things that Donald Trump hasn’t done, he’s worked in what, for him, is a remarkably organized fashion to stall or nix any projects that wouldn’t further heat this planet of ours. Utterly unfocused as he so often is, he’s remained strikingly focused on shutting down wind power and solar energy projects, while launching ever more fossil-fuel ones, including opening more than a billion acres of coastal waters to oil and gas drilling and paying a French company almost a billion dollars not to create two wind farms off this country’s east coast, but instead to invest in oil and gas projects here in the U.S.

Talk about dystopian! Donald Trump should truly be considered a full-scale dystopian nightmare playing out in real time.

Wait! I have a last urge for this piece. Think of it as a way for me to finally catch my breath. To end it, I want to create one of those missing section heads right here, right now. How about:

The Hothouse President on a Planet Going to Hell

[And yes, that is indeed the end of this piece, but not for a moment the end of the nightmare we’re now living through.]

George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama in 1963 and famously declared in his inauguration speech (written by a Ku Klux Klan leader) "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Two years later, Alabama state troopers violently broke up a nighttime voting rights march during which a police officer shot and killed young African American protester and Baptist deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson who was unarmed and protecting his mother.

In response, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King and John Lewis, organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an attempt to deliver a civil rights and voting rights message to Gov. Wallace. It became known as "Bloody Sunday" as state troopers gassed and beat the protestors, including fracturing Lewis' skull and sending 57 others to the hospital. Televised images of the brutal attack shocked the nation, directly leading to President Johnson's push for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Numerous Americans, black and white, were injured and even died fighting for the Civil Rights Act. John Roberts and his five Republican Supreme Court colleagues effectively overturned the Civil Rights Act and essentially disenfranchised black voters.

George Wallace tried to disenfranchise black voters with violent state troopers. Roberts disenfranchised black voters with the stroke of a pen. It's not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.

It's not hyperbole to say that while Roberts wears the black robes of a judge, he may as well wear the white robes of the Klan.

In her dissent to Louisiana v. Callais in which the 6-member Republican majority of the Court effectively overturned Section 2 of the Civil Rights Act, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: “The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history. It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality." Kagan concluded, " I dissent because the Court betrays its duty to faithfully implement the great statute Congress wrote. I dissent because the Court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity. I dissent.”

But the Court didn't destroy the Civil Rights Act in a day. It was part of a lifelong mission by John Roberts to do so.

Starting as early as 1981, as a 26-year-old lawyer just three years out of Harvard Law School, Roberts began his campaign to undermine the Civil Rights Act. He got himself a job as Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan's Attorney General William French Smith. Congress was about to amend the Civil Rights Act to provide that state laws would be illegal if they had a racially discriminatory effect, without having to prove that they had a racially discriminatory intent—something almost impossible to prove.

Roberts zealously took on the assignment coming up with arguments against the Amendment. Roberts wrote over 25 memos opposing the Amendment. In one, he argued that the Civil Rights Act was "the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes."

Despite the efforts of Roberts and others in the Reagan administration, Congress passed the Amendment with overwhelming bipartisan support. Little did anyone imagine at the time that Roberts would become Chief Justice and the leader of right-wing Justices' ultimately successful efforts to undermine the Civil Rights Act as he had initially set out to do as a young Justice Department official.

At his confirmation hearing, Roberts told the Senate "The existing Voting Rights Act, the constitutionality has been upheld and I don't have any issue with that." He was lying.

In 2013, Roberts got his first shot at dismantling the Civil Rights Act. In his 5-4 ruling in Shelby v. Holder, he overturned Section 5 of the Act , which required that states with a history of racist voter suppression pre-clear changes in election laws with the Justice Department to be sure they were not reinstituting racial suppression. He argued that it was no longer necessary since racism in America had diminished since the Act had been passed. In response, many states previously subject to preclearance rushed to enact new voter suppression laws.

In coming years, the Roberts Court further chipped away at the Voting Rights Act. But Roberts finally got his opportunity to make the rest of the Voting Rights Act a nullity when Louisiana v. Calais came before the Court this year. In a 6-3 opinion, which Roberts assigned to his anti-voting rights ally Justice Samuel Alito, the Court overruled the other crown jewel of the Voting Rights Act which had previously held that racially gerrymandered districts were illegal if they had racially discriminatory effect. Instead, racially gerrymandered districts would only be illegal if it can be proven that they have a racially discriminatory intent, a bar that is almost impossible to clear.

This was the argument that Roberts first made as a young Justice Department attorney back in 1982. As Chief Justice, he finally succeeded in his long campaign to revoke the Civil Rights Act.

Meanwhile, if a state can claim that it's gerrymandering is motivated by ensuring that its political party wins, it's totally cool with the Roberts Court. With the Court overturning both Section 2 and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, it effectively repealed the entire Voting Rights Act that so many had fought and died for.

The very next day, Florida passed a redistricting law that would allow for new levels of gerrymandering designed to erase districts with large populations of black voters.

Roberts accomplished with a pen what George Wallace had tried to accomplish with violent state troopers.

As a progressive who watches too much television, when I see a Democratic candidate dominating the TV air war with ubiquitous campaign ads, I usually know that’s a Democrat I should oppose—the one being lavishly funded by wealthy corporate interests. And the ads are usually vapid, empty.

Living in California these past months, I’ve had to adjust my normal mindset. Because the Democrat running for governor who was dominating the airwaves had put out one substantive ad after another—calling for taxing the wealthy, breaking up utility monopolies, standing up to Big Oil. Each ad could have been put out by Bernie Sanders. Like the ad featuring Rep. Ro Khanna about taking on the “big insurance companies” to pass universal “single-payer healthcare” for California.

Or the candidate’s video message denouncing AIPAC (“they’re attacking progressive Democrats every chance they get”) and the Democratic Party establishment for “not talking more forcefully” against the Iran war.

The candidate putting out all these wonderfully progressive ads is billionaire Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager turned environmental advocate, now self-funding his campaign to the tune of $130 million. So far.

Let me be clear: I generally loathe billionaires and hedge-funders and everyone in the financial speculation elite. I remain skeptical that someone as wealthy as Steyer who operated at the heights of amoral financialized capitalism can deeply understand and fight for working-class interests.

If Steyer is elected, will he prove to be the effective “class traitor” that most Californians need him to be—a governor who stands up to corporate greed and power?

So I was in a quandary. A month ago, after seeing Steyer’s anti-AIPAC video attacking Democratic leaders for failing to “forcefully” oppose Trump’s war, I started an intense dialogue with progressives across California, including journalists, experienced activists, organizational leaders. Almost all—somewhat surprisingly or confusedly or embarrassingly—were arriving at the same conclusion: the billionaire, Tom Steyer, is the best choice for governor.

Many had attended and been impressed by one of Steyer’s town hall forums across the state, where his introductory remarks were short while the audience Q&A went long. I started finding online memes from an activist I respect, Amar Shergill, a Steyer-supporter who formerly chaired the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus—including his charts comparing the Democratic field.

Like in other Democratic one-party states, pro-corporate corruption in California’s state capital is rampant, which is why California—with a population almost as large as Canada’s—lacks universal healthcare coverage. Most Democrats in office say they support it, but profiteering insurance interests fund their campaigns. A bill to move California toward government-provided single-payer health insurance that would replace private insurance sailed through the Democrat-led state legislature in both 2006 and 2008, when it was well-known that GOP Gov. Arnold Scwharzenegger would veto the measure. Both times. Schwarzenegger called it “socialized medicine.”

But a funny thing has happened in the California legislature ever since Democrats took the governor’s office in 2011, first Jerry Brown and then Gavin Newsom: A single-payer healthcare bill never made it to their desks. In some years, thanks to medical industry lobbyists, the bill didn’t even get out of committee.

Make no mistake about it: Corporate lobbyists are horrified that Tom Steyer might become California’s governor. To stop Steyer, corporate forces and their allies in the Democratic establishment have moved from now-disgraced Rep. Eric Swalwell to Xavier Becerra, former US Secretary of Health and Human Services. Becerra, who won praise from the right-wing Murdoch press for pocketing the maximum campaign donation from Chevron, is now bending to the will of private interests on healthcare, according to KQED public radio.

Steyer’s unequivocal support of CalCare universal health coverage is one of the reasons he’s endorsed by Rep. Ro Khanna and the California Nurses Association (CNA), and why RootsAction (which I co-founded) came out in support last week.

One dividing-line issue among Democratic candidates is the California Billionaire Tax Act—a ballot initiative launched by SEIU-United Healthcare Workers that would impose a one-time emergency tax on the state’s 200 richest individuals to bolster healthcare. It’s supported by Steyer, Khanna, Bernie Sanders and opposed by Gov. Newsom and billionaire friends like Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt of Google. (As a funder/activist, Steyer used statewide ballot initiatives to win reforms, including Prop 39 in 2012 that closed a corporate tax loophole to fund green jobs and energy-efficiency in schools.)

The TV air war has taken a bizarre turn. While Steyer’s ads dominated for many weeks, he is now facing a barrage of negative ads funded by some of California’s powerful corporate interests straight-facedly accusing him of being a corporatist—of profiting from past investments his hedge fund had made in fossil fuels and private prisons. We know who’s funding the attacks on Steyer thanks to California’s DISCLOSE Act, which requires that the top funders of campaign ads be listed in the bottom third of the TV screen.

Even though California has a strongly-Democratic electorate, it’s likely that only one of the half-dozen serious Democratic gubernatorial aspirants will make it through the June “jungle primary” into November’s general election to face a Republican—probably Steve Hilton, a former Fox News contributor endorsed by Trump.

If Steyer is elected, will he prove to be the effective “class traitor” that most Californians need him to be—a governor who stands up to corporate greed and power? Though not as rich as Steyer, President Franklin Roosevelt certainly provides a role model as someone willing to fight “the economic royalists” he knew so well in order to uplift working people.

Some lawmakers have grown so alarmed by the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America that they are beginning to accuse the administration of gangsterism.

Representative Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) saw the possibility of gangsterism at the start of the second Trump administration when he warned that the United States could “join the ranks of gangster nations,” but there is a growing sense in Congress that the day has arrived.

At a congressional hearing last month, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) asserted that the Trump administration is exploiting the US military to take Latin American resources for US corporations. Castro seemingly channeled the anti-war critiques of Smedley Butler, the US military hero of the early 20th century, who condemned war as a racket and lamented his exploitation as a racketeer for capitalism.

“For decades, our men and women in uniform who volunteered to protect our country became mercenaries ordered to risk their lives to protect the profits of US corporations,” Castro said. “Today, President Trump is ordering them to do so again.”

The Case of Venezuela

The Trump administration’s critics in Congress have been warning about the administration’s gangsterism due to its actions in Venezuela.

Since the Trump administration directed a military operation earlier this year to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and take control of the country’s oil and minerals, several lawmakers have suggested that the administration has begun to employ force and intimidation as its basic tools of statecraft.

Lawmakers have condemned the administration for conducting a military operation without congressional approval, meddling in Venezuela’s internal politics, displaying contempt for Venezuela’s political process, facilitating corruption in Venezuela and the United States, and using the US military to take control of Venezuela’s resources.

Now that the Trump administration has moved against Venezuela, establishing new leadership and doling out profits from its resources, lawmakers anticipate that it will move against Cuba next.

“You are taking their oil at gunpoint,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this year.

Although Congress has not held the president accountable, as the Republican majority in each chamber supports the president, critics have kept pressure on the White House, prompting officials to defend the administration’s actions.

At the congressional hearing last month, State Department official Michael Kozak claimed that the intervention in Venezuela advanced US interests. He cited the Monroe Doctrine, which marks Latin America as a sphere of influence. Like the president, he boasted that the United States now controls the country’s resources.

“We’ve got very significant control over the oil revenues at this point,” Kozak said.

Several Democratic lawmakers responded with strong criticisms. They condemned the Trump administration for acting so aggressively in the hemisphere, and they warned that its actions would create a backlash against the United States.

Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) described the administration’s approach as “shameful.” She insisted that the United States should not be “reviving a policy of domination and subjugation in the Western Hemisphere through the Monroe Doctrine.”

Castro repeated his warning that the Trump administration is focused on commerce and profits. He suggested that the president is using the US military to enrich people close to him.

“What has happened now is that there’s a group of folks that the president favors in his circle that is able to commence commerce and make money off of, whether it’s valuable minerals, oil, anything else in Venezuela,” Castro said.

Kozak expressed disagreement with Castro’s analysis, but he acknowledged that the Trump administration has established significant controls over Venezuela. Once again, he boasted that the Trump administration controls the country’s resources.

“People can lift oil and sell it on the open market, but all that money goes into an account that we have control over,” Kozak said. “All the revenues that are coming from the mining sector and everything, instead of going into their bank accounts, are coming into the Treasury accounts, and then we can dole it out as we see fit.”

The Case of Cuba

Now that the Trump administration has moved against Venezuela, establishing new leadership and doling out profits from its resources, lawmakers anticipate that it will move against Cuba next.

For months, President Donald Trump has been openly threatening Cuba. He has moved to block oil shipments to the country, causing an economic crisis. Knowing that he has put tremendous pressure on the Cuban government, he has demanded that the country’s president leave office.

“I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba,” Trump said in March. “I think I could do anything I want with it, if you want to know the truth.”

Critics are giving serious consideration to the idea that Trump’s wars are a racket and that Cuba may be next.

Although the Trump administration’s military intervention in Iran has shifted its focus away from Cuba, the administration is maintaining an economic stranglehold over the island nation, making its recovery impossible. The US military continues blocking the free flow of oil to Cuba, even while Trump demands the free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The few oil shipments that have reached Cuba, for instance a recent tanker from Russia, have provided little relief.

At the congressional hearing last month, several lawmakers argued that the Trump administration is a major reason why Cuba is facing such tremendous hardship, including island-wide blackouts and preventable deaths at hospitals and health clinics.

“We cannot ignore our own country’s role in the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Cuba,” Castro said.

Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.), who recently visited the country, made the strongest criticisms. Warning that the administration’s policies are causing tremendous harm to the Cuban people, he indicated that the Trump administration is violating international humanitarian law.

“We have engaged in collective punishment,” Jackson said.

The congressman also accused the Trump administration of trying to make life so miserable for the Cuban people that they would rise up and overthrow the Cuban government. He described it as a failed “policy of starving” Cuba.

“It was one of the most cruel things I had ever seen in my life,” he said.

Just as the Trump administration has been able to get away with its actions in Venezuela, however, it has been able to continue its policies toward Cuba. The administration maintains support among Republicans and some Democrats, few of whom oppose the administration’s goal of regime change.

The president, who knows that he faces little opposition in Congress, continues threatening to direct a military intervention in Cuba, even citing the operation in Venezuela as a precedent.

“In January, our warriors flew straight into the heart of the Venezuelan capital, captured the outlawed dictator Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to face American justice,” Trump said last month. “And very soon this great strength will also bring about a day 70 years in waiting. It’s called, ‘A New Dawn for Cuba.’”

War Is a Racket

When Smedley Butler spoke against his exploitation as a racketeer for capitalism nearly a century ago, he made a criticism of the American way of war that was considered to be so radical by US leaders that it has been largely excluded from mainstream political discourse.

Only a few politicians, such as former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) and Ron Paul (R-Texas), have cited Butler and his warnings. Rarely, if ever, does the mass media report on war as a racket in which the country’s leaders are exploiting US military forces as gangsters for capitalism.

Today, however, some elected leaders are beginning to issue the same kinds of warnings about the Trump administration. Alarmed by the president’s insatiable lust for wealth and power, they are starting to suggest that the president is engaging in a kind of gangsterism across Latin America. The president, they say, is using the power of the US military to steal the wealth of Latin American countries to enrich himself, his family, his closest business associates, and US corporations.

“By any measure, this is the most corrupt administration in American history,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said earlier this year.

Now that the Trump administration is openly pillaging Venezuela and getting away with it, several lawmakers are warning that it may apply the same approach to other Latin American countries.

“It’s making me think that the goal in Cuba is going to be the same,” Castro said at the hearing in April. “It’s who’s going to go over there that’s friends with the president to make money and who’s going to profit off of Cuba and the Cuban people.”

Indeed, there is a growing sense in Congress that the Trump administration is turning to gangsterism. Moving beyond standard establishment critiques of the president’s contempt for norms and traditions, critics are giving serious consideration to the idea that Trump’s wars are a racket and that Cuba may be next.

Eat real food. Buy organic. Filter your water.

Scroll through Instagram and you’ll find no shortage of such advice from the “MAHA girls,”—young women drawn to the Make America Healthy Again movement. If you have been accustomed to MAHA through its most famous champion—Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who helped popularize the slogan—#MAHA girls show a wider and growing allure of MAHA and their messages.

It’s tempting for progressives to either mock them or tune out, especially given their association with the current administration. But that would be a mistake. Not because MAHA has the right solutions—it often doesn’t—but because it names a real problem: Our modern lives are saturated with industrial contaminants from which individual consumer hacks can’t protect us.

As a sociologist who studies food systems, I recognize the mix of anxiety and practicality driving this trend. The MAHA movement’s concerns overlap with long-standing environmental and public health priorities championed by progressives. But the question isn’t whether these groups share a few “clean” habits; it’s whether they can work together to build the political muscle needed to implement regulations that make everyone safer.

Rather than rejecting MAHA’s sentiments, progressives need to listen carefully to the experiences that drive this movement, while being mindful of the limits of individual actions.

Consider glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup. There has been ongoing debate over its potential consequences. Thousands of lawsuits have been filed against Monsanto and its parent company, Bayer. And on April 27, the US Supreme Court heard arguments in Monsanto v. Durnell. The MAHA movement is watching the case closely and held a protest outside the Supreme Court.

Environmental and public health advocates have warned about these chemicals for decades. On this point, MAHA advocates and progressive environmentalists are aligned: Both want glyphosate out of the food system.

Or take fermented foods. My book, Fermenting for the Future, traces the decline of fermentation practices in industrial societies and the resulting loss of gut microbial diversity. Our guts are often described as the “industrial microbiota”—but thanks to our modern food system, they are becoming a less diverse ecosystem linked to a rise in chronic conditions. That’s because industrial food systems don’t just add questionable additives; they also reshape “traditional” foods that are standardized, pasteurized, or only nominally fermented—optimized for cost and convenience.

Here, too, MAHA supporters often agree. They champion fermented foods such as kimchi and miso and emphasize gut health. These concerns have even entered mainstream policy, as seen in the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which highlighted gut health and fermented foods.

Usually, MAHA’s intellectual roots are traced simply to MAGA (Make America Great Again). But its intellectual roots run deeper: health freedom movements, environmentalism, and women’s health activism—many of which have progressive roots.

But there are key differences and they matter.

First, MAHA discourse is marked by a strong current of purism: the idea that we can purify our bodies, homes, and communities if we shop correctly and avoid the “bad” stuff. Purism often draws a moral boundary between the “pure” and the “impure.” Historically, such thinking can slide from labeling chemicals as “impure” to applying the same labels to people—feeding stigma, exclusion, and conspiracy thinking.

Purism also rests on an illusion. We live in a world saturated with contaminants—from microplastics to forever chemicals—such that we are, in a sense, born “pre-polluted.” To try to shield ourselves individually by careful shopping choices is impossible and creates a sense of false security.

Second, the movement is deeply shaped by healthism—an idea that puts most of the responsibility for health on personal behavior. If you feel unwell, the MAHA approach is to take personal steps: Monitor your glucose, eliminate processed foods, buy organic. Structural factors—regulation, labor conditions, environmental exposure—fade into the background.

This is a paradox. While MAHA advocates sometimes call for tighter regulation of certain substances, their overall mindset often distrusts government and scientists, which limits their willingness for necessary systemic reforms and support for experts.

Healthism also obscures inequality. The capacity to “choose health” is unevenly distributed. A single mother juggling multiple precarious jobs likely lacks both the time to research good supplements and the income to purchase organic foods. Without structural changes in how food is produced, regulated, and distributed, those with fewer resources will continue to bear higher burdens—and then be blamed for their circumstances.

Despite these differences, the underlying overlap to progressive causes offers a window of opportunity. Many of the MAHA girls on Instagram are responding to real personal experiences that speak to larger issues: chronic symptoms without clear diagnoses, medical visits that feel rushed or dismissive. Conditions such as allergies, eczema, irritable bowel syndrome, and diabetes have become prevalent, and the fear that today’s generation may fare worse than their parents cannot be waved away as mere hyperbole.

Rather than rejecting MAHA’s sentiments, progressives need to listen carefully to the experiences that drive this movement, while being mindful of the limits of individual actions. If we are serious about making Americans—and the environments we inhabit—healthier, we can’t rely on individual choices alone.

We should meet this moment with “clean rules,” not just clean eating. Tackling bad food requires sustained advocacy for better regulations that foremostly consider the existing and potential harms to the most socioeconomically marginalized, such as farm laborers, fenceline communities, and the poor. And better food governance requires more support for scientists and public agencies that help to build a solid knowledge base for regulations and for them to be fully enforced.

“Clean” also means addressing conflict of interests in appointment of officials, in scientific data gathering, and in the endorsement of “solutions” including commercial products. Those reforms would help everyone—including the people with the least time and money to manage risk on their own.

There is no sector of the workforce more resilient than those who work in public service. As billionaires raise costs for working families and funding for essential services is slashed, these workers are being asked to do more with less.

Every day they go above and beyond to respond to the needs of their community: stepping up during extreme weather events, responding to emergencies, educating the next generation, keeping our streets clean, caring for patients and the elderly, ensuring public safety, and so much more.

This Public Service Recognition Week, we can show our appreciation for their grit and dedication by taking a page out of their book and joining the fight to protect public services and workers’ voices on the job.

Despite the importance of all they do, public service workers are often met with attacks by anti-union politicians, rather than the support they deserve. These attacks include budget cuts that endanger their jobs, staffing crises that jeopardize safety for everyone, and threats to pay and benefits.

The best way to channel our love for this country and commitment to our communities is by getting organized and standing together to make working people’s lives better.

Never giving in, public service workers answer this assault by getting organized.

Nationwide, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) members are using their union voice to demand more for their communities. Since the extremists in Congress and the Trump administration recklessly slashed funding for Medicaid, food assistance, and other programs to give tax breaks to billionaires, AFSCME members have been fighting at the state and local level to protect schools, hospitals, public works projects, and more.

In the courts, AFSCME members have successfully protected funding for museums, libraries, and childcare. And at the bargaining table, they continue to negotiate for fair wages, safe staffing, and respect, all of which ensure public services remain strong for the community.

They don’t do it to get rich or get famous. They keep going—behind the scenes and outside the limelight—because working in public service is their life’s calling.

Their resilience and perseverance teaches all of us an important lesson: The best way to channel our love for this country and commitment to our communities is by getting organized and standing together to make working people’s lives better.

So, this week, remember to stop and show your appreciation for the public service workers who show up every single day by joining them in the fight.

Across the country, resistance to data centers is rising even as plans are steadily being made to build new ones.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of new data centers—67%—are being built in rural areas. And three-quarters of those are in Midwestern and Southern towns.

The negative effects have not gone unnoticed. A new data center in Southaven, Mississippi, for example, is reportedly terrorizing the community with high levels of noise and air pollution, and residents are now regretting its existence.

But it’s not just the pollution, the depletion of water systems, and the increased energy costs to consumers that should lead communities to resist data centers. When you dig a little deeper, you begin to see how data centers are built on exploitation that goes far beyond small-town USA.

In defense of the planet, our communities, and communities around the world, I hope urban and rural communities alike can unite to stop data center projects.

Data centers are both products and producers of wars that kill people and destroy the planet on a global scale. The rapid expansion of these data centers requires raw materials, especially fossil fuels—resources often obtained through violence—and they fuel a technology that is increasingly used to commit war crimes.

Fossil fuels provide almost 60% of the power for data centers, especially for “emergency generators.” AI data centers run almost 24/7, so these “emergency” generators are consistently operating.

Control over fossil fuels, of course, is a driving factor behind the US regime change efforts in Iran, Venezuela, and other resource-rich regions. And the extraction of other needed minerals—like silicon, gallium, lithium, and cobalt—requires both the destabilization of the sovereign regions in which they are found and inhumane mining practices, including the use of child labor.

Then there is the question of the moral and ethical use of generative AI. The expansion of data centers comes at a time when AI and LLMs (large language models) are increasingly being used by the Pentagon for militarism domestically and internationally.

The Pentagon recently agreed to massive deals with both Palantir and OpenAI. The employment of AI in military operations has already resulted in war crimes. For instance, Anthropic’s Claude was used in the bombing of the girls’ school in Minab, Iran, which killed around 170 students and teachers. Do towns that pride themselves on family values want to be behind a killing machine capable of murdering young girls?

It’s easy to understand why the announcement of these data centers can seem like good news for areas facing dire economic conditions. Existing low-wage jobs are difficult to survive on. But the evidence suggests data centers create very few local jobs in the towns where they’re built. Should this small number of jobs come at the expense of people and the future of our planet?

The state officials brokering these deals with tech companies could instead work on bringing jobs that design, install, and maintain renewable energy systems to replace fossil fuel reliance. They could sign contracts with companies that manage and protect the beautiful natural ecosystems, habitats, and biodiversity that often surround rural towns.

We need jobs that sustain the heartbeat of the Midwest and the charm and hospitality of the South—not jobs in an industry that terrorizes communities and kills people.

Data centers are not just toxic installations in communities’ backyards—they are a driving force behind wars and instability, and they keep American workers tied to the endless cycle of wars for fossil fuels.

In defense of the planet, our communities, and communities around the world, I hope urban and rural communities alike can unite to stop data center projects—especially across the Midwest and the South, where they have so much beauty and love to protect.

Rural communities’ future is not AI. We should be investing in what makes us great: the people and the land.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, he bemoaned the failure of his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to protect him from the Justice Department’s investigation of Russia’s efforts to elect Trump in 2016.

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump erupted, referring to his notorious former fixer who had also been Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hatchet man during the 1950s Senate hearings into communist activity. Trump later fired Sessions.

For a time, Attorney General William Barr was the answer. But the two men parted ways after Barr told him repeatedly that no evidence supported Trump’s obsessive claims that voter fraud had cost him the 2020 election.

In Trump’s second term, it appeared that Pam Bondi fit the bill. She tried valiantly to meet Trump’s every legal need. She transformed the Justice Department into Trump’s personal tool, prosecuted Trump’s perceived enemies, and tried to protect Trump from the fallout over the scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking of minors.

Bondi's Deputy, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is now auditioning to remove the “Acting” from his title. He hopes to succeed where his predecessors have failed—to become Trump’s enduring Roy Cohn.

But she bungled the Epstein files. She tried but failed to prosecute two key targets on Trump’s vengeance list: New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey. She savaged her own reputation but could not save her job.

Bondi’s deputy, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is now auditioning to remove the “Acting” from his title. He hopes to succeed where his predecessors have failed—to become Trump’s enduring Roy Cohn.

From Democrat to Trump Enabler

Blanche began his legal career in 1999 as a paralegal in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Working days and attending Brooklyn Law School at night, he graduated in 2003. After a stint as an associate in the Davis Polk firm and two federal court clerkships, he returned in 2006 to the US Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor and eventually became co-chief of the violent crimes division.

In 2014, Blanche joined the WilmerHale firm as a partner before moving to another big New York firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft. In 2019, he represented Paul Manafort on state mortgage fraud charges similar to federal crimes for which Manafort had already been convicted in 2018. (Trump pardoned Manafort in December 2020). Blanche got the state law claims dismissed on double jeopardy grounds.

But in April 2023, Cadwalader balked when Blanche, then a registered Democrat, sought to represent Trump in the hush-money case involving payments to Stormy Daniels. So Blanche left Cadwalader and started his own firm. The jury eventually convicted Trump, but for Blanche it began a profitable relationship that generated over $3 million from Trump’s Save America PAC in the new firm’s first year alone.

Blanche went on to represent Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case and in the election obstruction case involving Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. In 2024, Blanche switched his registration from Democrat to Republican.

Trump’s Latest Roy Cohn

Blanche is no longer Trump’s personal attorney, but you wouldn’t know it from his conduct in office.

Although he was the No. 2 official in the Justice Department, in July 2025 he tried to quiet the MAGA backlash over Trump’s breach of an election pledge to release the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Blanche went to Florida where Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell was in prison and interviewed her personally. Openly seeking a pardon, Maxwell said that she had never seen Trump do anything inappropriate.

Mission accomplished.

Shortly thereafter, Maxwell was transferred to a “club fed-type” prison camp—even though her conviction had rendered her ineligible for such placement under Bureau of Prisons policy. Blanche said that threats against her were the reason for the transfer.

As acting attorney general, Blanche has now picked up where Bondi had failed to put Comey behind bars. At an April 28, 2026 press conference, he announced Comey’s indictment alleging that in posting an Instagram photo of sea shells that formed “86 47” on a North Carolina beach, Comey “knowingly and willfully made a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States.”

A sea-shell death threat via Instagram.

“So, I think it's fair to say that threatening the life of anybody is dangerous and potentially a crime,” Blanche said indignantly as he explained that the charges against Comey came with a 10-year potential prison sentence. “Threatening the life of the President of the United States will never be tolerated by the Department of Justice.”

Blanche continued, “[W]hile this case is unique and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate and regularly prosecute.”

Really? How about these?

“Hang Mike Pence”—Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 insurrectionists, some of whom may have been responsible for the sign carrying that message and the gallows accompanying it. The statute of limitations on such “threats” is five years. Where was that indictment?

“86 46”—Anti-Biden Trump social media personality Jack Posobiec posted this in January 2022. It also appeared on T-Shirts, caps, and Republican fundraising messages.

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) posted this in February 2024: “We’ve now 86’d: McCarthy, McDaniel, McConnell. Better days are ahead for the Republican Party.”

Wasting Taxpayer Money

Prosecutors face a daunting task proving Comey’s subjective intent to harm Trump. Even longtime Trump apologist Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, acknowledged that the indictment “is unlikely to survive constitutional scrutiny. If it did, it would allow the government to criminalize a huge swath of political speech in the United States.”

When asked at his press conference how he would prove intent, Blanche said “with witnesses, with documents, and with the defendant himself,” adding: “It's very premature for me to do that today.”

That non-answer won’t suffice when Comey’s lawyers provide evidence that this is just another vindictive prosecution on Trump’s behalf at taxpayer expense.

Someday Blanche’s progeny may ask him why—as the chief law enforcement officer in the United States—he helped a rogue president run roughshod over the rule of law.

He probably won’t tell them about Roy Cohn.

A leading preoccupation of the first Trump administration has all but slipped from view. Except when ostensible conservatives speak out against it, the major media have scarcely breathed a word on the subject. But it’s still there, 30 feet tall, aspirationally 1,952 miles long, obliterating habitats, dividing families, and sucking down public funds faster than a carrier-based air squadron.

The media’s lack of attention is understandable. All-too-real wars of choice and metaphorical wars against science, universities, and the environment have dominated our airtime and the headlines. The rise of a new medievalism in medicine and the abrogation of international trade and security agreements have also won attention. Add to all of that a federal paramilitary kidnapping people, even from what still passes for the halls of justice, while murdering the occasional protester, and one’s journalistic cup runneth over.

The meta story of the US government’s comprehensive abandonment of its Enlightenment heritage needs telling, too. Goodbye to empiricism and the troublesome scientific discourse it produces. Goodbye as well to empiricism’s political collaterals, including the “created equal” credo of the Declaration of Independence, which the current regime finds distinctly irritating. There is simply too much to report on as the new monarchy, as if in a sped-up nature film, blossoms flowerlike, its palace under renovation, the king’s signature being prepared to grace the currency, and myriad kickback mechanisms whirring like gold-plated turbines to enrich an aristocracy of tech bros and oil emirs.

So, dear reader, it’s not just logical but inevitable that Donald Trump’s border wall, a major story during his first administration, has essentially fallen out of the news. Rest assured, though, that the world’s least pragmatic and most performative construction project continues to prosper.

Spend Now, Think Later

Modern border management relies on three tools: human patrols, remote detection backed by quick response teams, and the construction of physical obstacles. Smart gatekeepers coordinate those tools to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost. But there’s no need for thrift in Trumpworld. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, which Trump signed into law last July 4, negated all need for fiscal restraint. Among other things, it appropriated $46.55 billion for border wall construction, $7.8 billion for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents and their vehicles, $6.2 billion for high-tech border surveillance, and a hefty $10 billion for anything else border-related. The total: $70.55 billion. Those funds will be available through Fiscal Year 2029. By comparison, the government will spend about $10 billion less over that same period to fund the entire Department of the Interior, which manages half a billion acres of surface land as well as the continental shelf and vast subsurface mineral deposits.

Such border largesse means that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can go all out on all three tactical approaches at the US-Mexico border—patrol, surveillance, and a wall—simultaneously, without troubling to eliminate redundancies, tailor tactics to the environment, or streamline coordination. Daddy has proudly given DHS his credit card.

In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity.

In a victory-lap cabinet meeting four days after enacting the OBBBA, Trump told Kristi Noem, then still his DHS secretary, “You’re loaded up on the border.” He essentially admitted that the bill’s munificence demonstrated power, not budgetary acumen, simultaneously adding, “We had zero [migrants] come in last month, so I am not sure how much of it we want to spend. You may actually think about saving a lot of money because the wall is largely built.” The president then continued with fact-free claims that the migrant population abounded with murderers and mental defectives.

Notwithstanding Trump’s comments, DHS administrators and the contractors who are their most immediate constituents show no sign of leaving money on the table. At the border, their blank-check funding meets a matching regulatory void—the most extensive waiver of laws and regulations in American history. In addition to suspending laws intended to protect the environment, wildlife, national parks, national wildlife refuges, lands sacred to Native Americans, and historic and cultural sites, the Trump administration has also waived more than 60 contracting and procurement regulations. In the name of a national emergency, which is no emergency at all—illegal border crossings (as measured by apprehensions) have indeed plunged—the president has stripped the playing field of all boundaries and opened the door to cronyism and corruption.

Under showers of money and in the absence of restraint, a single border wall is no longer viewed as adequate. Double-walling has become the norm and certain select areas now boast triple walls. With no cap on costs, whole mountaintops, rugged and unvisited, have been sheared apart to make way for the standard 30-foot-tall, steel-bollard wall, even at costs exceeding $41 million per mile, or almost $8,000 per foot. Meanwhile, the Border Patrol’s terminally bored agents (giving new meaning to bored-er) sit behind the wall in white trucks, looking at their phones and incubating their hemorrhoids.

The Non-Monetary Costs Are No Less Astronomical

It’s easy to think of the mostly arid US-Mexico border zone as empty, but biologically it’s a busy place. The grasslands of the San Rafael Valley in Arizona, for instance, are home to 17 threatened and endangered species. For years, existing vehicle barriers, bolstered by remote detection technology, have allowed jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, mule deer, and other wildlife to move back and forth across the valley’s 30 miles of border and disperse according to their ancient ways. A network of 60 remote cameras along that stretch, monitored by the Sky Island Alliance, recorded just one possible migrant per camera every 20 months. Besides being easily patrolled, the valley is also heart-stoppingly beautiful. Nonetheless, DHS intends to double wall all of it. In addition to bifurcating the wildlife habitat and scarring a gemlike landscape, the wall builders will extract large amounts of groundwater to make concrete for the wall’s foundation, almost certainly desiccating wetlands that are hotspots of biodiversity. And for nothing, save symbolism, bragging rights, and contractor profits.

No detail illuminates the mentality behind border enforcement better than this: In cooperation with US Customs and Border Protection, military elements at Fort Huachuca, Arizona are now engaged in “the largest Concertina wire (C-wire) emplacement in US territorial history.” “C-wire,” or “razor wire,” is designed to lacerate any flesh, human or animal, that comes in contact with it. Fort Huachuca soldiers are deploying 43,000 rolls of it, the largest single purchase ever.

Usually C-wire is used atop a wall or fence to prevent people from climbing over. Ominously, it’s now being spread on the ground, sometimes in areas where there is no wall, but also in front of the wall and between double walls—a policy of pure viciousness, not necessity. Someone should explain this deployment to the bighorn sheep of California’s Jacumba Mountains, which are now separated from their key Mexican waterhole by thickets of the nasty stuff, which will become ever more camouflaged and treacherous as grass and brush grow through it.

Buoy, Oh, Buoy, What a Wall!

For treachery, however, it’s hard to top CBP’s plans to “secure” 536 miles of the border in Texas by mooring a chain of cylindrical buoys, linked end to end, down the middle of the Rio Grande. Once in place, the array will look like an orange sausage, five feet in diameter, floating on the river. The anchors and mooring lines, of course, will be invisible. What could possibly go wrong?

This ill-conceived plan offers a retro-snapshot of American life before the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) became law in 1970, back when strip mines and other land-wrecking ventures could be launched with no evaluation of their impact, no public involvement, and no second opinions as to their necessity. The waiver of NEPA and every other environmental constraint means that no modeling of the “Buoy Wall’s” hydrodynamics (that is, its reaction to flooding), if any exists, has been made public.

The Rio Grande International Study Center in Laredo, Texas, however, commissioned its own study. The results are unequivocal. The Buoy Wall will be a debris trap during floods, as when a hurricane lodges over the region. It will redirect flows of water and raise water levels, especially in places where it’s paired with river-crowding segments of the wall. And if a section of buoys should break loose from the sandy, unstable riverbed, the likelihood of disaster will soar.

Geomorphologist Mark Tompkins, who authored the report, concludes, “Failures will cause catastrophic flooding, damage, and destruction to property, and risks to the health and safety of people near the river corridor.” Thousands of people living adjacent to the river in Laredo and other communities in both Mexico and the US will be put at risk.

Conflicts Brewed and Brewing

Walls have their place. They can be effective in urban areas. But DHS startled more than a few onlookers with plans to build a wall among the cliffs and arid wildlands of Big Bend National Park. Even the sheriffs of West Texas, one of the reddest regions in the country, got riled up. Although DHS may yet fall back to a more sensible “detection technology” alternative for the national park, it has failed to communicate a clear decision, while nearby private lands and Big Bend Ranch State Park remain at risk.

Even worse uncertainty may be brewing in Arizona, where the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, whose presence predates the border by many centuries, are spread on either side of the line. The tribe’s exemplary cooperation with border authorities includes tribal enforcement teams that have helped keep illegal crossings at a historic low. But the rigid minds and hungry contractors of the “CBP industrial complex” remain unsatisfied. The agency’s “smart wall map” indicates that it aims to build a double wall across the Tohono O’odham reservation, splitting apart families, clans, and longstanding webs of relationship.

And then there’s the unhappy Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Cruces, which serves Sunland Park, New Mexico. Walls have long separated El Paso and Sunland Park from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. However, there is an unwalled gap at Monte Cristo Rey, a steep-sided peak long considered impractical for barrier construction. Not now, though. Blasting for the Border Wall began on Cristo Rey in March, in time to appall the thousands of Holy Week pilgrims who visit the statue of Christ the King on the mountain’s summit.

The land available to CBP, however, is not sufficient to finish the job on Cristo Rey, and the adjacent landowner, the Catholic Church, refuses to sell. CBP claims it may assert the right of eminent domain, while the church has said it will fight, although its best tool for resistance, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, has predictably been among the many laws waived by DHS.

Orgasms for Birders

On a recent trip to the border, I visited one of the most exquisite places in the entire Southwest. To get to it, I drove 40 miles on dirt roads across broken, arroyo-carved desert. The Border Wall was almost always in sight.

Apart from the roadway itself, the commonest evidence of a human presence were signs at the approach to each arroyo: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, which is good advice in an area where flash floods from local thunderstorms can sweep away a heavy truck. All the arroyos that the road crosses are also crossed by the Border Wall. Floods pile tons of debris against the wall, and sometimes the accumulated weight is enough to push the structure down. CBP continues to experiment with designs for swinging water gates, but a durable solution remains unproven.

Between a pair of “lay-bys”—bulldozed flats where the wall contractor has assembled fleets of eighteen-wheelers, excavators, scrapers, dumpers, pickups, bulldozers, loaders, and cement trucks—I veered down a rough track to a steel gate and let myself in. A little way beyond that, I stopped my car beside a lazy creek at the bottom of a canyon. White-barked sycamores and cottonwoods, just coming into leaf, towered overhead. Amid their shadows, the air smelled of duff and wet sand. The birds were not just singing, they were yelling. When I opened a birding app on my phone, the bird-call IDs scrolled by like movie credits.

From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power.

The canyon has a perfectly good name, but I’ll call it Paradox Canyon in recognition of the contrast between the vigorous life it contains and the brutalist-walled horizon looming above it. During the first Trump administration, the nearest mountain peak was cleaved open like a watermelon, leaving the landscape not just scarred but grotesquely amputated.

The current contractor, Fisher Industries, is no stranger to disassembling and rearranging mountains. Besides installing the standard bollard wall, Fisher is pouring a concrete patrol road at the foot of the wall, portions of which, rising above Paradox Canyon, are so steep that, absent the paving, no wheeled vehicle can climb it.

The next mountain, however, is too steep even for a patrol road. The previous contractor’s employees dubbed the peak “Widow Maker,” and the zigzag scars of switchbacks and ledges by which they gained access to the path of the wall make it easy to understand why.

Fisher is the largest player in the wall-building business. Based in North Dakota, it was the contractor for “We Build the Wall,” a crowd-funded enterprise that got its promoters, including Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally, convicted for fraud. “We Build the Wall” funded Fisher to build 3.5 miles of wall on private land beside the Rio Grande near Mission, Texas. The Department of Justice and the International Boundary Waters Commission subsequently sued Fisher for shoddy work and violation of the boundary treaty with Mexico. The suit has since been settled, with Fisher having agreed to make immediate repairs and carry out future repairs subject to the forfeit of a $3-million bond.

The Paradox Canyon rancher whom I came to visit is philosophical about the wall. The assault on his land began at the end of Trump I and, after a Biden-era pause, has resumed at full strength. The “shock and awe” accompanying Trump’s resumption of office, he says, left no room for negotiating a more sensible path forward. He believes that the symbolism of the wall is its real power, as it channels the fears of the MAGA faithful. The wall, he says, stands for more than shutting out migrants and narcos. It stands for shutting out other complex things, possibly complexity itself. It represents Trump’s promise to his base that their worldview will be fulfilled.

Making War at Home and Abroad

My rancher friend feels that his present task is to weather the storm of wall building and await a time when wiser heads prevail, when the rush to spend and build might yield to thoughtful redesign, when gaps for wildlife might be installed and properly monitored, and when the wall’s proponents and its enemies might find a “third path.”

Meanwhile, the excavators, scrapers, bulldozers, and haulers carry on. From concertina wire to counter-functional buoys, from mountain blasting to free-wheeling billion-dollar contracts, the mindset behind the wall is the same as that which spawned the Iran war. Both are exercises in unchecked power. Both were conceived with disdain for the complexities of the real world. Both serve rhetorical as much as tangible purposes.

The war with Iran has confounded Trump’s expectation of a quick victory. Thousands of gravestones will be its monument. The Border Wall, in its own slow way, will provide another sort of monument. It won’t be the graves of those who died crossing it or flanking it by sea, for they will rarely be marked at all. And it won’t be the local extinctions of plants or animals, for they will simply vanish. It will instead be a tottering, linear, soulless version of Stonehenge—think of it as America’s Steelhenge—built on sand and made of haste, fear, and avarice.

It will memorialize Trump’s success in making America less and less great.