“How’s the Democratic Party’s ground game in Pennsylvania?” I asked a friend several weeks before the 2024 presidential election. He replied optimistically that there were far more door knockers this year than in 2022. It turned out these door knockers were just urging a vote for the Democrats without putting forth a compelling agenda attached to candidate commitments on issues that mean something to people where they live, work, and raise their families. There was no Democratic Party “Compact for the American People.” Biden visited Pennsylvania, which went Republican, many times, with his most memorable message being that he grew up in Scranton.

Once again, the vacuous, feeble Democratic Party is relying on the Republicans and the cruel, lawless dictator Trump to beat themselves to gain control of the Senate and the House.

Legendary reporter Seymour Hersh last week made the case for the Republicans taking themselves down, to wit: “I have been told by an insider that the internal polling numbers are not good …” and that “Anxiety in the White House that both the House and the Senate might fall to the Democrats is acute. Trump’s poll numbers are sliding …. The public lying of Cabinet members in defense of ICE has not helped the president or the party. Trump hasn’t delivered on the economy, except for the very rich, and he hasn’t made good on early promises to resolve the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine.”

GOP operatives are assuming the Democrats will take back the House by a comfortable number and now think the Senate, where the GOP holds a three-seat majority. There are six seats in play. The GOP’s biggest fear is that their negatives continue to increase, propelled by a pile of unpopular Trumpian actions, ugly behavior, and corruption. The combination of all these things could create a critical mass and produce a landslide comparable to the Reagan-led victory in 1980. In this election, the Republicans defeated seemingly unbeatable Senate veterans like Senator Magnuson, Senator Nelson, and Senator Church, and gave the GOP control of the Senate.

Our Republic has been invaded by the Trumpsters, who are taking down its institutional pillars, its safety nets, and its rule of law. Our democracy is crumbling by the day.

So, what is the Democratic Party doing during this GOP slump? It is Déjà vu all over again. The Dems are furiously raising money from commercial special interests and relying on vacuous television and social media ads. They are not engaging people with enough personal events, and they are not returning calls or reaching out to their historical base – progressive labor and citizen leaders. Most importantly, they are not presenting voters with a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS. Such a compact would spark voter excitement and attract significant media coverage.

Their aversion to building their own momentum to answer the basic questions “Whose side are you on?” and “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” remains as pathetic as it was in 2022 and 2024. Ken Martin, head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), recently quashed a detailed report he commissioned about why the Democrats lost in 2024. He has refused to meet with leaders of progressive citizen organizations. We visited the DNC headquarters and could not even get anyone to take our materials on winning issues and tactics. We offered the compiled presentations of two dozen progressive civic leaders on how to landslide the GOP in 2022. This material is still relevant and offers a letter-perfect blueprint for how Democrats could win in 2026. (See winningamerica.net). (The DNC offices are like a mausoleum, except for visits by members of Congress entering to dial for dollars.)

Imagine a mere switch of 240,000 votes in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) would have defeated Trump in 2024. That margin would have been easily accomplished had the Democratic Party supported the efforts of AFL-CIO and progressive union leaders who wanted the Dems to champion a “Compact for Workers” on Labor Day, with events throughout the country. (See letter sent to Liz Shuler, President of AFL-CIO, on August 27, 2024).

The compact would have emphasized: raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers and increasing Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years, could have benefited over 60 million elderly, paid for by higher Social Security taxes on the wealthy classes. The compact would also include: a genuine child tax credit would help over 60 million children, cutting child poverty in half; repeal of Trump’s massive tax cuts for the super-rich and giant corporations (which would pay for thousands of public works groups in communities around the nation); and Full Medicare for All (which is far more efficient and life-saving than the corporate-controlled nightmare of gouges, inscrutable billing fraud, and arbitrary denial of benefits).

Droves of conservative and liberal voters would attend events showcasing winning politics, authentically presented, as envisioned for the grassroots Labor Day gatherings, suicidally blocked by the smug, siloed leaders of the Democratic Party in 2022 and 2024.

Clearly, this is a Party that thinks it can win on the agenda of Wall Street and the military/industrial complexes. (See Norman Solomon’s book The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy. It can be downloaded for free at BlueRoad.info.) The Democratic Party scapegoats the tiny Green Party for its losses again and again at the federal and state levels to the worst Republican Party in history – BY FAR.

It is fair to say that, with few exceptions, the Democratic Party apparatus is coasting, playing “it safe,” and expecting that the Trumpsters will deliver the Congress to it in November.

The exceptions are warning about this hazardous complacency, such as adopting James Carville’s ridiculous advice just to let the GOP self-destruct (though recently he also has urged a progressive economic agenda). There are progressive young Democrats challenging incumbent corporate Democrats in the House. They are not waiting for a turnover in the Party’s aging leadership. They believe the country can’t wait for such a transformation. Our Republic has been invaded by the Trumpsters, who are taking down its institutional pillars, its safety nets, and its rule of law. Our democracy is crumbling by the day.

As for the non-voters, disgusted with politics, just go vote for a raise, vote for health insurance, vote for a crackdown on corporate crooks seizing your consumer dollars and savings, and vote for taxing the rich. That’s what your vote should demand, and these are the issues that should be conveyed to the candidates campaigning in your communities.

Tell the candidates you want a shakeup, not a handshake. (See, the primer for victory, “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” 2024).

Don Lemon, a high profile personality was arrested on orders from US Attorney Pam Bondi, accusing him of violating the Federal Civil Rights of worshippers. Lemon, an independent journalist followed protesters into a church on January 18 to cover the event. The Trump administration known for its vindictiveness and with no love for the outspoken Lemon, who has expressed outrage over the policies and racism of the administration, felt obliged to make him an example. We have witnessed how these political rogues in the White House don't hesitate to wield power in a punitive and targeted way. Also arrested were Trahern Jeen Crews, co-founder of Black Lives Matter in Minnesota, Jamael Lydell Lundy, and local independent journalist Georgia Fort—each with high profiles in their own right. There were many other protesters and independent journalists that were in the church.

Following the arrests, Pam Bondi posted a statement to social media that read: “At my direction, early this morning federal agents arrested Don Lemon, in connection with the coordinated attack on Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.” One of the church’s pastors, David Easterwood, heads the local ICE field office and given the high tensions and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—coupled with the unrestrained hostilities and overwhelming presence of DHS and other so-called law enforcement agencies—was the reason this particular church was chosen.

Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said that her investigation of Lemon and others have to do with these people “desecrating a house of worship and interfering with Christian worshippers.” The post went on to state, “A house of worship is not a public forum for your protest! It is a space protected from exactly such acts by federal criminal and civil laws!”

This church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), a conservative church movement that has its own history of racism, including its support of slavery, its stance against women in ministry, and homophobia. There was immediate outrage that a church’s worship service would be disrupted. Immediately the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention recoiled.

The conservative church, often referred to as the white evangelical or charismatic church is one of the places that this right-wing "Make American Great Again" agenda garnered strength and energy to help Donald Trump and other MAGA adherents elected.

“I believe we must be resolute in two areas: encouraging our churches to provide compassionate pastoral care to these (migrant) families and standing firm for the sanctity of our houses of worship,” said the SBC's Trey Turner in a social media post. “No cause—political or otherwise—justifies the desecration of a sacred space or the intimidation and trauma inflicted on families gathered peacefully in the house of God,” stated Kevin Ezell, president of the North American Mission Board of the convention. He went on to argue that what "occurred was not protest; it was lawless harassment.”

I have served ministries in Chicago, Boston, and for 30 years in DC and am perplexed why churches would think that they are insulated from criticism from outside once they have made forays into the issues of the world? When churches intentionally enter into vital and important political discussions or take positions that affect the lives of people they have opened themselves to the critique and questions of those issues by the people affected by their positions.

This invites actions and disruptions that may manifest itself in worship. Disruptions to church services are not new. Civil Rights leader James Forman disrupted services at New York's Riverside Church in 1969 to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches. It was the Black Manifesto, an action aimed to force institutions to address their historical complicity in slavery. The protest led to increased discussions about religious accountability, with some institutions later adopting anti-poverty, and racism awareness initiatives.

Another example includes Stop the Church, a demonstration organized by members of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). In December 1989, that group disrupted Mass being led by Cardinal John O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. One-hundred and eleven protesters were arrested. The main objective of the demonstration was to protest O'Connor's opposition to the teaching of safe sex in the public school system, and his opposition to the distribution of condoms to curb the spread of AIDS. During the Free South Africa Movement there were numbers of church disruptions to press churches and denominations on divestment from South Arica. More recently worship services were confronted over the genocide in Gaza. Church disruptions are not new but bring urgency and concern evaluating the public policy positions of the church and at times pointing out the contradictions in the church and of the pastor.

The conservative church, often referred to as the white evangelical or charismatic church is one of the places that this right-wing "Make American Great Again" agenda garnered strength and energy to help Donald Trump and other MAGA adherents elected. It was from the conservative pulpits that pastors presented to their members that it was “God’s will” and that God took a flawed person like King David, known in the scriptures for adultery and murder, and like King David God anointed Trump even with all of his flaws. These statements or those of a similar bent were made behind many church doors to parishioners across the country. It was in these circles that people like Charles Kirk gained his notoriety and political influence among young white evangelicals with his brand of ridicule of “woke-ness,” DEI, Black people, and other people of color.

Behind worshipping doors across the country right-wing and predominantly white evangelical churches have impacted the society in fascist ways. The theology of these churches believe that God puts in place leadership. That leadership is appointed by God. But the reality is that divine leadership tends to be the assertion of those in positions to assert that point of view, dress it biblically, and asserted it as divine will. Those of us fighting bias and exclusion in the church observe how "God loves all the people that people in the church love, and hate all the people that people in the church hate!” That is hardly a divine equation. When Obama left the White House and Trump took office in his firs term, Paula White-Cain, a religious adviser to Trump wrote that Jesus had "finally returned" to the White House. This was a peculiar comment because the Obama's were deeply rooted in the church, and no one knew any church affiliation that Trump could claim.

Now I am not saying that people should indiscriminately target churches, but I am saying that churches when they enter the political fray to reshape the world and make politics for all the rest of us are open face the consequences of political discussions and critique whether in worship or not. In addition, Pastors and the positions that they theologically take to influence the secular world does not insulate them or protect them from criticism or accusations of hypocrisy.

There are pastors doing secular work, and that has been called “tent” ministry. These secular jobs supplement their church income. The pastor in St. Paul was involved in a “tent” ministry. A “tent” ministry is to have a secular position in addition to a church one. This raises another question of whether that secular job contradicts or compliments a person’s overall ministry. In the St. Paul ministry an important question emerged, the scriptures asks, ‘whether you can serve two masters,’ in this case ICE and the church. How can the church comfort and advocate for immigrants, which it claims it does, while arresting and deporting them? The protesters were calling out the contradiction.

Pam Bondi and others are interested in protecting their right-wing religious base and therefore are not interested in the history of church disruptions and advocacy. Churches are not exempt from the political or theological fray once they enter the public debate. Institutional churches should be held accountable as well as pastors who serve full-time or in ‘tent” ministries. What happened on January 18 in St. Paul, Minnesota is not beyond what is reasonable or appropriate. The pastor opened himself to the disruption and criticism. Instead of being outraged the pastor and others need to comprehend why they drew the anger of protesters who were spotlighting the lack of congruency in serving ICE and claiming to offer comfort to immigrants.

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•  After Democrats won a pair of special elections in surprise upsets, another bright spot for the party as they try to back the Senate: their candidates are raising a lot of money. Democrats have two weeks to squeeze concessions out of ICE—which has locked down its Texas gulag due to a measles outbreak—is it possible?

• Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall memorial arch in DC to celebrate July 4th.

• Gulf Allies characterize Iran’s mid-range missiles as a deadly threat to the Middle East and US bases there. Turkey to host US-Iran negotiations.

• Google accused of violating its own ethics rules by handing over AI tech to Israel, which is using it to build its surveillance state. Meanwhile, Israel bans MSF from Gaza as Rafah crossing sort-of reopens.

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After ICE killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, right-wing defenders of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation strategies blamed the victim for coming to a demonstration bearing a weapon. This is despite the state’s clear right to carry a gun openly, the Second Amendment, and the GOP’s longstanding arguments in defense of its own who did the same thing in the past.

The post The Right To Bear Arms—Well, It Depends appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

I don’t remember ever hearing federal officials so quickly, in unison, blame the victim as after the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis on January 7 by an agent of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. And as quick after the killing of Alex Pretti two weeks later on January 24 by agents of US Customs and Border Protection, or Border Patrol.

The Border Patrol before principally operated within 100 miles of the US border, hence its name. That changed with the so-called immigration enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) under President Donald Trump. With the lines between ICE and Border Patrol blurred, when protesters shout “ICE Out,” they mean both.

Both killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. That is, ICE’s transformation under the Trump administration led to their killing. A metamorphosis in which scapegoating is one motivating force to justify scaling up ICE and its deployment into the Twin Cities, tagged by DHS “Operation Metro Surge.” Victim blaming is one manifestation of the Trump administration’s overarching scapegoating propaganda machine.

German documentarian Neal McQueen reminds us of the poisonous functions of scapegoating in his comparison of the rise in Germany in the 1920s of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary force Sturmabteilung (often called “Brown Shirts”) and today’s ICE. “No moral equivalence is asserted,” he writes of his comparison. What he does do is highlight how both organizations, his words, “constructed their ideological purpose through scapegoating.”

Where was the mind of ICE and Border Patrol personnel shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good? Was it the mindset of a paramilitary force in combat with those at odds with MAGA and its ideology?

Scapegoating is nothing new in the US. The Ku Klux Klan (“KKK”), one example, has been a paramilitary group supporting its purpose via scapegoating. As historian William Trollinger wrote, while “the original Klan concentrated its animus against the newly freed slaves and their Republican Party supporters,” the Klan growth in the 1920s relied upon an “expanded list of social scapegoats that included Catholics, Jews, and immigrants.”

But the KKK hasn’t been an armed force within the executive branch of the US government as is ICE. With ICE becoming more so with the ballooning funding and personnel expansion during President Trump’s second term.

President Trump has proven himself a master of using scapegoating to maintain and grow his political power, as Jess Bidgood at the New York Times chronicles. His targeting Somalis in the Twin Cities in Minnesota a latest example.

A video posted in December 2025 by a conservative YouTuber alleged fraud in some Somali-run childcare centers. Allegations refuted in follow-up investigation by the state. But damage done, as President Trump and his minions ramped up attributing fraud to all of Somali descent in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the majority American citizens.

What the video missed was actual fraud occurring during the Covid-19 pandemic. And the biggest fraudster then was the convicted white female founder of Feeding Our Future. That fraud involved providing a publicly-financed nutrition program with false counts and invoices of meals provided to children. Some of Somali descent participated in the fraud, but only around one-tenth of 1% of all Somalis in the Twin Cities.

Repeatedly we hear the focus of Trump’s immigration enforcement is deporting “the worst of the worst.” The word “worst” said referring to criminal and violent undocumented immigrants. But analysis at the Cato Institute indicates these are not the vast majority of immigrants being rounded up and deported. In practice, as America has witnessed in Minneapolis and elsewhere, “worst” means not being white.

Scapegoating is evident in the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. In likely nurturing trigger-happy ICE and Border Patrol agents. And in blaming Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti.

Within two hours of Renee Good’s killing, the victim blaming started, as analysis by ABC News documents. A post on X by DHS stated Ms. Good “weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over” ICE agents “in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” And President Trump joined in with his own post that day writing:

The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer… it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.

Vice President J.D. Vance also jumped in, blaming Ms. Good, as did DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. All the victim-blaming lies, revealed as such in the video analysis by New York Times, that by the Guardian, and others.

When the officer shot through Ms. Good’s open driver-side window, he clearly wasn’t run over. Instead, he was positioned with Ms. Good as a target he couldn’t miss. And after all the shots were fired, you can hear him say “fucking bitch.” He then walked away, casually as if leaving a session at a shooting range proud to have hit the bullseye.

Looking at the video of Ms. Good’s killing, I can’t help but think the ICE agent already knew he had immunity before Vice President Vance announced it later that day. Knew when he shot with his gun pointed through the window at Ms. Good’s head.

A private autopsy performed for Ms. Good’s family revealed she was shot three times; in the breast, forearm, and head. The wounds of the breast and forearm were deemed not immediately fatal. But the head wound was deemed more immediately so.

And why was Ms. Good’s killer taking video of her license plate. Probably because he and other agents were told to collect identifying information on protesters; protesters joining an enemy list with Somalis. And, as should be expected, as in all wars enemies get killed.

Victim blaming continued with the killing of Alex Pretti. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, held a news conference a few hours after this fatal shooting saying:

…an individual [Alex Pretti] approached US Border Patrol agents with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic handgun. The agents attempted to disarm the individual, but he violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, a border patrol agent fired defensive shots…This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

And at her news conference the same day, DHS Secretary Noem’s victim blaming was identical word for word.

But video shows Alex Pretti did not brandish his legally-carried gun. Nor violently resist. With instead holding his hands up above his head, cell phone in one hand. What violence there was happened when Border Patrol agents threw him to the ground and held him down.

One agent appeared to step back with Mr. Pretti’s gun in his hand having removed it. Then gunfire heard. Not by one officer, but two. The first shots finding Mr. Pretti motionless lying face down. Then agents stepping back fired a rapid blast of more shots into Pretti’s still body, analysis indicating a total of 10 shots fired.

The preceding description is consistent with the moment-by-moment video analysis of Alex Pretti’s shooting by CNN. And, also, by ABC News and the New York Times. And with sworn testimonies of eye witnesses.

When I watched videos of Mr. Pretti’s killing, I couldn’t help but wonder how the agents felt when firing their rapid volley of bullets. Was it to them, as the scene intensely felt to me, like a moment of target practice as if at a shooting range?

Where was the mind of ICE and Border Patrol personnel shooting Alex Pretti and Renee Good? Was it the mindset of a paramilitary force in combat with those at odds with MAGA and its ideology? More that than of agents performing disciplined immigration enforcement?

Rep Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) seems to wonder that himself in his letter on January 12 to Attorney General Pamela Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noems, writing:

DHS seems to be courting pardoned January 6th insurrectionists. It uses white nationalist “dog whistles” in its recruitment campaign for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents that appear aimed at stirring members of extremist militias… which participated in the insurrection… ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6th and were convicted of their offenses [but Trump pardoned]?

Aside from recruitment messages already winking to extremists, Washington Post reported on future ICE recruitment plans (also discussed on Democracy Now) to reach attendees at, for instance, gun shows and NASCAR races among other venues.

After the killing of Mr. Pretti, the killing of Ms. Good not sufficient alone, President Trump said he was “de-escalating” the surge of ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minnesota “a little bit,” replacing Commander Greg Bovino with Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan.

Then again, an ICE agent also told an observer in Minnesota just days after Alex Pretti was killed, “You raise your voice, I will erase your voice.”

Fat is now phat, at least according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

When President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary unveiled new federal dietary guidelines this January, he declared: “We are ending the war on saturated fats.” Seconding Kennedy was Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, who promised that children and schools will no longer need to “tiptoe” around fat.

Kennedy’s exaltation of fat comes complete with a new upside-down guidelines pyramid where a thick cut of steak and a wedge of cheese share top billing with fruit and vegetables. This prime placement of a prime cut is the strongest endorsement for consuming red meat since the government first issued dietary guidelines in 1980.

The endorsement reverses decades of advisories, which the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and HHS jointly issue every five years, to limit red meat consumption issued under both Democratic and Republican administrations given the strong evidence that eating less of it lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. Multiple studies over the last decade have linked red and processed meats not only to cardiovascular disease, but also to colon polyps, colorectal cancer, diabetes, diverticulosis, pneumonia, and even premature death.

Given the scientific evidence, we should intensify the war against saturated fats, not call it off.

The new dietary guidelines even contradict those issued under the first Trump administration just five years ago, warning Americans not to eat too much saturated fat. “There is little room,” those guidelines stated, “to include additional saturated fat in a healthy dietary pattern.” A significant percentage of saturated fat comes from red meat. Americans, who account for only 4% of the people on the planet, consume 21% of the world’s beef.

Kennedy’s fatmania even extends to beef tallow and butter, which the new pyramid identifies—along with olive oil—as “healthy fats” for cooking. In fact, beef tallow is 50% saturated fat. Butter is nearly 70%. Olive oil, meanwhile, is just 14% saturated fat and is, indeed, healthy.

This rendering of recommended fats muddles a message that could have been stunningly refreshing, given the Trump administration’s penchant for meddling with science. Some of the new pyramid’s recommendations were applauded by mainstream health advocacy groups, particularly one advising Americans to consume no more than 10 grams of added sugar per meal and others, as Kennedy pointed out, calling for people to “prioritize whole, nutrient-dense foods—protein, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, and whole grains—and dramatically reduce highly processed foods.”

But such wholesomeness could easily be wasted if Americans increase their meat consumption. That would not, as Kennedy professes, make America healthy again. Given the scientific evidence, we should intensify the war against saturated fats, not call it off.

Saturated Fats Are Poison

The 420-page report by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee prepared in 2024 for the USDA and HHS found that more than 80% of Americans consume more than the recommended daily limit of saturated fat, which is about 20 grams—10% of a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet. The report concluded that replacing butter with plant-based oils and spreads higher in unsaturated fat is associated with lower cardiovascular disease risk and eating plant-based foods instead of meat is “associated with favorable cardiovascular outcomes.”

A March 2025 peer-reviewed study in JAMA Internal Medicine came to a similar conclusion. It found that eating more butter was associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Using plant-based oils instead of butter, the researcher found, was associated with a 17% lower risk of death. Such a reduction in mortality, according to study co-author Dr. Daniel Wang, means “a substantial number of deaths from cancer or from other chronic diseases … could be prevented” by replacing butter with such plant-based oils as soybean or olive oil.

What does a “substantial” number of deaths look like? Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States, and heart disease and stroke kill more people than all cancers and accidents combined. The annual number of American deaths tied to cardiovascular disease is creeping toward the million mark. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), it killed more than 940,000 people in 2022.

Over the next 25 years, AHA projects that the incidence of high blood pressure among adults will increase from 50% today to 61%, obesity rates will jump from 43% to 60% and diabetes will afflict nearly 27% of Americans compared to 16% today. Reducing mortality by 17% for those and other related health problems would go a long way to make Americans healthier.

Highly Processed Food Is a Killer, Too

A good place to begin reducing food-related mortality is by cutting highly processed foods out of the American diet. That would require a drastic change in eating habits for a lot of people. A July 2022 study found that nearly 60% of calories in the average American diet comes from ultra-processed foods, which have been linked to cancer, cardiovascular disease, depression, diabetes, and obesity.

One of the main culprits is fast food. A January 2025 study of the six most popular fast-food chains in the country—Chick-fil-A, Domino’s Pizza, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway and Taco Bell—found that 85% of their menu items were ultra-processed. And, according to a 2018 study, more than a third of US adults dine at a fast-food chain on any given day, including nearly half of those aged 20 to 39.

The new federal dietary guidelines reverse decades of advisories that recommended limiting red meat consumption. (Illustration: HHS/USDA)

Our overreliance on fast food presents a huge conundrum. US food systems are structured in a way that it is unlikely you can tell people to cut processed foods and eat more meat at the same time. Hamburgers and processed deli meat are among the main ways Americans consume red meat. And given the blizzard of TV ads for junk food and fast-food joints, which have proliferated across the country and especially in low-income food deserts—it is also unlikely that many people will use the new guidelines to comb through their local grocer’s meat department for the leanest (and often most expensive) cut of beef.

According to the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health, food, beverage, and restaurant companies spend $14 billion a year on advertising in the United States. More than 80% of those ad buys are for fast food, sugary drinks, candy, and unhealthy snacks. That $14 billion is also 10 times more than the $1.4 billion fiscal year 2024 budget for chronic disease and health promotion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And don’t expect the CDC to get into an arms race with junk food advertisers any time soon. Kennedy slashed the CDC staff by more than 25%, from 13,500 to below 10,000.

All of this adds up to the probability that Americans will see the new guidelines’ recommendation to eat red meat as a green light to gorge on even more burgers and other fast-food, ultra-processed meat.

Meat and Dairy Interests Weigh In

The new guidelines’ green light for consuming red meat and saturated fats is particularly vexing given the guidelines produced five years ago during Trump’s first term did not promote them. Why the about-face?

During the run-up to Trump’s second term, the agribusiness industry went into overdrive to install Trump in the White House and more Republicans in Congress. In 2016, agribusinesses gave Trump $4.6 million for his campaign, nearly double what it gave Hillary Clinton. But in 2024, they gave Trump $24.2 million, five times what it gave Kamala Harris. Agribusinesses also donated $1 million to Kennedy’s failed 2024 campaign, making him the fourth-biggest recipient among all presidential candidates during that election cycle.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is nowhere near making America healthy again by declaring in his new food pyramid that red meat is as healthy as broccoli, tomatoes, and beans.

Despite claiming he wanted dietary guidelines “free from ideological bias, institutional conflicts, or predetermined conclusions,” Kennedy rejected the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and turned over the nation’s dietary data to 9 review authors, at least 6 of whom had financial ties to the beef, dairy, infant-formula, or weight-loss industry.

Three of them have received either research grant funding, honoraria, or consulting fees from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which is known for funding dubious research downplaying or dismissing independent scientific findings that show read meat to be threat to public health and the environment. In 2024, the trade group gave nearly all of its $1.1 million in campaign contributions to Republican committees and candidates.

Kim Brackett, an Idaho rancher and vice president of the beef industry trade group, hailed the new guidelines, claiming “it is easy to incorporate beef into a balanced, heart-healthy diet.”

Perhaps, but the grim reality is most Americans do not follow a balanced, heart-healthy diet. Four out of five of us are already consuming more than the recommended daily limit of saturated fat and we are well on our way to a 60% obesity rate.

So, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is nowhere near making America healthy again by declaring in his new food pyramid that red meat is as healthy as broccoli, tomatoes, and beans. Beholden to Big Beef, he is driving us full speed ahead on the road to a collective heart attack.

This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.

I learned one of my most valuable lessons about US power in my first year as a Brown University doctoral student. It was in anthropology professor Catherine Lutz’s seminar on empire and social movements. I’d sum up what I remember something like this: Americans consume one hell of a lot—cars, clothes, food, toys, expensive private colleges (ahem…), and that’s just to start. Since other countries like China, the United Kingdom, and Japan purchase substantial chunks of US consumer debt, they have a vested interest in our economic stability. So, even though you and I probably feel less than empowered as we scramble to make mortgage, car, or credit-card payments, the fact that we collectively owe a bunch of money globally makes it less likely that a country like China will want to rock the boat—and that includes literally rocking the boat (as with a torpedo).

In classes like that one at Brown, I came to understand that the military power we get from owing money is self-reinforcing. It helps keep our interest rates low and, in turn, our own military can buy more supplies (especially if President Donald Trump’s latest demand for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget goes through!). Our own debt somewhat ironically allows this country to continue to expand its reach, if not around the globe these days, at least in this hemisphere (whether you’re thinking about Venezuela or Greenland). Often when I splurge on a fancy Starbucks latte or a new pair of shoes, I think about how even critics of US military hegemony like me help prop up our empire when we do what Americans do best—shop!

To put this crudely, we consume far beyond our means because our military keeps enough of us feeling secure, and we have such a large military because we consume far beyond our means.

American Trash and the Politics of Consumption

And boy, can we shop! As of August 2025, US consumer debt ballooned to nearly $18 trillion and then continued to rise through the end of last year.

Here’s one consequence of our consumptive habits: We Americans throw a lot of stuff out. Per capita, we each generate an average of close to two tons of solid waste annually, if you include industrial and construction waste (closer to one ton if you don’t). Mind you, on average, that’s roughly three times what most other countries consume and throw out—much more than people even in countries with comparable per capita wealth.

Reminders of our waste are everywhere. Even in my state, Maryland, which funnels significant tax dollars into environmental conservation, you can see plastic bags and bottles tangled in the grass at the roadside, while the air in my wealthy county’s capital city often smells like car exhaust or the dirty rainwater that collects at the bottom of your trash can. Schoolchildren like mine bring home weekly piles of one-sided worksheets, PTA event flyers, plastic prizes, and holiday party favors. Even the rich soil of our rural neighborhood contains layers of trash from centuries of agricultural, household, and military activity, all of which remind me of the ecological footprint we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren.

Not all of us create or live with garbage to the same degree.

To our credit, some of us try to be mindful of that. In recent years, three different public debates about how to fuel our consumptive habits (and where to put the byproducts) have taken place in my region. Residents continue to argue about where to dispose of the hundreds of thousands of tons of our county’s waste (much of it uneaten food) that’s currently incinerated near the scenic farmland where I live. Do we let it stay here, where it pollutes the land and water, not to mention the air, and disturbs our pastoral views? Or do we haul at least some of the residual ash to neighboring counties and states, to areas that tend to be poor majority-minority ones? While some local advocacy groups oppose the exporting (so to speak) of our trash, it continues to happen.

A related dispute has taken place in an adjacent county that’s somewhat less wealthy but also majority white. That debate centers on the appropriate restrictions on a data center to be built there that will store information we access on the internet and that’s expected to span thousands of acres. How far away need it be from residents’ homes and farms? Will people be forced to sell their land to build it?

While many of our concerns are understandable—I’m not ready to move so that we can have a data center nearby—it turns out that some worries animating such discussions are (to put it kindly) aesthetic in nature. Recently, a neighbor I’d never met called me to try to enlist our family in a debate about whether some newcomers, a rare Indian-American family around here, could construct a set of solar panels in a field along a main road, where feed crops like alfalfa can usually be seen blooming in the springtime.

My neighbor’s concern: that the new family wanted to use those fields for solar panels to supply clean energy to their community (stated with emphasis, which I presumed to denote the Asian-Americans who would assumedly visit them for celebrations and holidays). Heaven forbid! She worried that the panels would disrupt the views of passersby like us and injure a habitat for the bald eagle—ironic concerns given how much of a mess so many of us have already made renovating our outbuildings, raising our dogs and chicken flocks, and chopping down trees that get in the way of our homes or social gatherings.

Many such concerns are raised sincerely by people who care deeply about land and community. However, the fact that, to some, solar panels are less desirable than the kinds of crops that look nice or feed our desire for more red meat should reframe the debate about whose version of consumption (and garbage) should be acceptable at all.

Indeed, not all of us create or live with garbage to the same degree. Compared to white populations, Black populations are 100% more likely and communities of Asian descent 200% more likely to live within 6 miles of a US Superfund site (among America’s most polluted places). Such proximity is, in turn, linked to higher rates of cancer, asthma, and birth defects.

Nor do whites suffer such impacts in the same ways. According to an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency—and let’s appreciate such an analysis while we still have access to it, since the Trump administration’s EPA just decided to stop tracking the human impact of pollution—Black Americans live with approximately 56% more pollution that they generate, Hispanic Americans experience 63% more than what they create, and—ready for this?—white Americans are exposed to 17% less than they make.

Military Contamination

Our military, far from being just another enabler of unequal consumption and suffering, contributes mightily to the waste we live with. In the US, hundreds of military bases are contaminated by so-called forever chemicals, such as PFAS, in the drinking water and the soil. We’re talking about chemicals associated with cancer, heart conditions, birth defects, and other chronic health problems. The civilian populations surrounding such bases are often low-income and disproportionately people of color. Of course, also disproportionately impacted are the military families and veterans who live and work around such bases, and tend to have inadequate healthcare to address such issues.

An example would be the Naval Submarine Base in New London, where my family spent a significant amount of time. Encompassing more than 700 acres along the Thames River, that base was designated a Superfund site in 1990 due to contamination from unsanctioned landfills, chemical storage, and waste burial, all of which put heavy metals, pesticides, and other toxic substances into the environment.

Rather than bore you with more statistics, let me share how it feels to stand on its grounds. Picture a wide, deep river, slate gray and flanked by deciduous trees. On the bank opposite the base, multifamily housing and the occasional restaurant have been wrought from what were once factories. After you pass the guard station, a museum to your left shows off all manner of missiles, torpedoes, and other weaponry, along with displays depicting the living spaces of sailors inside submarines, with bunks decorated with the occasional photo of scantily clad White women (presumably meant to boost troop morale).

To your right, there are brick barracks, office buildings, takeout restaurants, even a bowling alley, and submarines, their rounded turrets poking out of the water. Along roadways leading through the base, old torpedoes are painted in bright colors like children’s furniture and repurposed as monuments to America’s military might. The air smells like asphalt and metal. Signs of life are everywhere, from the seagulls that swoop down to catch fish to the sailors and their families you see moving about in cars. It’s hard to comprehend that I’m also standing on what reporters have called “a minefield of pollution… a dumping ground for whatever [the base] needed to dispose of: sulfuric acid, torpedo fuel, waste oil, and incinerator ash.”

Empire of Waste

When I say that our military produces a lot of garbage, I don’t just mean in this country. I also include what it does abroad and the countries like Israel that we patronize and arm. Last summer, I corresponded with anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, who spent more than a year documenting the human casualties and costs of what the Israeli military and other Israelis have done in Israeli-occupied Palestine. That includes the mass dumping of garbage there from Israeli territories and the barricading of Palestinian communities from waste disposal sites, all of which have led to environmental contamination.

I think progressives would do well to consider how important it is that our signs, our social media posts, our political speeches, and even our patterns of consumption send a message—that many are welcome here, skin color, pronouns, and even specific brands of left-wing ideology be damned.

For example, Stamatopoulou-Robbins visited the 5,000-person Palestinian village of Shuqba, surrounded by open land on all sides and controlled by the Israeli government. Nearby cities and settlements dump waste, including X-ray images, household appliances, broken electronics like cell phones, industrial waste, wrecked vehicles, and car parts right in its neighborhood. One young man told Stamatopoulou-Robbins that he and his wife couldn’t have a baby because of the toxic environment. Many others, he told her, experienced the same problem, along with higher-than-average rates of cancer and respiratory and skin problems. His story, Stamatopoulou-Robbins wrote me, was one of many similar tales in Shuqba, tales that multiplied across the West Bank, where Israeli settlements and trucks from Israel, as she put it, “regularly dump their wastes in proximity to Palestinian residential areas and farmland.”

Her research drives home how we experience pollution all too often depends on who we are. I’m a case in point. My family and I pride ourselves on being the first to inhabit our sprawling rural property since the family whose ancestors built a home on it in 1890 and passed it down to two subsequent generations. In 2020, when we initially came to look at it, we couldn’t afford the asking price. However, the older couple who, in the end, sold it to us wanted a family in the house who would raise children there as they had. As they put it flatteringly, we were a “salt-of-the-earth” family (and the feeling was mutual).

Trash and Belonging

Nowadays, the news abounds with references to who is a “real” American, and who belongs beyond our borders. References to purity and contamination apply not just to our growing piles of waste but to human beings, too. Consider candidate Donald Trump’s promise, at a 2023 campaign rally, to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” or his claim that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and other Somali immigrants are nothing less than—yes—“garbage.”

And it’s true that what (or who) we consider garbage, and what (or who) we tolerate in our field of vision matters. My family recently renovated an old cabin behind our house to serve as an office for me to see my psychotherapy patients in person. The idea was that the veterans and military families who come to me for help with trauma, many of whom themselves are lower-income people of color, would have a peaceful place to process it.

As we demolished an outer wall to add a bathroom to my new office, something fell out of that wall: an old paper advertisement for black licorice candy (“Licorice Bites”) that depicted a Black baby, eyes wide in the stereotypical fashion of Jim Crow Era ads, trying to crawl away from an alligator, its mouth gaping open. Good thing, I thought, that it hadn’t fallen out of that drywall when a patient of mine was there. The experience, while fleeting, reminded me of writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s point that Americans so easily minimize foreign genocides because we’ve done such a striking job of burying (in the case of my house, literally!) the atrocities of slavery, the segregated world that followed it, and their role in our country’s expansion.

Whoever put it there, that ad in my cabin wall—just like local gossip about that Indian-American family—is a reminder of who belongs and who doesn’t in this country. Like an Egyptian pyramid filled with a pharaoh’s possessions, remnants of American lives remind us of how some of us are kept sick, intimidated, and belittled, while feeding the appetites of others.

In the meantime, I think progressives would do well to consider how important it is that our signs, our social media posts, our political speeches, and even our patterns of consumption send a message — that many are welcome here, skin color, pronouns, and even specific brands of left-wing ideology be damned. Who is “of this earth” is questionable at best.

We should also ask why pictures denigrating Black people and half-naked women, and monuments to weaponry, so excite the patriotic souls of enough Americans that it’s easy to find them throughout our land. We cannot continue to allow the other side’s exclusionary ideals to dominate today’s political messaging.

The real estate industry doesn’t want you to know an important fact about rent control: Since World War I, rent regulations have protected poor and middle- and working-class tenants against skyrocketing rents and predatory landlords. Rent control, in other words, has long been a part of the American way.

Soon after World War I, elected officials understood that they needed to protect tenants against sky-high rents due to a worsening housing shortage. Fair rent committees, with an emphasis on “fair,” were set up in 153 cities in the United States, and those committees routinely reached out to landlords to stop unreasonable rent hikes. In Washington D.C. and Denver, rent commissions determined fair rents, and, in New York, state legislators passed emergency laws to control sky-high rising rents.

Politicians knew that they couldn’t allow the status quo of unfair rents to continue, and they knew that they had the power to do something about it. So they stepped in to help hard-working Americans.

During World War II, politicians again did the right thing and expanded rent control. The federal government established rent control for around 80 percent of rental housing in the U.S. in response to housing shortages and rent gouging. When that federal program was phased out, some states, such as New York and New Jersey, established their own rent control policies in the early 1950s.

If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire.

Throughout this period, elected officials understood that tenants needed stable, affordable housing that would not force renters to choose between eating or paying the rent or paying medical bills or paying the rent. Americans’ well-being was at stake.

Fast forward to the early 1970s. With worsening inflation, rents spiked. President Richard Nixon pushed for temporary rent controls, and that was followed by American cities passing rent regulations, including Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s, the deep-pocketed real estate industry pushed back, aggressively lobbying state legislatures across the country to pass rent control bans or restrictions. Landlords and lobbyists went against the American way of looking out for people.

Today, more than 35 states have laws that stop the expansion of rent control while the real estate industry’s profits, through unfair, excessive rents, go through the roof. Between 2010 and 2019, renters paid a staggering $4.5 trillion to landlords in the U.S, according to Zillow.

Recently, Big Tech and Big Real Estate teamed up to charge wildly inflated rents through a rent-fixing software program by RealPage, which brought about numerous lawsuits and investigations. The software allowed corporate landlords to collude and charge outrageous rents that harmed Americans throughout the nation.

If there was ever time for politicians to protect tenants, now is that time, and the situation is dire. Eviction Lab, the prestigious research institute at Princeton University, found that increasingly unaffordable rents are linked to higher mortality rates. And a wide-ranging study on homelessness by the University of California San Francisco revealed that people ended up living on the streets because of sky-high rents. An urgent way to address these life-threatening problems is to utilize rent control—an American tradition since World War I.

But activists believe that rent control isn’t the only tool to fix the housing affordability and homelessness crises. There needs to be a multi-pronged approach called the “3 Ps”: protect tenants through rent control and other renter protections; preserve existing affordable housing, not demolish it to make way for unaffordable luxury housing; and produce new affordable and homeless housing.

Taking care of each other is a part of the American way. Politicians doing the right thing on the behalf of vulnerable tenants is also a part of the American way. Today’s elected officials must continue that work, especially since tenants throughout the country are facing serious risks of death and homelessness. They must immediately utilize rent regulations and the 3 Ps.

The first year of this Trump administration has dealt significant blows to the advancement of clean energy and efforts to lower energy prices. The federal government has cut clean energy funding, repeatedly disrupted construction on in-progress wind energy projects, and shut down energy affordability programs. For workers on solar and wind energy projects, there’s been no shortage of bad news.

And yet, there’s also been undeniable progress. In the absence of federal leadership, state and local governments have picked up the slack, and labor unions have taken action.

To see what I mean, just take a closer look at my home state of Maine. In 2025, we had one of the most successful legislative sessions for climate and workers in our history. We passed landmark bills that expanded the state’s ability to build new clean energy projects and committed the state to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2040. Strong labor standards throughout this legislation help ensure every clean energy project we build in Maine creates high-quality, family-sustaining jobs while protecting ratepayers from rising costs. Policies like this are how we can insulate ourselves from harmful federal actions and continue to deliver real benefits. Other states could take note.

Across the country, energy demand is rising for the first time in decades, and we’re not building enough new energy to keep up. This supply and demand imbalance is pushing energy bills to unaffordable prices for working families, who are already struggling to stay afloat. At the same time, we’re experiencing the impacts of climate change with more and more frequency—extreme cold and devastating storms in the winter; scorching heatwaves, wildfires, and smog in the summer.

If we want climate policy to be popular and durable, it needs to do more than reduce emissions. It needs to materially deliver for working people.

This moment of high costs, worsening climate impacts, and a lack of good-wage jobs requires us to build more clean energy, urgently. We simply cannot bring down energy prices without more energy. Labor unions understand this, and we understand that clean energy will and is already creating thousands of job opportunities.

That’s why we so ardently fight for strong climate legislation in our state. It’s why our members were some of the first to speak up against federal cuts to clean energy tax credits. And throughout it all, we’re still building solar panels, installing heat pumps, erecting wind turbines, and upgrading building efficiency—work that makes our communities cleaner and safer.

Labor’s work for climate action will continue on, both in Maine and across the country. If we want climate policy to be popular and durable, it needs to do more than reduce emissions. It needs to materially deliver for working people—with good jobs, higher wages, and lower bills. It’s both possible and necessary to do all of this at once.

This year in Maine, we’re working to push the envelope even further to win bold, worker-led climate policy while driving down costs for ratepayers.

For example, we are advancing legislation that would streamline permitting of utility-scale clean energy projects built in Maine with high-road labor standards, accelerating the pace by which Maine brings clean energy online that is cheaper and lowering our exposure to global energy price volatility through greater energy independence.

The onus has certainly shifted to states to lead on climate and affordability; it’s not coming from the federal level. But that hasn’t deterred us in Maine, and it shouldn’t deter the rest of the country either. Even in red states like Texas, our brothers and sisters in labor have pushed for and won local climate progress.

Labor is proud to be advocating for and building clean power that provides affordable energy and good jobs for our communities. With working people at the table, we can drive meaningful climate action and pocketbook benefits for working people—all at once.

Let us not be afraid or resigned in this moment. Maine is proof that we can still create union jobs, lower costs, and build domestic clean energy, but only if we keep fighting for it.

And here I am, an American, staring at the border again... and slowly coming to realize the paradox of it. Borders don’t actually exist. They’re invisible lies. They’re also virtually everywhere.

Consider the border Alex Pretti crossed on January 24, on a street in Minneapolis, as he stepped between some US Border Patrol agents and the woman they had just pushed down. He crossed the border that separates ordinary people from the federal Proud Boys (or whoever they are), the masked invaders who were occupying the city to enforce The Law. Pretti interfered with them! He dared to try to protect the fallen woman, who herself had just crossed the same border. In so doing, they both went from being ordinary citizens to “domestic terrorists.”

“Yet our greatest threat isn’t the outsiders among us, but those among us who never look within.”

The words are those of poet Amanda Gorman, who wrote a poem honoring Alex Pretti after the agents shot him, almost 10 times. Another killing! Oh my God! Another cut to the American soul—a cut, by the way, that comes with complete immunity, according to Team Trump. They’re waging civil war against those who cross the border that separates right from wrong. “Fear not those without papers,” Borman’s poem continues, “but those without conscience.”

Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway.

You know what? As terrifying as the idea of a new civil war sounds, I prefer it to something worse: a great national shrug and acquiescence to the Trump agenda. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as so many people have pointed out, is acting like the Trump Gestapo, as his administration rids sacred (white) America of the brown-skinned other, who may or may not be immigrants. What matters is that they’re different from “real” Americans. Right?

Regarding the whole concept of the border: It seems so real and viable until you start questioning it, which includes looking into its history.

As Elisa Wong and Raymond Wei write:

The way we think of borders today, as firm boundaries that are violently enforced, is a relatively new thing, and we would argue it doesn’t serve humanity’s best interests. While ‘strong borders’ are often argued as a necessity for our security, we think they limit humanity’s potential as a global community.

In ancient times, rivers, oceans, and mountains marked the boundaries of territory... As humans began building kingdoms and empires, more walls began to form, thus more firmly delineating borders.

And in Medieval times, from around 1000 to 1700 AD, European kingdoms started engaging with each other in a state of unending warfare, violently squabbling over the limits of their territory. And plunk! Global borders were created, and whole contents started getting divided almost randomly into European territorial possessions.

“At the Berlin Conference in 1884,” Wong and Wei write, “European leaders met to carve up Africa for themselves, which split local tribes across arbitrary lines and laid the groundwork for ethnic conflicts that still rage today’”

Oh, let us evolve toward a trans-border world! This is the core of the American civil war that is now, seemingly, getting underway. This is why protesters are flooding the streets in Minneapolis and across the country. This is why they’re enduring pepper spray and tear gas and flash bang grenades. This is why some people are being killed. But the rational—effective—response to violent aggression is not counterviolence.

“Anger and hatred are natural in response to such atrocities,” David Cortright writes, “but it is essential to avoid causing physical harm, to maintain a nonviolent intention and commitment despite increasing government provocation. A major outburst of protester violence would be disastrous, diverting attention from the message of support for victimized communities. That’s exactly what the White House is hoping for—to cover up ICE abuses, reinforce their lies about violent protesters, and justify additional domestic militarization.”

And he quotes—who else?—Martin Luther King: “Hatred multiples hate. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Violence multiplies violence.”

Yeah, that’s the world as we know it: endless war. But America’s new civil war must not—will not—go that way. “Loving ICE” doesn’t mean accepting their actions or their purpose, but rather, challenging it head on, courageously and nonviolently. What we choose to love fully and unconditionally is Planet Earth itself—a planet without borders—and all who live within it. Yes, that includes ICE agents. It includes Donald Trump. But loving them also means standing up to them—and handing them their conscience.

The recent firing of Greg Bovino, the face of Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, was clearly intended to serve as a pressure-release valve for a city at its breaking point. For weeks, we have watched federal agents transform our neighborhoods into a theater of intimidation, characterized by warrantless stops, the brutalization of peaceful protestors, and the killings of two constitutional observers, captured on video and now seen by the majority of Americans.

By replacing Bovino with Border Czar Tom Homan, the administration likely hopes to signal a new direction or a cooling of tensions. But no one should be fooled. Firing a commander is an empty act of appeasement when the machinery of the operation itself remains fully fueled and operational. Bovino’s departure changes nothing about ICE’s lawless behavior on the ground. If anything, the situation has become more volatile.

The timing of this leadership shuffle is particularly cynical when viewed alongside the latest developments in the federal judiciary. On Monday night, the Eighth Circuit granted the Department of Justice (DOJ) a full stay on the injunction previously secured by Judge Katherine Menendez. That injunction was the only thin line of defense protecting protesters from ICE violence and retaliation. With that stay in place, federal agents have been handed a blank check to target activists and constitutional observers in ways that Menendez had previously found unconstitutional.

Operation Metro Surge was never about public safety in the way most Minnesotans understand it. It is a display of federal power, designed to bypass local oversight and treat our state as an occupied zone because the current administration doesn’t like our social welfare policies. Bovino was a symptom of this strategy, not its sole architect.

Minneapolis does not need a new commander, it needs Operation Metro Surge to end.

The tactics of intimidation, unmarked vehicles, lack of clear identification, and the racial profiling of community members is baked into the Operation Metro Surge’s DNA. Changing a public-facing figure while maintaining the underlying tactics only creates a more dangerous environment. It allows the operation to continue under a veil of "reform" while ICE’s mandate continues to broaden, and the reality on the street remains one of fear and violence.

I believe we are now entering the most dangerous phase of ICE’s enforcement operations in Minnesota. The combination of a leadership changeup and a legal victory for the DOJ has created a perfect storm. History shows us that when law enforcement agencies feel vindicated by the courts and pressured by optics, they do not retreat, they push forward, and citizen vigilantes come to their defense.

The attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Tuesday was primed by years of dehumanizing rhetoric against her, prompted by ICE’s illegal actions in Minneapolis, and executed by a lone-wolf reactionary in an attempt to silence calls for abolition. When the administration labels “disrespect” as a capital offense, and has pushed the rule of law to its breaking point, we should not be surprised when citizens take it in their hands to “enforce” the new law.

Minneapolis does not need a new commander, it needs Operation Metro Surge to end. The replacement of Bovino is a tactical retreat, a cosmetic change meant to buy time. If we accept Homan’s takeover as "progress," we are consenting to the continued erosion of our civil liberties and political culture. A leadership shakeup doesn’t change anything; it’s just a convenient news cycle that the Trump administration would prefer for us to focus on. Don’t give them your attention. Keep watching the streets of Minneapolis and the actions of our federal courts.

“How’s the Democratic Party’s ground game in Pennsylvania?” I asked a friend several weeks before the 2024 presidential election. He replied optimistically that there were far more door knockers this year than in 2022.

It turned out these door knockers were just urging a vote for the Democrats without putting forth a compelling agenda attached to candidate commitments on issues that mean something to people where they live, work, and raise their families. There was no Democratic Party “Compact for the American People.” Then-President Joe Biden visited Pennsylvania, which went Republican, many times, with his most memorable message being that he grew up in Scranton.

Once again, the vacuous, feeble Democratic Party is relying on the Republicans and the cruel, lawless dictator Donald Trump to beat themselves to gain control of the Senate and the House.

Legendary reporter Seymour Hersh on Thursday made the case for the Republicans taking themselves down, to wit: “I have been told by an insider that the internal polling numbers are not good …” and that “anxiety in the White House that both the House and the Senate might fall to the Democrats is acute. Trump’s poll numbers are sliding… The public lying of cabinet members in defense of ICE has not helped the president or the party. Trump hasn’t delivered on the economy, except for the very rich, and he hasn’t made good on early promises to resolve the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine.”

Their aversion to building their own momentum to answer the basic questions “Whose side are you on?” and “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” remains as pathetic as it was in 2022 and 2024.

GOP operatives are assuming the Democrats will take back the House by a comfortable number and now think the Senate, where the GOP holds a three-seat majority. There are six seats in play. The GOP’s biggest fear is that their negatives continue to increase, propelled by a pile of unpopular Trumpian actions, ugly behavior, and corruption. The combination of all these things could create a critical mass and produce a landslide comparable to the Reagan-led victory in 1980. In this election, the Republicans defeated seemingly unbeatable Senate veterans like Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.), Sen. Gayord Nelson (D-Wis.), and Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), and gave the GOP control of the Senate.

So, what is the Democratic Party doing during this GOP slump? It is Déjà vu all over again. The Dems are furiously raising money from commercial special interests and relying on vacuous television and social media ads. They are not engaging people with enough personal events, and they are not returning calls or reaching out to their historical base—progressive labor and citizen leaders. Most importantly, they are not presenting voters with a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS. Such a compact would spark voter excitement and attract significant media coverage.

Their aversion to building their own momentum to answer the basic questions “Whose side are you on?” and “What does the Democratic Party stand for?” remains as pathetic as it was in 2022 and 2024. Ken Martin, head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), recently quashed a detailed report he commissioned about why the Democrats lost in 2024. He has refused to meet with leaders of progressive citizen organizations. We visited the DNC headquarters and could not even get anyone to take our materials on winning issues and tactics. We offered the compiled presentations of two dozen progressive civic leaders on how to landslide the GOP in 2022. This material is still relevant and offers a letter-perfect blueprint for how Democrats could win in 2026. (See winningamerica.net). (The DNC offices are like a mausoleum, except for visits by members of Congress entering to dial for dollars.)

Imagine a mere switch of 240,000 votes in three states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) would have defeated Trump in 2024. That margin would have been easily accomplished had the Democratic Party supported the efforts of AFL-CIO and progressive union leaders who wanted the Dems to champion a “Compact for Workers” on Labor Day, with events throughout the country. (See letter sent to Liz Shuler, President of AFL-CIO, on August 27, 2024).

The compact would have emphasized: raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 per hour, benefiting 25 million workers, and increasing Social Security benefits frozen for over 45 years, which could have benefited over 60 million elderly, paid for by higher Social Security taxes on the wealthy classes. The compact would also include: a genuine child tax credit that would help over 60 million children, cutting child poverty in half; repeal of Trump’s massive tax cuts for the super rich and giant corporations (which would pay for thousands of public works groups in communities around the nation); and Full Medicare for All (which is far more efficient and lifesaving than the corporate-controlled nightmare of gouges, inscrutable billing fraud, and arbitrary denial of benefits).

Droves of conservative and liberal voters would attend events showcasing winning politics, authentically presented, as envisioned for the grassroots Labor Day gatherings, suicidally blocked by the smug, siloed leaders of the Democratic Party in 2022 and 2024.

Clearly, this is a party that thinks it can win on the agenda of Wall Street and the military-industrial complexes. (See Norman Solomon’s book The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy. It can be downloaded for free at BlueRoad.info.) The Democratic Party scapegoats the tiny Green Party for its losses again and again at the federal and state levels to the worst Republican Party in history—BY FAR.

It is fair to say that, with few exceptions, the Democratic Party apparatus is coasting, playing “it safe,” and expecting that the Trumpsters will deliver the Congress to it in November.

The exceptions are warning about this hazardous complacency, such as adopting James Carville’s ridiculous advice just to let the GOP self-destruct (though recently he also has urged a progressive economic agenda). There are progressive young Democrats challenging incumbent corporate Democrats in the House. They are not waiting for a turnover in the party’s aging leadership. They believe the country can’t wait for such a transformation. Our Republic has been invaded by the Trumpsters, who are taking down its institutional pillars, its safety nets, and its rule of law. Our democracy is crumbling by the day.

As for the nonvoters, disgusted with politics, just go vote for a raise, vote for health insurance, vote for a crackdown on corporate crooks seizing your consumer dollars and savings, and vote for taxing the rich. That’s what your vote should demand, and these are the issues that should be conveyed to the candidates campaigning in your communities.

Tell the candidates you want a shakeup, not a handshake. (See, the primer for victory, “Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People” 2024).

Another American citizen has been murdered in the streets of Minneapolis at the hands of a federal immigration enforcement agent. This victim, a 37-year-old ICU nurse named Alex Pretti, was killed on January 24 while tending to the injuries of a woman agents had pushed to the ground. The previous victim, Renee Good, was a 37-year-old mother of three who was executed in her car on January 7.

In both of these cases, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claimed the agents were acting in self-defense. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem immediately issued a statement accusing Good of “domestic terrorism.” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller denounced Pretti as “a would-be assassin” who “tried to murder federal law enforcement.” These statements, released before any investigation took place, seem intended to halt any investigation at all and make the “official” story the only one that counts.

But anyone who’s watched the videos of these killings knows that neither of them were in self-defense. Good’s car was pointing away from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross when he put three bullets in her. Her last words were, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Pretti was lawfully carrying a holstered gun, but he was unarmed and down on the ground when a Customs and Border Protection agent emptied a magazine into him.

The executions of Good and Pretti are only the tip of the iceberg. In Minnesota alone, ICE’s reign of terror has included blinding a young man with a nonlethal round, shooting teargas into a car filled with children, and abducting children as young as 5 years old. Videos of these incidents and countless others, filmed daily by ordinary Americans around the country, show the unforgivable violence that President Donald Trump, ICE, and Border Patrol are unleashing on the American people.

The Evolution of ICE, From Bad to Worse to Gestapo

Formed in 2003 by the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11, ICE is a relic of the War on Terror, founded when there was widespread fear of al-Qaeda entering the country through the Mexican border. Its purview is fairly broad, covering more than 400 statutes related to immigration, trade, and customs.

The agency’s evolution into a paramilitary organization, deployed in high numbers on American streets, is new to President Trump. His second administration quickly began a mass recruiting campaign for ICE, offering generous salaries and high sign-on bonuses and appealing specifically to white nationalists. Then Trump green-lit the agency’s escalating use of violence and intensified its presence in American communities, all while Congress increased its budget astronomically.

Now the agency acts as an invading and occupying force, loyal solely to Trump and not to the law, the Constitution, or any state or local governing bodies. Its actions have put it in conflict not only with American citizens but with local law enforcement and, in some states, even the National Guard. Some of ICE’s violent, unconstitutional, and immoral tactics include:

• A racially targeted, Gestapo-style “show me your paperwork” approach to enforcement. Rather than using investigative police work to go after the “worst of the worst,” as Trump once pledged, ICE agents simply stop whoever they think looks like they might not have been born here. They are raiding job sites, restaurants, public areas, schools, and even impersonating police and going door-to-door, apparently trying to meet Miller’s 3,000-deportations-a-day quota. At least 170 US citizens have been swept up in raids like these, some of them violently assaulted and detained for days.
• Arresting people in the midst of immigration hearings. Republicans often say they don’t mind immigrants as long as they do it the “right way.” But ICE has stalked immigration courts to capture people doing just that, deporting them right in the middle of trying to get their paperwork sorted.
• Detaining and disappearing people into concentration camp-like detention centers. The most notorious facility currently used by ICE is CECOT in El Salvador, a supermax gulag with brutally inhuman conditions and a chilling reputation for torture. But in America, conditions may be no better. Amnesty International condemned Florida’s secretive Alligator Alcatraz as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading.” Detention facilities are refusing to provide medical care. Detainees sometimes disappear entirely, leaving their lawyers and family members unable to reach them or find out if they’re alive. In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody that we know of.
• Compiling a mass surveillance database and labeling Americans domestic terrorists. ICE partners with Palantir, a nefarious tech and AI company co-founded by billionaire Trump-ally Peter Thiel, to not only track immigrants but also to keep records on Americans who oppose them. This effort is closely tied to NSPM-7, a presidential memo that effectively sets the table for Trump to declare any political or ideological opponent an enemy of the state. One ICE agent told a woman recording him in Maine, “We have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist.”
• Killing Americans in broad daylight. The executions of Good and Pretti were not mistakes or accidents brought about by poor training. They were immediately backed up by the administration as good and proper responses, with Vice President JD Vance even declaring the agents have “absolute immunity.” ICE agents have since invoked these incidents to threaten Americans, with one saying, “Have y’all not learned from the past couple days?... Is this how you want to die?” This is terrorism, plain and simple—violence and intimidation to achieve their authoritarian political goals.

For a MAGA true believer, all this is forgivable because, in their minds, anyone without the right paperwork is a criminal, anyone who protects them is also a criminal, and any violence the state uses against criminals is justified. In reality, undocumented immigrants commit violent and drug-related crimes at a much lower rate than the native-born population, and simply being here without the proper authorization is codified as a civil offense, not a crime.

Not all of these abuses are brand new. Immigration activists have long blasted ICE and US immigration policy, especially under former President Barack Obama. But the scale, violence, regularity of abuse, and lack of accountability have turned the situation into a five-alarm fire. ICE is acting well outside its statutory duties, committing crimes and terrorizing communities to carry out its mission as handed down by Trump, Noem, Miller, and other MAGA extremists.

Skating on Thin Ice With the American People

If there is a silver lining in any of this, it's that people are fed up with it. Residents in Minneapolis have turned out en masse to protest ICE. They are protecting one another through constant filming, as well as blowing whistles to alert neighbors to the presence of ICE agents. On January 23, tens of thousands of Minnesotans marched down the streets in the state’s biggest general strike in 100 years. They shuttered businesses and halted labor with the understanding that the best way to combat the system is to hit it in the only spot it truly feels pain: its pockets.

Most elected officials aren’t yet close to representing the energy and anger of the people. Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) still speak of reforming ICE rather than abolishing it. But there have been increasing calls for things like the impeachment of Kristi Noem, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has deployed the National Guard to, hopefully, protect his state’s residents.

In the battle for hearts and minds, at least, MAGA is losing. Even on Fox News, they are struggling to uphold the narrative. In an interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, far-right pundit Maria Bartiromo was incredulous that Alex Pretti posed a threat and said: “There is outrage across the country… Someone is dead at the hands of border patrol.” At this point, only the most diehard MAGA faithful seem to be buying the administration’s talking points.

Essential immigration and customs functions can be reallocated to other agencies, but there is no need for storm troopers to go door-to-door demanding to see people’s papers under threat of violence. It is rank Nazism.

While these recent excesses might give the Trump administration a black eye in the public view, it’s only part of a larger struggle being waged. This violence and chaos is not an accidental byproduct. The administration doesn’t care about casualties, and they aren’t interested in making nice. It’s about seeing how far they can go, how much power they can grab, and then defying the American people to do something about it.

Recall who we’re dealing with here. Stephen Miller is widely believed to be in charge of the administration’s law enforcement and border policy. He’s the most brazenly fascistic senior member of the administration and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has an “affinity for white nationalism.” Meanwhile Greg Bovino, the commander of US Border Patrol and the only field agent who goes out unmasked, essentially cosplays as an SS agent.

Amid the chaos in Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a mafioso-style letter to Gov. Walz telling him that all he had to do to “bring back law and order to Minnesota” was hand over his state’s voter data in exchange for ICE withdrawal. This alone shows that their goals go far beyond immigration reform or enforcement. They’re interested in a complete takeover, which requires that they muddle election integrity and identify and track enemies of the regime. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said of Bondi’s letter: “This is blackmail. This is the way organized crime works. They move into your neighborhood, they start beating everybody up, and then they extort what they want.” So far, it hasn’t worked.

In the Declaration of Independence, the founders wrote that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Through their actions and violent abuses, ICE have lost that and then some. Americans are right and justified in their filming, protest, and even obstruction of ICE. Now we need to go further.

At the political level, sorting all this out means removing ICE from streets, eliminating their overly broad national security powers, canceling their partnerships with big tech, prosecuting the Trump administration officials responsible for these abuses, and throwing out of office the Democrats who funded it. In plain language, we need to abolish ICE. Essential immigration and customs functions can be reallocated to other agencies, but there is no need for storm troopers to go door-to-door demanding to see people’s papers under threat of violence. It is rank Nazism.

Once that’s done, we need to take a much broader look at our use of state violence. It’s no coincidence that the killing of two white people is causing cracks in the dam. This is the way we’ve been treating less fortunate people for decades, from the militarized police killings of Black Americans to the genocide we funded in Gaza. As a nation we remained largely indifferent to those atrocities. Wake-up calls are always welcome, but America can’t go back to sleep if and when this stage of the violence is contained.

The lesson is that the worst our government does can be done to any of us at any time, and we all need to work to curtail it. Minnesotans are showing us the way with their fearless solidarity and general strike. Trump’s campaign against blue states and his occupation of Minneapolis look like the early stages of a civil war. It needs to be stopped now, and the perpetrators held to account before their power has the chance to grow an iota.

On Sunday afternoon, CNN anchor Jake Tapper was interviewing US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hours after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti. Suddenly, CNN cut away to live coverage of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference. Noem declared that Pretti had “attacked our officers” while “brandishing” a handgun and planned “to kill law enforcement.” When a reporter tried to ask a question about her claim, she interrupted to say, “That is no claim. It is the facts.” When another reporter noted that the White House had just called Pretti a “domestic terrorist,” Noem forcefully agreed.

By this time, bystanders’ videos of the shooting were appearing online and on news outlets. When Tapper resumed his interview with Ocasio-Cortez, the representative said that Noem and the Trump administration were “asking the American people to not believe their eyes… to instead hand over your belief into anything that they say. I’m not asking the American people to believe me, or her, but to believe themselves.”

Any journalist who’s been paying attention knows that Noem’s boss, President Donald Trump, often doesn’t tell the truth. Trump launched his political career by asserting without evidence that America’s first Black president wasn’t born in the United States, which would have meant Barack Obama was in power illegally. After losing the 2020 election, Trump said he had no plans to leave office because, he insisted, he had actually won. Trump repeats that lie to this day, along with his claim that the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol to keep him in power was a day of “peace” and “love.”

But in spinning their latest web of lies, Trump and his aides didn’t reckon with the ingenuity and courage of Minnesotans who witnessed Border Control officers shooting Pretti—and Renee Good before him—and recorded the encounters on their cell phones. Without that evidence, the government’s version of the facts would have had the upper hand in shaping the public narrative. With that evidence, however, it’s obvious that “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked,” as Pretti’s “heartbroken but also very angry parents” wrote in a statement the next day. “He had his phone in his right hand, and his empty left hand is raised above his head trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down.” Likewise, bystander videos of Renee Good’s shooting show that she was turning her vehicle away from ICE agent Jonathan Ross when he fired three deadly shots through her windows.

Whether they know it or not, the bystanders who recorded these videos are citizen journalists. They are ordinary people, not trained in conventional journalism, and they were bearing witness to events of utmost importance to their community and country. And they were doing so under dangerous conditions, as was also exemplified by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, who on May 25, 2020, bravely kept her cell phone focused on police officer Derek Chauvin throughout the nine minutes and 29 seconds that Chauvin’s knee was choking the life out of George Floyd.

The events of recent days have shown that citizen journalists, though not a substitute for professionals, can be an invaluable complement. Without their presence at the scene and steadiness under pressure, the public and the rest of the media would be ignorant of a pivotal aspect of the story unfolding in Minneapolis. We’d be hearing only the government’s version of the truth, which, given the Trump administration’s history of flagrant falsehoods, deserves extreme skepticism. Absent these videos, it is all but inconceivable that the editorial boards at three of America’s most influential newspapers—The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal—would be stating that the administration’s narrative defies belief or that the administration itself would be trying to walk back its initial slanders of Pretti.

All parts of the modern information system, from legacy newsrooms to social media influencers, can now present a fuller account of what is happening in Minnesota and let viewers and readers draw their own conclusions. And we can explore urgent questions raised by these videos, such as: How many more people might ICE agents have killed when no cameras were recording? Working in tandem at this critical moment for American democracy, citizen and professional journalists can fulfill the essential mission the nation’s founders envisioned for a free press: to inform the people and hold power to account.

After a year of gutting the United States government, deploying armed jackboots to American cities, and bombing at least seven countries, the Trump administration kicked off 2026 by invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In the wake of that assault, President Donald Trump doubled down on his abandonment of the isolationist positions he once supposedly held, threatening military action against Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico. He then vowed that the US would come to “own” Greenland either “the easy way” or “the hard way.”

In truth, American imperialism defines much of this country’s history, but the latest escalation comes at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have also been deployed around the nation to grab immigrants off the streets and whisk them to detention centers. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to preach the jingoistic gospel of stopping the arrival of new refugees and migrants, while blasting European governments over migration—even as he vows to launch military campaigns that will undoubtedly result in further mass displacements and fleeing people crossing borders in search of safety.

Destabilizing countries the world over and then attacking the people who flee those wars is, of course, nothing new. From the September 11 attacks in 2001 until September 2020, this country’s war on terror, according to one study, displaced an estimated 37 million people in eight countries. And that figure doesn’t even include several million displaced during smaller conflicts the US participated in from Chad to Tunisia, Mali to Saudi Arabia. Nor does it include the number of people displaced by Israel’s five wars since 2008 in and around the Gaza Strip; its land theft in the occupied West Bank; or its frequent airstrikes in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran, all made possible thanks to Washington’s financial and military support.

When it comes to Washington demonizing the people displaced by its weapons, just ask the Palestinians. Millions of them live strewn across the map of the Middle East and beyond thanks to Israel’s ongoing military occupation and the American tax dollars that have enabled it.

“Eight Lives, Gone Just Like That”

In March 2015, I sat in the back of a taxi bound for Saida, a Lebanese coastal city a little less than an hour south of Beirut. The taxi hummed down the highway, the sea blurring through the windows to our right, and then swerved inland. Saida is more than 30 miles north of the country’s boundary with Israel and some 50 miles west of the border with Syria, but even that deep inside Lebanon, a de facto border appeared in the front windshield. The driver made a series of turns, braked, and inched toward a military checkpoint outside Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp.

Lebanese soldiers appeared on either side of the vehicle. Their job was to decide who could—and could not—enter the camp. After reading over our documents and ensuring that we had the proper military permission to enter the camp, the soldiers motioned the driver to move forward. We eased in amid a sprawl of ramshackle homes, many built atop one another. It was a dusty, humid day, but people clogged the streets. Children punted a soccer ball back and forth in the road. Motorbikes trembled over potholes. Men stood around in knots, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, and some walked by with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.

Along with an American photographer and a Lebanese reporter, I had gone to Ain al-Hilweh, the largest of Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian camps, to speak to people who had been doubly displaced by the war in neighboring Syria. As that civil war tore through the country—a war that drew interventions from the US, Great Britain, France, Israel, Russia, Iran, and several other places—Palestinian refugees from Syria found themselves fleeing to Lebanon. The population of Ain al-Hilweh alone had swelled by tens of thousands.

"For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”

Of the Palestinians we met that day, the only ones who had ever set foot in their ancestral homeland were those who had been born before—and lived through—the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation. What we’d soon learn, however, was that a term like double displacement failed to capture the extent to which borders had governed every aspect of their lives in permanent and repeated exile.

In a corner store with barren shelves, we found Afaf Dashe sitting in a small chair near the counter. At 70 years old, she had survived the Nakba—Arabic for catastrophe, the term Palestinians use to describe the ethnic cleansing of their country since 1948—as a three-year-old girl when her family fled to Syria. She had grown up in a suburb of Damascus, married, and raised children. When civil war started to rip through Syria in 2011, she and her family gritted it out through four years of barrel bombs, airstrikes, and shelling before they finally escaped.

While Ain al-Hilweh offered some respite, it offered neither true safety nor stability. In Lebanon, decades of state repression, lethal Israeli interventions, and failed Palestinian rebellions had left such refugees particularly vulnerable. Rather than setting down new roots in that dismal camp, Afaf explained, three of her daughters, along with five of her grandchildren, had decided to risk taking the long, often deadly journey to Europe. After crossing from Syria to Lebanon, they parted with Afaf and continued on by sea to Libya. They then paid smugglers to board a boat bound for Italy. As Afaf reached that point in her story, tears gathered in her eyes and she paused, for a long moment staring into the distance, seemingly at nothing, before turning back to us. The boat carrying her family, she said, had capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. “Eight lives, gone just like that. For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”

More than once in her life, it occurred to me, wars had pushed her, her children, and her grandchildren across borders and, in a distinctly embattled world, borders decided where she and her loved ones could possibly move, where they could live, and where they could die. I thought about the US passport in my pocket, the relative ease with which I had crossed borders throughout my adult life, and the American tax dollars that helped doom Afaf to a life of permanent exile. She would be the first person I met who had lost loved ones simply looking to cross a border to find safety, but by no means the last.

Violent Borders

For tens of millions of people, borders are not merely places where the risk of violence is present. Borders are, by definition, violent. Borders are not merely crossed. Borders must be survived and endured. Borders are not only walls and razor wire. Borders are guards and police, surveillance cameras and drones, batons and bullets. For those tens of millions of people, borders don’t stop where one country ends and the next begins; they stalk and haunt across endless miles and years. Borders are both crime scenes and crimes, with nationalism the motive.

For people forced to flee, the violence doesn’t stop once they escape countries being bombed or economically strangled. The journey itself offers its own slate of dangers. The International Migration Organization has recorded more than 33,200 instances of refugees and migrants dying or going missing in the Mediterranean Sea alone since 2014. Between 1994 and 2024, rights groups estimate that more than 80,000 people died in the deserts or rivers on and around the US-Mexico border.

Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe.

Throughout the last decade, I’ve traveled along the European refugee trail, stopping off in countries across the Balkans and Central and Western Europe, while also reporting from American communities along the heavily militarized US-Mexico border. Wherever I’ve gone, the displaced have horror stories to tell—of people drowned at sea, of migrants shot along borders, and others who simply disappeared along “the refugee trail.” At a shelter in Belgrade, Serbia, Afghans who had fled the fallout of the US war in their country and walked the endless land route from Turkey spoke of the Bulgarian border police who had detained, threatened, or beaten them along the way. On the Serbian border with Hungary, Moroccans and Algerians told me of policemen who beat their feet with batons to deter them from ever trying to cross the border again. In Greece, young men from Sudan and Somalia—their countries no strangers to US intervention—described the tear gas and rubber bullets they faced on the country’s northern border with Macedonia. In Turkey, Syrians told me about the dogs that Bulgarian border police sicced on them. In Arizona, people recalled walking for so long in the Mexican desert that the soles of their shoes tore apart.

Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe. From the time Donald Trump first entered the Oval Office in January 2017, far-right and ultranationalist parties around Europe have also gained ground in ways that would once have been unimaginable—and where the far-right has yet to take power, center-left and liberal parties have often swung hard to the right on their immigration and border enforcement policies.

In one breath, even Democratic Party officials in the United States, still singing praises of liberal democracy, are also promising to crack down on immigration and strengthen border enforcement in a desperate bid to appear tougher in the age of Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom, the center-left Labour Party ousted the Conservatives in 2024, only to put into practice anti-immigrant policies that align with those even further to the right, like Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party. In Greece, even after the violent neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party was banned, following years of anti-immigrant violence, the nominally center-right New Democracy Party adopted and repackaged its rhetoric in slightly modified form, while placing a former fascist in charge of its migration ministry. From the United States to Europe, immigration is ever less often discussed as a humanitarian issue and ever more often described in terms of an “invasion,” functionally recasting desperate civilians as armed soldiers.

Politically, the invasion story is more easily digestible than the grim actual stories of displaced people. Unsurprisingly, it has found ever larger audiences. And consider that a grim irony, since so many of the people crossing into the US and Europe, even before they faced deadly journeys at sea and militarized borders, were driven from their countries at least in part due to American and European involvement in mass violence and policies designed to foster economic collapse in their homelands.

Such invasion stories about immigrants are, of course, anything but new, after centuries in which a nationalistic desire for hard borders has undergirded so many claims that war and violence are necessary. In 1908, a decade before she herself was deported from the United States, the Lithuanian-American anarchist Emma Goldman pointed to the violence at the heart of such nationalism during a speech in San Francisco. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” she told her audience. “Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.”

Hope in the Pushback

In the decade since I started covering migration and borders, I have also witnessed what resistance to the anti-immigrant far-right might look like. In Greece, activists and volunteers, anarchists, socialists, and everyday people worked together to do what they could to offer an alternative to the grim realities displaced people were experiencing. On Greek islands like Lesbos, humanitarians gathered by the shore to help the displaced disembark from boats. Others headed out to sea to rescue people from sinking vessels. In Athens, anarchists and other leftists occupied abandoned buildings, refashioning them into squats that displaced immigrants could inhabit without the overcrowding and decrepit living conditions of the official camps. In Germany, everyday people opened their homes to newly arrived refugees. In Austin, Texas, the congregants of a church told me about how they had taken in asylum-seekers facing deportation.

And today, Americans in cities from Chicago to Los Angeles have rallied to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Ever since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, ever more protesters have taken to the streets in growing numbers to voice their opposition to state-sanctioned murder and the Trump administration’s drive to carry out mass deportations fueled more by cruelty than any concern for the country’s safety. As the president deepens federal deployments and threatens to use the military against what he calls the “invasion from within,” those demonstrators undoubtedly understand that their own fates are wrapped up with those of immigrants and refugees. Squats, humanitarian aid, and mass protests may not stop the cruel wheels of the anti-immigrant political machine, but they do offer glimmers of hope at a time when hope is in short supply.

You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet.

In the early months of 2026, that hope may be needed more than ever, in part because all too many Americans and Europeans continue to empower politicians who recycle the tired argument that, if there were fewer immigrants, life in their countries would be more prosperous and peaceful. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump bluntly assured Americans that immigrants were invaders who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” During the first year of his second term, his administration snatched international students off the streets, separated families, and shipped immigrants off to foreign prisons. Meanwhile, he continued to repeatedly tell Americans that they were being “invaded,” a story that comes with a painful body count, while courting what inevitably loiters behind nationalism and nativism: fear.

In her novel White Teeth, Zadie Smith put all of that in perspective this way: “But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance.”

Last year, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimated that more than 122 million people across the world had been displaced as a result of war, violence, or persecution, a number that marked a decade-long high and was also the 10th consecutive year that the total number of people displaced across the globe had increased. Worse yet, war and military campaigns are still driving people from their homes globally.

Sooner than later, such wars and other disasters will result in yet more people seeking safety in Europe and the United States. When that happens, there is little doubt that far-right leaders, hoping to offload the blame for their own failures, will once again stand in front of us and claim that state violence is necessary to protect our country from an “invasion.” Then, you’ll have to make a choice: You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet. That choice will determine just how much hope there is for a world where desperate people escaping disasters they had no hand in creating don’t have to consider crossing a manmade line a matter of negotiating their very survival.

nited States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol began “Operation Metro Surge” targeting the Twin Cities nearly two months ago. Since then, they have taken the lives of Renee Good and Alex Pretti while terrorizing Minnesota’s immigrant communities.

The massive deployment of immigration officers to Minneapolis and Saint Paul has been met with an incredible response from the community. Neighbors have come together to develop complex rapid response networks to track ICE and notify vulnerable people, keep immigrant families fed and protected with strong mutual aid networks, and make their opposition to what amounts to a full-scale federal invasion clearly visible.

This past Friday, unions, faith leaders, and community organizations organized a day of mass protest and economic disruption, punctuated by a rally and demonstration in well below sub-zero temperatures attended by tens of thousands.

What’s next for organized resistance in the Twin Cities? To get a picture of the situation on the ground, Inequality.org checked in with experienced labor organizer and activist Kieran Knutson, the president of Communications Workers of America Local 7250 in Minneapolis.

Chris Mills Rodrigo: What has your experience been like on the ground in Minneapolis over the last two months?

Kieran Knutson: It’s unlike anything I’ve ever lived through before. There are 3,000 ICE agents in the Twin Cities metro area, just by comparison the Minneapolis Police Department is between 800 and 900 cops.

You see them frequently and they’re constantly active, whether that be abduction raids, missions where they have the name of someone they’re trying to grab specifically, or just straight up racial profiling while ripping people out of gas stations or as they’re picking up their kids from daycare.

And confrontations with ICE have been intense. They’re deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades. Brutalizing people. It’s hard to describe, it really just strikes me as a fascist paramilitary force, a force of occupation.

CMR: How has that presence affected the community you live in?

KK: One the one hand, huge numbers of Latino workers in particular are just locking down. People stopped going out altogether. Imagine being stuck inside, not being able to go to the bar, go see friends, run errands, none of that stuff. I think there’s this level of terrorism that even if you don’t ever run into ICE you do fear it.

On the positive side, in the neighborhood that my wife and I live in, for example, there are 700 people in the rapid response network. And my understanding is that there are eight or so similar neighborhood networks across the Twin Cities — that means there’s thousands of people participating in this movement. Tons of people here are outraged, the whole society hates ICE here and that’s heartening.

CMR: What has labor’s role been in community response?

KK: The first thing to say is that the immigrant portions of the working class are an incredibly important part of the working class in the Twin Cities and have really strengthened it to be much more pro-union and more militant. Some unions are heavily immigrant, so what’s been going on can’t help but affect them. Our local is less so, but we do have this spirit of an injury to one is an injury to all that we’ve cultivated over the years.

We see this as an extremely important fight, and labor unions have been involved in the scaling up of rapid response networks and planning actions like the big day of action last Friday.

CMR: Can you tell me more about how labor was involved in organizing that?

KK: The idea for it came out of the labor movement. There have been talks for some time about how unions have to be more serious about being able to do strikes, and political strikes in particular. There’s this problem in U.S. labor law where almost every collective bargaining agreement has a strike clause. And while this action was not able to avoid that, what it did do was create a situation where tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of workers were absent from work, almost like a mass sick out.

The unions built the coalition which includes a lot of faith groups and community organizations, ones that represent the Somali community, the Latino community, Native American groups.

Also, since the George Floyd uprising, there have been some significant labor struggles in the Twin Cities area — teachers here went on strike, nurses have done strikes. I think that’s given people more confidence. I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the experience, and the networks, that came out of the uprising in the response to ICE today.

We really wanted to push to make this action a mass one, so we included no school and no shopping so that it could become a society-wide effort. There was a huge amount of support from small businesses, I think 700 ended up closing.

CMR: What was the intended message of the action?

KK: Some union organizers pointed out that early on in his term, when Trump was listing cities that he was going to send ICE to, San Francisco was on the list. Trump backed off though, saying that tech executives had called him to explain that deployment wasn’t necessary. So some of the thinking was, there are all these CEOs and billionaires with corporate headquarters here in Minnesota that have been silent about this reign of terror in our communities, we should start squeezing them into speaking up.

And it kind of worked — on Sunday a letter came out from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce with over 60 big CEOs signing on. That showed the business class is willing to say something to the Trump regime about the chaos it’s causing.

CMR: The day after this incredible show of solidarity, ICE officers shot and killed Alex Pretti, a union member. What’s the next escalation for labor?

KK: On Monday, the first day back at work after the action, coworkers that I talked to all felt very excited about Friday. They saw the national coverage, how big the march was despite -20º weather, how celebrities got behind it. And then, to them, Saturday felt like retaliation.

Some people are calling for staying on strike, or a real strike. Our membership hasn’t had a chance to discuss next steps yet, but speaking with other labor activists what makes sense to me is to organize a substantial assembly of rapid response groups, unions, activists, and community organizations to hash out what’s next.

CMR: What makes ICE and the occupation of the Twin Cities a labor issue?

KK: It’s an attack on oppressed sections of the working class, some of the poorest paid sections of the working class, and sections of the working class that have the least rights.

I think the administration is also aimed at the Twin Cities because of the George Floyd uprising, a sense of disciplining the population that had been a big part of that. I think that unions which want to be fighters for the working class have to be a part of this fight. This army that’s being constructed could just as easily be unleashed against workers who are organizing or on strike, or on social movements.

This is a dangerous, dangerous force that has to be defeated. To leave this force intact would mean a constant danger for all of us.

By Ralph Nader January 30, 2026 “How’s the Democratic Party’s ground game in Pennsylvania?” I asked a friend several weeks before the 2024 presidential election. He replied optimistically that there were far more door knockers this year than in 2022. It turned out these door knockers were just urging a vote for the Democrats without…

Ever since Trump rode down the escalator in 2016 attacking immigrants as drug smugglers and rapists, immigration has been his signature issue, often putting the Democrats on the defensive.

During his first term, however, his cruel policies of separating families at the border and his BS about Mexico paying for the wall contributed to his defeat in 2020. But the Biden administration had no answer for the flood of immigrants who then crossed the border, which Trump used as a cudgel during the 2024 campaign. Once again the issue was Trump’s and in his second term he’s decided to play hardball by, in effect, totally shutting down the border and deporting record numbers of immigrants.

And it was working. While his handling of the economy tanked his poll numbers, immigration enforcement remained strong, until Minneapolis.

There, he overplayed his hand and did not stick to his argument to deport undocumented felons. Instead, he allowed the psychotic Steven Miller to round up undocumented immigrants, non-felons and felons alike, with even some darker-skinned citizens (literally) tossed into the ICE detention centers.

Not only is this a cruel and inhumane policy, but it’s also not what the American people, including the white working-class, want.

For different reasons Trump and the Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that nearly two-thirds of the American people support “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and committed no felony crimes.”

Trump doesn’t give a damn about these hard-working immigrants. He’s quite happy to support the MAGA “replacement theory” that calls for the protection of a white America from people of color. For Democrats, a pathway to citizenship is too hot to handle, making them look as if they support “illegals,” even if these undocumented immigrants are not felons. They fear Trump’s cudgel and ignore what the American people want.

According to our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 63 percent support the “granting legal status” statement and only 37 percent oppose it.

In urban areas in these four states the support is massive:

• Democrats: 91 percent
• Independents: 73 percent
• Republicans: 47 percent

Looking at urban and non-urban areas combined, 36 percent of those who voted for Trump in 2024 supported this path to citizenship. And 81 percent of Hispanic voters supported it.

We also have 2020 data on the support of the white working class throughout the country, which shows that 62 percent supported this same exact “granting legal status” statement, up from 32 percent in 2010.

It’s as if Trump and the Democrats are stuck in 2010 and don’t realize that the working-class has great sympathy for hard working undocumented immigrants, especially in urban areas where day-day contact is greatest. That’s where nearly everyone comes into contact with immigrants who do so much of the hard labor that makes our economy function. Just 20 metro areas account for 60 percent of all undocumented immigrants.

It is politically explosive to send thousands of ICE and border agents into urban areas to randomly round up undocumented workers. Unless you are trying to foment an urban rebellion so you can send in troops to crush it in the name of law and order and cancel the midterms.

What about the dangerous felons?

The Trump administration has deported each month approximately 1,100 undocumented immigrants with prior violent convictions, according the New York Times. I have no doubt that many Americans support their deportation if it is done in a reasonable way. But at the same time Miller’s shock troops have deported 2,100 immigrants with no criminal records per month. Per month!

That’s what happens when thousands of heavily armed mask-wearing troops invade an urban area, stopping people on the street and raiding houses of worship, businesses, and hospitals without court-approved search warrants. That’s not how you catch felons, that’s how you round up undocumented non-felons. That’s how you get away with stopping people based solely on their skin tone, not on any investigative information about criminal activity. And it shouldn’t be surprising that that’s not OK with much of the American people, something Trump slowly is realizing.

Will the Democrats Come to the Defense of Undocumented Workers?

You couldn’t ask for a better political moment given that Miller’s goons have killed two protesters in the last two weeks. This would be the perfect time to demand that ICE be prohibited from conducting any and all random stops throughout the country, and refrain from arresting any undocumented immigrants who have not committed a felony crime. And this is the time to call for a clear path to citizenship for hard working, non-felonious, undocumented workers.

Undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness...

But there’s little indication that the Democratic Party is willing to go there. The political calculous is obvious: let Trump overplay his hand and hope the anger against him crests into a massive blue wave flooding the midterms. Why risk supporting a path to citizenship, which only will be thrown back at the Democrats declaring they are weak-kneed on immigration? Stopping Trump, the thinking goes, is more important than grandstanding about paths to citizenship given that the Democrats don’t have the votes to deliver. And besides, undocumented workers can’t vote, angry protestors can and will.

But here are two problems with this strategy. The first is that Trump will adjust the ICE invasions between now and November. He has to realize that rounding up felons requires a different, less visible approach that refrains from random searches and street brawls in urban areas. It should be obvious to Trump that Miller’s masked goons will cost the Republicans the midterms if the shock troops continue to roam the streets. White House border czar Tom Homans already is in Minneapolis saying that the shock troops will stand down, in some way, soon.

The second problem is that undocumented workers need political champions, those with enough guts to call for an end to the dual labor market system in which undocumented workers live and work in the shadows and are exploited again and again. That’s not grandstanding. That’s setting a principled agenda for justice and fairness, something that working people of all shades can connect with.

The anti-ICE protestors are leading the charge with the backing of a few state and local Democrats. But nationally the Democrats seem more comfortable talking about Epstein than protecting terrorized immigrants.

The Democrats may not have the nerve, but Dan Osborn, a working-class independent in Nebraska running for the U.S. Senate sure does. Here’s how he put it:

I believe that undocumented workers, there should be a clear path for them to become documented or become legal status.

We need some meaningful immigration reform. These people are our friends. They’re our neighbors. A lot of them have been here 30 years or more, and I think it’s time they get into Social Security already. There’s 80,000 open jobs in Nebraska that we can’t fill, that we can certainly use immigrant labor for.

Did that kill his chances in his 2024 race? He lost by six points but ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris and he’s running again in 2026. He deserves our support.

And, as Bruce Springsteen sings in his a song he wrote last weekend, so do the people who are protecting “the stranger in our midst.”

Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We'll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of '26
We'll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis

Democratic Rep. John Larson of Connecticut is an irreplaceable leader in the fight to expand Social Security. As the top Democrat on the Social Security subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, he combines deep policy expertise with passionate advocacy for Social Security’s 67 million beneficiaries and its 185 million contributors.

Rep. Larson’s signature legislation, the Social Security 2100 Act, would increase Social Security’s modest benefits for everyone. It also includes additional targeted increases for the most vulnerable. And it is paid for by requiring millionaires and billionaires, who currently stop paying into Social Security after their first $184,500 in income, to finally pay their fair share.

Not surprisingly, billionaires hate the Social Security 2100 Act—and the man who wrote it. That’s why they are backing Rep. Larson’s primary challenger, corporate lawyer Luke Bronin. Hidden behind shadowy outside groups, they plan to pour enormous sums into the race.

These billionaires know that the clock is ticking. The Social Security 2100 Act has support from nearly 90% of House Democrats. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has pledged that if Democrats take back the House this November, they will hold a vote on the bill—setting the stage for it to become law the next time there is a Democratic trifecta.

Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand the fear felt by millions of Americans who don’t know how secure our Social Security is, with billionaires like Elon Musk buying political power to try to demolish the system brick by brick.

Thanks to Rep. Larson’s leadership, we are closer than ever to expanding Social Security. It’s no accident that the Social Security 2100 Act has such widespread support among the entire Democratic caucus, including both progressives and moderates. Rep. Larson made that happen by appealing to his colleagues in person at every opportunity—the type of work many members of Congress leave to their staff.

Rep. Larson is legendary for his tenacity. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was first elected to Congress, she was shunned by Democratic leadership and many of her Democratic colleagues. Not Rep. Larson. He immediately went to her office and asked for her support for the 2100 Act. In fact, I was called by her staffer, who asked me who the guy patiently waiting in her office with a folder for her explaining Social Security expansion was.

Rep. Larson works this tirelessly to educate every member of the caucus about Social Security expansion. AOC signed on—and recorded a video with Rep. Larson about their mutual support for Social Security.

Wall Street and its billionaires know that their best shot at stopping Social Security expansion is to take out Rep. Larson. That’s why they are uniting behind Bronin.

Rep. Larson grew up in a public housing project. He went to state university and then worked as a history teacher. In contrast, Bronin went to a fancy prep school and Yale University. He then worked in corporate law and focused on opportunistically climbing the political ladder.

Bronin was elected mayor of Hartford in 2015, on a pledge to serve out his full term. Bronin broke that pledge to unsuccessfully run for governor of Connecticut two years later. At the time, the Connecticut Mirror reported that “even admirers of Bronin, most of whom declined to be quoted by name, said he risked being seen as an opportunist, someone more interested in advancement than completing a difficult job.”

That’s exactly what Wall Street is looking for, and has found in Luke Bronin—someone who wants power for its own sake, and is happy to carry out its preferred agenda. Wall Street wants to deprive Social Security of its greatest champion in the US House, and Bronin is its weapon of choice.

Tellingly, Bronin attacks Rep. Larson for fighting too hard for Social Security. I think that is because Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand what life is like for the 154,216 residents of Connecticut’s First Congressional district and the 67 million Americans around the country who rely on Social Security to live their lives independently and with dignity.

Bronin and his Wall Street buddies can’t understand the fear felt by millions of Americans who don’t know how secure our Social Security is, with billionaires like Elon Musk buying political power to try to demolish the system brick by brick. President Donald Trump and Musk have closed offices, broken the phones, and most destructively fired thousands of workers needed to keep the system functioning. Larson has been fighting against that destruction and shined a spotlight on it. Social Security is in the greatest danger in its 90 year history, and it is because of Wall Street and its billionaires.

More than ever, we need Rep. Larson leading the fight to protect and expand Social Security.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST.

Today we discuss:

•  Democrats covered up Biden’s physical and mental decline. As Trump gets caught sleeping through a cabinet meeting and rambling incoherently, some are asking: are Republicans covering up for their own octogenarian president?

• Will the world’s richest man let The Washington Post die? Fewer reporters are being sent to the Olympics and the Super Bowl. Foreign correspondents are holding off on trips to conflict zones. And editors are being encouraged to experiment with new forms of storytelling. Big layoffs are coming to the newsroom and the business sides of the paper, with sports, local and international taking most the pain. Video journalists, as well as politics and national security are expected to become more central.

• Democrats and the White House agreed to fund ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for two weeks while they negotiate restrictions on an immigration crackdown. Demands: banning ICE goons from masks and requiring them to wear body cameras and ID, an end to random immigration sweeps, judicial warrants for stop and searches and the same use-of-force standards as real cops. How much will Dems cave? Will Lindsey Graham hold things up? Did you hear about the “National Shutdown” today?

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