The FANTASY STATE OF DER FÜHRER TRUMP’S speech turned an already pitiful Congress into a TRUMP DUMP of self-adulation, debasing the historic purpose of the annual State of the Union address. President Donald Trump spewed one hour and 48 minutes of nonstop repetition and canned lies about “the golden age” of America, and claimed that in just one year, his presidency has “achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before and a turnaround for the ages.” (Standing ovation by his GOP supplicants.)

Trump’s “turnaround” has orchestrated the corporate hijacking of the federal government, its people-protection agencies, and the federal workforce. Each day, he illegally plunges our country further into a deeper, more violent dictatorship. He has shattered our Constitution and serially violated the rule of law he swore to uphold.

Tyrant Trump turned this event into an egomaniacal showbiz spectacle, handing out awards to soldiers, a rescuer of flood victims, a 100-year-old veteran, and others brought in as props of virtues to cover his embedded vices.

Trump’s tirade was his usual grab-bag—full of delusions about his past greatness and illusions about the coming glorious future for Americans. Bereft of shame, he repeats lies that the media have corrected. The Associated Press published a story titled “FACT FOCUS: A Look at Trump’s False and Misleading Claims in His State of the Union Speech” the same night so many lies gushed from his foul MOUTH.

Shuddering with anxiety, dread, and fear are millions of Americans who may lose their Medicaid insurance to help pay for Trump’s tax favors for the Plutocrats. Who are the winners in this scenario?

Despite the media repeatedly correcting the record when Trump slanders his opponents with words perfectly applicable to him, he continues defaming those who challenge his lawless actions and fabricated charges. He sticks to his racist vilifying of impoverished immigrants over our Southern border, ignoring, as do all presidents, our historical backing of dictators and oligarchs who oppress and starve their own people, many of whom become asylum-seekers.

A segment from the State of the Union illustrates how Trump demeaned the seriousness of the assemblage by combining his monstrous juvenile ego with inappropriate frivolity:

Our country is winning again. In fact, we’re winning so much that we really don’t know what to do about it. People are asking me:

“Please, please, please, Mr. President, we’re winning too much: we can’t take it anymore. We’re not used to winning in our country. Until you came along, we were just always losing, but now we are winning too much.” And I say, “No, no, no, you’re going to win again. You’re going to win big. You’re going to win bigger than ever.” And to prove that point, here with us is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud. The men’s goldmedal Olympic Hockey team, come on in.

He then meandered on and on about the team’s play.

One of Trump’s favorite epithets perfectly applies to him: “A ‘deranged’ distractor,” trivializing the plight of half of the American people who are losing ground in the desperate struggle to escape poverty in the world’s richest country, controlled by the few over the many.

These include 25 million American workers held down by Trump’s refusal to push for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour. The United States has the lowest minimum wage in the Western world. Is this Winning?

Tens of millions of Americans are at risk of losing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) assistance (formerly known as food stamps), whose budget was cut by Trump and GOP legislation last year to help pay for his tax cuts for the already under-taxed super rich and big corporations. Are these people Winning?

Elon Musk’s Tesla corporation made $5.7 billion in US profits last year and paid ZERO federal income tax. One Tesla worker alone sends more tax dollars to the US Treasury than did the Tesla corporation and probably its boss. Musk was the architect of the illegal, criminal, Trumpian DOGE rampage that closed or strip-mined federal agencies mandated to protect the health, safety, and economic rights of American consumers and workers. Is letting corporate polluters, corporate crooks, and huge tax evaders wreak havoc on America Winning?

Shuddering with anxiety, dread, and fear are millions of Americans who may lose their Medicaid insurance to help pay for Trump’s tax favors for the Plutocrats. Who are the winners in this scenario?

Are the elderly losing their Meals on Wheels winners? Are the little children losing Head Start winners? Are the scientists shut out by Trump from working to prepare our country for coming pandemics and the rising violence of climate disruption winning? Remember, NBC reported that in 2020, “President Donald Trump accused Democrats of ‘politicizing’ the deadly coronavirus during a campaign rally here on Friday, claiming that the outbreak is ‘their new hoax’ as he continued to downplay the risk in the US.” Trump has repeatedly downplayed the impact of Covid-19. No one wins when a President ignores serious outbreaks of viruses and contagious diseases, resulting in tens of thousands of preventable fatalities.

The Congressional GOP knew ahead of time of Trump’s “circus barker” performance. As the hosts, they could have urged him to provide a serious and truthful presentation of the State of the Union and saved his presentation of wandering, egotistical commentary and lies for a political rally. Instead, they gave him or the people he mentioned several standing ovations, shouting “USA, USA, USA.” Tragically, the GOP majority in Congress is rubber-stamping Trump’s policies and allowing him to weaken our domestic defenses against economic, environmental, and health threats in ways we have never seen before.

When co-belligerent Trump got to the Israeli genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinian babies, children, women, and men, he focused on the recovery of the remaining bodies of the Israeli hostages under the rubble. He made no mention of the tens of thousands of Gazans violently killed by US weapons, whose bodies are still under the rubble, and who were not recovered for burial.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues with impunity to break the ceasefire violently because Trump fears what Netanyahu may have on him in Israeli intelligence files.

It was past 11:00 pm ET when the 12-minute Democratic response was delivered by the new Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger. She accused Trump in strong, succinct language of corruption at the highest levels of Trump’s regime and of making life for the people harder, more expensive, and fearful.

What the governor failed to do was make the affirmative case for an authentic Democratic Party COMPACT FOR AMERICA, answering the venerable question: “Whose Side Are You On?” She could have said the Democrats stand for a living wage, Medicare for all, restoring taxes on the super rich, an authentic child tax credit cutting child poverty in half, cracking down on corporate crooks stealing big time from consumers and workers, and transitioning from a bloated military budget of a fossil-fueled Empire to building public works and installing renewable energy for communities across the land.

Once again, the Democrats blew an opportunity to persuade voters that the Democratic party is going TO STAND FOR THE PEOPLE in the critical November election.

At his February 2026 State of the Union address, Great Leader Donald Trump was atypically modest about his achievements as president in his second term. He has conquered inflation; ended eight wars; taken $1 off the price of gas; created jobs as never before; conquered unemployment; ridded the cities of criminals and immigrants; secured $18 trillion in investments with highly effective tariff wars; and created a peace board with a modest $1 billion entry fee.

Of course, none of these claims is true. But the president should be honored for his hard work and delusionary beliefs. President Trump loves nothing more than hearing his name and seeing it affixed, preferably in gold color, to apartment and office buildings, casinos, and consumer products. The board of trustees of John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, most of whom Trump appointed and whose chairman is Donald, voted to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. But more work is to be done. The following buildings, objects, and programs are just a first cut of the most important honors.

• The Trump Constitution. Russian President Vladimir Putin promulgated one to make him president for life…
• The Trump and Genesis “I Can’t Dance” Ball Room. For $1 million, you can have a lifetime “I Can’t Dance” membership.
• Trump Archive and Bathroom. At Mar-a-Lago. Where he read classified documents, refused to return them, and washed his hands. Apparently.
• Donald Trump Prisons. Geo Group, with 100 facilities and a total of 80,000 “beds” (or, as they are usually called “cells”), has become the second-largest contractor for Trump’s mass incarceration campaign, with a 700% increase in profits since 2024. Private prisons gave Trump over $1 million toward his reelection. And Trump is a felon. Trump deserves a prison or two.
• The Trump Penn Station, Washington International Airport, and Gateway Tunnel. Trump said he would unfreeze roughly $16 billion in federal funding if Democrats support the name changes.
• Trump Toll Booths. Fifty percent of tunnel tolls go to the Trump Organization through booths emblazoned in gold paint as “Trump Little Towers.”
• The Trump Kennedy-Trump Center Drag Gala. To headline the opening of the 2026-27 season. It will include a reprise of the year 2000 drag performance of Trump with Rudy Guiliani. Special guest JD Vance dressed in drag as he was at Yale Law School. The Gala will be held monthly since schedule permits: Dozens of artists cancelled their performances.
• Trump and Sons Gaza Resort. For $2 million you can name a Gaza skyscraper after yourself.
• The Trump, Kennedy, Oz, and Heath Pharmacy. Medicaire has put a pause on funding medical equipment, orthotics, and prosthetics. For $1 million you can buy a pair of Trump Crutches™ for the needy.
• Qatar Trump Airlines: What to do with a gifted 747? Daily flights between any golf course and Mar-a-Lago.
• Trump Hospitals and Research Centers. No vaccinated or masked patients permitted. No cutting edge research allowed.
• The Trump Center for Human Resources (Trump HR™). His university went bankrupt, and he paid a $25 million fine for it. But Trump is a wonderful judge of quality employees whose main virtue is making their boss look good. A half dozen top administration officials are in the Epstein files.
• Trump Triumphal Arc. Bigger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, but dedicated to heroes with bone spurs who salute North Korean generals. The Arc would resemble the meaning of Albert Speer’s “Cathedral of Light” to commemorate the thousand-year Reich in Nuremburg.
• The Jeff Epstein Beauty Pageant. Donald Trump co-owned and operated the Miss Universe Organization from 1996 to 2015. He bragged about going into dressing rooms. He may wish to re-acquire the business for his former friend (we have photos and emails).
• Trump Veterinary Center and Restaurant. Menu includes Cats and Dogs.
• Trump Amusement Park and Tariff Research Center. Highlight is the “TACO” Roller Coaster.
• Trump Rushmore National Monument. Granted, it must overcome significant geological and structural issues, and significant political opposition. But entry valid with “Trump the Beautiful” Park pass. If you deface the pass which has his orange likeness, you are deported.
• Trump Orange Cosmetics. Trump sells a tawdry fragrance whose slogan might be “Because real women love the kind of real man who smells of spray tan.” Also gaudy gold sneakers at only $800.
• Trump Condoms. In gold wrapper with label “Tiny Hands, Big Ego.” (Men whose ring finger is longer than middle finger have slightly bigger penises than average. This apparently explains why Trump flipped off an autoworker on a visit to a Michigan Ford plant. The Trump Footlong wiener, sold in Chicago, is 3” long.
• Trump Cell Phones. Already in the works. None have been delivered as promised six months ago. Phone comes loaded—with one app, “Truth Social,” discounted to annual fee of $100 per year.
• The Trump “Dzhugashvili” Prize. Joe Stalin awarded himself 11 major medals, including three Lenin prizes, but never the Stalin prize.
• The Trump Legislative Award. To be given annually to Trump himself for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law in July 2025 that will impoverish Americans, lead to hunger crises, cut medical care, successfully enrich billionaires, enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain residents without due process, and increase the deficit by $3 trillion in one decade.
• Trump Currency. Name and stunning physiognomy on legal tender. Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced the “Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act.” In addition to the slang for the $100 bill as the “C-note” and “Benjamin” (Franklin), there will be the “Cheeto” or “Taco” for the $250 bill.
• Trump Collectible Cards. What could be more presidential? Already available including images of the four-time draft dodger wearing American flag boxing gloves that run counter to his own presidential order of August 2025 making it a crime to desecrate the flag.

To ensure these and other possibilities, in February 2026 Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport in a variety of possible names, along “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.” This would enable US citizens to continue to pay Trump through licensing fees. A reasonable patent lawyer might trademark “Grifting President™”.

Trump has already immortalized his legacy in: at least eight Trump towers, and at least 13 others never completed; 10 other Trump buildings, and a dozen more never completed; a handful of Trump hotels, but at least 18 never completed or renamed;15 golf courses, and five abroad, and several under discussion abroad funded by Qataris and Saudis; seven former casinos and four never completed that led to six bankruptcies; and 94 felonies and one case of sexual abuse.

Trump can already be satisfied to learn that scientists have named several creatures after him: a fragile yellow-white moth (Neopalpa donaldtrumpi), a fossil sea urchin (Tetragramma donaldtrumpi), and Dermophis donaldtrumpi, the proposed name for a new species of blind amphibious 10 centimeter-long worm.

Michael Parenti, who died on January 24 at the age of 92, blazed a long, brave, and often lonely trail through American political thought and radical politics. The author of more than 25 books, including such many-editioned classics as Democracy for the Few and Inventing Reality, Parenti leaves behind a rich and vital legacy of intellectual and moral clarity.

Arguably one of the most influential thinkers and writers on the US left this past half-century, Parenti stands out as uniquely courageous and unapologetic in directly confronting capitalism, US imperialism, and the manifold corruptions and inequities of society’s powerful. Where many liberal writers bemoaned corporations and the rich, Parenti educated generations (including this writer) about capitalism’s fundamental contradictions and intrinsic forces of inequality, harm, and destruction.

Parenti grew up in a working-class family in East Harlem in New York City, and worked for a few years after high school before obtaining his BA from City College of New York. From there, he gained a teaching fellowship at Brown University, where he earned his MA, then earned his PhD at Yale University. Parenti taught at a slew of different colleges and universities across the United States, eventually becoming an itinerant lecturer and writer after he was widely blackballed from academia for his ideology and activism.

In 1970, Dr. Parenti’s career as a professor was derailed when he was clubbed by police while protesting the shootings of students at Kent State, leading to his ouster from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He soon resettled at the University of Vermont, which then booted him when he was convicted for the protest altercation. Parenti became part of the Green Mountain State’s upwelling of political ferment. He ran for Congress in 1974 on the Liberty Union ticket, netting third place with 7% of the vote, while his then-friend Bernie Sanders garnered 4% in his run for the US Senate.

At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.

While growing up in this fertile milieu of 1970s Vermont, I met Parenti through our interconnected communities and chatted with him many times over the years. Alongside his brilliance and courage, Parenti was warm, amiable, engaging, and funny. He had a visceral humanity and compassion to him that embedded both his interactions and his writing.

“What the military-industrialists fail to see is that the pyramid of power and profit they build rests on a crumbling base,” he wrote in a 1981 essay in The Progressive, one of several pieces he contributed to this magazine between 1975-1992. “Ultimately, no political-economic order can remain secure by victimizing its own people. Sooner or later, this truth returns to haunt the mighty.”

One trademark Parenti talent was his ability to pierce through clotted, contorted mainstream narratives with sharp original insights. A favorite of mine comes from a speech he gave before a packed auditorium at the University of Colorado in 1986:

The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money... Most countries are rich. The Philippines are rich. Brazil is rich. Mexico is rich. Chile is rich. Only the people are poor. There’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and to be taken. There’s been billions, for 400 years, the capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor... These countries are not underdeveloped, they are over-exploited.

The crowd erupted in thunderous applause, as often happened at a Parenti speech.

Many of Parenti’s works, while maligned or dismissed by mainstream critics, have proven to be startlingly prescient. Democracy for the Few, first published in 1974, provides a trenchant original analysis of the multi-layered relationships between economic and political power. A few short quotes from the book bear chillingly close resemblance to the intertwinement of money and politics today:

The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.It is ironic that people of modest means sometimes become conservative out of a scarcity fear bred by the very capitalist system they support.In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system.

In his 1986 book, Inventing Reality, Parenti delivers a searing and wise indictment of corporate mass media that goes beyond standard critiques. While liberal critics of corporate media may decry big business control of journalism, Parenti’s examination dug deeper into core fundamentals of capitalism: “As with any business, the mass media’s first obligation is to make money for their owners,” he wrote, and these wealthy owners “determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public.”

As a young, budding journalist when Inventing Reality was first published, I learned a great deal, not only about who owns and controls the media, but also about the many hidden biases embedded in US journalism stemming largely from that economic power. As Parenti often pointed out, mainstream media discourse typically spans a narrow political continuum from liberal to conservative, rarely including any radical or progressive perspectives, particularly ones like Parenti’s which confront capitalism directly.

Ironically, following Michael’s passing, the New York Times ran a lengthy obituary piece that illustrated many of these biases, highlighting mainstream criticisms of Parenti’s “uncompromising” stances and terming his speaking style as “feisty and animated.” Displaying some of the biases Parenti long critiqued, Times staffer Trip Gabriel wrote, “Parenti seemed to view every American domestic challenge as the fault of capitalism and every US foreign venture as an act of militarized imperialism.” As if such an assessment is somehow objectively inaccurate.

Parenti’s passing is especially notable and poignant due to the dearth of radical political thought and leadership in the United States today. While he was often outcast and blackballed throughout much of academia, he was of a now-gone generation on the left that, at least to some extent, retained its radicalism and Marxist analysis. In this respect, Parenti and his ideas came from the Old Left of the 1930s to the 1960s, rather than the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which often diverged from Marxism and communism.

In today’s chaotic and confusing political landscape, we have left-progressive figures of varying prominence and radicalism, but very few who, like Parenti, directly confront capitalism and its structural, systematic destruction, rather than simply chronicling the many anecdotes of its impacts.

Parenti’s legacies are many and important. Through his books and countless lectures, he inspired generations of progressive-left activists and thinkers. He kept the American left’s torch, so often flickering and adrift, lit and sharply afire.

But there’s another reason I think it’s time for many to discover or revisit Michael Parenti’s prolific oeuvre. At a time when the most radical US political rebellions are sadly emanating from the fascist, bigoted MAGA right, what we so urgently need is a fierce, disciplined, unapologetic, nonviolent uprising from the progressive left.

Parenti’s old one-time friend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called for political revolution when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020. We hear less of that call to action today, when so much of our political energy and time are consumed by our desperate defenses against President Donald Trump’s hideous autocracy.

Amid the daily chaos and maelstroms over Trump’s unrelenting assaults on immigrants, human, and civil rights, our environment, and this nation’s withering democracy, the “Overton window” of the politically possible has been squelched nearly shut. These days, even many progressives have been at least temporarily reduced to anti-Trumpers and, to some degree, to the dreary-grim “Blue no matter who” camp. We could really use the bold radicalism of Michael Parenti now, with his piercing ferocity and that iconic moral and intellectual clarity.

Recent public announcements that many public libraries could no longer accept passport applications surprised many.

In a now unusual attempt at bicameral and bipartisan legislation, Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.) and Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), have put forth bills (H.R.6997 and S.3733) that would enable all public libraries, whether they are organized as units of government or nonprofit organizations, to serve as passport acceptance facilities designated by the State Department.

As a university educator in Library and Information Science, I was at first taken aback by the passport application ban attempt. Many others were surprised that libraries had been accepting passport applications. But then perhaps neither the service nor the attempt to shut it down are a surprise at all.

Public libraries across the nation are an integral piece of our social and civic infrastructure. Librarians see up close the needs for social services in their communities, and they step up to meet those needs.

Libraries are where people step from one world into another, sometimes by opening books and sometimes by sharing space with people very different from themselves.

Libraries provide internet access for people who do not have the resources to get online from home or may not have a home where they can get online. Libraries provide physical shelter, in times of climate emergency like extreme heatwaves or intense freezes. They provide shelter for people who need to get off the street for a few hours to find a safe place. Recently, they have begin offering telehealth booths to support medical care in remote communities.

Libraries promote literacy, a lynchpin of economic security for both individuals and the communities in which they live. Indeed, there is considerable research demonstrating that there are higher literacy rates in communities with access to a public library, particularly in low income and rural areas.

There are approximately 17,000 public libraries in the United States, a number that has remained remarkably stable in the past few decades. Despite funding difficulties, skepticism about the value of physical libraries in the digital era, and political and social challenges to library collections, libraries remain at the center, meeting many of those communities’ needs.

Of course, it is perfect that libraries were places to apply for passports as they are places of border crossing. Libraries are where people step from one world into another, sometimes by opening books and sometimes by sharing space with people very different from themselves.

There is a public library that famously straddles the Vermont-Canada border where you can literally step across a border. That quiet fame has grown louder now that it plays a key role in Louise Penny’s latest novel, The Black Wolf.

To step into the world of the library at most you’ll need a library card. Everyone is welcome.

To be sure, not every library looks like it welcomes all people with open arms. Legacy architecture and practices can perpetuate the perception of the library as hushed and exclusive.

The precarity of funding for public libraries often prevents libraries from addressing that perception. Many libraries aspire to renovating and modernizing their spaces in ways that they simply cannot afford. Public libraries rely upon local taxpayers for much of their funding, but they also rely upon federal grants to innovate and develop new initiatives.

Nearly one year ago, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order intended to dismantle the only federal agency dedicated to funding library services, the Institute for Museum and Library Services. The agency awards almost $300,000,000 in grants every year, including more than $160 million that goes to states and largely supports the work of public libraries.

The executive order was successfully challenged in court by the attorneys general of 21 states, and on November 21 of last year, the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island struck down the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

One result of this victory is that last month, IMLS awarded for eight projects “dedicated to building AI literacy.” Once again, libraries see a need and step up to meet it.

Many people voice public criticism and concern about the use of public libraries. Critics complain that they are overrun with noisy teens after school, socializing and playing video games. Some complain libraries are filled with sleeping, foul-smelling people who experience homelessness, or that they are opening the doors for children to step into obscenity.

But it is crucial to see the critical need for accessible public libraries in this country. It is important to support these bills now up for review to support libraries in providing passport application services, particularly in communities where it can be difficult or intimidating for people to use other federal offices.

More than that, it is essential for the country for policymakers, funders, and all Americans to support libraries through ensuring funding, community advocacy, and moral support. It is crucial to help libraries continue to be places where everyone can cross borders and step into new worlds.

It is 1955 and the hot Mississippi sun is blazing overhead. Miles away in Chicago a Black mother is having a conversation with her 14-year-old son. She tries to impress upon him the often subtle but dangerous realities of what it means to be Black in America, and how one misinterpretation, one lie, could result in his death. That boy is Emmett Till, and in her memoir, Death of Innocence, Mamie Till-Mobley reflects on “The Talk” she delivered to her son before his historically tragic trip to Mississippi.

This version of The Talk dates back to American chattel slavery and has been passed down for generations in Black families, shaped by ongoing racial violence and unequal treatment. But recent violent and fatal encounters involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have forced families across lines of race, ethnicity, and immigration status to confront the reality of their precarious existence in America—and start talking to their children about how to stay safe. Black families’ experience on how to have these conversations is now, tragically, something many families can learn from.

The Talk has always carried more than one meaning. For many families, it refers to the conversation about the birds and the bees, the discussion parents have with their children about dating, puberty, and sex in an effort to prevent teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. That version of The Talk is often framed as universal.

But for Black families, The Talk has long meant something entirely different. In addition to conversations about puberty, Black parents have used The Talk to prepare their children for the realities of race and how to stay safe in a society shaped by racism.

In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation.

Both conversations typically happen around the onset of puberty, but only some families have had the privilege of needing just one version of The Talk. In a 2024 study conducted by Dr. Conial Caldwell, Black fathers reflected on whether other communities also have The Talk. The consensus was clear: Some groups have long had the luxury of avoiding it, while others have their own versions shaped by identity, history, and perceived vulnerability. However, that distinction is beginning to blur.

Because of recent ICE actions, many immigrant and mixed-status families are foregoing everyday liberties out of fear, like grocery shopping and going to work. In Connecticut, Minneapolis, and other locations school attendance stymied by ICE-related anxiety is widespread. Recent deaths linked to encounters with federal immigration enforcement, including those of Keith Porter Jr., Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Preti in Minnesota, have sparked national outrage and renewed scrutiny of ICE’s training practices, accountability, and use of force, including against white Americans. These incidents follow the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos by ICE agents, showing that not even young children are safe.

Families who once felt insulated from normalized and state sanctioned violence against Black Americans, are now asking the same questions Black parents have asked for generations: How do we keep our children safe? How do we prepare them for interactions with law enforcement? What do we say and when?

The fathers in Caldwell’s study offered simple but powerful guidance.

Parents should have The Talk early and revisit it often, adjusting the conversation as children grow. As children grow and become part of new environments outside of the home, so too do the risks of danger increase. Parents’ protective conversations should reflect their children’s developmental stage and level of maturity. At the same time, they should be mindful of social media and television, recognizing that children are exposed to images and narratives that shape their understanding of safety and belonging. Social media has become of one the major spaces of youth interactions; thus, the risk of exposure is not only heighted but as consistent as their internet access. Beyond one’s immediate family, communities must work together to protect all children, not just their own. And children must be consistently reminded that their lives have value, regardless of how they look or where they come from.

From chattel slavery to emancipation, from reconstruction and the civil rights period to post civil rights, The Talk has had to respond to harsh prevailing societal realities for Black Americans. In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation. So, just as Mamie Till-Mobley may have agonized over her words as she gave her son some of her final attempts at guidance and protection, parents across the USA are weighing their words and conversations in their attempts to safeguard their children.

In 2004, I wrote about a peaceful protest I had just attended with my young children that turned into a sudden melee, with riot police shooting pepper bullets into the crowd.

Desperate to find a place to share what felt like important information I discovered after the experience, I decided to take a chance and submit my piece to Common Dreams, a progressive news and opinion website. I was shocked to log on the morning after my late-night submission and see that they’d published it: "To Be Silenced, Or Not to Be: That is the Question."

At the time, Common Dreams didn’t have, as they do now, a section for comments or discussion following a piece they published. I did receive, however, over 600 emails. Those emails helped me know that something I—an everyday American without a collegiate degree—had written about not being silent had resonated, informed, and inspired.

I no longer have access to those emails, a few of which were from well-known people, but I often think of one in particular, in which a couple wrote to say that they were installing new stairs in their home and they wanted me to know that they’d printed my piece and put it under the stairs in a small time capsule they had created.

I’ll Admit It, Though, I’ve Been Pretty Silent the Last Few Years

While I attended the two local No Kings protests last year, and a local ORD2 Indivisible protest this year after the murder of Renée Good, I did think twice before going, and mostly hung quietly around the edges (in order to try and make a hasty exit if anything went awry).

I’ve barely written about any of the administration’s growing atrocities, other than notes in my journal.

And, until the horrific murder of Alex Pretti by federal agents, and the administration’s immediate lies, including saying he was a domestic terrorist (just as they’d lied about Renée Good and others), I hadn’t posted anything “political” on Facebook for over five years. (Mostly due to a friend on the platform telling me a mutual friend didn’t like my political posts, even though they’ve been minimal, respectful, and mostly with a reach-across-the aisle sentiment. This “friend” said the platform is only for “fun” stuff.)

Yes, the masses of everyday people have power in any society. Power to do nothing, or power to rise in resistance.

Yes, fear has kept me silenced. Fear of what may happen to myself or my loved ones if I choose to stand up and not be silenced, be it at a protest, or by sharing things on social media, or if I write something critical of President Donald Trump and his administration.

Following are just two new examples leading to what I’d suggest are rational fears, and are specifically intended to chill and silence dissent and criticism of Trump and his regime:

• There are new reports about the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) using secretive administrative subpoenas (which don’t need a judge’s approval) in order to try and gain personal information of individuals online who have been critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the Trump administration. In one case, a retiree simply sent an email to a DHS agent, imploring him to reconsider trying to deport an asylum-seeker. Within five hours, Google emailed to let him know that DHS wanted to subpoena his information, which he later learned included any credit card numbers on file as well as his Social Security and driver’s license numbers. They also wanted a list of services he used, along with dates, times, and the length of online sessions.
• There are also alarming new details about an enormous domestic spying infrastructure, paid for by our tax dollars, with frightening implications regarding privacy and our constitutional rights.

In a recent opinion piece published at the Boston Globe, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote:

This pervasive surveillance doesn’t just undermine our privacy. It also changes how we behave. If you know that DHS can identify you at a protest, track your movements, or pull up years of personal information with a single inquiry, you may—consciously or unconsciously—begin to self-censor. You may think twice before criticizing the government online or showing up at a rally. This chilling effect is real. It’s dangerous. And it’s a direct threat to our freedom of speech.“Each Act, Each Occasion, Is Worse Than the Last, But Only a Little Worse”

At the end of the piece I wrote in 2004, I’d shared a chilling quote, an excerpt really, from something I’d recently read. It has stuck with me ever since, and started reverberating more loudly once Trump’s second term in office began.

The excerpt comes from chapter 13, “But Then It Was Too Late,” from Milton Mayer’s book They Thought They Were Free, The Germans 1933-45 (1955, University of Chicago Press). In it, the person doing most of the talking in this eight-page chapter—who Mayer only names as a colleague of his, a philologist who lives in Germany—speaks of trying to understand the silence and inaction of masses of everyday people, including “learned men” like himself, that allowed the horrendous evil of Nazi Germany:

What no one seemed to notice... was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people... And it became always wider... The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway...

Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and "crises" and so fascinated, yes fascinated, by the machinations of the "national enemies," without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us... Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

Clearly feeling regret and wondering how it might’ve been different had they resisted, Mayer’s colleague finally admits a painful realization:

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you... The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays... Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves...

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing)... If one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood...You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

Ever since learning about Nazi Germany as a youth, and the monstrosity of horrors committed therein, I’ve been curious why many everyday Germans responded (or not) the way they did. At the same time, I’ve wondered how I would have responded if living in Nazi Germany. Shortly after the end of World War II, Mayer, an American journalist and author, traveled to Marburg, Germany and took up residence for a year to try and learn the answers to these questions as well.

Via extensive interviews, “a year’s conversations, in their own language, under informal conditions involving meals, ‘a glass of wine,’ or, more preciously, a cup of coffee, exchange of family visits (including the children), and long, easy evenings, Saturday afternoons, or Sunday walks,” Mayer sought to understand the thinking of 10 men, “little men” he called them, who were members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, aka, Nazis. He also interviewed women related to these “little men,” but alas, did not include those interviews.

Mayer, a German descendant (and also Jewish, though he didn’t admit that to the interviewees he came to call friends), wrote:

Every one of my ten Nazi friends... spoke again and again during our discussions of “wir kleine Leute, we little people.”

These 10 men were not men of distinction. They were not men of influence. They were not opinion-makers...Their importance lay in the fact that God... had made so many of them. In a nation of 70 million, they were the 69 million plus.

Those 69 million plus everyday people in Nazi Germany had power, but the majority didn’t recognize or use it. As Mayer wrote, “The German community—the rest of the 70 million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism—had nothing to do except not to interfere.”

I’m just an everyday person, too, in a nation of mostly 349 million other everyday people—minus those few at the top seeking to control us, and those few among us who seem to only know hate (maybe because they’ve never known love). An everyday American who is increasingly concerned about the frightening and escalating actions of the current “administration” of my country, and what they portend for us (and also the rest of the world and planet).

Thankfully, Many Everyday Americans Are Standing Up and Speaking Out!

As recently reported by The Guardian, based on data from the Crowd Counting Consortium: “There were more than 10,700 protests in 2025, a 133% increase from the 4,588 recorded in 2017, the first year of Trump’s first term... An overwhelming majority of US counties—including 42% that voted for Trump—have had at least one protest since he was re-inaugurated last year.”

According to other informative data compiled by Britannica regarding No Kings demonstrations in June and October of last year: “Both demonstrations were some of the largest single-day protests to occur in US history, with more than 5 million protesters attending in June and almost 7 million protesters attending in October.”

And then there’s the recent massive and predominantly nonviolent demonstrations in Minneapolis and the surrounding region.

But, until now, aside from cautiously attending a few local protests, I’ve still been too silent.

Other Things That Have Kept Me Silent: the “Forms,” and Then Also the Paralysis

Interestingly, it was the colleague of Mayer’s mention of the forms that has stuck with me the most from that particular excerpt: “The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.”

None of the above forms, nor the addition of so many others since, such as TV, computers, cell phones, social media, streaming programs, and more—most forms that I, too, partake of—are bad forms in and of themselves. But is it possible that at least some are used to manipulate us masses? Or, at the very least, used to take advantage of our attention being, as the excerpt from Mayer’s book says, diverted?

Think of all the time, work, and money that we exhaust just to (hopefully) make ends meet. There’s the skyrocketing rent or mortgages, utilities, transportation, groceries, childcare, household insurance, etc. There’s the medical bills, health insurance (which I and millions of others can no longer afford), taxes, college tuition (which is now leaving graduates with difficulty finding work), Social Security and Medicare—which we’ve paid into, and more, along with all of the attendant literal forms that keep us busy. There’s all we spend trying to pay for the myriad of things they tell us to need or want, and then all of the time we spend organizing and taking care of those things (and often later getting rid). And then, exhausted from it all, if we even have time or energy left over, we (yes, me, too) often check-out with our never-ending sports and streaming programs.

All of these things, and more—including any debt we go into, not only keeps our attention diverted and out of their way, effectively silencing us, it also makes those seeking to control us wealthier than the majority of all Americans combined (if you figure those seeking to control us are likely in the top 10% of the population owning 63.77% of all wealth in the country, per the following data).

Regarding Wealth Inequality in America

We can look at new Federal Reserve reporting, assets by wealth percentile group in 2025:Q3. Using their data, I have created the following to make it easier to follow:

• 1% of the population owns 28.98% of all wealth (with 0.1% owning 13.04% of that).
• 9% of the population owns 34.79% of all wealth.
• 50-90% of the population own 30.91% of all wealth.
• The bottom 50% of the population owns 5.32% of all wealth.

I certainly can attest to this effective silencing in my own life (aside from having an amazing landlord who charges fair rent). But I definitely see at least some room where I could choose differently.

In addition to allowing myself to be silenced through both covert and overt means, there has also been the very distinct paralysis I’ve felt after trying to follow the absolute barrage of appalling things coming from Trump and his administration. It’s a constant blitz, which comes from “blitzkrieg” of course, which Britannica deftly explains as a military tactic “calculated to create psychological shock and resultant disorganization in enemy forces.”

The speed and seeming chaos of these shocking and growing anti-democratic and authoritarian actions by the current administration are surely no accident, and are instead more intentional attempts at diverting our attention with the common authoritarian modus operandi of Ruling by Distraction and Chaos. Oh, and a Barrage of Outright Lies.

One Great Shocking Occasion

I’d been shocked and stunned by the murder of Renée Good, of course, but, for me apparently, Pretti’s murder was the “one great shocking occasion” that spurred me back into speaking up more publicly. Regretfully, I admit there were many, so many, shocking occasions before Pretti’s murder which should have done so.

The Monday after Pretti was murdered, doing chores while listening to and watching the reporting out of Minneapolis, I stopped myself short, asking: “If I received an emergency alert on my phone that a wildfire was on its way, would I continue trying to ‘finally get my house and life organized’ before I evacuated?” It was an incredibly clarifying question, as that’s exactly what I’ve been doing regarding the fire raging in our country.

Almost immediately, I ceased everything else and sat down and started writing. And have been writing for weeks since.

We have a five-alarm fire going on in our country that is getting terrifyingly close to, among other things, incinerating the rule of law, our civil liberties and constitutional rights, and democracy.

It can be difficult to track, especially when most media are only able to report on the immediate fire(s) of the day, but the following are just some of the Trump Regime’s current blitzkrieg. It is not necessarily in order of importance, nor is it exhaustive by any means.

• According to newly released data, the “worst of the worst” make up less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 ICE arrests last year. According to the FBI, violent crime consists of four crimes: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Most agree that they want violent undocumented immigrants deported, via due process; however, the majority of those who’ve been arrested and detained, approximately 86%, have not committed violent crimes. Nearly 40% have no criminal record at all!
• US citizens—in addition to Renée Good and Alex Pretti—are being shot, injured, and detained for standing up for their neighbors or just being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Afterward, the administration has immediately lied before there’s even been time for an investigation, and those injured or murdered have been routinely called, by the administration, “Domestic Terrorists,” and “Agitators.” Just two examples are Marimar Martinez, and Aliyah Rahman. Martinez was shot five times by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent. Aliyah Rahman, was violently pulled from her car when she was on her way to a doctor’s appointment and happened upon an ICE operation. There are other US citizens, and also noncitizens, who have been injured, shot, and also killed by federal agents. How many times did agents and this administration lie the same lies about those cases? And how many more instances do we not even know about?
• The regime’s intentional and routine labeling of protesters, activists, groups, organizations, anyone critical of Trump and his administration, (or those like Rahman who was just on her way to a doctor’s appointment) as “Domestic Terrorists” is not only an attempt at restricting or silencing our First Amendment right to free speech. It also comes with actions they can take, via National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM)-7, against those they decide to deem “Domestic Terrorists.” (Sure, we expect our government to keep a watch out for true domestic terrorists. How many are they actually missing, though, with all of their focus on the “radical left democrats,” “paid agitators,” and others simply standing up to exercise their First Amendment rights to criticize Trump Regime behaviors and policies?)
• Among many of the falsehoods he uttered during his recent State of the Union address, Trump described the horrible killing of Ukrainian refugee, Iryna Zarutska, as being the fault of “open borders.” However, the man charged with her murder is a US citizen. There have been horrible murders committed by undocumented immigrants; however, according to many studies, native-born individuals are much more likely to commit violent crime. (Also, out of curiosity, since Trump introduced Zarutska’s mother at the SOTU, what does he think about the tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who are losing work visas and Temporary Protected Status, and fear increasing risk of deportation?)
• An ICE attorney, who also trained cadets at the ICE training facility in Glynco, Georgia, resigned on February 13 and then testified as a whistleblower on February 23. In Ryan Schwank’s testimony, he described the training he witnessed as, “deficient, defective, and broken.” He went on to testify that ICE was training new agents to violate the constitution by entering homes illegally, and that they had “ceased all of the legal instructions regarding use of force.”
• There is the unnecessary and heartbreaking toll—which is already a massive source of trauma, and will likely remain so for years to come—that CBP agents, and masked, heavily armed, and usually unidentified ICE agents, are inflicting on millions of young children in communities around the country as they seek to fulfill the “quotas” of mass deportations set by the demonstrably white nationalist White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
• ICE, with $38.3 billion of our tax dollars, is seeking to purchase (and already has in some cases) giant warehouses across the country to convert into detention facilities (concentration camps) in which to house tens of thousands of immigrants who they plan to arrest and slate for mass deportations.
• There are already widespread inhumane and dire conditions at existing ICE detention facilities (concentration camps).
• There will likely be many negative long-term effects on children who are already living in the abysmal conditions at ICE detention facilities (concentration camps).
• In addition to many concerns regarding how Trump could try to disrupt the 2026 midterms, he recently said, in yet another attempted abandonment of established law, “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
• The SAVE America Act, in its current writing, could make voting much more difficult for millions and millions (and millions) of eligible voters. (It passed the House recently and is currently stalled in the Senate as of February 26.) BTW: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote, and voter fraud is exceedingly rare. Even the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation researched voter fraud going back decades and found it was less than 1%. And that number, when it comes to noncitizen registrants and voters, according to CEIR (The Center for Election Innovation and Research) falls even more upon further investigation.
• The Trump administration is attempting unlawful seizure of states’ voter data, which includes private information. Many states have already complied.
• There’s the alarming reporting from NPR back in August of last year regarding our Social Security data: “A whistleblower says that a former senior DOGE official now at the Social Security Administration copied the Social Security numbers, names, and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency's cloud.” It’s an ongoing story that could have tremendously alarming and troubling ramifications for the majority of the US population with Social Security numbers.
• There’s Trump’s brazen graft and personal profiteering. (Not to mention similar graft by so many others in his administration.)
• There’s the ongoing genocide in Gaza despite a supposed ceasefire; concerns regarding what Trump’s “Board of Peace” is really about; and fear that the US government master plans for “New Gaza” are nothing more than money grabs for investors while facilitating the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
• And what about the Epstein Files? Which are full of known pedophilia, sex trafficking, abuse, suspected bribery and money laundering, and more. An enormous ring of abuse and deceit, at high levels, that may likely be even worse than is already known. Prior to millions of Epstein files being released (still only a little over half, though the Department of Justice says it’s final), Trump claimed they were a “Democrat hoax.” However, in recent days and weeks, the files have triggered multiple reactions from or regarding many implicated in the files, which definitely does not support Trump’s “Democrat hoax” claim. Around the world, there have been multiple high-level government officials, attorneys, industry moguls, influencers, a Nobel laureate, former royalty... who have—just since the release of the files—either resigned, retired, gone on leave, been replaced, stepped down, announced they were selling, canceled their charities, or have been arrested. There is a there, there. (And, in new investigative reporting from NPR in the last few days, we learned about missing files regarding Trump and a woman who claimed he sexually abused her when she was 13. According to NPR’s reporting, “The FBI interviewed this Trump and Epstein accuser four times.” Why weren’t those files released?)

Again, that’s just a partial list. Just a small bit of the scope of what we everyday people should be deeply concerned about. Each have been important factors in helping me recommit myself to doing what little I can to add my voice to the millions of other everyday people who are currently refusing to be silenced—often at risk to their own safety—and are choosing to stand and speak up for their neighbors, our communities, the rule of law, the Constitution, and democracy.

Some of the Ways to Speak Up and Get More Involved

For those who are ready to act but haven’t yet—or, like me, haven’t done much more than attend a protest or two in recent years—here are just a few ways we can start speaking up more:

• Write or call our leaders in Congress;
• Attend local rallies;
• Consider joining groups like Indivisible, MoveOn, or the 50501 Movement—all groups that have helped organize No Kings events. (Indivisible and MoveOn also make the top two items in this list easy.);
• Join the next No Kings event, scheduled for March 28, with events planned (and growing) all over the country (and world);
• Attend (or host) local Know Your Rights training sessions, which can be scheduled through a variety of organizations and also hosted by community groups. These sessions also likely have information on how best to monitor ICE and CBP locally, and other ways we can get involved and help;
• Minneapolis, who has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, suggests that getting organized before ICE comes to town is important, and one of the things they most recommend doing? Getting to know our neighbors;
• Consider subscribing to Project Salt Box in order to stay up-to-date and learn what can be done regarding the DHS-ICE attempt to purchase massive warehouses across the country and turn them into immigrant detention centers (concentration camps);
• Respectfully share honest concerns, opinions, news, and details on current and important events on social media accounts and elsewhere (as more and more are doing now);
• Engage directly again—being willing to listen and dialogue compassionately and respectfully—with family, friends, neighbors, people we work with, and people we care about even though we know they may currently disagree with our views and concerns; and
• Reevaluate where we spend our resources and attention.

Whatever we are motivated to do, nonviolently, helps. It all matters. It all adds up. And in doing so, together we millions of everyday people will intensify and help sustain the needed resistance to an attempted authoritarian (or fascist) takeover of our country. An attempted takeover by this administration and its allies that is clearly devoid of heart, truth, justice, rule of law, conscience, empathy, or any concern whatsoever for anything other than their own selfish and unquenchable thirst for control, money, and power.

A Few Hopeful Notes

Many have probably already heard of the “3.5% rule.” It was coined by political scientist Erica Chenoweth following research she and a colleague undertook over a decade ago at the Harvard Kennedy School. In an updated paper in 2020, she explains the rule again: “The ‘3.5% rule’ refers to the claim that no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event.”

Chenoweth also shared new data showing there has been at least one time where the 3.5% rule didn’t work, as well as other times where it took less than 3.5% of the population to resist. Chenoweth also has cautioned that the 3.5% rule is more a “rule-of-thumb,” and that it’s a “descriptive finding but not necessarily a prescriptive one.”

To be up front, Chenoweth is also, as noted on her website, currently working to understand why the “rule” has appeared to be less effective over the last decade. From an interview with Harvard Magazine last year, we learn, “Chenoweth sees a number of factors at work, such as regimes managing to control the information environment, or provoking violence within a movement to discredit it, or criminalizing protests.” She believes autocrats are catching on, and it is likely going to take more than just mass nonviolent protests going forward.

There are clearly many factors that may affect the success of a particular resistance. Nevertheless, the data on the 3.5% rule remains impressive concerning the potential power of even just a small percentage of a population participating in a sustained and organized campaign of nonviolent resistance.

Let’s look at just Minneapolis for a moment. Population estimates vary, but according to Minnesota Monthly, in March of last year the combined population for the Twin Cities was 724,630, with Minneapolis being 423,250 and St. Paul being 301,380.

Applying the 3.5% “rule of thumb” here: Minneapolis proper would need 14,814 people to actively protest, and St. Paul would need 10,548.

According to estimates, the amount of people who marched in the massive “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom” event on January 23 in Minneapolis was widely estimated to be at 50,000, with some reports even suggesting it was closer to 100,000. Not even one month after that historic and peaceful march of at least 50,000 everyday people—in sub-zero temperatures—border czar Tom Homan declared in a news conference: “I have proposed, and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude.”

The population of the United States sits at around 349 million people; 3.5% of that is a little over 12 million. Seven million of us already showed up around the country at the October 18, 2025 No Kings peaceful protests. Imagine what might happen at the next one coming up on March 28? Will we everyday people become Democracy’s 12th man?!

The regime’s mass deportation plan clearly has little to do with deporting the “worst of the worst.” We can have a dream, however, with so many of us everyday people standing up and speaking out across the country, in greater and greater and greater numbers—that Trump, Miller, and the rest of the regime will be quickly forced to agree as they did in Minnesota: “We concur that all mass deportation operations conclude.” (And may they concur thusly before spending billions of our dollars creating more unnecessary and inhumane concentration camps.)

From a spiritual perspective, I tend to believe that what we focus on expands. I also believe we are all intrinsically connected. So, even while fighting (nonviolently) against the abhorrent is necessary, I believe it’s important to remember (and I have to remind myself often) that it’s also important, perhaps even more so, to also focus on what we are fighting for.

While standing up and speaking out about the Trump regime and its clearly authoritarian push and inherent ills, we are also standing and nonviolently fighting for: kindness; compassion; empathy; joy; respect; dignity; forgiveness; equality; diversity; understanding; love; a healthy life for ourselves and our loved ones; and a just, equitable, safe, supportive, peaceful, inhabitable world for all.

Wouldn’t we masses of everyday people—which far, far outnumber both those who seek to control us, as well as the small percentage among us who only know hate—agree on most of those ideals?

As former President Barack Obama said in a recent interview:

Right now, we’re being tested, and the good news is, what we saw in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and what we’re seeing in places across the country... has been the American people saying... at least a good number of the American people saying, "We’re going to live up to those values that we say we believe in." As long as we have folks doing that, I feel like we’re going to get through this.

I’m going to conclude here the same way I concluded another piece back in 2020. It was a piece about questioning so-called truth, especially as disseminated by organizations, corporations, governments, etc. It was also, more importantly, about the power of everyday people:

In George Orwell’s all-too-prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the proles are the proletariat who make up 85% of the population of Oceania… In Orwell’s novel, the proles came to represent hope, if for no other reason than the power their sheer numbers represented. Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith observed: “If there was hope, it must lie in the proles… If only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength.”

Yes, the masses of everyday people have power in any society. Power to do nothing, or power to rise in resistance. We could choose to ignore what is going on before our very eyes, like the mostly 69 million that Mayer mentioned doing so in Nazi Germany before realizing it was too late. Or we can choose to become more and more conscious of our own strength, which is already being evidenced across the country as more and more of us everyday people are standing up and saying, nonviolently and in unison: We Will Not Be Silenced.

By Ralph Nader February 27, 2026 The FANTASY STATE OF DER FÜHRER TRUMP’S speech turned an already pitiful Congress into a TRUMP DUMP of self-adulation, debasing the historic purpose of the annual State of the Union address. Trump spewed one hour and 48 minutes of nonstop repetition and canned lies about “the golden age” of…

Recently, Steve Bannon told an audience:

And I will tell you right now, as God is my witness, if we lose the midterms… some in this room are going to prison—myself included.

Now, it looks like President Donald Trump and the people around him are seriously considering declaring an emergency to let them seize control of this November’s elections, according to reporting yesterday in the Washington Post:

Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.

Donald Trump and the lickspittles and criminals he’s surrounded himself with are in a panic. If Democrats take the House or Senate in this November’s elections, they’ll have the power of subpoena so the regime’s crimes and corruption will be laid out for everybody to see. Some could even go to prison, including Trump himself.

He’s been basically screaming, “Do something!!!” at Republicans for the past year. It started publicly with his demanding that Texas and then other red states further gerrymander their elections to reduce the number of Democrats in the House.

If you’ve studied history—and you know I have—that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

In red states they’re purging voters in blue cities from the rolls like there’s no tomorrow, and the GOP is trying to recruit “election observers” to challenge signatures on mail-in ballots on an industrial level. As reporter Greg Palast pointed out, this is how Trump took the White House in 2024; if it hadn’t been for over 4 million (mostly Black) fully qualified US citizens being purged or having their ballots rejected after technical challenges, Kamala Harris would be our president today.

But given how badly Trump’s doing in the polls today, even all these efforts don’t look like they’ll be enough to keep the House and Senate in Republican hands.

So now Trump toadies like Jerome Corsi (the creator of the Birther movement and the Swift Boat slurs, who’s been a guest on my program multiple times) have an idea: Just imitate what Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Adolf Hitler, and other dictators have done to hang onto power when they get unpopular: Declare an emergency and use it to rig the election.

Yesterday, The Washington Post detailed how MAGA-aligned activists are now openly discussing manufacturing or exaggerating a national emergency to justify Trump’s agents in the federal government to interfere in this November’s elections.

These aren’t fringe anonymous trolls on some obscure message board; they’re people operating in proximity to the president of the United States. Corsi arguably destroyed John Kerry’s chances in 2004 and lit the Birther fuse that catapulted Trump into political fame.

And they’re floating the idea that if normal democratic processes don’t produce the “right” outcome, they could help create a fake crisis to seize control of the election nationally.

If you’ve studied history—and you know I have—that’s the moment when the hair on the back of your neck should stand up.

Because this isn’t new, creative, or even uniquely American: It’s straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: They’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

In 1933, Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, went up in flames at the hands of a mentally ill Dutch communist who was probably maneuvered into the act by the Nazis. Adolf Hitler declared it “proof” of an existential communist threat. Civil liberties were suspended overnight. Gone in the blink of an eye were freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble as Hitler’s goons began to round up his political opponents and throw them into his new concentration camp at Dachau.

Elections were technically still held, but under conditions so distorted they no longer qualified as free or fair in any meaningful sense, and the so-called “temporary” emergency became Hitler’s legal bridge to a permanent dictatorship.

Similarly, in Turkey in 2016, elements of the military tried to pull off a coup against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan while he was out of town. Erdoğan declared a national state of emergency and then kept it in place permanently. Tens of thousands of protesters were arrested. Judges and teachers were purged from their jobs, and media outlets were closed down for being “fake news.”

While emergency rule was in effect, Turkey held an election that transformed its parliamentary democracy into a hyper-presidential system tailored to give virtually all federal power to Erdoğan himself. It was the end of democracy in Turkey.

Vladimir Putin’s rise offers another variation. In 1999, a series of apartment bombings killed hundreds of Russians and the Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. The attacks propelled Putin, then a relatively unknown prime minister, into the presidency on a wave of fear and fury.

Putin then declared a state of emergency that expanded his police powers, gave him tighter media control, and let him seize control of the elections process. In the years since then, elections in Russia have become ritual rather than reality. The ballots are printed every few years, and the votes are counted, but the outcome is never in doubt.

Viktor Orbán in Hungary shows yet another model. He declared a “state of crisis” over migration by Syrian refugees in 2015 and kept renewing it long after migration levels collapsed. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he got the parliament to give him the authority to rule by decree on an indefinite basis; it’s still in effect.

As a result, elections still happen (there’s one coming up), but the media landscape was completely taken over by Orbán-friendly billionaires (see: CBS, WaPo, LA Times, Fox “News,” Sinclair, Wall St. Journal, NY Post, and 1,500 right-wing radio stations). Orbán didn’t need to cancel Hungary’s elections; he simply reshaped the legal and political environment in which they happened.

There’s a common thread in all of this. The crisis wannabe dictators inevitably declare—real, exaggerated, or cynically manipulated—become the justification for seizing extraordinary powers. Those powers narrow dissent, intimidate opponents, and functionally rig the elections.

That’s why this shocking new reporting in the Washington Post is so alarming. When political actors like Corsi begin talking openly about declaring an emergency to override or interfere with elections, they’re not blowing smoke: They’re testing a classic dictator’s narrative.

They’re trying to figure out—and will learn from the national reaction to this Post reporting—whether they can persuade the public that normal election processes are too dangerous to trust. After all, in each of the cases I listed above, the machinery of democracy was used to hollow out democracy itself.

And they may not even have to manufacture an emergency: if Trump can sufficiently provoke Iran, they may activate their proxy network around the world and in the United States, and we could be facing a genuine crisis on the order of 9/11. This is one of the few ways to make sense of today’s massive military buildup in the Middle East.

The danger here isn’t just a fabricated catastrophe or a retaliatory strike by Iran, although those are pretty damn severe. It’s the normalization of the idea that if the electorate appears likely to choose “wrongly,” an emergency can justify changing the rules of democracy.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition.

History shows us, over and over again, that when a nation loses its democracy to an aspiring autocrat, the language and strategy used is always the same. “The nation is under threat.” “The moment is an emergency.” “Normal rules must be suspended—just temporarily—to save the country.”

And in every case, “temporary” turned out to be the most dangerous word of all.

We’re now at that moment where influential figures are publicly contemplating that path, and the lesson from history isn’t subtle. The real emergency, in a constitutional republic, begins when leaders like Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan and Trump—and their toadies like Corsi, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Tulsi Gabbard—decide that elections themselves are the problem.

Multiple observers have noted that this plan is grossly unconstitutional. But so were Trump’s tariffs (which also used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act emergency authority as their rationale), and the Supreme Court let him run with them for almost a year before stopping him.

Similarly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons kicking in people’s front doors and smashing their car windows to drag them off without a judicial warrant is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but Trump’s agents continued to do it every day. Something being against the law or the Constitution has never stopped our convicted felon-rapist-insurrectionist president in the past.

This plot will only be stopped if it’s widely reported and an outraged public rises up in opposition. Call (202-224-3121) your elected representatives—Democratic and Republican—and let them know you’re onto this plot and won’t tolerate it. And that if they have any fidelity left to the Constitution and American values, they won’t either.

When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl halftime performer, critics predicted backlash. He’d be too Spanish. Too political. Not “American” enough. The assumption was that in a country this polarized, cultural borders were fixed—and he stood on the wrong side of them.

Instead, one of the largest audiences in National Football League history tuned in. Streams surged. Album sales climbed. Millions of viewers who didn’t understand every lyric found themselves moving anyway.

Maybe nothing flipped overnight. Maybe hardened partisans didn’t suddenly renounce their politics. What happened was subtler—and more powerful. The borders didn’t collapse. They became more permeable. How did Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio pull that off?

His Music Is a Joyful Invitation, Not a Grievance

Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rico has endured over 400 years of exploitation. And yet his music is uplifting; his community feels resilient, not defeated. Political messaging, especially among progressives, often starts with what communications strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio describes as, “Boy, have I got a problem for you.” Bad Bunny flips the sequence. He invites us to dance first. To celebrate music and food and love and family. It feels like the greatest party on Earth.

Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization.

When I told my husband to check out Debi Tirar Más Photos, Bad Bunny’s Grammy Album of the Year (the first Spanish language winner ever), he was reluctant. The next day, though, the album was blasting through the house. The music is so accessible because there’s something for everyone. Even within a single song, he moves across genres and generations. Having grown up in the Bronx, I was drawn to the salsa rhythms of “Baile Inolvidable.” But then the dembow pulse of “Tití Me Preguntó” had me moving too—despite years of thinking that I didn’t like reggaeton because it all sounded the same. Bad Bunny’s music loosened assumptions I hadn’t even realized I’d been carrying.

He Uses Curiosity as a Teacher

Viewers who tuned in for the spectacle of the halftime show noticed people dressed as sugar cane plants, workers climbing electrical poles, empty white plastic chairs scattered across the stage. What did it mean? I know I wasn't the only one burning a hole on the internet that evening. People don’t resist information they discover themselves, especially if they’re being entertained.

Without lecturing, Bad Bunny’s show gave us a history lesson on over 125 years of US colonization: the dismantling of Puerto Rico’s agricultural economy; environmental catastrophes; and gentrification driven by tax breaks for wealthy developers. The result: a diaspora in which 2 out of 3 Puerto Ricans now live off the island.

That’s not persuasion through argument. It’s softening through exposure.

His Call to Connect Counters the Us-Versus-Them Narrative Used to Divide Us

Bad Bunny’s music is more than about Puerto Rico. It’s about countering the fear and anger-mongering being used to pit us against each other. The deliberate cultivation of suspicion that someone else is taking what’s yours—when the real plundering is happening from the top.

His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.

Instead, Bad Bunny’s jumbotron message called on people to view each other through a loving lens instead of a hateful one. Former President Barack Obama praised the performance for conveying a simple message: There is room for everyone here. Contrast that to Turning Point’s All-American Halftime Show, the alternative created for those who preferred a narrower definition of who is an American.

Some observers have compared Bad Bunny to John Lennon who also insisted that love could be politically disruptive. Lennon’s “Imagine” wasn’t about changing policy; it was a call to picture the world differently. That imaginative shift is what unsettles power. Fear-based politics relies on narrowing who counts, on who gets to define the nation. Benito is all about expansion.

He Doesn’t Shrink to Widen His Audience

The NFL executives may have worried that Americans wouldn’t understand Bad Bunny if he didn’t sing in English, but he refused to change himself to accommodate a fractured country. He made the audience stretch instead. (Duolingo reported a 35% surge in Spanish learners following his show.) Understanding doesn’t always begin with translation. It can begin with proximity.

The anger directed at Bad Bunny, writes journalist Jim Heath, is about losing control over identity. “Latino culture is framed as divisive,” writes Heath, “only because its permanence challenges an older mythology about who America is.”

Changing Heart and Minds

We often assume persuasion begins with argument—that we must win debates before we can win anyone over. But most of us don’t reason our way into a larger sense of “us.” We feel our way there. Bad Bunny understands that. His work is an invitation: to learn about his culture, to experience joy together, to recognize how much we share. Not to contort ourselves to fit in, but to widen the circle without losing who we are. And before long, we’re dancing beside people we were warned to fear.

His approach isn’t just entertainment. It’s strategy. Not a bid to crush opponents overnight, but a patient expansion of belonging—joyful, magnetic—until the line between “us” and “them” begins to dissolve.

That’s how movements grow.

Our government should make life better for all people. Local and federal elected leaders should ensure we all have enough to eat, a roof over our heads, the opportunity to learn and grow, and access to care when needed.

Instead, Congress cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and nearly $200 billion from food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), while committing a staggering $85 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This administration has chosen to fund fear over food, detention over dignity, and the interests of billionaires over the well-being of working people.

In the shadow of this federal failure, there’s a hopeful truth emerging in cities and states across our country: When communities act in solidarity, they can reclaim government and transform it to serve the people.

This is evident in the work of countless community organizations, including Chicago-based Equity and Transformation (EAT). EAT creates space for working people across race and language to take action to advance collective worker safety and justice.

Housing, public transportation, public schools, healthcare, and food are the foundations of a dignified life, and must be guaranteed for all.

Thanks in large part to EAT’s community organizing, Cook County has established permanent funding for guaranteed income. This vital work can serve as a protective non-carceral form of community support that addresses some of the economic harm and exclusion EAT’s members face. Especially for communities disproportionately harmed by the violence of policing, a basic guaranteed income can provide material stability that helps ensure essential needs, healthcare, housing, and food are not trade-offs, and that acts as a buffer against criminalization and the trauma of overpolicing.

Now, EAT is scaling its Cook County win, leading a statewide campaign for a permanent guaranteed income program that would support all SNAP-eligible households. The Illinois Future Fund Act would direct 25% of cannabis tax revenue toward direct cash assistance of $500 per month to SNAP-eligible residents in communities disproportionately impacted by decades of drug war policing. If passed, this legislation would be a step toward progress and show Illinois's commitment to using public resources to make people’s lives better.

A Blueprint for a Government That Works for All of Us

We are clear about what's at stake at this moment and what leaders are being asked to do. Leaders of community organizing groups are being asked to meet the pressing needs of their members as services and benefits are cut, fight government overreach as police and ICE target their neighbors, and continue demonstrating that solidarity is central to building the country we want.

Marguerite Casey Foundation is committed to staying in lockstep with grant recipients like EAT and remaining clear about the role of funders supporting grassroots leadership as their communities create a new blueprint for how the government should work.

So, how can we scale this solidarity through the work of community organizing groups and ensure policy choices improve the lives of residents?

1. Create a universe of public goods that belong to all of us. Housing, public transportation, public schools, healthcare, and food are the foundations of a dignified life, and must be guaranteed for all. We have seen global proof that access to public goods reduces poverty and precarity. It’s time our public dollars are used for the public good across our country.

2. Hold corporations and lawmakers that are exploiting our communities accountable. Those who make policies that starve our schools, close our hospitals, and detain our loved ones always find another billion dollars for corporate subsidies and surveillance giveaways. We must create penalties for those who are stealing from the poorest and whose fortunes are built on systems of harm.

3. Continuously practice a politics of solidarity. For Marguerite Casey Foundation, acting in solidarity means using our endowment to surge funds to frontline groups like EAT. Philanthropy’s resources are meant for moments like this. For EAT, it means organizing not just for services but for the power to define and deliver on solutions.

How to Help Build Solidarity Through Community Organizing

If you are a funder, building real solidarity means moving beyond transactional grantmaking. Funders must support bold and creative actions, not only by funding larger efforts but by standing with our partners when they take risks to protect their communities. Solidarity also requires us to bring more than money to the table. We should leverage all of our resources, from our extensive networks to our role as institutional investors, and be intentional about activating those assets in ways that generate momentum to meet the urgency of this moment.

If you are a nonprofit leader, ask for what you need and refuse to settle. Urge funders to meet this moment with courage and capital to fuel the bold experimentation needed. Can they give more, commit to multiyear grants, frontload payments, reduce reporting hurdles, provide no-interest loans, or organize pooled funds with their colleagues in philanthropy to raise the resources needed to fully fund your initiatives?

And if you’re not a funder or nonprofit leader, find an organization to support with your money, time, and talent.

Local organizations building community power are mapping a new way forward in these dark times. They are proving that the government can and must keep its promise to improve people’s lives—to be a means to collective thriving. Nonprofits, funders, and community members, acting in solidarity, can make this promise real.

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:

• America’s least popular government agency, ICE, is under fire after another wild day of brutality. Another Columbia student was illegally abducted from campus housing by agents, with no warrant, who used fake NYPD badges and a forged NYPD missing persons poster to lie their way past university security. Reuters reports that ICE is hiring career criminals and members of violent street gangs as they lower standards and skip vetting procedures, as the top federal judge in Minnesota threatened to jail ICE officers who routinely defy court orders. A nearly blind refugee from ethnic violence in Myanmar, a father of two, died after Border Patrol goons dumped him at a Buffalo doughnut shop and he tried to walk home five miles in arctic weather, after BCE confiscated the cane he needed to walk.

• “Open War Between Us”: Pakistan bombed Kabul and Kandahar and assaulted Taliban border posts.

• Anthropic, which created Claude AI, will not allow the Pentagon to use it for fully autonomous armed drones or AI-assisted mass surveillance that could track dissent. Pete Hegseth is giving Anthropic until 5 pm today to cave in, or he’ll take it for free under the Defense Production Act.

• For the third year in a row, Israel is the top killer of journalists who have managed not to get laid off.

• Texas airspace was closed after the DoD used a high-energy laser to shoot down a HomeSec drone near El Paso.

• The Washington Post reports that activists with close ties to the White House are urging Trump to declare a national emergency to justify to placing midterm elections under his control, with mail-in voting canceled and ICE “protecting” polling stations.

TO ASK A QUESTION FOR TED AND/OR JOHN BEFORE TODAY’S SHOW AIRS LIVE: https://ahaslides.com/T1S4E

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JohnKiriakou

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/2kdFlw2w8sSPhKI8NRx8Zu

APPLE MUSIC: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-john-kiriakou-and-ted-rall/id1825379504

The post Cold As ICE | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Trump administration has largely abandoned the subtle covert coup of the past in favor of much blunter and more exposed overt overthrows. It turns out, though, that there are many ways to forcefully change a regime.

The first is to not change the regime but to do alterations. That is what was done in Venezuela, where the regime was left in place, but alterations were made to make it pliable to US demands. The US operation in Venezuela was a decapitation that removed the head of the government while leaving the government. The president was replaced by the Vice President, Delcy Rodríguez, who was forced to execute US policy first with a gun, and then with a gunboat, to her head.

There are unconfirmed reports that when the US captured Maduro, they gave the interior minister, the congressional president, and Rodríguez “15 minutes to respond, or they would kill us.” Once she “responded” and was sworn in as acting president, President Donald Trump warned that the US is “ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so” and that if Rodríguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” First the gun, then the gunboat. Then Rodriguez was told that all American demands had to be fully implemented before the United States would allow Venezuela to pump another drop of oil.

In Cuba, the Trump administration believes that military intervention of the Venezuela type won’t be necessary because “Cuba looks like it is ready to fall.” Already cut off from its Venezuelan oil supply, Cuba’s fall can be precipitated by cutting its final energy lifeline. “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA—ZERO!, Trump announced, “I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” With that, Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba. “Now there is going to be a real blockade. Nothing is getting in. No more oil is coming,” the US Charge d’Affairs in the US Embassy in Havana told his staff.

If the protests fail to bring about regime change, perhaps the air and sea power that is massing near Iran will.

The result is a humanitarian disaster. The spokesperson for the secretary-general of the United Nations has said that “the secretary-general is extremely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Cuba, which will worsen, if not collapse, if its oil needs go unmet.” That is not an accident but the plan: That is what Trump meant by “BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.” On February 16, Trump told reporters that Cuba “should absolutely make a deal, because it’s really a humanitarian threat.”

Starvation is being used as a deliberate tool for regime change in Iran as well where US sanctions have caused an economic crisis that drove Iranians to the streets to demand economic reforms the government was incapable of making without the lifting of sanctions. It was clear, though, that the terms for lifting the sanction posed a threat to the existence of the nation and the regime. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained that “President Trump ordered… maximum pressure on Iran. And it’s worked, because in December, their economy collapsed… this is why the people took to the street…This is economic statecraft… Things are moving in a very positive direction.” Bessant told the Senate Banking Committee that “what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country… the Iranian currency went into free fall, inflation exploded, and hence we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.”

But the US did more than cause the protests: They aided them. Calling for regime change, Trump promised, first to protect the protesters, then to help them. And aid them they did. Though the US has denied Iran’s accusations that they aided the protests, it is now known that they did. After the Iranian government shut down the internet in an attempt to disrupt protesters, the US smuggled around 6,000 Starlink satellite-internet kits into Iran to help the protesters stay connected and in touch.

And if the protests fail to bring about regime change, perhaps the air and sea power that is massing near Iran will. The force gathered in the region is already bigger than the one gathered for US Operation Midnight Hammer that bombed Iran’s civilian nuclear cites last June. There are now two aircraft carriers in the region. They are accompanied by guided missile destroyers, cruisers, submarines, hundreds of fighter jets, and ballistic missile defense systems. If using sanctions for starvation and protests fails to bring about regime change, plan C is bombing Iran.

Regime change in Iraq is taking yet another form: economic blackmail to influence the choice of leader. Iraq’s latest election produced a struggle to form a coalition. It looked like former Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, could emerge as the leader. Then Trump took to Truth Social: “I’m hearing that the Great Country of Iraq might make a very bad choice by reinstalling Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister... That should not be allowed to happen again. Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq…” The US then threatened that, if Iran-allied groups, like Maliki’s party, are included in the government, the US would target the Iraqi state, including blocking Iraq’s access to its own oil revenue.

The same regime influencing plan of using the threat of withholding economic aid if the candidate acceptable to America is not chosen was used in Honduras where Trump told Hondurans that if they vote for the wrong candidate, they will face economic abandonment. “If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive,” Trump said, “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.”

Similar interference has been employed in the choice of leader in Haiti, though the ominous consequences were more ambiguous than the withdrawal of economic support. In Haiti, a majority of the Presidential Transition Council signed a resolution to replace the prime minister. Though the Organization of American States says that decision “rest[s] with Haitian leadership,” the US Embassy in Haiti says it considered the resolution “to be illegal” and warned that “the corrupt politicians” who signed the resolution will “pay the ultimate price.” Accusing the signatories of “support[ing] violent gangs and sow[ing] terror in the country,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared that, “The US would consider anyone supporting such a disruptive step favoring the gangs to be acting contrary to the interests of the United States, the region, and the Haitian people and will act accordingly.”

There seems to be a lack of imagination at the State Department, where the only way to negotiate is to negotiate with a gun to your interlocutor’s head. But there seems to be no lack of imagination about ways to hold the gun to your interlocutor’s head.

The US Department of Education recently withdrew its unlawful directive that would have restricted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and universities nationwide. The guidance was framed as an attempt to enforce “neutrality” in education. In practice, it would have narrowed how institutions identify and address inequity, discouraging efforts to create learning environments that reflect the realities of an increasingly global student population.

That national debate can feel abstract, just another skirmish in a broader culture war over higher education. But equity is not abstract. It lives in the quiet mechanics of institutions: who gets seen, who gets filtered out, and which barriers are treated as incidental rather than structural. I am reminded of this not by a court ruling or federal directive, but in the ordinary work of teaching and mentoring students from around the world as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It shows up during office hours, committee meetings, and the quiet moments when institutional rules do their work.

Americans are fluent in a familiar story about immigration: Immigrants come to the United States for opportunity—better education, better jobs, better lives. That story is not wrong. But it is incomplete. What is talked about far less is how immigrants improve the institutions they enter, often by exposing the limits of systems that were never designed with them in mind.

Case in point: Like many graduate programs, ours used procedures that filtered out applicants who had not paid an application fee before faculty review. When they failed to pay, I was never supposed to see their application. The fee, common by US standards, was prohibitively expensive in some local currencies. Until I learned about that procedure, I hadn’t fully appreciated how many judgments about who “belongs” in graduate school happen long before any evaluation of research potential or intellectual fit. Once I understood the implications of that policy, I advocated to have it amended, and a student I would never have otherwise met was later admitted and enrolled.

The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.

That experience crystallized something for me. The student’s presence highlighted how even well-intentioned programs can struggle to value ways of thinking they were never designed to account for. The student, meanwhile, navigated those gaps with a practicality that exposed where the system itself needed adjustment.

The same design logic operates across American institutions that confuse neutrality with fairness. Even institutions that are equity forward, including my own, must navigate a shifting and often constraining federal landscape, making progress real, but necessarily incomplete.

This kind of exclusion is not unique to admissions policies. Across higher education, international students routinely navigate US systems calibrated to financial, cultural, and administrative norms that quietly penalize difference. More than 1 million international students are enrolled in US colleges and universities, and an analysis from the Association of American Universities estimates that international students contribute nearly $44 billion to the US economy annually. Yet research consistently shows that international students experience higher levels of social isolation than their domestic peers.

From a public health perspective, these barriers are not incidental—they are risk factors that function as chronic stressors. Uncertainty around visas, financial precarity, cultural dislocation, and exclusionary policies shape mental health and academic persistence long before a student ever sets foot on campus. Research shows that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality among international students have risen sharply over the past decade, even as access to culturally responsive mental health services remains uneven.

In public health, we name these design failures plainly: policy choices—not personal deficits. Improving the experience of international students is less about individual support than about whether institutions are willing to change the conditions they create.

What struck me most, though, was not my student’s resilience in the face of these barriers, but what institutions gain when those barriers are confronted. They were adept at finding workarounds where institutions offered only walls—and unapologetic about pointing out the walls. That resourcefulness did not just help them navigate the system; it revealed where the system itself needed to change.

The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.

We often talk about immigrants as beneficiaries of American opportunity. But in higher education, healthcare, research and beyond, immigrants are also architects of institutional improvement. They expose inefficiencies, challenge inherited assumptions, and force clarity around what we actually mean by merit.

Immigrants make up a disproportionate share of the US healthcare workforce, including physicians, researchers, and direct-care providers—roles that are essential as the country grapples with workforce shortages and widening health inequities.

Opportunity is not a one-way transaction. Institutions that welcome immigrants while resisting the changes their presence demands are not neutral—they are extractive.

Some people change institutions not by asking for permission, but by refusing explanations that don’t make sense. The question isn’t whether immigrants benefit from coming to the United States—the evidence is clear. The more uncomfortable and more important question is whether institutions are willing to reckon with how much they benefit from immigrants, and whether they are prepared to change to welcome them.

In early February, the barbarians reached my gate. There could be no more comfort or denial here on this island where I live. The masked thugs were roving through a town just across the water, a short ferry ride away, harassing and arresting long-time residents.

I was shocked, but not surprised. What do we do now? Yes, we all knew they were coming, still….

I was raised in the post-World War II “it can’t happen here” era. Hadn’t my parents’ generation crushed the Nazis for all time? While we’d been taught that democracy, like a faith or a marriage, did need tending, we had mostly taken it for granted. Yes, I did understand that life as I had lived it was under attack, but there was still, I thought, some time to respond.

The Republicans would come to their senses, right? They weren’t the Germans of a past era. The monster would sooner or later be brought down. And yes, he was bad, but he certainly wasn’t Hitler. And he looked so sickly. Eventually, the court system would kick in or the Epstein files would produce the Big Bang, whatever that might be. This was America, for God’s sake. We didn’t deserve to go down like this.

I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability.

Like most of my friends, I’d been thinking of little else for much too long and talking about it incessantly in a tone of wonder. Can you believe this shit? Yet living here on my island allowed me the destructive luxury of refusing to understand that we were all Minneapolitans, no matter where we were, even if our portfolios kept rising. Sure, we felt anxious and depressed, were wary of Trumpish neighbors, more generous donors to liberal causes, and active consumers of the media, but we were able to deflect the dangers, given our blind belief that being right was the best defense.

And I had an extra advantage: I was protected by a moat.

Shelter Island is a 28-square-mile town near the eastern end of New York’s Long Island in a region called the East End. It’s surrounded by water, but accessible by ferries from Greenport to the north and North Haven to the south. A third of the island is a protected nature conservancy. There are no street lights. The population in winter is around 3,000, which triples in the summer with tourists and second-home owners.

I’ve owned a home here for more than 30 years and lived here full-time for almost a decade, just about the right amount of time to appreciate the local mythology without entirely absorbing it—that Shelter Island is a quasi-independent republic, populated by rugged individualists who take care of their neighbors, especially seniors, through volunteer organizations (including a fire department and ambulance corps), while stoutly eschewing the glamorous greed of the nearby Hamptons.

It’s not been hard to feel above this country’s recent rush toward autocracy. Meanwhile, in recent decades, the island has been revising its sensibility in some progressive ways. For example, when I first arrived here in the 1980s, Shelter Island’s early history as a place of enslavement and provisioning for the slave trade was not a topic of polite conversation. Now, Sylvester Manor, once one of the earliest and northernmost slave plantations in this country, is internationally known for research and the preservation of slave remains and artifacts. It is also an integral local pillar through its educational farm.

The Pharmacy

It wasn’t until last year that I even realized just how vulnerable this island was to the whims of wealth and power. Yes, rich people routinely built houses and renovated hotels on the island that violated local zoning rules and they got away with it. But it wasn’t until one of our very own oligarchs casually betrayed our trust that I realized just how naïve we had been.

The Soloviev Group, one of the nation’s largest property owners, particularly of agricultural land, had bought a number of buildings on the island, including an iconic hotel, several stores, and the only pharmacy. Town officials mostly applauded the newcomers as “saviors.” Thanks to them, there would be an injection of money and jobs that would cover up the failures of those officials to come up with a comprehensive plan for taking care of Shelter Island, installing affordable housing, and protecting the water supply. They wouldn’t have to raise taxes, already low by regional standards.

“Shelter Island is like a womb,” said Stacey Soloviev, the ex-wife of Soloviev Group CEO Stefan Soloviev and the company’s cheery local face. “You feel very good when you come to Shelter Island.”

And for a while, the Solovievs did indeed go about their business on the island quietly feeling good without doing much good. Their parent corporation was busier. It tried and failed to build a gambling casino in midtown Manhattan. It negotiated with a nearby town to create a large residential development that would include a luxury spa. And then, out of the blue, in a stunning move with little notice, it suddenly shuttered the local hotel and closed the pharmacy, the only dispenser of medicine for a population that (like me) skewed elderly.

Like most Shelter Islanders, I was furious. As a board member of the town’s Senior Citizens Foundation, a support group for municipal senior services, I understood what an existential problem this could pose for people with limited mobility and resources, which just happens to be a large part of the population.

Us and Them

I also began to understand, however belatedly and somewhat sheepishly, what an enormous difference there was between my leftish friends and me and the mostly white men who now rule America with their cruel selfishness and moral disability. Our compassion, our tendency toward basic decency, our belief in fairness and equality were an enormous disadvantage in the battle against Trumpism, as was the faint shame so many of us felt for what seemed like a righteous posture, a sense of simply being better than those MAGA voters, handicapped as they were by manufactured fear and distinct inferiority complexes.

As for those super rich and intricately well-connected guys like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, they were just more intellectually refined models of the genuine nightmare of our world, Donald Trump!

Sadly, of course, like so much else, it was even more complex than that. The rich guys were acting out of their best interests and were not even secretly ashamed, while the rural poor who had played such a role in getting us into this mess with their votes in 2016 and 2024 had not acted malevolently. They were flailing against a society that had ignored their needs.

And I was finally becoming truly woke myself.

As long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost.

In late January, while I was still wallowing in rage at the closing of that pharmacy, a massive snowstorm hit the island. I was sitting in my warm house watching three Latino men wrestle with the foot of snow outside that held me hostage. I knew and liked them from past work, but I had no idea what their citizenship status was (or wasn’t), though I could imagine them becoming targets of the same sort of gang of thugs terrorizing Minneapolis and making sporadic forays into the East End. I assumed, of course, that I was safer than they were. But maybe that was only true for now. After all, out in Minneapolis, white American citizens were being executed—“cruel and unusual punishment”—for bearing witness to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Only a day before that Island snowstorm, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, had been gunned down in Minneapolis for observing and recording masked ICE agents too closely and trying to help a female protester they had assaulted. He should have known better. After all, two weeks earlier, poet and mother of three Renee Good had been killed for a similar “offense” in the same city.

The Vigil

A week later, on an 18°F night, we Shelter Islanders held a vigil in front of the community center.

Such a passive demonstration evokes both pathos and courage. It’s pathetic in the sense that nonviolence always seems weak in the face of blatant Trumpian-style aggression, however brave it may, in fact, be in its restraint and promise of commitment. In the long run, however, it is also the strategy most likely to succeed. The campaigns for civil rights and women’s rights provide the best historic lessons about that reality: Just keep coming out and ultimately the secret police and the criminal lunatic who sent them will get the message.

Because of that, I felt very proud that night of my 70-odd neighbors at the vigil, including the local Presbyterian pastor who read the names of the 32 people who had died in ICE custody last year. Most of them had Latino names, a grim reality which obscures for all too many whites the degree to which everybody remains in danger. I remembered that the killer thugs of 1964, the Ku Klux Klan, in their campaign to intimidate resistance and suppress Black voting, killed two young white men, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with their Black fellow civil rights activist, James Chaney. As then, it was the killing of whites that got national attention, the bad guys’ intent.

By the night of that vigil, the early tutorials about dealing with ICE—including reminding people of their right not to speak to agents or allow them to search their homes and cars without a judicial warrant—seemed almost quixotic. After all, President Trump’s belligerent rhetoric had clearly set the stage for them to disregard both our rights and court orders. More important now, according to an activist friend I called in Minneapolis, was organizing groups to lower the vulnerability of people who might otherwise be prime targets of “our” secret police—drive them to work sites, do their shopping, and act as their lookouts. The shrilling of warning whistles, he said, had become the soundtrack of resistance to the totalitarian goons.

Arrests at the Gate

As the media has shrunk from its responsibility to bear witness and inform (while also shrinking in size), the involvement of everyday people (who might not yet be directly affected by the crisis) becomes ever more critical—as is sending money to legal defense groups. That need became even more apparent to me one early weekday morning in early February when ICE raided a line of cars waiting at the North Ferry terminal in Greenport, New York to come to our island for their jobs. Three men were arrested, all long-time residents of the area, none with criminal records (other than alleged illegal entry from Mexico many years ago). One of them, Hugo Leonel Ardon Osorio, was on his way to work at Marcello Masonry on the island. My wife and I remembered him from the crew that had rebuilt our driveway several years ago.

The next week, the snows returned and so did the three men who had cleared it away the last time around. I was happy—and relieved—to see them again.

Make no mistake: The barbarians are still at the gates. The Shelter Island Town Board has been holding meetings to determine what to do if they come across the water and land on our island. Will our local police department cooperate with them in any way? Will ordinary citizens be restricted in their demonstrations? Will the school lock its doors to ICE? (On the day ICE breached that ferry line, a quarter of Greenport’s students stayed away from school.)

The barbarians are now coming for most of us. Their mission has extended well beyond deporting some brown-skinned people. They’re trying to convince all colors that resistance is futile, that Trump is all-powerful, and that a totalitarian government with him as its head is inevitable.

And as long as we stay in denial, in the bubble, clinging to the dream that goodness or Bad Bunny can save us, we are lost. I know that my whistle and enhanced wokeness won’t be anywhere near enough. And I don’t have a plan yet, other than to stay the course, fight despair, support the most vulnerable, and preach to the choir that they—that all of us—should hang tough.

Protests against ICE prompted Republicans to revive their hoary 1960s-era complaints—utterly unsourced and demonstrably false—that protesters are “outside agitators” paid to march around and get beaten up by the police.

The post Earn Big Bucks as an Outside Agitator! appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

President Donald Trump has declared that he has “won affordability.” In his State of the Union speech, he even bragged that he’s bringing costs “way down on healthcare and everything else.“

In reality, the Trump administration is making it much harder for working families to both meet their daily needs—and to fulfill their long-term dreams of higher education.

The Republican tax-and-spending plan adopted last year—the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—includes huge tax giveaways to the rich, paid for with deep cuts to programs for working people. The Congressional Budget Office expects 7.5 million Americans to lose their Medicaid insurance and 4 million to lose some or all of their SNAP food aid benefits.

Slashing these public assistance programs will make it even harder for working families to save money for college. In fact, the same tax law also includes an overhaul of critical federal student aid programs that will destroy many young people’s dreams of pursuing higher education—again, all to finance tax breaks for corporations and the rich.

President Trump didn’t even mention student aid in his State of the Union address. But this issue is central to the health of our union. It’s about whether we as a nation believe working families deserve opportunity—or just survival.

This problem is not abstract to me. It’s personal. I am a first-generation college student and now a doctoral student. My hard-working Black family and my broader community poured everything they had into me because they believed—against every obstacle—that education could be my ladder up.

Federal student aid programs like Pell Grants and the Grad Plus subsidized loan program helped me as I struggled up that ladder. It still wasn’t easy. I worked two part-time jobs and still could barely make ends meet. But without that help, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Now, the aid programs that I’ve depended on are under attack. Students are facing tighter borrowing limits and dramatically reduced repayment options, making it even more difficult to get out from under heavy debts. Under the new borrowing caps, the government plans to slash about $44 billion in aid over the next 10 years, affecting roughly 25% to 40% of graduate borrowers.

Making matters worse, the Pell Grant program, which helps more than 6 million low-income students a year pay for college, is facing a potential shortfall crisis. If Congress doesn’t put in new funds, the program’s deficit will skyrocket to $11.5 billion in 2027, and those grants could very well dry up.

Across the country, families who believed education was their way forward are feeling their dreams fade away. I’ve spoken to aspiring and current graduate students who are unsure if staying in school is still an option. I’ve talked to borrowers who fear they will live the rest of their lives crushed by student debt and parents who are worried they’ll never be able to afford to send their babies to college.

President Trump didn’t even mention student aid in his State of the Union address. But this issue is central to the health of our union. It’s about whether we as a nation believe working families deserve opportunity—or just survival. It’s about whether we as a nation value the futures of our young people—or only the futures of billionaires.

Higher education was supposed to be the great equalizer. But if we continue to shortchange student aid, working families will see it as either a hopeless fantasy or a life-long debt sentence.

I’ve grown accustomed to the violence in Palestine; to seeing my brothers and sisters stripped from their homes and taken away from life itself. That violence has always felt close. And yet, with Nasrallah Abu Siyam, it became unmistakable.

Not only was he my age, he was born just miles from my hometown. An American citizen. Living an ordinary life. Dreaming of ordinary things. And still, he was shot and killed by Israeli settlers, simply for helping guard his fam ily’s livestock in the occupied West Bank.

In nearly every way, his life mirrored mine. The only difference was where he stood. And that difference, it seems, was enough.

What happened to Nasrallah was not unusual; in fact, it was entirely predictable. It reflects a pattern Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank have been forced to live with for decades—one in which violence is routine, accountability is absent, and loss is absorbed without consequence.

Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it.

That pattern is clearest in how these moments of violence unfold. In Mukhmas, the village where Nasrallah was killed, a resident described what happened plainly:

“When the settlers saw the army, they were encouraged and started shooting live bullets.”

In other words, the presence of the occupying forces did not interrupt the violence; it emboldened it. This is a reality Palestinians have long understood— that the forces ostensibly tasked with “maintaining order” often function instead as a mechanism for enabling and inflicting violence.

Time and time again, Palestinians are left to bury the result.The scale of that violence is not abstract, nor is it disputed.

Between October 2023 and October 2025 alone, more than 1,100 Palestinians were killed in the occupied West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers—229 of them children. That means more than 1 in 5 of those killed were children. In that same span of time, over 10,900 Palestinians were wounded and nearly 21,000 were detained.

And yet, none of this devastation takes place on a battlefield. There is no armed group to point to, no battle to cite. What remains is an occupied territory where civilian death, injury, and detention occur as a matter of policy and practice—not as rare or exceptional events.

By this point, it may sound like a broken record—not just from me, but from years of warnings repeating what the international community has recorded and then promptly ignored. But repetition becomes inevitable when impunity is preserved at every level.

Impunity—that, I must say—does not exist in a vacuum. It is sustained through material support, political protection, and deliberate silence. All of which the United States is deeply embedded in: in the weapons supplied, in the cover extended, and in what goes unsaid. When Americans like Nasrallah Abu Siyam—at least six of them in the past two years—are killed under an occupation supported by US authority, and little is said and less is done, that silence becomes a statement in itself.

Put simply, it is a statement of how Palestinian life—American or not—is weighed, and how little that weight has meant in the political world.

No power should have the authority to dictate which lives are expendable—and which are not. Nasrallah Abu Siyam lived an ordinary life. He should have been afforded the ordinary right to keep it. But again, that failure is not abstract. It has a name, a place, and a date.

This piece was originally published on Substack.

The Supreme Court’s decision is clear. The president did not have the authority to impose most of his tariffs.

President Donald Trump argued that, under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, his actions were justified because of a national emergency caused by a foreign threat. In the 6-3 ruling, the court said that, on the contrary, that act provides Congress with that authority, which hadn’t delegated it to the president. The tariffs left standing are largely by sector: cars, semiconductors, steel.

Trump, like the infamous honey badger, don’t care.

The president immediately insulted the six justices who ruled against him, calling them “disloyal, unpatriotic” and “lapdogs… for the radical left Democrats.” Then he turned around and reimposed a global 15% tariff rate.

The court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach.

For a lot of countries, that new rate is actually an improvement. Mexico and Canada have faced higher tariffs, at least for products not covered under the existing US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. China, Brazil, and India will also benefit from the court decision. But for countries that negotiated lower rates with the Trump team—Japan, Indonesia—it’s a slap in the face. That should teach them to made deals with the devil.

To justify his reassertion of tariffs, Trump is using another law, which establishes a ceiling of 15% and a 150-day limit before Congress can weigh in. No previous president has invoked this law to impose tariffs. For good reason: its provisions reference not a trade deficit but an “international payments problem” connected to fixed exchange rates and the gold standard, a world that no longer exists. As such, Trump is simply graduating from one illegality to another. It may not be long before Trump dispenses altogether with his misinterpretation of esoteric laws to sanctify his lawlessness.

A sensible president might have used the court decision as an opportunity to jettison an unpopular policy and pivot toward “affordability” in the run-up to the midterm elections in November, as his advisers have been urging. But that’s not Trump’s style. He almost always doubles down in the face of resistance.

And resistance there will be. The court ruling opens up the possibility for companies to file suit against the US government to recover costs associated with the tariffs. In his dissenting opinion, Brett “OG Lapdog” Kavanagh warned that this could usher in a “mess.” Perhaps Kavanagh slept through his econ classes at Yale, because the “mess” was already created by Trump’s chaotic approach to trade in the first place.

Trump’s intransigence will naturally interfere with a court-driven effort to restore a measure of predictability to US trade policy. However, perhaps the court decision—on top of other judicial setbacks Trump has faced—may well mark the high tide of the president’s overreach. Low approval ratings, pushback by some Republicans against Trump’s federal diktats, intimations of rebellion from countries like Canada: These are signs that guardrails are going back up to protect against a presidential monster truck gone amok.

Tariff Impact

The United States continues to run a huge trade deficit—in goods and services—of roughly $901 billion. There was a slight decline last year—of $2 billion—that amounted to a reduction of 0.2%—a far cry from the 78% decline that Trump has claimed. Worse, from Trump’s point of view, the deficit in goods—which his tariffs were supposed to target—went up 2.1%.

Okay, but hasn’t the United States pulled in a lot of revenue from these tariffs? With an effective rate of 11.7%—the average for the previous two years was 2.7%—tariffs brought in $194.8 billion in 2025. That’s not a small figure. It ends up in the same place as domestic taxes: the US treasury. From there, Congress makes decisions regarding spending (which the Trump administration has, on occasion, unconstitionally ignored).

The more important concern is: Who pays?

The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “No, thank you.”

A majority of Republicans believes that foreigners pay the cost of these tariffs. They are just following the president, who argued this week in his State of the Union that “tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax.”

However, since they apply to goods entering the United States from other countries, it’s actually American importers who pay the tax. That includes car manufacturers that are using foreign-made components, big retailers like Walmart that are selling foreign-made products, and service providers like FedEx that deliver goods across borders.

Ordinarily, US companies will pass on the cost of tariffs to the consumer. And there has been an overall increase in inflation over the last year: an uptick of 2.7% in consumer prices in December 2025 from the year before. The rising cost of autos is a case in point. The average cost of a car hit a new record in December at just over $50,000. And that’s with car companies making the decision not to pass on to the consumer many of the additional costs associated with imported components. Companies are not likely to continue swallowing their losses in 2026.

It’s not just consumers who are paying for the tariffs in the form of higher costs. It’s also American farmers who aren’t selling their soybeans to China because of the reciprocal tariffs that Beijing has imposed. This year, crop farmers in the United States lost nearly $35 billion, though not all of that can be connected to tariffs. The $12 billion the Trump administration has pledged in agricultural assistance this year only goes part of the way to limit the damage.

Recouping Costs

The Supreme Court decision opens up the possibility for companies to sue the federal government to recover some of the costs inflated by the tariffs. According to economists at Wharton, the total could reach as high as $175 billion. If companies went after that full amount, that would leave only $20 billion of the tariff revenues in the federal kitty.

To get the issue to the Supreme Court, thousands of companies, including Costco, Revlon, and Goodyear Tires, had already sued the Trump administration. Ford says that it has lost $2 billion because of the tariffs.

Like most bullies, Trump backs down if confronted with comparable power and resolve.

The president imposed these tariffs in order to help American businesses. Those same businesses are saying pretty clearly, “No, thank you.”

FedEx is the first company to take the administration to the US Court of International Trade after the Supreme Court ruling. This federal court, located in New York, already ruled against Trump’s tariffs back in May, with even Trump’s appointee to the court siding against him. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has also sent Washington a bill for $8.6 billion, the proceeds to be distributed to all of the state’s households.

Trump promised to run the country like a business. But he has more experience navigating bankruptcy than posting genuine profits.

Peak Trump?

The US president is still exercising his erratic unilateralism in the global arena. He continues to threaten Iran with military strikes if it doesn’t bend to his will. He has encircled Cuba with a new embargo covering oil shipments. The Pentagon is still bombing alleged narco-traffickers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with six strikes this month alone.

But the Supreme Court decision is a sign that US institutions are attempting to claw back authority from an overreaching executive. Some Republicans have pushed back against Trump’s insane moves to seize Greenland. CEOs and the Chamber of Commerce are starting to test the waters with mild criticisms of Trump’s economically destabilizing policies. Back in December, the Republican-controlled Senate in Idaho rejected the redistricting plan the Trump administration was trying to push down the state’s throat.

It’s not as if Trump will mature into the job of president. He is, after all, already well into his second childhood.

The president has abysmal approval ratings. But it’s not so much fear of public disapproval as of Trump’s retribution that has kept critics within his party and in the economic elite in line. Politicians prefer to retire—Marjorie Taylor Greene from the House, Thom Tillis from the Senate—rather than face the outpouring of hate and death threats that Trump unleashes when he wants you out of office.

Like most bullies, Trump backs down if confronted with comparable power and resolve. China played chicken with Trump over tariffs, and the US president swerved out of the way. The power of the street in Minnesota forced the administration to reduce its Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in the state. And some independent-thinking Republicans are standing firm—Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, Thomas Massie and Rand Paul from Kentucky.

Trump seems to be growing increasingly erratic. He has threatened Iran with not just a targeted attack but a rapid escalation. He has lashed out against his judicial allies (like Neil Gorsuch on the court). Rather than deal with all the backlash against his heavy-handed approach to the Kennedy Center programming, he decided just to close down the center “for repairs.”

The president’s attention-deficit problems are legendary. His unlimited capacity to insult people goes all the way back to his youth. But his most recent tirades seem to be tinged with desperation, like the tantrums of a child who can’t get out of the crib no matter how much it screams and shakes its rattle.

It’s not as if Trump will mature into the job of president. He is, after all, already well into his second childhood. The only solution is to take away his toys before he hurts himself and everyone else. The Supreme Court has shown the way.

The use of key security policy terms in public discourse is intended to suggest facts that serve to calm people down. However, there are many reasons for concern that could also trigger peace forces.

The Illusion of a Nuclear Protective Shield

Political scientist and historian Herfried Münkler called for a European atomic bomb as early as 2023. There is currently an increasingly heated debate about whether Germany should seek refuge under France's nuclear protective shield in view of Russia's aggression in Ukraine. The leader of the Social Democrats in the European Parliament, Katarina Barley, also raised the issue of acquiring nuclear bombs as part of European armament in 2024. The German and French heads of government, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron, are also paving the way for talks on European nuclear armament and the extension of France's nuclear umbrella, according to Merz in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in early 2026.

There is repeated talk of a nuclear umbrella. The problem is already clear in this choice of words. Such a protective shield, which one would only have to deploy to be protected, does not exist. This term suggests that Germany or even Europe would be protected from attacking missiles with nuclear warheads if the nuclear protective shield were installed. However, there is no protection against dozens of hypersonic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads attacking simultaneously. The few minutes of reaction time are not enough for a successful counterattack.

Anyone who promises a nuclear protective shield in this sense is trying to deceive people about the real danger of a nuclear conflict in order to achieve their actual military-strategic goals.

So-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those who are more knowledgeable know that the term “nuclear protective shield” refers more to the nuclear deterrence of a potential attacker. This deterrence would result from the nuclear second-strike capability if a nuclear first strike is underway or has already taken place. The question here, of course, is whether a nuclear second strike is still possible if the first strike with nuclear weapons could not be repelled. Here, too, the talk of a nuclear protective shield is problematic.

Lowering the Nuclear Threshold Through ‘Tactical’ Nuclear Weapons

The distinction between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons also poses a semantic problem. Here, technological language suggests that there is a clear distinction between the two. Tactical nuclear weapons are weapons that are intended for limited use due to their lower explosive power, shorter range, and deployment. However, the boundaries are fluid, and Russia also considers tactical weapons to be strategic. If this distinction is nevertheless used, the use of more limited (tactical) nuclear weapons could then be viewed fundamentally differently from the use of larger and longer-range nuclear weapons in terms of explosive power.

The conceptual problem is further exacerbated by so-called “mini-nukes.” Thus, the gradation and differentiation of nuclear weapons pretends that a nuclear war could be confined to a regional or local level. This merely lowers the nuclear threshold and thus downplays the risk of nuclear escalation. Incidentally, so-called "mini-nukes" have a yield of between 10 and 20 tons of TNT equivalent, which is roughly the same as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is therefore also a linguistic distortion and trivialization of a terrible weapon.

Putin's Special Military Operation as a Crude Semantic Deception

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a clear act of war, albeit without a declaration of war. Russia's war against Ukraine, which has now been going on for over four years, has been disguised as a “special military operation.” To this day, the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge the conceptual truth of its war. In doing so, it attempts to downplay the illegality and barbarity of its aggression to its own population and to the world. "Special military operation" sounds more like a clean, technical intervention. Language could not be used in a more manipulative way, considering that hundreds of thousands of people have already fallen victim to this war, millions have fled, and Ukraine's vital infrastructure and ecology have been destroyed.

When people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them.

Equally problematic is the term "Russian world" (Russkij Mir), which Russian President Vladimir Putin uses repeatedly. A Russian world as such does not even exist in Russia, as it is a multiethnic state created by coercion and military force, with very different cultural characteristics among its peoples. Thus, talk of the "Russkij Mir" serves to justify military aggression against other states with the argument that the Russian world and the Russian-speaking people there are under threat.

This ethnically charged term is also the central ideological construct used to restrict the state independence of countries such as Belarus and Ukraine.

Deception Through the Term ‘Nuclear Sharing’

Since Germany is not permitted to possess nuclear weapons under the 2+4 Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NATO has agreed on the principle of "nuclear sharing." However, this term also serves to obscure harsh security policy realities. According to reports, up to 20 US B61-3/4 nuclear bombs are stored in Büchel (Rhineland-Palatinate), combined with German Air Force Tornadoes capable of delivering nuclear warheads to an enemy target.

However, the American nuclear capabilities stored there—and also in other European NATO countries—do not allow for participation by the German federal government. Participation implies the possibility of having a say. But the US government repeatedly makes it clear that the possible use of these nuclear weapons is exclusively subject to the respective US government. This undermines and circumvents the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear sharing among NATO countries, while at the same time obscuring the fact that these weapons are controlled by a foreign power.

Misuse of the Term ‘Modernization’ of Nuclear Weapons

The potential dangers of the "modernization" of nuclear weapons are also being downplayed. The term "modernization" as used in security policy also implies a positive development of nuclear weapons—after all, "modern" represents a positive innovation in language usage—and obscures the increasing danger of these weapon systems.

A particularly problematic aspect of this modernization is the integration of artificial intelligence and the expansion of its functionality within the framework of nuclear strategies. However, AI works on the principle of probability calculation and is extremely prone to error. The information from hundreds of sensors, which an AI uses to make a statement in a very short time, e.g., about attacking nuclear missile swarms, cannot be reliably verified by those responsible in the few minutes of time available. However, this development could make an accidental nuclear war more likely.

War Readiness Versus Defense Capability—the Importance of Conceptual Usage

When German Defense Minister Pistorius says that Germany must become “war ready,” this contradicts the defense mandate of the Basic Law and the prohibition of wars of aggression (GG Art. 26 (1) and 115a). The concept of war includes both defense and attack. Therefore, if the federal government adheres to the Basic Law, it should only talk about and take appropriate measures to become defensible.

War readiness is based on the postulate of military strength through deterrence. Since no state wants to voluntarily face the military superiority of an enemy state or military alliance, that state will devote an increasing share of its national budget to further armament measures in order to surpass its opponent in military strength. This leads to an arms race and—as World War I shows, for example—ultimately to war.

Defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties.

Defense capability means prioritizing military defense capabilities, e.g., with regard to defending against drone attacks, in conjunction with improved “resilience” of critical infrastructure. Even this kind of resilience is currently unachievable for any state. Today's industrialized nations in the digital age are virtually impossible to protect against hybrid attacks, especially hacking of power and heating networks. Anyone who suggests that this is entirely possible creates a false sense of security.

But when people are satisfied with their governments' security policy, which is secured by a system of terminology that obscures the facts, then a false consciousness is hegemonically induced in them. They are deprived of the civil society power to resist their government's risky course. This also characterizes the dilemma of the current peace movement. Although it clearly addresses the dangers of military escalation and nuclear war in its appeals, it does not find the resonance that would actually be expected in the current crisis situation.

Deployment of US Missiles in 2026 as a ‘Security Policy’ of Deterrence

The deployment of three different missile systems, including hypersonic weapons, planned for November 2026, follows the verdict of strength through deterrence. These weapon systems will be stationed in Germany under US command. This was agreed upon between former US President Joe Biden and former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the sidelines of the NATO summit in New York in the summer of 2024, without any debate in the Bundestag. The deployment will take place without any accompanying offer of negotiation to Russia. These are so-called "decapitation weapons," i.e., weapons that are not primarily intended for defense, as stipulated in the Basic Law.

In this case, too, it is problematic to speak of "security policy" in relation to the US missile deployment. It could well be that this deployment could increase uncertainty and the risk of escalation for Germany. These weapon systems, which certainly pose a threat to Russia, could become targets for Russian missile attacks, which in turn would trigger a corresponding spiral of retaliation, possibly even nuclear.

But defense capability relies on the priority of negotiations, diplomacy, and systematically coordinated control and disarmament treaties. In this context, building up military defenses and attempting to secure critical infrastructure is entirely necessary and legitimate. However, the planned US missile deployment undermines this defense policy objective. What will Russia do in this case? It should not be forgotten that Russia has already deployed Zircon and Kinschal hypersonic missiles, for example in Kaliningrad, and has already used the Oreschnik hypersonic weapon, which is virtually impossible to defend against, at least twice in the war in Ukraine. If NATO's Western allies are not prepared to renegotiate the disarmament and control treaties, Russia will certainly attempt to expand and upgrade its own arsenal once the US missiles are deployed at the end of 2026.

Conclusion

Disclosing the dangers implied in security policy language in connection with nuclear weapons does not mean defeatism or resignation in the face of an opponent armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons.

However, if people allow themselves to be deceived by appeasing terminology and its use in public discourse on security policy, this leads to a dangerous lulling of these people into a false sense of security. The security policy promises behind this terminology give them a feeling of security that does not correspond to the actual risk when states focus on military armament, in particular the further development of nuclear weapons systems, and military escalation. The disclosure of real dangers is not intended to cause anxiety about security policy and paralysis, but rather to raise awareness of actual dangers as the basis for the priority need for improved defense capabilities, in particular through negotiations and diplomacy.

Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict.

In summary, it can therefore be said that the security policy goal must be defense capability. This also includes a disarmament proposal that has already been mentioned several times, within a framework controlled by the United Nations, that the two major military powers, the US and Russia, should gradually disarm all weapons systems, including nuclear weapons, to the level of the People's Republic of China. In a next step, under the transparent supervision of international institutions such as the UN and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, these three states would have to disarm to the level of smaller states until, for example, the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is fully implemented.

This would be an effective and sensible security policy worthy of the name. Even though there are currently major geopolitical obstacles standing in the way of such controlled and transparent international disarmament, this peace-bringing disarmament strategy must not be lost sight of. The trillions that would be saved by all participating states as a result of disarmament and the elimination of further armament could also be a compelling argument for such an internationally coordinated and balanced disarmament strategy, at least in the medium term.

Historical experience with a policy of deterrence through military strength shows, however, that a spiral of military armament increases the likelihood of military conflict. A security policy that is oriented toward defense capability rather than war capability would also have to use different language. Obscuring terms that are embedded in a context of meaning and semantically designed to conceal rather than reveal military risks are part of a media-mediated military strategy that will not lead to peace.

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:

• Filet of Pigs: Four US-based Cuban nationals who entered Cuban waters on a US-registered speedboat have been shot dead by border patrol after the speedboat’s armed passengers opened fire on a coast guard vessel. Six additional passengers were wounded. Secretary of State Marco Rubio denied the infiltration was a US covert operation. James Uthmeier, Florida’s attorney general, said he would direct local law enforcement to investigate the incident. “The Cuban government cannot be trusted, and we will do everything in our power to hold these communists accountable,” he said.

• #EpsteinToo: Forced out of Harvard, Lawrence Summers became the latest public figure to be impacted but their implication in the Epstein Files. Others include Paul Weiss chair Brad Karp, longevity expert Peter Attia of CBS News, former Obama counsel Kathy Ruemmler, mind behavior scientist Richard Axel of Columbia, ex-Prince Andrew, UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson, as well as Slovak and Norwegian officials. Who’s next? Hillary testifies today at the House, Bill tomorrow.

• Senate in Play: With just days until Texas’ primary, Republicans are alarmed that their increasingly vicious intraparty contest could cost them a must-win Senate seat. Sen. John Cornyn appears to be headed to an expensive and nasty 10-week runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, with a strong chance that Paxton wins the nomination even after national Republicans spent months airing his filthy laundry all over the Texas airwaves in an effort to boost Cornyn. If Cornyn loses the primary, Senate Republicans could be forced to spend hundreds of millions of dollars that could otherwise go toward key battleground races in expensive states like North Carolina, Georgia or Michigan, complicating their path toward holding Senate control.

TO ASK A QUESTION FOR TED AND/OR JOHN BEFORE TODAY’S SHOW AIRS LIVE: https://ahaslides.com/ZKWAI

MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JohnKiriakou

LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow

SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/2kdFlw2w8sSPhKI8NRx8Zu

APPLE MUSIC: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-john-kiriakou-and-ted-rall/id1825379504

The post In the Same Boat | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.