Donald Trump fundamentally misunderstands power. He is not playing chess; he is playing a reckless game of Jenga with the foundational components that actually made America great. With each ill-conceived move, he pulls out another critical block from our national structure, destabilizing the entire edifice while claiming to strengthen it. His vision for American greatness is anchored in a historically dishonest version of the Gilded Age—a period he explicitly admires, when he believes "we were at our richest." It's no coincidence that this era represented the apex of white supremacist control following Reconstruction, when newly enfranchised Black Americans were systematically stripped of their voting rights and democratic participation.

"We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913. That's when we were a tariff country," Trump has declared, revealing his nostalgia for an America where oligarchs accumulated vast wealth while the masses struggled in poverty, where women couldn't vote, and where Jim Crow laws ensured white supremacy remained intact.

This conception of power is devastatingly wrong and dangerous. In Trump's worldview, might is measured solely through domination: tariffs, walls, military threats, economic leverage, and the unchecked authority of the executive branch. His fantasies about seizing Panama or purchasing Greenland reveal a colonial mindset where sovereign nations exist merely as potential American acquisitions—trophies for his ego and extensions of a twisted imperial vision. This approach not only reflects a backward 19th-century understanding of power but abandons the very sources of American influence that have made us a genuine global leader for generations.

True Power Lies in Innovation and Academic Freedom

While Trump fixates on the symbols of 19th-century power, he systematically dismantles the infrastructure of 21st-century American influence. For the first time in modern history, China has edged past the United States in producing the most frequently cited scientific papers—a critical measure of research impact and intellectual leadership. Research tells us what is true, research shapes reality, and research determines which voices hold authority. The United States for decades led in research and therefore was positioned to determine truth and shape worlds. This position of power is now being deliberately eroded as Trump attacks universities, academic freedom—a necessity for innovation and discovery—and withdraws vital funding.

History demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.

The power of the United States has never stemmed primarily from military might or economic leverage; it has flowed from our leadership in knowledge creation. Researchers worldwide have looked to institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for guidance. The articles published in American journals have become foundational concepts within disciplines, allowing the U.S. to lead in virtually every intellectual field. When federal agencies generate data and analyses that become the global standard, America exercises an influence far more profound than any military operation could achieve.

When Trump attacks universities that dare to uphold academic freedom, cutting their federal funding and threatening scholars with deportation, he isn't demonstrating strength—he's surrendering intellectual authority. The recent arrest of Palestinian academic Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder detained by ICE "in support of President Trump's executive orders"—reveals how quickly academic freedom can collapse under authoritarian pressure. This is not projection of power; it is its destruction. Trump is making the United States powerless and weak.

America's Power has Come from Welcoming the Persecuted

Trump's vision of American greatness is narrowly nativist, focused on exclusion and ideas of racial purity that have ties to eugenic projects that have historically ended in atrocities like the Holocaust. Yet history demonstrates that America's greatest achievements often came from embracing the persecuted and marginalized whose lives were threatened by authoritarian, white supremacist regimes.

When Hitler's Nazi regime drove Jewish academics and intellectuals from Europe in the 1930s, America's willingness to welcome these refugees transformed our scientific and cultural landscape. Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and countless others fled persecution and found new homes in American universities and laboratories. Their contributions to the Manhattan Project and beyond revolutionized physics, mathematics, and engineering—laying the groundwork for America's technological supremacy in the latter half of the 20th century.

True power comes not from building walls and criminalizing free speech but from recognizing talent regardless of origin or wealth. Trump's methodical dismantling of immigration pathways and his demonization of foreigners don't make America stronger—they deprive us of the next generation of brilliant minds who might otherwise choose our universities, our laboratories, our companies, and our communities. Our greatest resource has never been the oligarchs who were invited to buy a "gold card" but the persecuted who found that this country welcomed them and supported their work.

The Gilded Age's True Legacy

Trump's romanticization of the Gilded Age is an admission of his true aim: the systematic dismantling of American democracy in service of white supremacy—a defining feature of those years he aims to recreate through his brutal agenda attacking diversity initiatives, public service workers, universities, and fundamental human rights.

Between 1885 and 1908, all 11 former Confederate states reformed their constitutions and electoral laws to disenfranchise African Americans. Though these efforts couldn't explicitly mention race, they introduced ostensibly neutral poll taxes, property requirements, and complex literacy tests designed to prevent Black citizens from accessing the ballot box. In South Carolina, these measures reduced Black voter turnout from 96% in 1876 to just 11% in 1898. Across the South, Black turnout plummeted from 61% in 1880 to a mere 2% by 1912.

This is a legacy of the Gilded Age—a retreat from democratic principles that locked in white supremacy for nearly a century. The era Trump celebrates as America's peak was precisely when our democracy was most severely compromised.

The Choice Before Us

Trump's conception of power represents a devastating miscalculation. By fixating on the trappings of 19th-century dominance—tariffs, military posturing, white supremacy and misogyny, and oligarchic wealth—he surrenders the very sources of influence that have made America genuinely powerful: our intellectual leadership, academic freedom, diverse talent pool, democratic institutions, and moral authority.

The question isn't whether Trump makes America powerful—it's whether his understanding of power belongs in a modern world. When he severs relationships with allies, seeing cooperation as "weakness," he doesn't demonstrate strength but reveals a profound failure to understand how international influence operates in the 21st century.

True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility.

When he dismantles the Department of Education and undermines scientific research, he isn't eliminating waste—he's surrendering our most significant competitive advantage. How do we measure the loss of a great mind who might have contributed to our understanding of climate science, identified cures for devastating diseases, or developed technologies to preserve our democratic systems? The cost of his destruction is beyond measurement.

Trump is indeed making America powerless even in ways that he should be able to understand through his myopic worldview—after all, he is making America bow to the richest man on earth and embracing dictators who destroy democracy. But he is abandoning the very sources of American power that have made us exceptional: our commitment to knowledge, our embrace of talent regardless of origin, our democratic institutions, and our capacity for moral leadership. The world could once rely on the United States, that is no more.

The gilded America he envisions—where oligarchs extract immense wealth from land and labor, where white supremacy reigns unchallenged, and where democratic participation is systematically suppressed—isn't a vision of American strength. It's a return to a time when our nation's power was narrowly concentrated among the few at the expense of the many. That is no power. That is a monarchy. That is death to democracy.

True power has always resided in our democratic values, our intellectual leadership, and our willingness to embrace the full spectrum of human talent and possibility. By abandoning these principles, Trump isn't making America great again—he's making America powerless in the ways that truly matter.

On March 4, 2025, President Donald Trump gave a speech to a joint session of Congress. Although this speech may be labeled by some as a State of the Union address, it is actually not a State of the Union address because those are delivered by a president in January or February after they’ve completed their first year in office.

Of course, a president is free to speak in front of Congress anytime he or she wants to, but I think a fake State of the Union address that is filled with lies spewed out by a man who was convicted of 34 felony counts of fraud, whose company has been found guilty of fraud, who ran a fraudulent university that defrauded its students, who filed numerous fraudulent lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, and who orchestrated a multi-state fraudulent elector scheme to stop the 2020 election certification, is very on brand.

It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them.

Donald Trump tells lies like a fish swims through the water, but some of his most egregious lies are related to immigration and immigrants. Perhaps his most notorious and dehumanizing lie about immigrants was about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs. However, his speech to Congress on March 4 contained numerous lies about immigration that are worth debunking. I cannot possibly write about all of the lies contained in his speech, but I want to highlight the ones that stood out to me, and that I can help provide important context on.

Immigration Lie No. 1: Lowest Number of Border Crossings

Within minutes of starting his speech, Trump shot out the following lie: “Within hours of taking the oath of office, I declared a national emergency on our southern border, and I deployed the U.S. military and Border Patrol to repel the invasion of our country, and what a job they’ve done. As a result, illegal border crossings last month were by far the lowest ever recorded, ever. They heard my words, and they chose not to come.” This is actually multiple lies tied together to push a false narrative, which again, is very on brand.

First, the military was already deployed to the border by former President Joe Biden in 2023. It’s important to remember that Trump likes to find things that already exist, slap his name on them, and take credit for them. Second, the Border Patrol was already at the border, because that’s their entire mission. His lie makes it seem like the Border Patrol wasn’t there before, but that he, in his infinite wisdom, sent them to the border and now they are stopping people from crossing. Third, the U.S. is not being invaded at the southern border. An invasion implies a foreign army or some other militant group, but we know that the people who come to the border are increasingly families and other desperate people seeking help, many of whom are fleeing from the effects of decades of right-wing U.S. policy. Characterizing these people as invaders is not only extremely loathsome, but it is just plain incorrect, and it serves the greater narrative that Trump is pushing that we are under attack.

Remember, the purpose of framing migration at the southern border as an “invasion” is to build support for himself and his brutal, militarized immigration policies that will cause suffering to a vulnerable group of people who need help, as well as enriching his private prison corporate campaign donors and increasing the power of the federal police state, which he will almost certainly use for nefarious purposes.

If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it.

Fourth, Trump claims that as a result of his actions, “illegal border crossings” dropped to the “lowest ever recorded” in February 2025. Of course, he doesn’t cite to a specific number, so it’s impossible to know what exactly he is referring to when he makes this claim. The best guess is that he is referencing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s February 2025 border “encounter” numbers, which haven’t even come out yet. Because the number hasn’t been released, we can’t definitively fact check him, but there are months from the past that already have lower numbers than what’s been reported by news agencies for February 2025. However, the bigger issue is that Trump is conflating “border crossings” with border apprehensions. This is an important distinction. The number of arrests decreasing doesn’t mean that fewer people tried to cross the border illegally: it just means fewer people were caught.

It’s also important to understand that many of the illegal crossings were people crossing the border and then immediately turning themselves in so they could claim asylum. If we had a well-functioning immigration system, there would be a way for people to come to the border, claim asylum, do their credible fear screening, get a background check, and then be legally paroled into the country to pursue their asylum claim. This is what the CBP One app was designed to facilitate, but it was woefully inadequate. Instead, the only practical way for most people to claim asylum was to cross illegally and then turn themselves in. The status quo before Trump was already a failure in our immigration system, caused by a lack of funding and the right-wing policy that treats asylum-seekers like an invading army.

To make matters worse, one of Trump’s first executive actions after the inauguration was to cancel the CBP One app, and completely suspend asylum at the border. Suspending asylum is not only illegal, but it will cause people to cross the border and disappear into the interior instead of crossing the border and turning themselves in to start the asylum process. Trump is pointing to the lower number of arrests and lying to you by saying that illegal crossings are down, when in reality, he has likely just pushed more of them into the shadows.

The best way to reduce illegal border crossings is to: 1) give people pathways to come to the U.S. legally; and 2) stop the right-wing policies that disrupt living conditions in the countries to the south of us that cause people to flee and seek refuge in the U.S. Trump wants to push the narrative that immigrants are invaders and the best way to stop them from crossing the border is with walls and militaristic border policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Immigration Lie No. 2: Insane Asylums

The next immigration lie from Trump is that under the Biden administration, there were “…hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month, and virtually all of them, including murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and people from mental institutions and insane asylums, were released into our country.” I’m not going to spend much time on this, but this is false. He previously said it was millions of people, so he can’t even get his story straight, but this has been debunked numerous times. This is one of his favorite immigration lies, and I am sure he will keep repeating it for the foreseeable future.

Immigration Lie No. 3: Gold Card

Trump briefly touched on the so-called “gold card” he had announced recently. “With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the Gold Card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship. It’s like the green card, but better and more sophisticated.” He says they have developed this “in great detail” but there is actually no detail as to how this would work. It appears that he is saying that people would be able to buy permanent residency by paying $5 million dollars, but that would have to be enacted by Congress because the president cannot create new green card categories. Also, there is already an EB-5 investor green card, that actually requires investment in a U.S. business and creation of jobs, whereas the “gold card” apparently doesn’t actually require that any U.S. jobs be created. He is lying to the American public by implying that rich people will create jobs in the U.S. if we allow them to just buy their way into the country.

Remember when they called former President Barack Obama a tyrant because he tried to help Dreamers with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)? DACA is well within the purview of presidential authority because it is simply prosecutorial discretion coupled with employment authorization. I wonder if the GOP will make the same critique if Trump illegally creates a new category of permanent residency that he admits will allow Russian oligarchs to effectively buy U.S. citizenship. He also said of the gold card holders, “They won’t have to pay tax from where they came, the money that they’ve made, you wouldn’t want to do that.” Since he doesn’t have the authority to suspend tax laws in the home countries of these people, this is clearly a lie, or possibly just incoherent rambling.

Immigration Lie No. 4: 21 Million People Poured into the U.S.

Trump claimed that, “Over the past four years, 21 million people poured into the United States.” Not only does this use dehumanizing language, likening people fleeing from desperate situations to some kind of flood, but it’s completely incorrect. The narrative that the Democrats should counter with is that immigration is a good thing, but right-wing policies create illegal immigration by pushing people out of their home countries and denying them a legal way to come to the U.S.

Immigration Lie No.5: The Dangerous Immigrant

Trump’s last major immigration lie was the “immigrants are dangerous” narrative that he has been poisoning American discourse with for nearly a decade. He pushed this lie by making a spectacle out of the deaths of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray and cynically using their families as political props. This exploitative appeal to emotion is meant to obscure the basic fact that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crime at a lower rate than U.S. citizens and U.S. citizens are the primary smugglers of fentanyl into the U.S. through ports of entry. Statistically speaking, if you were walking down the street and there was a U.S. citizen walking toward you from one direction and an undocumented immigrant walking toward you from the other direction, you’d be safer if you walked toward the undocumented immigrant.

To bring it full circle, the ultimate irony is that Donald Trump is himself a convicted felon. If he were not a U.S. citizen, he would be deported and barred from ever returning to the U.S., not only for his felony fraud convictions, but for stealing national security documents and lying to the FBI about it. He would have you believe that immigrants are a threat to public safety, while he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths due to his Covid-19 mismanagement, responsible for freezing USAID funding that will lead to thousands of deaths around the world, and many more.

Every single thing that Trump says about immigrants should be scrutinized and not taken at face value because there is a good chance it is a lie or misleading. They say that every Republican accusation is a confession. We should all keep that in mind the next time Trump tries to fearmonger about immigrants.

Not even two months in office and President Donald Trump has slashed U.S. climate partnerships and aid to developing countries, notably from USAID. Expected? Yes. International anomaly? No.

Last November's COP29 conference on climate finance showed the widespread vapidity of global action. Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, revealed 1,200 notifications went out about significant gas leaks over the past two years to governments and businesses around the world. Only 1% responded. The U.N. acknowledged "capacity issues, technical barriers, and a lack of accountability," but failed to acknowledge another contributing factor. People are fundamentally not incentivized to care—because the climate crisis is consistently poorly communicated.

Publications like The New York Times typically report climate change like this: "Emissions soared to a record 57 gigatons last year." The U.N. Emissions Gap report's front page has this seething call to action: "Limit global warming to 1.5°C, struggle to adapt to 2°C, or face catastrophic consequences at 2.6°C and beyond." The media skews toward this numerical doom-and-gloom for two main reasons: One, journalists are often taught people pay attention to negative information. Two, scientists are often taught numbers speak for themselves. Logically then, numbers with negative consequences should make people care…

Instead of telling governments to fix a leak because the "data says so," we need to emphasize the positive impact on people.

No. As someone with training in data journalism and storytelling, I advise considering the underlying psychology. In 2023, a Pew Research Center survey revealed 7 in 10 Americans feel "sad about what is happening to the Earth" after seeing climate change in the news. Despite that negative frame, only about 4 in 10 Americans feel "optimistic we can address climate change" when they see news on the topic. And only about 1 in 10 Americans feel activism is "extremely or very effective at getting elected officials to act on the issue." Sadness, fear, and anxiety don't often translate to motivation.

"Climate change" and "greenhouse gases" are simply too abstract. When former U.S. President Joe Biden said climate change is an "existential threat to all of us," it felt like a hypothetical issue. When the media reduces climate change to facts and numbers—to "emissions" and "gigatons" and "degrees Celsius"—it feels like a psychologically distant entity devoid of humanity and ineligible for our care.

How then should we communicate? Maybe the solution is emphasizing the negative consequences on human beings… showing images of wildfires destroying communities and people suffering from drought. Nonprofits, for example, traditionally use negative imagery of emaciated children, often Black and brown, to get donors' attention. And many studies show this "poverty porn" works. After Haiti was severely damaged by an earthquake in 2010, for example, the negative images of victims was criticized by the media. But it led to the second biggest success in the organization's fundraising history.

Destroyed Houses during Haiti's Earthquake in 2010. (Photo: ECHO/Raphaël Brigandi via Flickr).

These conclusions, however, lack nuance and ethics. Negative imagery may inspire pity and a donation out of guilt in the short-term. But it can lead to decreased care in the long-term. By portraying people in an undignified light, as "others" in need of "saving," we fetishize their suffering and infantilize their agency. Research demonstrates we attribute less respect and less agency to those in helpless, suffering outgroups, and are less likely to back policies that support them.

If negative data, "poverty porn," and "disaster porn" all aren't the answer, what then is? In my TEDx talk on data communication, I emphasize how emotion guides our decision-making. Research has found people gave the most money to charity after hearing simple stories that start with sadness and end on hope. Yes, negative frames do grab attention and elicit sympathy. But evidence of success emotionally inspires us to act.

Consider the U.N.'s 1% response rate to gas leak notifications. According to the executive director, "We are quite literally talking about screwing bolts tighter in some cases." Our current approach can't even get governments to screw in a bolt. If we want global leaders to keep their COP29 promise of $300 billion in annual funding for developing countries (which the U.S. certainly isn't helping with anymore), we desperately need to pivot.

Instead of telling governments to fix a leak because the "data says so," we need to emphasize the positive impact on people. How will decreasing your abstract methane emissions lead to better health for human beings? How will donating trillions to some abstract goal of "1.5°C" benefit people in your local community that you personally care about? If we want the climate crisis to be seen as not just an "existential" environmental problem, but a horrifically human one happening right now close to home, we need to stop sharing negative stats and start telling hopeful stories. Especially with staunch resistance from a second Trump administration, we need to communicate the climate crisis in a much more human and much more ethical way if we are to inspire global action.

The evening of the 8th of March, which coincides with the Holy month of Ramadan celebrated by almost 2 billion Muslims worldwide, took an expected turn for Mahmoud Khalil and his wife. Khalil just returned home from iftar—the evening meal Muslims eat to break their day-long fasting during Ramadan. His wife was eight months pregnant. The couple, perhaps, were preparing for the upcoming delivery of the baby and welcoming the new member of the family. Perhaps, they were getting ready to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, one of the two major religious festivals Muslims celebrate at the end of Ramadan.

What was likely not foreseen at all by this family was a raid, arrest, and detention by ICE. Mahmoud, a recent graduate of Columbia University and leading Palestinian solidarity organizer on campus, recently received his green card. A green card is the Permanent Resident Card that allows a person to live and work in the United States permanently. Mahmoud’s wife is a U.S. citizen. If all went well, Mahmoud could have applied for his U.S. citizenship after three to five years, subject to some terms and conditions. Because of being a legal permanent resident—the prior step to receiving U.S. citizenship through naturalization, ICE detention most likely was the last thing on Mahmoud’s mind.

I would argue that we are currently living in a state of exception. Since the Trump administration has assumed power, most of the welfare- and social justice-oriented laws and policies that were historically designed to protect and nurture our humans, environments, and the most vulnerable ones are being gradually replaced by extreme right-wing, hateful, and anti-all-kinds-of-minoritized-communities rules and regulations. To date, a total of 83 executive orders have been signed by President Donald J. Trump, and a significant portion of these orders are aimed at destroying environmental protections, abolishing social security, and cracking down against various marginalized and minoritized communities. If you are not a rich, white, Christian, U.S. citizen, cis-man, you are very likely to be impacted by a good number of these executive orders.

The goal is to remind us that we will be the next if we speak up and challenge oppressive systems.

A notable feature of most of these executive orders is that they appropriate the language of social justice. For example, the executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” is nothing about defending women’s rights but everything about erasing trans- and nonbinary identities and experiences. If President Trump really cared about women’s rights, perhaps he would have allowed federal funding for elective abortion in government programs instead of reinstating the Hyde Amendment. Similarly, the executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” disproportionately targets Palestinian solidarity organizers in various institutions of higher education—specifically those who are not U.S. citizens.

Let’s not forget the 2017 white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers displayed swastikas and chanted slogans like “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil”—a Nazi ideological slogan. Trump was heavily criticized for adopting a “both-sides” narrative in response to the violent demonstrations, as he said, “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” A 2021 New Yorker article by David Remnick dives deeper into inquiring, “Is Donald Trump an Antisemite?” The article features a series of interviews that reveal that Trump was more pro-Israel than pro-Jewish. Some of the voices from the Israeli left criticized Trump for portraying American Jews as betrayers who betrayed Israel by voting for Democrats. The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland described Trump’s views towards Jews as, “...if American Jews don’t support what he says, they are ungrateful and he can question their loyalty. He sees Jews as foreign and supplicants who should be grateful to him.”

Against this background, when the Trump administration’s executive order to “combat Antisemitism” was enacted by the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by arresting and detaining Mahmoud Khalil, we should look beyond the formal accusation of antisemitism outlined by DHS on X: “Khalil led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” We must dive deeper into asking what exactly the series of xenophobic measures, which include but are not limited to travel bans, visa cancellations, crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, terminating the Spanish-language version of the White House website, and trade and diplomatic wars, along with cuts on government spending and reducing the size and scope of the federal government, aim to achieve.

The U.S. has long been transforming into an oligarchy, which has been alarmingly expedited under the leadership of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. An executive order has assigned the White House more power to monitor and vet independent federal regulation agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission, restricting their ability to regulate cryptocurrency trading or curb the monopoly of multinational tech giants like Meta or Amazon. Billionaire elites are engaged in a partnership with the state, where the state is primarily tasked with serving elite corporate interests. Professor Allison Stanger rightfully says, “When we grant tech leaders direct control over government functions, we’re not just streamlining bureaucracy—we’re fundamentally altering the relationship between private power and public governance.”

When the balance of power between private versus public sectors disappears, and the state is no longer aimed at serving the commoners, the state struggles to maintain its relevancy and seeks legitimacy from the common people. Noam Chomsky argues that one of the most effective ways to establish the state legitimacy is the creation of a culture of fear and the construction of endless enemies, which pits vulnerable communities against each other without drawing any attention to intersecting systems of oppression. Since the Trump administration is not going to serve anyone in this country except for its billionaire allies and rich-white-Christian-cis-male supporter base, it needs to give the rest of the people the impression that it is going to save them from some existentialist threats.

I would argue that the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil is part of the Trump administration’s larger project of creating and sustaining the illusion of endless enemies, which include but are not limited to Arabs; Muslims; Palestinians; immigrants; refugees; Indigenous communities; people of color; women; the “undeserving” poor; and trans, queer, and nonbinary communities. Even though the Trump administration must be well aware of the fact that the oversimplistic conflation of all Palestinian solidarity organizers with “Hamas sympathizers” or the attempt to detain and deport noncitizen peaceful student protestors on the false ground of leading “activities aligned to Hamas” will face serious legal challenges in the court and pushback from progressive and social justice organizations, why does it continue to threaten Palestinian solidarity organizers?

I would say the goal is to leave a chilling effect. The goal is to remind us that we will be the next if we speak up and challenge oppressive systems. The goal is to emphasize that even securing a green card will not ensure that the constitutional right of freedom of speech or freedom of peaceful protest would extend to us. The goal is to push us to a state where we would start censoring ourselves in anticipation of being targeted long before the authoritarian state intervenes and starts penalizing us.

As the Trump administration attempts to restrict abortion and gender-affirming care and erase trans and nonbinary experiences in the name of protecting “life,” protecting “America’s children,” and protecting “family values,” Khalil was torn apart from his eight-month pregnant wife. The pregnant U.S. citizen wife was threatened with being arrested by ICE for trying to help her husband. The eighth month of pregnancy could feel debilitating, yet with a heavily pregnant body, Khalil’s wife has been forced to deal with the unbearable psychological and physical stress of spending hours communicating with lawyers and traveling between New York City and New Jersey trying to find the whereabouts of Khalil only to stay in the dark.

Will Khalil be able to be there with his wife on the day of Eid al-Fitr? Will he be able to be there by the side of his wife during the birth of their baby? If not, the United States does not really deserve to claim itself as “the land of the free.”

Last week witnessed the Third Meeting of States Parties at the United Nations in New York to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons entered into force on January 22, 2021. This historic intergenerational meeting occurred 80 years into the nuclear age with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weeklong meeting was attended by survivors of the atomic bombings, Hibakusha, whose average age is currently 85. Additionally in attendance were their descendants and other victims of the nuclear legacy from testing to extraction and mining. Others engaged at the 3MSP included faith leaders, and Mayors of cities all around the globe, including Hanover in Germany, Chicago in Illinois, Rochester in New York and Easthampton in Massachusetts. Scientists, artists, scholars and many other diverse members of civil society were there led by ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, with representatives of its 650 partner organizations.

The focus of the meeting was to further universalize the Treaty and stigmatize nuclear weapons and the nation states that continue to possess them. Currently half the world’s population has endorsed the Treaty with ratification by 73 nation states and 94 signatory nation states.

Ultimately, we will see the end of these weapons, either by the verifiable elimination supported by the efforts this week, or by their use whether intentional or by miscalculation, accident or AI algorithm.

The conference emphasized the humanitarian threats posed by any use of nuclear weapons and the ongoing threat posed by their very existence, even in the absence of use. Throughout the week long conference there were sidebar meetings on wide ranging topics including the myth of deterrence and its role as the principal driver in the arms race, the economics and morality of nuclear weapons, and how to bring old and young alike from where they are to an awareness of this existential threat through various media and expression.

It was clear throughout the week that the leaders of this next generation are indeed concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons to their future and are ready to act. Young high school students from Georgia to Detroit and students from Northwestern University to Morehouse College get it. It’s never been a case of them not being concerned, but rather an “awareness gap”. Once informed they are motivated and ready to share that knowledge and act for their future.

In the United States, a growing movement called “Back from the Brink” is bringing communities together to abolish nuclear weapons. Currently this movement is endorsed by 494 organizations, 77 municipalities and cities, 8 state legislative bodies, 429 municipal and state officials, and 44 members of Congress.

It calls on the United States to:

1.Take a leadership role and bring together the nuclear nations of the world in support of a verifiable, time bound agreement to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

2. Renounce the use of nuclear weapons first.

3. End sole authority for this president or any president to unilaterally launch a nuclear weapon.

4. End hair trigger alert.

5. Cancel enhanced nuclear weapon development replacing all of our current nuclear arsenal.

At this point in history, we are closer to nuclear war than at any point since the outset of the nuclear age. It’s “89 seconds to midnight,” according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Simultaneously we face two interconnected existential threats. We must abolish nuclear weapons so that we can move forward and properly address our climate crisis. What is necessary is to build the political will among our elected officials for a world free of nuclear weapons.

Ultimately, we will see the end of these weapons, either by the verifiable elimination supported by the efforts this week, or by their use whether intentional or by miscalculation, accident or AI algorithm. The choice is ours. Let’s land on the right side of history.

When I first heard President Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” scheme, it brought back memories of the hopes Palestinians had three decades ago during the heyday of the Oslo Accords. Back then, I was serving as co-chair of “Builders for Peace,” a project launched by then-Vice President Al Gore to encourage American businesses to invest in the Palestinian economy to support the fledgling peace process.

We had prepared for our mission by reading the exhaustive World Bank study on the pre-Oslo Palestinian economy. The observations and conclusions were sobering, and yet hopeful. It noted obstacles that stifled the development of a Palestinian economy—problems like: Israel’s control of Palestinian land, resources, and power; its refusal to allow Palestinians to independently import and export; and the impediments Israel had created to Palestinian travel and even to conducting commerce within the occupied lands. The bank, however, concluded that if these Israeli restrictions on Palestinian entrepreneurs were removed, external investment would provide opportunities for rapid growth and prosperity.

We also read Sara Roy’s brilliant study of the cruel measures Israel had implemented to “de-develop” Gaza so as to stifle the development of an independent economy, thereby creating a cheap pool of day laborers for Israeli businesses or a network of small workshops that produced items for export by Israeli companies.

When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia.

We also made a few exploratory visits to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to meet with business and political leaders to assess the possibilities before us and the challenges we would confront. In short order, both became quite clear.

When the project was ready to launch, my fellow co-chair, Mel Levine, and I led the first of a number of delegations of American business leaders (which included both Arab Americans and American Jews) to the Palestinian lands. Our first exposure to the problems we would encounter came as we attempted to enter via the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. American Jews and others passed easily, while Arab Americans were separated from the group and forced to undergo humiliating screening.

We convened a session in Jerusalem for Palestinians to meet with the Americans interested in investment opportunities, only to discover that in order to enter the city Palestinians had to secure a pass from the occupation authority. Since the passes only permitted them a few hours in the city, the time they were able to devote to our discussions proved limited.

Entry into and exit from Gaza was equally problematic. One scene on leaving Gaza has stayed with me. Hundreds of Palestinian men filled what I can only describe as cattle chutes, waiting in the sun for permission to enter into Israel. Straddling these chutes were young Israeli soldiers shouting at the Palestinians below, ordering them to look down and hold their passes above their heads. It was deeply disturbing.

In both Gaza and the West Bank, our meetings with Palestinian business leaders were hopeful. They were eager to discuss possibilities with their American counterparts, and the Americans were impressed. A number of partnerships were discussed.

Two projects were notable. One sought to manufacture leather products and another to assemble furniture. Both sought to take advantage of Gaza’s proximity to Eastern Europe so as to export there. As both projects required that the Israelis permit import of raw material and export of finished products, both projects failed. It appeared that the Israelis might have been willing to entertain such projects but only if the Americans and Palestinians operated through an Israeli middleman, thereby reducing the profitability of the ventures.

Even opportunities that the U.S. government tried to implement failed. One day I received a call from an official in the Department of Agriculture who told me that they had provided 50,000 bulbs for Gazans to develop a flower export industry. These bulbs he told me had been sitting in an Israeli port for months and were rotting. He said that the department was able to send another 25,000 bulbs but could only do so if the Israelis ensured their entry. This too proved fruitless as Israelis wanted no competition with their flower export industry, and therefore wouldn’t allow a competing Palestinian industry to develop.

After a few frustrating years, I saw then-President Bill Clinton who asked me how the project was developing. I told him about the frustrations we were encountering due to the Israeli impediments on investment in independent Palestinian economic growth. He appeared troubled and asked that I write him a detailed memo. The letter I sent to the president both outlined the specific problems we were facing and my complaint that his peace team was not taking these challenges seriously, as they insisted that any U.S. challenge to the Israelis would impede efforts to promote negotiations for peace. I told the president that since Oslo: Palestinian unemployment had doubled, poverty had risen, and Palestinians hope for peace was evaporating. To my dismay, the response I received from the White House appeared to have been drafted by his peace team, and was no response at all. At the end of Clinton’s first term, Builders for Peace (BfP) was disbanded and with it the hopes for Palestinian independent economic growth.

Over the next decade, absent any U.S. pressure on the Israelis to change their behavior, negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians continued to falter, Palestinians became poorer, Israeli became more emboldened and oppressive, and Palestinian attitudes hardened, leading to renewed violence.

There are two other memories from that period that need to be recalled.

One of the more optimistic projects BfP endorsed was a proposal by a Virginia-based Palestinian-American company to build a Marriott resort on the Gaza beachfront. Securing initial investment, they began construction, starting with the foundation and a massive parking garage. Because of the risks involved, they sought risk insurance from OPIC, the U.S. agency created to guarantee investment against risk. The project was endorsed by then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, a champion of our BfP, and supported by PLO head, Yasser Arafat—both of whom saw the resort hotel as laying the foundation for the future economic growth of a Palestinian state.

When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia. Israel did everything it could to guarantee that Gaza would become Somalia—and they appear to have succeeded.

Against this backdrop, it was painful to hear of Trump’s insulting plan to build an American-owned Gaza Riviera. It reminded me of what might have been, but, three decades later, is being discussed without benefiting any Palestinians from its development.

The conversation on settler colonialism must not be limited to academic discussion. It is a political reality, clearly demonstrated in the everyday behavior of Israel.

Israel is not merely an expansionist regime historically; it remains actively so today. Additionally, the core of Israeli political discourse, both past and present, revolves around territorial expansion.

Frequently, we succumb to the trap of blaming such language on a specific set of right-wing and extremist politicians or on a particular US administration. The truth is vastly different: the Israeli Zionist political discourse, though it may change in style, remains fundamentally unchanged throughout time.

Zionist leaders have always associated the establishment and expansion of their state with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, later referred to in Zionist literature as the "transfer."

Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, wrote in his diary about the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population from Palestine:

"We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

It is unclear what happened to Herzl's grand employment scheme aimed at "spiriting" the population of Palestine across the region. What we know is that the so-called "penniless population" resisted the Zionist project in numerous ways. Ultimately, the depopulation of Palestine occurred through force, culminating in the Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948.

The discourse of the erasure of the Palestinian people has been the shared foundation among all Israeli officials and governments, though it has been expressed in different ways. It has always had a material component, manifesting in the slow but decisive takeover of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the confiscation of farms, and the constant construction of "military zones."

Despite Israeli claims, this "incremental genocide" is not directly linked to the nature and degree of Palestinian resistance. Jenin and Masafer Yatta illustrate this clearly.

Take, for example, the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the northern West Bank, which, according to UNRWA, is the worst since 1967. The displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians has been justified by Israel as a military necessity due to the fierce resistance in that region, primarily Jenin, but other areas as well.

However, many parts of the West Bank, including the area of Masafer Yatta, have not been engaged in armed resistance. Yet, they have been primary targets for Israel's colonial expansion.

In other words, Israeli colonialism is in no way linked to Palestinian resistance, action or inaction. This has remained true for decades.

Israel...rarely feels the need to explain itself to anyone. It remains a model of a ferocious, traditional colonial society that fears no accountability and has no regard for international law.

Gaza is a stark example. While one of the most horrific genocides in recent history was being carried out, Israeli real estate developers, members of the Knesset (Parliament), and leaders of the illegal settlement movement were all meeting to discuss investment opportunities in a depopulated Gaza. The callous tycoons were busy promising villas on the beach for competitive prices while Palestinians starved to death, amid an ever-growing body count. Even fiction cannot be as cruel as this reality.

It is no wonder that the Americans joined in, as evidenced by equally ruthless comments made by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump, and eventually by the President himself.

While many at the time spoke about the strangeness of US foreign policy, few mentioned that both countries are prime examples of settler colonialism. Unlike other settler colonial societies, both Israel and the US are still committed to the same project.

Trump's desire to take over and rename the Gulf of Mexico, his ambition to occupy Greenland and claim it as American territory, and, of course, his comments about owning Gaza are all examples of settler colonial language and behavior.

The difference between Trump and previous presidents is that others used military power to expand US influence through war and hundreds of military bases worldwide without explicitly using expansionist language. Instead, they referenced the need to challenge the Soviet "red menace," "restore democracy," and launch a global "war on terror" as justifications for their actions. Trump, however, feels no need to mask his actions with false logic and outright lies. Brutal honesty is his brand, though in essence, he is no different than the rest.

Israel, on the other hand, rarely feels the need to explain itself to anyone. It remains a model of a ferocious, traditional colonial society that fears no accountability and has no regard for international law.

While the Israelis pushed to conquer and ethnically cleanse Gaza, they remained entrenched in southern Lebanon, insisting on remaining in five strategic areas, thus violating the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, which was signed on November 27.

A perfect case in point was the immediate—and I mean immediate—expansion into southern Syria, the moment the Syrian regime collapsed on December 8.

As soon as the events in Syria opened up security margins, Israeli tanks rolled in, warplanes destroyed almost the entirety of the Syrian army, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled the armistice agreement signed in 1974.

That expansion continued, though Syria represented no so-called security threat to Israel whatsoever. Israel is now in control of the Sheikh Mountain and Quneitra inside Syria.

The unquenchable appetite for land in Israel remains as strong as it was upon the formation of the Zionist movement and the takeover of the Palestinian homeland nearly eight decades ago.

This realization is crucial, and Arab countries, in particular, must understand this. Sacrificing Palestinians to the Israeli death machine with the flawed calculation that Israel's ambitions are limited to Gaza and the West Bank is a fatal mistake.

Israel will not hesitate for a minute to militarily move into any Arab geographic space the moment it feels able to do so, and it will always find US support and European silence, regardless of how destructive its actions are.

Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab countries could find themselves facing the same predicament as Syria today: watching their territories being devoured while remaining powerless and without recourse.

This realization should also matter to those busy finding "solutions" to the Palestinian-Israeli "conflict," which narrowly frame the problem to that of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Settler colonialism can never be resolved through creative solutions. A settler colonial state ceases to exist, and a settler colonial society ceases to function if territorial expansion is not a permanent state of affairs.

The only solution to this is that Israel's settler colonialism must be challenged, curtailed, and ultimately defeated. It may be a difficult task, but it is an inescapable one.

“It is pretty wild how you can make someone mad by just holding a sign,” my 18-year-old Ro told me, as an irate driver peeled out of the intersection, shaking both his middle fingers at us but managing not to hit us. Phew!

Ro was right. It didn’t take much to turn a perpetually busy intersection in New London, Connecticut, into a discussion forum on presidential overreach, cruelty, and immigration politics — with all the excesses, including those fingers, of the Age of Trump. In fact, all it took was four of us, four signs, and a little midday coordination. Oh, and some noise makers! Our signs said: “New London cares about our neighbors” and “ICE Not Welcome” and two versions of “Vecinos, no tienen que abrirle la puerta a ICE.” The translation: “Neighbors, you do not have to open the door to ICE.”

We stood there for an hour or so, clanging noise makers, waving those signs, and telling our neighbors to be careful about the rumored activity of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) in our community. Cars slowed and beeped, drivers waved — mostly their whole hands, but sometimes just that one lone finger — and some called out “Thank you” or “Gracias!” To our surprise, even a reporter and photographer from our local paper showed up.

New London is a small city — or maybe just a big town — of fewer than 28,000 people. According to the 2023 Census, we are 51.8% White, but only 12.8% of those Whites (myself included) send our kids to the public schools. I’ve always thought that doing so was a strength in our community. And thanks in part to that, I’ve become capable of maintaining a passable conversation in Spanish with my neighbors and the parents of some of my kids’ friends.

Unfortunately, I don’t know any Haitian Creole or French, but that community is growing in New London, too. I worked for a while at a local food pantry and I loved hearing the gentleness in tone as my young Haitian coworkers helped older Haitian ladies with their food boxes. Their voices grew soft, respectful, and full of warmth.

Recent immigrants are my neighbors, friends, and have been coworkers at my jobs and other responsibilities, but when, on a recent Friday morning, I got the text about ICE entering New London, the last thing I wanted to do was launch myself into action. I had a grant application due later that day. Ro, a senior, had a random day off from school but also a looming college application deadline. We were sitting next to each other at the library plugging away and nowhere near done. But I found that I couldn’t just sit there. I had to do something.

I texted a few people, including a friend with close ties to Spanish-speaking communities in our town, passing on what I’d heard.

“Oh no,” she texted back, “what should we do?”

What Should We Do?

That is the big question, right? What should we do? What’s happening in this country all feels so big and hateful and we’re all so small. And the Spanish-speaking and Haitian communities feel so vulnerable. Of course, the Trump administration’s policies are racist and cruel (and the news only gets worse and worse). The administration began its potentially vast deportation effort by flying 104 Indian nationals to Punjab on a military airplane shackled for the duration of the 40-hour flight. The White House also sent 300 immigrants from Afghanistan, China, Iran, and other countries on a harrowing, pointless odyssey to Panama — yes, Panama! — that included being trapped in a local hotel and then bused to a makeshift prison in the jungle.

The White House announced an end to temporary protective status for Haitian and Venezuelan immigrants who would face a welter of problems back home. Trump and company then opened Guantanamo to detain apprehended immigrants from Venezuela only to abruptly airlift them all back to Venezuela. The newest plan is to use military bases across this country as detention and processing sites for people rounded up in ICE raids, sweeps, and other operations. Incidentally, though you don’t see much about this, all of it comes at an astronomical price tag. Trump’s “show of power” putting those Indian immigrants on that single C-17 Globemaster for the 40-hour flight to Punjab reportedly cost $28,562 per flight hour — more than $1.1 million (or almost $11,000 per person). So many better things to spend that money on! And we taxpayers are the ones who will foot the bill. According to the Institute on Taxation and Policy, immigrants without work papers in this country nonetheless paid $96.7 billion in taxes to the United States in 2022. Tell me how you square those two facts.

And what indeed should we do?

On a sudden impulse, I texted my friend back: “What do you think if I go hold a sign at Coleman and Jefferson? Just to let people know — and to say it’s not okay?”

The emojis came back fast. Thumbs Up. Thank You hands. Hearts.

“Okay,” I thought, “Here we go. The grant will have to wait.” I texted a few friends to see if others were hearing what I was hearing. I found out that a bunch of them were in a meeting discussing what to do if/when ICE comes to our town. “What perfect timing, friends!” I texted the group. “I was thinking of holding a sign, but let me know if you think I should do something different.”

The text I had gotten said that ICE was on Spring and Summer Streets, as well as Coleman and Jefferson Streets, conducting sweeps. Half an hour later, Ro and I joined my sister Kate and our friend Kris at Coleman and Jefferson, a very busy intersection in New London. It’s where two two-way streets meet two one-way streets, and a commercial strip becomes a neighborhood. It’s down the hill from our town’s high school and was a strategically good spot for our tiny protest/public-service announcement.

Courage is Contagious

I knew that if I got the news, half of New London had, too. Lots of people call New London “News London,” because it seems as if everyone knows everyone and everything that’s going on. We’re a city of gossips and snoops and curious curtain peepers (myself included). Unfortunately, while it’s fun to know what’s going on and it demonstrates a certain level of care and concern, it’s not enough. The jolt of fear that went through me when that text told me ICE had made it to New London was nothing compared to how that same news affected my immigrant neighbors, but it was a jolt nonetheless. I sat paralyzed for a few minutes, wrapping myself in all the work I had to do, as fear grabbed me by the throat. And I had to work through that fear before I could head out to the street corner.

Later, as Ro and I held our signs, shifting them so different groups of cars could see them as the lights changed from red to green and back again, I thought about how contagious fear is — but so is courage. The smiles, thumbs ups, and horn toots from passing vehicles reminded me that our whole country hasn’t gone mad, despite those screaming headlines daily. Good people, I suspected, were busy, scared, confused, outraged, and — yes — getting organized. Just like my friends and me.

Buy the Book

My sister Kate and our friend Kris held their signs across the street, as it rained off and on. While we stood there getting wet, some of our friends were meeting and laminating little “Red Cards” that included a statement the holder could read or simply hand to an ICE agent. Here’s how it went:

“I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions or sign or hand you any documents based on my 5th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution. I do not give you permission to enter my home based on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution unless you have a warrant to enter, signed by a judge or magistrate with my name on it that you slide under the door. I do not give you permission to search any of my belongings based on my 4th Amendment rights. I choose to exercise my constitutional rights.”

The “Red Card” had that statement in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole and friends were already starting to drop bundles off at businesses that cater to our immigrant neighbors.

During one of their runs, a car full of them rolled by and said they had heard that ICE agents were at the local hospital and middle school. We promptly packed up our signs, already soggy and water-stained, and went to both locations to ask around. “No ICE here,” a worker at the hospital said. “I would have seen them.”

“They knew we were coming,” I joked, “We got them running scared.”

“It’s not right,” he replied, laughing not (I suspect) at my joke but at my attempt at humor. “It’s not right. Everyone is just trying to make it the best they can.”

I nodded encouragingly.

“We all came from somewhere,” he added.

I tried not to think about what he must have thought of me — wet, unkempt, and free (in the middle of the day) to chat him up and hold a sign that told ICE to go melt somewhere else. After all, “I” (and I have to put that in quotes) came from somewhere too, but it’s been a while.

We All Came from Somewhere

Like all of us, I did indeed come from somewhere else after a fashion.

Nearly 48 million people are immigrants today — about 14% of our total population. Three of my four grandparents emigrated here. Only my paternal grandfather, Thomas Berrigan, was born in the United States. My mother’s parents both hailed from the same small town along Northern Ireland’s coast. Elizabeth O’Mullen left it first, heading for New Jersey to find her fortune far from the provincial hatred of her Catholic minority. William McAlister soon decided to leave, too. There were no jobs, no prospects at home. “You should look up the O’Mullen girl when you get there,” people told him. And so he did. They married, settled in the city of Orange, New Jersey, opened a construction business, and had seven kids.

My father’s mother was the lone German in our family. Frida Fromhardt emigrated from the Black Forest in the late 1800s and ended up in northern Minnesota with her parents as a five- or six-year-old. Later, she met Thomas Berrigan, a railroad laborer and raconteur. They were married in 1911 and had six sons. And I’m hardly alone in my connection to the “old country.” Seventy-five percent of Americans are, in fact, the grandchildren of immigrants. That is how the United States has been and remains a “nation of immigrants.”

As far as I can tell, for both the Berrigans and the McAlisters integration into White America was fairly straightforward. On both sides of the family, the path from poverty to comfort in the middle class took but one generation of hard work and sacrifice (and the G.I. Bill and the support of the Catholic Church and access to lines of credit denied Black Americans). Grandmother McAlister — like today’s immigrants who send remittances back to their families — dispatched regular packages to her relatives in Ireland’s County Antrim with food, money, and all her kids’ old clothes.

And now, here I am in an America where Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk are fanning the flames of racial hatred and scapegoating recent immigrants. I don’t know what happens next, but I do know that holding that sign on that recent Friday was a turning point for me. It was the day that I felt transformed from someone in despair, consuming ever-grimmer news (and rumors), into someone willing to visibly resist all that in public. And in the process, I think I taught my kid something — that we can move from consumers to actors in minutes: a couple of texts, a couple of pieces of cardboard, a couple of Sharpies, and we make people mad or happy or supported or connected and become part of the news rather than simply depressed by it.

And in that, I’m nothing special. All over the country, resistance is rising. Massive marches in Los Angeles and San Diego a few weeks back demonstrated that recent immigrants are not afraid. Churches are suing Homeland Security to protect their congregants. In cities and towns across this country, people who do not fear deportation are building networks to respond to ICE raids.

That Friday when I demonstrated ICE did not actually apprehend anyone in New London. Still, we cheered ourselves up, feeling more connected and powerful that afternoon — a rare, wonderful, and motivating experience! It’s now been a few weeks and ICE hasn’t come back yet. Still, I know perfectly well that we’ll need more than a few demonstrators and cardboard signs to roll back the worst abuses of our dictator-in-the-making, but believe me, I’m prepared.

Trump is following Putin’s, Xi’s, and Orban’s playbook. First, take over military and intelligence operations by purging career officers and substituting ones personally loyal to you.

Next, subdue the courts by ignoring or threatening to ignore court rulings you disagree with.

Intimidate legislators by warning that if they don’t bend to your wishes, you’ll run loyalists against them. (Make sure they also worry about what your violent supporters could do to them and their families.)

Then focus on independent sources of information: the media and the universities. Sue media that publish critical stories and block their access to news conferences and interviews.

Then go after the universities.

Last week, Trump threatened in a social media post to punish any university that permits “illegal” protests. On Friday he cancelled hundreds of millions in grants and contracts with Columbia University.

This is an extension of Republican tactics before Trump’s second term. Prior to Trump appointing her ambassador to the United Nations, former Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard class of 2006) browbeat presidents of elite universities over their responses to student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, leading to several presidents being fired.

Senator Josh Hawley (Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006) called the student demonstrations signs of “moral rot” at the universities.

But antisemitism was just a pretext.

JD Vance (Yale Law 2013) has termed university professors “the enemy” and suggested using Victor Orban’s method for ending “left-wing domination of universities.”

I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching. [The government should be] aggressively reforming institutions … in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Trump is also targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on university campuses.

But of all Trump’s and Republicans’ moves against higher education, the most destructive is the cancelation of research grants and contracts. The destruction is hardly confined to Columbia and other suspected left-wing bastions.

Research universities depend on funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Trump reportedly aims to slash the budget of the National Science Foundation by up to two-thirds. And he’s instructed the National Institutes of Health to no longer honor negotiated rates for “indirect costs” on grants that it administers — money that universities use for laboratory space and research equipment.

In defiance of court orders, Trump has largely maintained a freeze on NIH funding.

As a result, many of America’s great research universities have stopped hiring and are cutting Ph.D. programs — in some cases rescinding offers to accepted students.

Trump’s moves are consistent with the tyrant’s playbook, but they’re also jeopardizing America’s national security and competitiveness.

Trump speaks of putting America First, but his attack on the nation’s great research universities is ensuring that the U.S. comes in second — to China.

Although America has long been the global leader in scientific output, China is now surging ahead. Even before Trump’s cuts in research funding, China was projected to match U.S. research spending within five years.

China has already surpassed the U.S. as the top producer of highly cited papers and international patent applications. It now awards more science and engineering Ph.D.s than the U.S.

Tyrants close universities. Fascists burn books. Trump is destroying America’s most important asset — its innovative mind.

The debate over whether or not to continue to support Ukraine highlights a seismic ideological realignment on foreign policy. Democrats, who were traditionally more skeptical of militarism and foreign adventurism, are far more aggressive and warlike than their Republican counterparts.

The post Liberals Have Changed appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

We’re reaching the point with the second Trump administration where, as Wall Street investors would say, the crazy is “priced in.” There’s absolutely no reason to expect anything other than aggressively dishonest and profoundly stupid governance. Would you say, at this point, that you’re surprised to learn that the new #2 at EPA, who will be running the day-to-day operations,

made nearly $3.2 million in 2024 representing a range of corporate interests against pollution cases and enforcement actions. His clients included Chevron, Sunoco Pipeline, and Energy Transfer, a major oil and gas company that is currently litigating a high stakes trial against Greenpeace, according to a recent financial disclosure report filed with the Office of Government Ethics.

And he wasn’t even the most egregious EPA nominee—another high-ranking future official told the Senate that as far as he was concerned the job was not to prevent climate change, it was to adapt to it once it happened. Thanks!

These kind of things are terrible, and also at this point entirely predictable. Indeed, it was all foretold with breathtaking candor in Project 2025, and then the nation voted for President Trump anyway. (Perhaps someone actually believed his demurrals about his plans during the campaign). We need to resist at every turn—please join us at Third Act as prepare for the next big round of actions on April 5—but at this point there is great damage we simply can’t avoid.

It makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn't vote for this charlatan.

I think it makes me even sadder to see that damage exported, to places that didn’t vote for this charlatan. News continued to flow in from around the globe last week of countries succumbing to White House extortion to buy more liquefied natural gas, on pain of getting tariffed otherwise. And then there’s Ukraine—and if you want to watch a truly stinging takedown of Trump’s treachery, check out this from a center-right French parliamentarian. Better yet, read Antonia Juhasz’s long account for Rolling Stone of the truly extortionate “mineral rights” deal that Trump is demanding from Zelensky. She quotes Svitana Romanko, who will be familiar to readers of this newsletter—a longtime climate campaigner who has emerged as Ukraine’s most passionate environmentalist.

I have no doubt that a hidden agenda is getting access and decision-making rights to gas and oil pipelines, especially gas that’s so critical given that the European market is so important for Russia and has always been.” This is “really threatening to everything we’ve done so far” to weaken Russia’s war-fighting ability and influence, including “getting the full ban on Russian oil and gas to the European Union,” she adds.

Though it gets drowned out in the news over Russia, Canada, and Mexico but just as disgusting and revealing was the initiative unveiled this week by America’s new energy secretary, fracking baron Chris Wright, who told his counterparts from across Africa that the future was…fossil fuels, above all coal. The Africans were gathered at a Marriott across from the White House for some sense of what would happen to them now that the Trump administration has summarily shut down Power Africa, the program begun by President Obama that has connected tens of millions of homes on the continent to electricity.

According to Times reporter Max Bearak, Energy Secretary Wright sold the shutdown as a gift. “This government has no desire to tell you what you should do with your energy system,” he said. “It’s a paternalistic post-colonial attitude that I just can’t stand.” He then went on to say:

“We’ve had years of Western countries shamelessly saying don’t develop coal, coal is bad,” Mr. Wright said. “That’s just nonsense, 100 percent nonsense. Coal transformed our world and made it better.”
And while Mr. Wright said climate change was a “real, physical phenomenon,” he said it wouldn’t make a list of his top 10 problems facing the world.

The amount of actual nonsense crammed into those two paragraphs is…amazing. Yes, coal transformed the world during the industrial revolution. But now it’s transforming the world again, by altering the climate—which is not only the world’s biggest problem by far, but is making all the others much worse. African countries worry about public health, about hunger, about building infrastructure: here’s what the World Meteorological Organization calculated in 2023:

On average, African countries are losing 2–5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and many are diverting up to 9 percent of their budgets responding to climate extremes.

More to the point, the idea that coal is the answer for Africa is belied by history. Which is to say, we’ve known about coal—and natural gas—for a very long time, and there are somehow still 600 million Africans unconnected to the electric grid. If coal was going to do the job, perhaps it would have done so by now.

The problem, in Africa, is the lack of a grid—the huge and hugely expensive collection of poles and wires that distributes power from centralized coal-fired power stations. I remember sitting in Tanzania, years ago, with a Silicon valley entrepreneur named Xavier Helgesen: “The belief was, you’d eventually build the U.S. grid here,” he said. “But the U.S. is the richest country on earth, and it wasn’t fully electrified until the nineteen-forties, and that was in an era of cheap copper for wires, cheap timber for poles, cheap coal, and cheap capital. None of that is so cheap anymore, at least not over here.”

Happily, there’s now a way around that problem: it’s called distributed solar power. And, as I’ve been writing, it’s exploding in Africa. I saw some of the first solar mini-grids on the continent five or six years ago—now there are thousands. There was a World Bank effort launched last fall to find $90 billion—one quarter of an Elon at today’s market prices—to provide power for 300 million of those 600 million Africans. (That one man could electrify the whole continent and still have $180 billion left over gives you some sense of the grotesque inequality now haunting our earth). But if that happened, it would be another step leading the world away from fossil fuels and the “energy dominance” that the Trump team dreams of.

“When we say ‘all of the above,’ you might ask, is that code for carbon? And yes, it is code for carbon,” said Troy Fitrell, a senior State Department official and former ambassador to Guinea. “There are no restrictions anymore on what kind of energy we can promote.”

In case you’re wondering how all this is going to happen, it’s worth remembering that one of Trump’s first acts in office was to suspend enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. companies from bribing foreign governments. As the evangelical magazine Christianity Today (in an earlier day, evangelicals had actually argued for the law, on the grounds of, you know, honesty) pointed out yesterday,

Taken by itself, the FCPA freeze could merely be a messy attempt to limit the authority of the DOJ and the SEC. But halting FCPA in tandem with limiting enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force poses a shift in American policy likely to affect not just American oversight of American bribery abroad but also the US government’s ability to monitor foreign agents in America.

If the U.S. is able to bully or bribe African governments into building more coal-fired power plants, let me make a prediction. Just as we’ve seen in Pakistan this past year, the expensive and unreliable power those plants deliver on underbuilt grids will be one more factor pushing people towards cheap solar. In fact, as I’ve described in this newsletter already, that process is underway across much of Africa already, as people and companies buy up cheap Chinese solar panels and liberate themselves from the status quo.

It would be cheaper, and provide more power more quickly to more people, to do this systematically with solar minigrids, as Power Africa has been envisioning, instead of one roof at a time. But the turn to the sun will happen eventually anyway; in the end, the greed unleashed by Trump, Wright, and their friends will be insufficient to alter either physics or economics. Much damage will be done in the meantime, though—to Africans, to the climate, and to whatever remains of the idea of American leadership. The Chinese are doubtless chortling; indeed by this point the laughter must be nonstop. If you want to read one account of China’s rise to the renewable pinnacle, this Washington Post piece might be it. Among other things, it makes clear that as the U.S. pushes coal, Beijing is actually offering something people want and need:

In 2024, Chinese exports of EVs, batteries, and solar and wind products to the Global South surged to account for a record 47 percent of the total.
“It’s probably a good thing for the climate because these clean technologies are diffusing all over the world,” says Kelly Sims Gallagher, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University who was a senior adviser on Chinese climate issues in the Obama administration. “But it is also probably resulting in the United States losing even more market share globally.”

At this point we sure deserve that loss. Here’s the big and wonderful news from China this week: gasoline sales fell…9 percent last year, as EVs took hold in the country. If I were Big Oil I’d be desperately trying to leverage the White House too, I guess.

"I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company."—Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Deep down, we struggle to come upon accurate words to describe the terrible beauty of our aloneness. In this plight, we are together. In this musing, I, listening to the music of my heart, will attempt to hobble through and send back dispatches conveying a lexicon of aloneness.

A lesson I hope to learn by scribing a travelog of the dark: I've noticed, people who have survived the howling abyss of abandonment, and have been freed from its grip of grief, have been transfigured by the ordeal. Rarely, as a consequence, do such individuals act as errand boys, muscle, or apologists of oppressors.

They have snatched this from the mouth of despair, it would be tragic to be false to the forces that formed them. Thus make a vow to self: Do not pretend to be anything other than yourself attempting to gain the approval of heartless authority and petty tyrants of the everyday kind. Your wounds demand you speak your truth.

Leonardo Da Vinci, "Saint Jerome in the Wilderness"i (1480, unfinished)

Even in our cultural atomization, we are connected to those cast out; we are bonded to society's denizens of the dark, to those who feel the pain of the suffering Earth; to those who the misnomer known as normalcy casts from conscious awareness; to those who capitalist functionality (i.e., crackpot realism) brutalizes, kicks to the curb, and condemns to madness and death… yet life on life's terms, confronts us with innumerable, seemingly infinite connections. Within, we mirror all things. We, unbeknownst to ourselves, communicate with all things. Not only the realm of the human but soil, ocean, storm, star, galaxy, electron…

We, moment to moment, travel the bridge between each other's heartbeats. We are connected both with what we love and what we shun. Moreover, what we cast out and shun will return as affliction. Hence, the Earth herself is unwell and she rages in floods and firestorms.

Breathe in deep, clear your throat, and make exhortations on behalf of the voiceless. If you have a gift for music, compose and play them a song, let the weary take refuge in the rest between musical notes. Display sacred vehemence toward life-defying oppressors who contrive to make the life of the many a prison by incarceration of the heart.

Louise Bourgeois, "The Femme Maison"

When the culture of a nation, intoxicated on extraverted mania inherent to Mephistophelian capitalism, disallows the visions of its denizens of despair into the conversation, compensatory angels borne from the unconscious (what people in times past knew as the soul) will descend bringing on a cultural darkness. In the sterile, clinical language of our time, the phenomenon is termed a pandemic of depression.

Emissaries, invisible in daylight glare, appear in the dreams of the scorned and forsaken; the visitors whisper verse to those capable of stillness, and guide the willing into moments of inadvertent reprieve. In short, deliverance occurs by means of easing the burden of self—which is a gentle way of saying, aiding one in getting the living hell over oneself. These emissaries impart the message the visible world can be a mirage. Hope is an invisible force allied with luminous angels whose light would blind us upon sight. Hence, we are moved to transformation by a force not perceptible during quotidian day.

Paradoxically, because all things arrive freighted with their opposite (enantiodromia) bearers of hope are, often, those aforementioned lonely, despair-wracked individuals driven to stand at the edge of the abyss—the abjectly lonely who have been moved, by desperation, to implore the unseen for mercy.

No person wants to arrive at such a place. One would choose, and most do, a mundane life wherein we follow the signposts, on an exclusive basis, of the visible world—yet is, in essence, given our human proclivity for habitual self-reference, a graceless tour of a house of mirrors. Oh—the hellish mix of confusion and blandness of the choice.

Edvard Munch, "Evening on Karl Johan Street" (1892)

Prayer before sleep: Lord of nightmares bestow grace on me by allowing me to be reborn from within the womb of night. Despair's blackness grants the intrepid traveller the ability to navigate darkness, thereby avoiding a life defined by the limbo of complacency.

A person open to being ministered to, thus transformed, by a numinous voice, calling from the darkness at the edge of the daylight world, will, in all likelihood, spend their days alone, all too often suffering the pain of wounds inflicted by rejection. Loneliness will be a constant companion.

But as Rilke avers in verse:

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything—
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.—Rainer Maria Rilke, "You Darkness"

Joseph Beuys, "I Like America and America Likes Me"

Often, a shunned soul, one who travelled through the world of mindless consensus' inferno of fuckwit and has returned, will be put on the defensive by normalcy's bullies and challenged to make an accounting of himself—i.e., to account for the unaccountable. In the end, one who has seen and survived one's own darkness, will be able to apprehend the darkness within his inquisitors. At the speed of a synapse, his tormentors will go from bullying to claiming victimization.

For, when backed against the wall, he is often moved to speak in a soul-plangent lexicon that causes a collapse, even for an instant, of his tormentor's protective yet ad hoc walls of coping—thus revealing the fragile banality that governs their lives. In so doing, he has committed an act, in nice society, that will never be forgiven.

Rilke surveys the scene and sends back this dispatch in verse:

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered birds flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial.—But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart.—Rilke, "Exposed On The Mountains Of My Heart"

René Magritte, "The Glass Key" (1959)

Stop for a moment and take it all in. This life… on our Earth. The beauty. The terror. Notice: The terror involved in taking in the beauty of it all. The act will awaken your heart. Ask yourself: Am I on my heart's path? Or does this road lead me, again and again, into the dominion of exploiters? If you received an affirmative in regard to the latter question, I suggest, after you cease weeping—a sane response to you taking notice of the heart-devoid landscape where you have strayed—ask yourself: How can I reorient myself as to the direction of my heart's path?

Do you feel thwarted by circumstance, by the inherent miseries in facing capitalist hierarchies of immovable power and the system's architecture of exploitation? Rebel by engagement with the eternity delivery system of the imagination. Doing so does not translate into idle fantasy. By a receptivity to originality, by being moved to enthusiasm by acts of creativity… will provide the libido to trundle through the living landscape of imagination; thereby, one does not need to be an artist to live and engage the world in an artful manner.

Become a one person hallelujah chorus for originality. Within you, glide wheels of fire. The valley of bones rises as an army of flesh. This is your exodus out of bondage.

Magritte, "The Healer" (1937)

A 500-year-old conquistador, hellbent on winning at any cost, has much to teach us about America today. If we have the stomach to see it.

Hernán Cortés led the expedition from Spain to the New World that resulted in the fall of the Aztec Empire and its leader, Montezuma II. Arriving on the shores of Veracruz, Mexico in 1519, Cortés saw that his men were exhausted and dispirited. There were calls to turn back, whispers of mutiny. Cortés, it is said, responded by burning and sinking his ships, thus stranding his crew, and giving them little choice but to fight and vanquish the Aztecs.

As Elon Musk demolishes the systems, institutions, and infrastructure that support and sustain America, I am reminded of the rapid fall of the Aztec empire, and the deliberate ruination that precipitated it. Like Cortés, Musk’s goals are destruction and assurance that there can be no going back.

People are overwhelmed and exhausted by the magnitude of consistent, determined, and effective resistance against the conquistadors who, having skuttled the ships, seek now to become overlords. Yet we have no choice but to act, to push back.

And another once-great empire falls.

Each day, the nascent “Mump” Regime—allegedly helmed by U.S. President Donald Trump, but clearly commandeered by Musk—razes more American foundations, moving us ever closer to the tipping point where far-right authoritarianism replaces an admittedly flawed, but principled, democracy.

If our president hasn’t the historical awareness, focus, or intellectual capacity to formulate and execute a complex plan, his surrogates and henchman do, and they are reveling in the dual promises of destruction and personal gain.

As Elon Musk, the Project 2025 architects, their accomplices, and enforcers gleefully erase 250 years of accomplishment—by turns, glorious and imperfect—they are creating a seemingly irreversible path to their own ends by reducing to rubble the institutions that might save us.

Department of Education? Burn it.

FEMA? Burn it.

USAID? Burn it.

NATO? Burn it.

Climate science? Burn it.

Medical research? Burn it.

Alliances, treaties, promises? Burn them.

The Republicans who control Congress daily demonstrate their own gullibility and culpability. And the Democratic minority wrings its hands, wavering among unorganized resistance, outrage, and a dawning awareness not only that it can happen here, but that it is happening here.

For the most part, the American people mirror Congress. Many outraged and resistant. Some condoning much of what they see, cherry-picking actions they consider laudable, while refusing to scrutinize the ones that cause their stomachs to clench. And others naively hoping thugs who have cheated their way through life will suddenly begin playing by the rules, i.e., the Constitution, the courts, existing laws, and the checks and balances of a three-branch government. Rules, the thugs sneer, are for suckers and losers. Meanwhile, they set fire to and sink ship after ship. There will be no going back, they assure themselves with a smug grin and a not-so-clandestine Nazi salute.

They may be right.

I’d like to believe that the best and brightest minds among democracy’s defenders and patriots are huddled together crafting solutions that will save America from the evil unleashed upon us by corrupt, would-be dictators, but with each day’s atrocities, lies, deliberate distractions, and concealments, my hope for my country fades.

America is burning. People are overwhelmed and exhausted by the magnitude of consistent, determined, and effective resistance against the conquistadors who, having skuttled the ships, seek now to become overlords. Yet we have no choice but to act, to push back. As British statesman Edmund Burke famously said, “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

This is what it looks like when a once-great country is dismantled.

Do not look away.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, is collapsing—not just as a corporate initiative, but as an ideological framework.

In what seemed like a flash, it became a dominant force in American institutional life, embedded in HR departments, university policies, and media discourse. And now, just as quickly, it finds itself in retreat, with entire DEI offices being gutted across corporate and academic America.

President Donald Trump’s administration has aggressively targeted DEI, issuing executive orders to dismantle these programs across federal agencies. This federal rollback has emboldened Republican-led states to eliminate DEI efforts within public institutions. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s recent firing of Joy Reid, a vocal defender of DEI who embodied many of its most aggressive tendencies, signals a broader cultural shift.

If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.

The right celebrates this as a victory over “woke ideology.” The left frames it as yet another example of backlash and white fragility. But these explanations fail to account for why DEI has unraveled so quickly.

The reality is that DEI was doomed to fail—not because the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are unworthy, but because the framework built around them was structurally flawed.

DEI’s fundamental contradiction was this: It argued that race is a social invention—a system created to control people by reducing complexity—yet it never suggested replacing it.

Instead, it doubled down on racial categorization, reinforcing the very thing it claimed to challenge. This reification of race, rather than dismantling structures of oppression, helped sustain them, making DEI brittle and politically untenable.

For the left, the lesson here is crucial. If we don’t break out of the rigid, black-and-white thinking that DEI promoted, we will continue ceding ground to the right. The need to discuss race and identity remains vital, but it must be done in a way that opens space for complexity rather than reinforcing the very constructs that uphold division.

DEI’s fatal flaw is that it traps itself in a closed loop. It rightly argues that race is a historical construct—a tool of power designed to enforce hierarchy. Yet instead of pushing beyond this construct, it reinforces race as fixed and immutable. The result is an ideological contradiction: Race is framed as an arbitrary invention, yet treated as an unchanging, permanent reality.

James Baldwin exposed the hollowness of racial constructs decades ago. In “On Being ‘White’… and Other Lies,” he wrote: “The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.”

Baldwin understood that whiteness, like all racial identities, was not a biological or cultural fact but a political invention—a shifting construct designed to serve power. Yet DEI never seriously engaged with this idea. It simply replaced one rigid racial hierarchy with another, treating whiteness as an unchanging position of privilege while treating other racial identities as fixed sites of oppression.

This rigidity meant that DEI operated as a closed system, reasserting racial categories rather than interrogating them. It failed to engage with race as a lived, historically contingent process—one shaped by history, class, and material conditions.

By doing this, DEI alienated people across the political spectrum. Many white people, even those who consider themselves progressive, felt that DEI erased any meaningful discussion of economic struggle or historical complexity within whiteness.

Meanwhile, many people of color found DEI’s racial framework superficial—offering corporate-friendly language about inclusion while doing little to address material inequalities. The framework functioned as a kind of racial accounting system, but it lacked a clear political vision for building solidarity.

Sheena Mason, a scholar of racial theory, has articulated the deeper flaw in this approach: “To undo racism, we have to undo our belief in race.”

This insight is crucial. If race itself is a construct designed to justify social stratification, then maintaining race as a primary framework for addressing inequality only reinforces the divisions we claim to want to overcome. Yet DEI never suggested dismantling the concept of race—it only sought to redistribute power within its existing framework.

This was a fatal mistake. Modern genetic science has definitively debunked the biological basis of race. There is more genetic diversity within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories that shape our politics and institutions are historical inventions, not natural facts.

Yet DEI, instead of leveraging this knowledge to transcend racial essentialism, entrenches race as the defining lens for justice. This approach not only deepens social division but also makes the left vulnerable to the right’s attacks.

By insisting on the permanence of racial categories, DEI created an ideological framework that could be easily caricatured as divisive and exclusionary—giving conservatives an easy target while failing to deliver meaningful change.

Racial discourse often eclipses broader discussions of material conditions, making it harder to address economic inequality in a meaningful way.

Patricia Hill Collins, a foundational thinker in intersectional theory, has observed that, “Race operates as such an overriding feature of African-American experience in the United States that it not only overshadows economic class relations for Blacks but obscures the significance of economic class within the United States in general.”

DEI’s fixation on race, detached from material conditions, contributed to this very problem. By prioritizing racial categorization over economic struggle, it often obscured the broader systems of inequality that shape American life.

This not only made class politics more difficult to articulate but also allowed racial identity to become a stand-in for structural critique—reinforcing an identity-based framework that often benefited elites more than the working class.

With DEI collapsing, the question becomes: What comes next? The right hopes this marks the end of racial discourse altogether. That cannot happen. Structural racism, economic exclusion, and historical injustice are still deeply embedded in American life. Ignoring the function of racism and racial categories plays into the hands of those who want to maintain both racial and economic inequality.

But we cannot simply replace DEI with another rigid, prepackaged framework that reproduces the same mistakes. If we want to build a politics that actually addresses racial injustice, we need an approach that is dynamic rather than static—one that acknowledges history without being trapped by it.

This means recognizing that racial categories are not timeless truths but historical constructions that have been shaped by economic, political, and social forces. It means rejecting the idea that people are permanently locked into racial identities that define their entire experience. And it means moving beyond an approach that focuses primarily on representation and inclusion toward one that addresses material conditions to redistribute power.

DEI’s failure provides an opportunity for the left to rethink how it engages with race and identity. We need to stop seeing race as an unchanging structure and start understanding it as something that can be transformed. Morgan Freeman put it bluntly in an interview, stating, “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”

This is the kind of shift we need—one that integrates historical understanding rather than segregates it, one that moves past “race”—which we know doesn't exist—as a fixed identity category toward a broader, more holistic vision of justice.

The goal should not be to replace DEI with another top-down, bureaucratic approach, but to build a new paradigm that is open, flexible, and capable of fostering real solidarity.

If the left fails to do this, it will keep losing to the right. And if that happens, the backlash against DEI will not just be the end of a flawed initiative—it will be a major setback for the broader struggle for justice and equality.

International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire global political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.

In principle, international law should have always been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism to practically enslave the Global South for hundreds of years.

Unfortunately, international law, which was in theory supposed to reflect global consensus, was hardly dedicated to peace or genuinely invested in the decolonization of the South.

Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society for merely advocating the enforcement of international law.

From the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the war on Libya and numerous other examples, past and present, the United Nations was often used as a platform for the strong to impose their will on the weak. And whenever smaller countries collectively fought back, as the U.N. General Assembly often does, those with veto power, military, and economic leverage used their advantage to coerce the rest based on the maxim, "Might makes right."

It should therefore hardly be a surprise to see many intellectuals and politicians in the Global South arguing that, aside from paying lip service to peace, human rights, and justice, international law has always been irrelevant.

This irrelevance was put on full display through 15 months of a relentless Israeli genocidal war on Gaza that killed and wounded over 160,000 people, a number that, according to several credible medical journals and studies, is expected to dramatically rise.

Yet, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened an investigation of plausible genocide in Gaza on January 26, followed by a decisive ruling on July 19 regarding the illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the international system began showing a pulse, however faint. The International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants were another proof that West-centered legal institutions are capable of change.

The angry American response to all of this was predictable. Washington has been fighting against international accountability for many years. The U.S. Congress under the George W. Bush administration, as early as 2002, passed a law that shielded U.S. soldiers "against criminal prosecution" by the ICC, to which the U.S. is not a party.

The so-called Hague Invasion Act authorized the use of military force to rescue American citizens or military personnel detained by the ICC.

Naturally, many of Washington's measures to pressure, threaten, or punish international institutions have been linked to shielding Israel under various guises.

The global outcry and demands for accountability following Israel's genocide in Gaza, however, have once again put Western governments on the defensive. For the first time, Israel was facing the kind of scrutiny that rendered it, in many respects, a pariah state.

Instead of reconsidering their approach to Israel, and refraining from feeding the war machine, many Western governments lashed out at civil society for merely advocating the enforcement of international law. Those targeted included U.N.-affiliated human rights defenders.

On February 18, German police descended on the Junge Welt venue in Berlin as if they were about to apprehend a notorious criminal. They surrounded the building in full gear, sparking a bizarre drama that should have never taken place in a country that perceives itself as democratic.

The reason behind the security mobilization was none other than Francesca Albanese, an Italian lawyer, an outspoken critic of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the current United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.

If it were not for the U.N.'s intervention, Albanese could have been arrested simply for demanding that Israel must be held accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.

Germany, however, is not the exception. Other Western powers, lead amongst them the U.S., are actively taking part in this moral crisis. Washington has taken serious and troubling steps, not just to protect Israel, and itself, from accountability to international law, but to punish the very international institutions, its judges, and officials for daring to question Israel's behavior.

Indeed, on February 13, the U.S. sanctioned the ICC's chief prosecutor due to his stance on Israel.

After some hesitance, Karim Khan has done what no other ICC prosecutor had done before: issuing, on November 21, arrest warrants for two Israeli leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. They are currently wanted for "crimes against humanity and war crimes."

The moral crisis deepens when the judges become the accused, as Khan found himself at the receiving end of endless Western media attacks and abuse, in addition to U.S. sanctions.

As disturbing as all of this is, there is a silver lining, specifically an opportunity for the international legal and political system to be fixed based on new standards, justice that applies to all, and accountability that is expected from all.

Those who continue to support Israel have practically disowned international law altogether. The consequences of their decisions are dire. But for the rest of humanity, the Gaza war can be that very opportunity to reconstruct a more equitable world, one that is not molded by the militarily powerful, but by the need to stop senseless killings of innocent children.

The deadly fires that devastated Los Angeles and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in January have been finally contained, but they left another sort of firestorm in their wake—one raging around the insurance industry and its shrinking coverage of climate risks such as extreme wildfires. Climate change increased the likelihood and severity of the fires—by far some of the most destructive in the city’s history. The blazes killed at least 28 people and destroyed some 16,000 structures over nearly 50,000 acres—an area larger than the city limits of San Francisco. Insured property damage alone is expected to reach as much as $40 billion. The question of who pays looms large.

For at least 50 years, the insurance sector has been aware of the physical risks of climate change and that greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from fossil fuels, are overwhelmingly responsible for rising temperatures. Despite this, U.S. insurance companies have investments of more than $500 billion in fossil fuel-related assets. The underwriting business of major insurers remains heavily focused on the fossil fuel sector, with the top U.S. insurers of fossil fuel businesses earning $5.2 billion from underwriting in 2023.

After decades of pocketing premiums from homeowners and investing significant portions of that money in the fossil fuel industry that drives climate change, private insurers like State Farm and Berkshire Hathaway carved out fire coverage from their policies or pulled out of the California market altogether.

All of California’s home insurance policyholders are the victims of fossil-fueled climate change.

The result: The insurers that played a role in facilitating the very climate disasters now affecting their former customers have effectively cut and run, leaving the residents and the state holding the bag.

Private insurers will escape the full bill, largely because they have shifted their exposure to the most extreme climate risks to California’s insurer of last resort—the FAIR Plan. In abandoning the California home insurance market, or otherwise excluding fire coverage from their policies, private insurance companies effectively pushed the responsibilities of shouldering climate risk back onto the public and protected their own profits. Despite their claims to the contrary, insurance companies, as recently as 2023, generated significant profits on homeowner insurance policies and are still raking in record profits.

The FAIR Plan is now on the brink of insolvency. To fund the shortfall, the California Insurance Commissioner has levied an assessment totaling $1 billion on private insurance companies. However, private insurance companies will pass $500 million of the assessment on to all of California’s insured homeowners.

This $500 million bill is a direct consequence of climate change and the profit-driven insurers who—after pocketing ever-increasing premiums and investing in the fossil fuel sector—have shed policies for homes most vulnerable to climate risks. All of California’s home insurance policyholders are the victims of fossil-fueled climate change.

Insurers Abandon Californians

The destructive force of the LA wildfires is a result of climate change-induced drought, which led to the accumulation of dried-out vegetation and the perfect conditions for extreme wildfires. Unusually strong wind gusts of more than 100 miles per hour spread the fires across LA, scattering flames throughout many of the city’s communities. And it was not just the fires causing damage—climate change intensifies fire smoke, filling the air with hazardous pollutants that harm health.

In California, the frequency and severity of wildfires have increased the cost of disasters, prompting insurers to hike premiums or refuse to renew policies. California’s home insurance rates jumped 48.4% from 2019 to 2024. Twelve major insurers have also restricted homeowners insurance even after being allowed massive rate hikes.

Insurers have justified abandoning California homeowners by citing rising climate risk. Yet, insurance companies are complicit in facilitating climate change through their massive investments in fossil fuel-related assets—including coal, oil, and gas—the primary sources of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

State Farm and the Hypocrisy of the Insurance Sector

State Farm General (State Farm)—through its parent company, State Farm Mutual—is a major investor in fossil fuels. The company’s investments include more than $6 billion in upstream oil and gas producers ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coterra Energy, and Shell and mining company Rio Tinto. These five companies sit on the list of the top investor-owned entities with the highest historical carbon dioxide emissions. State Farm Mutual also has billions of dollars of investments in fossil-fuel-intensive or dependent industries such as utilities, oil and gas services, and pipeline companies, as well as chemical, steel, and fertilizer manufacturers.

(Graphic: CIEL)

Despite facilitating climate change through its fossil fuel investments, State Farm—the largest property and casualty insurer in California—stated in 2023 that it would not renew 30,000 home insurance policies in the state. The decision was primarily due to the increasing risk of wildfires in California. After an approved rate increase of 20% in December 2023, among other concessions from the California Department of Insurance, State Farm agreed to renew these 30,000 home insurance policies, but only on the condition that the renewed policies exclude fire coverage. State Farm clients had to specifically secure separate fire coverage from the FAIR Plan.

The Pacific Palisades, one of the neighborhoods devastated by the LA Fires, was one of the zip codes abandoned by State Farm. According to California Department of Insurance spokesperson Michael Soller, State Farm dropped about 1,600 policies in Pacific Palisades in July. State Farm also dropped more than 2,000 policies in two other LA zip codes, which include neighborhoods also damaged by the wildfires, such as Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and Monte Nido. The FAIR Plan is now the principal recourse for wildfire coverage for former State Farm policyholders.

State Farm Demands Rate Hike Instead of Using Reinsurance Profits

Most private insurers are looking to their reinsurer to provide coverage for their losses from the LA Fires. Reinsurance, basically insurance for insurance companies, is a common part of an insurer’s business model as it allows them to shift some of their risk to protect themselves from the most catastrophic events. State Farm’s reinsurer is its parent company—State Farm Mutual. From 2014 to 2023, State Farm paid reinsurance premiums of nearly $2.2 billion but was only reimbursed $0.4 billion—less than 20%—suggesting that the company overpaid for reinsurance. These payments to its parent company, with little return, led to accusations that State Farm was artificially boosting its parent company’s profits.

State Farm Mutual has over $130 billion in surplus available to support its subsidiary. Despite the exorbitant profits of its parent company and well before the LA Fires, in June 2024, State Farm requested a 30% increase in its homeowners insurance rates (on top of the 20% increase it was granted in March of the same year) purportedly to improve its general financial condition. Within days of the LA fires being contained, State Farm again asked its California policyholders to step in and maintain the profits of its parent company. State Farm requested an annual $740 million bailout in the form of an “urgent” 22% increase in State Farm’s home insurance rates, as well as requesting rate hikes of 38% for rental dwellings and 15% for tenants.

Fortunately for California’s consumers, Commissioner Ricardo Lara rejected State Farm’s requested rate increase. And true to form, State Farm is now “considering its options” because the commissioner’s decision “sends a strong message to State Farm General about the support it will receive to collect sufficient premiums in the future”—a barely veiled threat to again abandon California policyholders.

State Farm had already limited its exposure to climate change-induced wildfires and then sought to reduce it further, asking policyholders to take on even more of the remaining risk. All the while, they continue to facilitate climate change and profit from their fossil fuel investments.

Climate Change Pushes FAIR Plan to the Brink

As insurance companies pull out of vulnerable areas or raise premiums, many California homeowners are left with no choice but to rely on the FAIR Plan—the state-supported insurer of last resort. The FAIR Plan offers limited coverage at higher rates, making it costly and an inadequate safety net for homeowners abandoned by private insurance companies.

The exit of insurers from the California residential property market has meant that the FAIR Plan’s exposure to wildfire risk has increased exponentially. The FAIR Plan now holds 13,752 policies with more than $23 billion in liability across the residential and commercial sectors in the zip codes affected by the fires.

Insurers should then seek to recoup the costs of covering the damage from climate change-induced severe weather events from fossil fuel companies—not from the individual policyholders or the public at large.

On February 11, 2025, Insurance Commissioner Lara found “that the FAIR Plan is faced with a substantial threat of insolvency due to unprecedented losses” and approved the FAIR Plan’s request to levy an assessment totaling $1 billion on private insurance companies. Before July 2024, insurers operating in California would have been solely required to fund any deficit, paying a fee based on their market share. But a July 2024 regulation allows insurers to shift 50% of the assessment onto the state’s existing policyholders. Homeowners from all over California are being asked to bail out the FAIR Plan, irrespective of the risk profile of their home and neighborhood and the climate risk mitigation or adaptation they have undertaken.

This change in regulation was part of a series of concessions Lara has given to the insurance industry in recent years, including provisions that make it easier for companies to raise premiums and a new rule that allows companies to use forward-looking catastrophe models when setting rates. These new regulations were aimed at convincing insurers to stay in California, but consumer advocates warn that they have the potential to further exacerbate homeowners’ climate-related costs.

Making Insurers Take on the Real Culprit of Climate Change

Insurance companies facilitate climate change by investing in fossil fuel assets and underwriting fossil fuel projects. However, the primary drivers of climate change are fossil fuels themselves, and it is the companies that produce and sell them that are principally responsible for the climate emergency. Instead of attempting to shift their exposure to California’s householders, insurers should divest from fossil fuel assets and cease underwriting fossil fuel projects. Insurers should then seek to recoup the costs of covering the damage from climate change-induced severe weather events from fossil fuel companies—not from the individual policyholders or the public at large.

A new bill, SB222, introduced into the California legislature, would make it easier to ensure that polluters pay for the climate-driven disasters befalling residents and upending the insurance industry. It specifically directs the FAIR Plan and incentivizes private insurers to pursue the parties responsible for climate change-induced weather events by standing in the shoes of policyholders to recoup the costs of losses, utilizing their right of subrogation. An insurer’s right of subrogation is the right to try to recover the amount of a claim or claims it paid out from another party that caused the insured loss(es).

The draft legislation directs the FAIR Plan to exercise its right of subrogation against “a responsible party for a climate disaster or extreme weather or other events attributable to climate change” if the benefits of subrogation outweigh the costs (as determined by an independent advisory body). If the FAIR Plan’s funds are exhausted and private insurance companies are being assessed, as is the case now, the bill also provides incentives to insurers to exercise the right of subrogation against a “responsible party” for a climate disaster. An insurer’s share of the assessment will be reduced by 10% if the insurer exercises its right of subrogation against a responsible party, but if it does not exercise its right of subrogation against a responsible party, it will be increased by 10%.

Finally, in addition to its right of subrogation, the bill provides that an insurer may seek damages against a responsible party for a climate disaster, extreme weather, or other events attributable to climate change.

Make no mistake: The responsible parties driving climate change are fossil fuel businesses.

Insurers Must Stop Fanning the Flames of Climate Risk

SB222 highlights that the real culprit of the climate emergency is the fossil fuel sector. But insurance companies are far from innocent bystanders. By supporting “business as usual” in the fossil fuel sector, insurance companies are facilitating the escalating climate crisis, causing climate change-induced events like the LA fires. When coupled with their representations around protecting policyholders from peril and their justifications for rate hikes and non-renewals, insurers’ conduct violates consumer protection laws and standards.

Insurers must no longer be permitted to invest large portions of premium income in fossil fuel companies and underwrite new oil and gas projects while charging some homeowners more for increased climate risk and simply turning others away. Before any further handouts are given to the insurance industry or any more concessions are made to preserve a profit-driven insurance model that may simply be untenable in the age of climate chaos, insurers must stop fanning the flames.

Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans so as to favor the insatiable greed and power of the Super-rich and giant corporations. The plutocrats are demanding more tax escapes, corporate welfare, and green lights for lawlessness.

No more excuses for the failing Democratic Party and its contracting out of electoral campaigns to profiteering corporate-conflicted political/media consulting firms

Progressive Congressional Democrats like Al Green, Elizabeth Warren, and Independent Bernie Sanders know exactly what needs to be done to Stop Dangerous Donald and Marauding Musk from their lawless, fascistic overthrow of our government and our Constitution.

Enough already with the Democrats’ confused disarray in responding to Tyrant Trump’s vicious, illegal destruction of critical federal programs for all Americans.

First and foremost, House and Senate Democrats can hold UNOFFICIAL public hearings on Capitol Hill, highlighting an all-time winning agenda supported by the citizenry and opposed by the Trumpsters. These are the long-overdue, immensely needed, and widely popular programs abandoned by the corporate Democrats who allowed the disastrous loss last November to the most corrupt, cruel, bigoted, and greedy GOP since its founding in 1854.

To see what I and Mark Green and two dozen civic leaders urged the Democrats to AUTHENTICALLY adopt in 2022 and 2024 (see winningamerica.net and my 2024 book titled Let’s Start the Revolution and The Inflection Election by Mark Green). The following are the election winners:

1. Raise the frozen $7.25 federal minimum wage to at least $15 per hour. (Twenty-five million workers would get a long-earned raise.)
2. Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for nearly 50 years for over 65 million retirees. Pay for this by lifting the income cap on the social security tax for the rich and super-rich (now at just $176,100).
3. Restore the child tax credit by sending $300 a month to over 60 million children, cutting child poverty nearly in half.
4. Pay for this and other necessities by raising taxes on the severely undertaxed rich, super-rich, and giant corporations (over half of which pay no federal income taxes). Eighty-five percent of Americans support this tax fairness reform.
5. Crack down on corporate crooks and swindlers eating away at the income of hard-pressed workers. We are talking big money stolen from consumers and workers. The polling support for this LAW AND ORDER reform is huge.

There are many more pro-people reforms shelved by the Democrats and their mendacious for-profit consultants. But these initiatives are the “Big Five” that draw overwhelming support from liberal and conservative voters, from Red and Blue States. An unstoppable coalition of political power over their legislators. (See my 2015 book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.)

The second parallel wave of UNOFFICIAL hearings could strongly rebut and reject dictator Trump’s cruel and mostly illegal Executive Order Dictates. In her largely feeble and dull response to Trump’s lengthy lying, deceptive, and distracting propaganda show before the U.S. Congress, Senator Elissa Slotkin used the weak words “reckless” and “chaotic” to describe Trump’s lying boasts. She should have called Trump “criminally insane” and “knowingly homicidal.” Trump’s vicious actions are harming many Americans and desperately poor people abroad.

The Trump/Musk Axis of Evil is knowingly leaving Americans defenseless by strip-mining programs dealing with pandemics, climate violence, toxic pollutants, unsafe air and surface transportation, and contaminated food, water, and air here at home. Abroad, cutting the lifelines of AIDS medicines, food supplements to near-starving children, and other emergency American help, long supported by previous Republican and Democratic Presidents, brings arrogant glee to these GOP gangsters. One new, obsolete aircraft carrier costs taxpayers more than the vital work of dismantled federal agencies.

Senator Schumer’s choice of Senator Slotkin (D-MI) to present the Party’s response shows that he has not learned anything from his self-inflicted losses to the GOP. It would have been far more popular and persuasive to have Senator Sanders or Senator Warren make the specific, devastating case against the vengeful, scapegoating, egomaniacal, delusional Trump.

Slotkin, a former CIA employee, used her 10 minutes of fame to be self-promoting and repeated the vague affirmations behind “the middle class” (of course, no mention of the vast poor), “national security,” and “economic security.” Like so many of the Democratic politicians, she just couldn’t get herself to be specific, as with the aforementioned Big Five, which, after all, are just updates of the successful New Deal policies under Roosevelt and Truman.

Letters decrying another lost opportunity for the Democrats to unmask the Trump Dump rising in Washington, DC poured into the newspapers. The Washington Post published many of them. One writer wanted this to be said: “Resign, Mr. President, Resign and you’ll hear a thunderous ovation.” A long-time Republican, Grant Grissom, took this a broader step forward by paying for a full-page ad in the New York Times on March 2, 2025, titled “A PLEA FOR DONALD TRUMP TO RESIGN” and presented cogent reasons for not waiting for Impeachment. (Grant Grissom: trumptimetoresign@gmail.com).

To conclude where I began: Democrats hold regular UNOFFICIAL hearings, which will get good mass media coverage and reach millions of registered voters who are increasingly indignant over what is being taken from them. If the Democrats stand with the fast-growing resistance by the people, they can stop the Trump madness and save what is left of our democracy.

As I stand here at the precipice of a cliff that spells career suicide as an academic physician, I pause to wonder how I got here.

A professor of medicine at a university known for its excellence, with over two decades of service and awards for my work, some of which I accepted and others I rejected for their performativity, I never put “health equity” in my job title and never got paid to specifically work for it. I got the sense early on that any career branded with the label “health equity” would require an allegiance I would never be prepared to give. Health equity is a part of the landscape of being a physician committed to health for all, just like source control of an infection or pain management. These are expectations of our professional duty.

Used as a poster child for health and justice in the academy when it was politically convenient, I am now facing intense repression for speaking up for health justice. As institutions across the US pursue broad criminalization of dissent, the flow of weapons to Israel and the mass murder of Palestinians continue unimpeded. The point of this repression is to silence me, to make an example out of me and to cast me as out of favor, “unprofessional” and an outlier.

My work is, always has been and always will be the moral center of gravity of medicine.

But my work is, always has been and always will be the moral center of gravity of medicine. What I did not realize when I embarked on this path that would lead me here to this point of no return was that this moral center was the most dangerous thing you could assert in academic medicine. Because what logically flows from this center is the following: the right of all people to have the opportunity to be healthy and the responsibility physicians carry to create the conditions for health to be possible–for all.

Of course, many people like to speak about these things, but no one actually likes to do anything about them. To act in accordance would require a reallocation of power from those who hold too much of it to those who hold very little. And when it comes to disease, the abundance or lack of power dictates who lives, who dies and how. To disrupt dynamics of power–or to even name them–would damage one’s personal aspirations, one’s reputation and one’s career.

As I shift my weight and peer over the edge of the cliff, squinting my eyes to try in vain to make out the distance to the bottom, I can hear the thousand shards of my shattered heart move. They poke me from the inside. The welling salt water stings my eyes. The images of doctors a half a world away pleading for humanity to care as their hospitals were bombed into oblivion. The sound of their voices as they sang their commitment, refusing to leave the bedside of their bedridden patients. We will remain. Their handwriting scrawled on the mangled white board was all that was left after Israeli forces bombed, shelled and raided their way through the sacred space of healing: We did what we could. Remember us.

Standing at the edge, feeling the breeze move the curls of my graying hair over my cheeks, I look over at my colleagues who are standing at a safe distance a ways back, looking at me sideways with a mix of consternation and pity. How did she get herself into this predicament? She has always been so different from the rest of us.

And the truth of the matter is—I am different.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. Not because I wanted the prestige. I never wanted to lead a department or be an expert of some esoteric medical condition. I am a generalist in every sense of the world. I love people and want to see us all thrive. I feel a kinship with the entire web of life. I am a part of the growing chorus of humans calling us back into the crucial and sacred relationships that keep us all healthy. I am passionate about teaching and sharing my vision for a world of health with the upcoming generation, a vision where physicians are whole, integrated and beloved members of the communities they serve and love. I have a knack for seeing the gaps and enjoy pushing myself and the field to extend its vast healing potential, in this particular moment of human, more than human and planetary sickness. I value the colleagues I work with who strive for excellence in our healing work together.

To learn this kind of medicine, I tuned my ear to hear the teachers who would show me how people live and how they die. Not in the hospital but in the streets.

But my vision of excellence is apparently controversial. My vision is one where systems-level interactions bring health, not just of individuals but of the whole. And to achieve this, our activity as healers must operate at both the individual and systems levels. This approach requires a different kind of training than we receive in medical school.

So I sought that training out, and that training continues to this day. To learn this kind of medicine, I tuned my ear to hear the teachers who would show me how people live and how they die. Not in the hospital but in the streets, in the alleys, in the railroad cars, in the slums, in the refugee camps and in water stops along dangerous desert border-crossings, in the interstitium of lived experience at the heart of empire. I had to learn to hear the voiceless and see the invisible–the undocumented, the unhoused, the gender queer, the Indigenous, the chronically ill and disabled, the non-English speakers, the Muslim, the Roma, the Traveller, the Black and brown, the imprisoned, the immunes–those in Roman times who were subsumed by the empire, but did not have the same rights as the conquerors. The people who fall in the cracks that were designed especially for them to fall into.

Since I came into my awareness of the world as the daughter of Punjabi immigrants growing up in California, where the original people are still healing from genocide and ongoing erasure, I have been a student of and participant in principled struggle. In medical school while I was studying the microbiology of urinary tract infections, I was simultaneously learning the histories of oppressed people, from their mouths, from their tender stories, from the aching memories of their loved ones who died before they had to. These living narratives shaped who I became as a physician more than any test score or career opportunity. I wanted to serve the communities who entrusted me with their lived knowledge, so that I would carry it to serve the benefit of all. I wanted to help understand what led to disparities in health and to heal what was hurting.

My own journey to this particular moment–where I am now staring over this edge with nothing to break my fall–was not a rapid one. For the most part, it was slow and measured. These past seven years though, the journey has accelerated.

The acceleration started when I began noticing how many Black patients were admitted to the hospital with emphysema, their lungs destroyed by some inflammatory molecule that ripped through the delicate pulmonary tissues. Typically we see this in smokers. But these people in their 30s and 40s had no smoking history or exposure. They all lived next to the Hunters Point shipyard, where the atom bombs were loaded onto ships before they were blown up over the Midway islands and eventually over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Traces of radioactive material persist in the soil today. The dust settles onto the window sills and bookshelves of the houses nearby. The people who used to live there were predominantly Black before the latest wave of “development,” as the tech industry took over the Gold Rush city once again in the early aughts.

The acceleration increased when Oscar Grant was executed point blank by a cop on New Year's Day at the Fruitvale station, Oakland. The ripple effects were felt all over the community and the world. It became louder still when San Francisco Mission homeboy Alex Nieto was shot 59 times by cops as he was eating a burrito, taking in the sunset over his beloved cityscape from a bench on Bernal Hill, just before his work shift started. The techies were moving back into San Francisco, and they wanted our homes and our parks. Coming from the predominantly melanin-scarce suburbs from across the US, they showed up in our predominantly melanated neighborhoods and called us “foreign”, “suspicious” and “threatening.” These same people developed the technology of the dreaded quadcopter drones, which are currently executing Palestinians sheltering in tents based on AI algorithms, which some suspect try to determine who may one day grow up to be a militant. No wonder so many children are being killed.

The tempo quickened as I accompanied the Frisco 5 on hunger strike, protesting the police killings of Indigenous, Black, Latino and poor people in the neighborhoods where invading tech workers wanted our housing. Rents exploded, evictions left elders unhoused and the trauma of the killings reverberated in every family. When I saw the effects of trauma in our communities, I started voicing how racism and police violence were threats to public health. I started putting my medical work more directly into the streets and into the hands of the people who needed it to create the conditions where their health could be a possibility. Getting shot by the police is an impediment to health for the whole community. Getting swept up like trash as our unhoused and poor communities experience, can cause devastating health consequences for all of us.

The pace of my steps picked up as I headed to Standing Rock, called by a California Native youth who asked me to support the medic response. He was concerned that the police were harming Lakota elders praying for their sacred water–Mnisose or the Missouri River. They were gathered to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from crossing their sovereign territory. The connections between extractive capitalism, the state violence required to uphold its agendas, the ongoing processes of colonialism, the impact of climate change—and ultimately our health—came into sharp focus. I watched lines of heavily armed police in military grade gear shooting rubber bullets into the faces and groins of unarmed, bare chested Native youth, praying at the water’s edge. I realized I could not call 911 for help, because these were the people firing the rounds.

It was around this time that two things happened simultaneously back at the university. Medical students from around the country were emailing me to work with me. They showed up at my university and said they came there explicitly because of my work. They wanted to be a physician who took on advancing health through challenging power. Simultaneously, the university administration started to call me in more regularly, first to try to offer “coaching” on my communication. But soon it was clear the goal was to silence me. This was six years ago.

When I spoke with my mentor, sociology professor Troy Duster, the grandson of Ida B Wells, he shared with me how many people disliked his grandmother speaking out about the lynchings in Jim Crow South–Black and white alike. We are living in similar times, except now, those of us decrying the bodies hanging in trees are cast as the racists. As we toasted Wells’ posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020 with lemonade outside in his front yard, Duster spoke to me about the critical importance of standing strong in our moral center to advance justice. When everyone tells you to shut up, that is exactly when you should speak up. Louder.

So I did.

In October 2023, I started communicating with Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a Palestinian British war surgeon who was working in Al-Ahli hospital when Israel bombed it, killing dozens of sheltering refugees. Receiving his communications daily at 3 a.m. for a span of 5 weeks, I was a witness to a genocide unfolding, told from the perspective of a colleague in an operating room across the world. He spoke of doing surgery by candlelight, running out of drinking water, not having enough anesthesia and using vinegar to clean wounds infected with the deadly Pseudomonas infection because Israel had cut off Gaza’s access to food, water, electricity and medicine. He spoke of thousands of people seeking shelter in the hospital hallways, sleeping on mats strewn across the floors of the emergency room, because their homes had been destroyed. They had assumed the hospital was safe. It wasn’t. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.

As I spoke up, my colleagues provided a list of excuses why they could not.

As I moved to share the urgency of his experiences with the medical community, with the institutions of medicine in the West, I was met with a stunning response. Everywhere around me were attempts to shut me up and to stop medical students, residents, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, lab technicians and other physicians from speaking about the avalanche of violence barreling down on Palestinians, landing squarely on the children.

As every hospital in Gaza was bombed, the acts of silencing intensified. As Israel kidnapped and tortured Palestinian healthcare workers, the repression grew. As multiple first-person accounts of doctors returning from Gaza reported sniper wounds to Palestinian toddlers’ heads, the criminal charges against protestors here racked up.

I spoke up and faced a torrent of racist repression in response. And as I spoke up, my colleagues provided a list of excuses why they could not.

It’s complicated.

I’m not knowledgeable and should not speak to things outside my area of expertise.

I don’t want to upset my supervisor–they’re my friend.

I have to get a letter from my boss for this grant next week and cannot risk it.

I have to apply for this fellowship and don’t want to ruin my chances.

I am afraid. I am not as courageous as you.

I have to protect my work in [insert whatever special program for marginalized population here] and if I speak up and I am punished, all those people will be left without the services I provide.

You have your strategy, and I don’t agree with it. I have mine.

The “You Do You” approach does not work for things that threaten our collective wellbeing. Genocide and the fascist logic that drives it—these are threats to all of humanity. For an excellent example of the stunning failure of the “You Do You” approach, look no further than the morbidity and mortality data for COVID-19. Physicians in academic medicine offered misdirected advice that led to the death and disabling of masses of Indigenous, Black, brown, chronically ill, elderly and poor people.

Individual calculated risk assessments sharpen the relief lines around power, as the powerful stay safe and the powerless die.

While community health workers were trying to shore up resources so that the people who are made most vulnerable by our society could be safe as each successive wave of virus hit, some healthcare experts offered a “calculated personal risk assessment” approach. As if a teenager spending a maskless night in a movie theater wouldn’t bring the virus home to their elder who would die. The elders who kept themselves sequestered safe at home eventually got sick and died—millions of them did.

With threats to our collective health, individual calculated risk assessments sharpen the relief lines around power, as the powerful stay safe and the powerless die. The only real move to address these threats with minimal harm is a collective approach where we insist upon the safety and health of all. Like COVID-19, the rise of fascism—where whole groups of people are oppressed, repressed or killed—is also a threat to collective health which requires this collective approach. Without it, we are overwhelmed, and many people will needlessly die. As they are right now, as Israel continues its genocide in Gaza.

When push comes to shove and the grotesque contours of power are exposed for all to see, doctors tend to side with the powerful. Not because they’re cold and unfeeling and not because they hold that much power themselves. While physicians are led to believe they are part of the elite as medicine’s hierarchies afford them some jurisdiction, they do not possess enough power to change the structures driving the disease patterns they spend their entire clinical lives trying to extinguish. Physicians have been educated in ways to maintain illiteracy around power. In academic medicine, doctors have tacitly and unknowingly pledged allegiance to power. We have been captured by a profession committed to power, not to life itself.

This list of my colleagues’ reasons to justify their silence as genocide rages in Gaza exposes something important. We cannot advance health equity if we are more concerned about our personal career or even the needs of one specific marginalized group than the collective wellbeing of all. To achieve health for all, physicians must be prepared to sacrifice the privilege we carry to confront the power that inexorably prevents that needle from moving forward. We must be prepared to commit career suicide. Without that commitment, we become performative cogs perpetuating the inequity of a system built on entrenched inequities.

No matter how one frames the silence of my colleagues—whether it is an act of self-preservation or a benevolent concern for a particular marginalized group they serve—all of it is under threat when we stay silent in the face of violent oppression. Because an injury to one group is an injury to all. As hard as some try to divide humanity, we are as connected by our threads of relations and duties to care as the mycelial web that extends its filamentous embrace around the entire globe, crossing every surface, even the seemingly barren ones.

This list of my colleagues' reasons to justify their silence as genocide rages in Gaza exposes something important.

So when Abu Sitta called me with the details unfolding in Gaza before he went to the International Court of Justice and offered the same testimony there, with my duty to collective care and my commitment to health for all, what else could I have done?

As I look over the edge of the cliff, dizzy with gravity’s coaxing of my semilunar canals, I take note of how much lighter I feel now knowing that this is the only path I knew how to take as an academic physician with a daily practice in the struggle for health and dignity. If this is its natural conclusion, so be it. Healing sometimes requires these transformative painful moments. We push through the skin to lance the abscess so the pus can escape. We call this source control. Without that action, the infection will fester, potentially grow and overwhelm the body’s ability to keep it walled off.

I take this all into account as I inch closer to the edge, with nothing to catch me now but faith. Faith that my commitment to humanity and serving health for all is more important than any career I could possibly pursue. Faith that there are times in history where it is more important to take a stand than to sit and be quiet. And understanding that in those moments, those who take a stand are often unpopular, hated and dragged. Faith that my ancestors have my back and that they knew this moment was coming. They prepared me, because they too had been dragged in their struggle against colonial oppression. Faith in knowing this: some things are worth losing for the greater things we gain.

I fix my gaze on the radical horizon where all may find the possibility of health.

I take the final step and catch my breath.

Earth gives way to air.

With water in my eyes and fire in my heart—I fall.

My mother was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was nine years old. She thought the initials for the Nazi Labor Front (Deutesche Arbeitsfront) stood for German Monkey Front (Deutsche Affefront) and, because she was dyslexic, she sounded it out. Her mother Emmy was not allowed to be with Eva while she was questioned about who had told her to say what she had. Afterwards Emmy was told if the child was not out of the country in 24 hours the entire family would be arrested.

Eva was put on a train and spent the next three years in a boarding school on an Italian mountaintop until finally reuniting with her family in Holland in 1939. There the American Quakers helped get the family, including her father Fritz (who had survived detention and torture at Buchenwald concentration camp), onto the last ship to America before the Nazis invaded.

My mother was a difficult, emotionally fractured person throughout her life in part, I came to believe, because of her childhood trauma and family separation that she unconsciously blamed on herself. I thought of her during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term when his migrant family separation policy left children locked away from their parents, some separated for more than three years.

The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.

I grew up a middle-class American but, given my parents’ backgrounds, believing that history can knock the struts out from under you at any time. While my mother had escaped the Nazis, my father, his sister, and mother had escaped a massacre in their village in Ukraine, 3 of 20 hiding in an attic while hundreds more were slain in the streets and in their homes. Ukraine still bleeds as Donald Trump cozies up to its latest invaders, attacks its leader, and demands its rare minerals.

My mother died in 1974, my father a few years later. In 2016, right after Trump was elected for the first time, my Aunt Renate, 89, was one of those people who actually made plans to move to Canada, to a small town in the province of Saskatchewan. She wasn’t ready to live with the fear she’d experienced as a child. Leukemia caught up with her before she could make the move. She died at 90.

Before the 2016 election I’d convinced Renate to write an article on her childhood memories of the election in which Adolf Hitler came to power, even after his attempt to stage a coup. It read in part:

In 1932, the German people went to the polls to choose between Hitler and President Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. My parents were afraid to vote in their small home community where the citizens all knew each other by name. They feared reprisal because they could easily have been identified as anti-Nazi voters. As a family, we drove to a distant, larger town where my mother and father voted.

My two sisters and I waited in the car. We did not speak. We were terrified without knowing why. An atmosphere of danger and secrecy held us in its grip as we watched the Nazi guards in their brown uniforms and swastika armbands march up and down in front of the voting booth. As Jews, this was the last time they voted—to make their voices heard as German citizens.

I vividly remember the first time I voted as an American citizen in 1948—Thomas Dewey versus Harry Truman…After I closed the black curtain of the booth and punched the buttons, I had to pull a lever to record my vote. I was awed by what this simple gesture implied: I was responsible to my country, to the world, for influencing the outcome of the election. In the privacy of the curtained space I burst into tears, grateful that I was permitted to record my opinion without fear of retribution and that my vote would be counted among millions to determine the political future which American citizens would accept.

Until 2020 that is, when many U.S. citizens were convinced not to accept the outcome of a free and fair election. Four years later a slim majority put Donald Trump back in power despite his attempted coup. Today the Quisling-like compliance of a Republican Congress unwilling to assert its constitutional role and the potential remolding of the FBI, CIA, and the military (starting with the unjustified firing of the Coast Guard commandant on Trump’s second day back in power and now a wider purge at the Pentagon) bodes poorly for the so-called “guardrails” of democracy.

In addition, the total amnesty of the rioters who took over the Capitol on January 6, 2021, demonstrating their willingness to use violence on his behalf, gives another clear indication of how things could rapidly devolve under Trump 2.0. Two generations of family history has convinced me that a deeply divided Weimer-like democracy can be destroyed from the inside out, even one that has been expanding its franchise of freedom for more than two centuries.

In 1968 I was in the streets of New York protesting a Madison Square Garden rally for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who was running for president as an openly racist third-party candidate. It was a wild riot scene that as a 17-year-old had me enthralled. When I confronted my mother’s worried fury later that night, I spoke thoughtlessly. In the 1930s, I said, if young people had gone into the streets of Germany, maybe Hitler wouldn’t have come to power.

Seven years later, when my mother was in the hospital after surgery for lung cancer and knew she was dying, she reminded me of that night, and how I’d hurt her to the bone. “I was only nine. There was nothing I could do,” she said through her tears.

My mother was too young to resist fascism when it enveloped and ultimately destroyed her country and many others. The threat in our country seems to be a uniquely American brand of celebrity fascism mixed with a tech-bro junta of uber-rich rocket-owning oligarchs.

But America’s last best generation of antifascists—including my parents who both joined the U.S. Army in World War II—defeated a similar though more advanced threat on the beaches of Normandy and beyond. Even if my mom was too young at nine, I’m not too old, even in my 70s, to join with my fellow citizens in mobilizing to again stop the dark threat, if not once-and-for-all, at least this time in America.

Lee Zeldin was full of pablum in his January Senate confirmation hearing to run the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. A former member of Congress from Long Island, New York, with scant regulatory experience, Zeldin promised to “defer to the research of the scientists” on whether climate change made oceans more acidic. In even more laudatory language, he said he would “defer to the talented scientists,” on whether Earth had hit thresholds for runaway climate change.

He said he “would welcome an opportunity to read through all the science and research” on pesticides and search for “common sense, pragmatic solutions” on environmental issues. Claiming there was “no dollar large or small that can influence the decisions that I make,” Zeldin went so far as to say, “It is my job to stay up at night, to lose sleep at night, to make sure that we are making our air and our water cleaner.”

It was all a lie. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said Zeldin was considering firing 65% of EPA’s staff, which would amount to nearly 10,000 of the agency’s 15,000 workers. The White House later issued a clarification—as if it made any difference—that Zeldin was “committed” to slashing 65% of the agency’s budget. The EPA issued a statement saying President Trump and Secretary Zeldin “are in lockstep.”

When Lee Zeldin promised at his confirmation hearing that he would “defer” to talented scientists on climate change data, it was a mere six days after NOAA and many other weather agencies around the world confirmed that Earth had its hottest year yet in 2024.

Also last week, the news broke that Zeldin is urging the White House to strike down the 2009 EPA finding that global warming gases endanger public health and the environment. That finding, made under the Obama administration, girded federal efforts to reduce vehicle and industrial emissions. The finding, long a legal target for climate deniers, has so far held up, even in an ultra-conservative Supreme Court, but that has not stopped the administration from attacking it. Project 2025, the blueprint organized by the Heritage Foundation to guide this White House, calls for an “update” to the endangerment finding. Leading climate denier and former Trump transition adviser Steve Milloy told The Associated Press last week that without the finding, “everything EPA does on climate goes away.”

This is after Zeldin told senators in written answers for his confirmation that he planned to “learn from EPA career staff about the current state of the science on greenhouse gas emissions and follow all legal requirements.” Instead, Zeldin has scientists in a state of bewilderment. In one fell month, he has every employee looking over their shoulder, fearing the dismissal of their work or the tap of outright dismissal.

Zeldin’s latest “lockstep” actions cap an already-breathtaking first month in running the EPA.

He has launched an illegal effort to claw back $20 billion in EPA clean energy funding significantly targeted for disadvantaged communities. He placed nearly 170 workers in the office of Environmental Justice on administrative leave and oversaw the firing of about 400 probationary staff (although some have momentarily been brought back after public outcry).

Zeldin has begun a rollback of Biden administration energy efficiency and water conservation regulations for home appliances and fixtures, and is asking Congress to repeal waivers for California to phase out new, gasoline-only vehicle sales and stricter emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks. Many other states in recent years have decided they would follow California’s standards, as they are allowed to under the Clean Air Act. Combined, these states add up to 40% of the automobile market in the United States.

There are surely many more attempts to come that will turn back the clock on environmental protection.

An EPA Led by Industry Apologists

Zeldin’s EPA includes a rogue’s gallery from President Trump’s first term.

Returning to the EPA in top spots for chemical regulation are Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva. Both formerly served on the American Chemistry Council, the top lobbying arm of chemical manufacturers, and Dekleva spent more than three decades at DuPont, one of the most notorious companies for burying the dangers of PFAS.

In the first Trump administration, Beck was at the center of the suppression on science to resist the most stringent regulation or bans on carcinogenic chemicals such as trichloroethylene, PFAS, methylene chloride, and asbestos. She was also reported to have helped in burying the strongest possible health and safety guidelines to help communities reopen during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dekleva was accused during her first stint in President Trump’s EPA of pressuring employees to approve new chemicals and colluding with industry to weaken the Toxic Substances Control Act.

The nominee to be Zeldin’s assistant administrator, David Fotouhi, is another returnee who was at the center of the first Trump administration’s efforts to strip wetlands protections. When not inside the EPA, Fotouhi has a long record defending industries in legal battles over standards or contamination lawsuits about toxic chemicals, such as asbestos, PFAS, PCBs, and coal ash.

Holding high-level positions in the Office of Air and Radiation are Abigale Tardif and Alex Dominguez. Tardif lobbied for the oil and petrochemical industry and was a policy analyst for the Koch-funded network Americans for Prosperity. Dominguez lobbied for the American Petroleum Institute, which opposed the vehicle pollution standards of the Biden administration.

Aaron Szabo has been nominated to be assistant secretary for Air and Radiation. Szabo was a contributing consultant to the Project 2025 chapter on the EPA that recommends sharply curtailing the agency’s monitoring of global warming gases and other pollutants and eliminating the Office for Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.

Other recent EPA appointees who also contributed to Project 2025 (which President Trump disavowed during the presidential campaign) are Scott Mason and Justin Schwab. Steven Cook, a former lobbyist for plastics, chemicals, and oil refining, and another veteran of the first Trump administration, is also returning.

Zeldin may be inexperienced at regulation, but none of the above are. Kyle Danish, a partner at Van Ness Feldman, a consulting firm for energy clients, told The New York Times, “This group is arriving with more expertise in deploying the machinery of the agency, including to unravel regulations from the prior administration. They all look like they graduated one level from what they did in the first Trump administration.”

Same Playbook at Other Agencies

Other agencies responsible for addressing climate change pollution have also quickly deployed the machinery of environmental destruction.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memorandum ordering a review of the fuel economy standards of the Biden administration, claiming without evidence that the standards would destroy “thousands” of jobs and “force the electrification” of the nation’s auto fleets. This is despite the agency’s own analysis showing the rules would save consumers $23 billion in fuel costs and result in annual health costs benefits of $13 billion from reduced air pollution.

Secretary Duffy also issued a memorandum canceling the Department of Transportation’s plans to address environmental justice in low-income populations and communities of color, climate change, and resilience polices for department assets and the department’s Equity Council. Again, no facts were offered as to why communities disproportionately beset with pollution and pollution-related diseases should be excluded from protection. He was just following President Trump’s Orwellian executive order that aims to wipe any consideration of race, gender, climate, equity, and disproportionate impacts from federal programs.

Over in the Interior Department, Secretary Doug Burgum issued a memorandum directing all his assistant secretaries to provide action plans that “suspend, revise, or rescind” more than two dozen regulations. The obvious goal is to plunder more public land and water for private profit for the fossil fuel and mining industries. Many of those regulations to be revised or killed involve endangered wildlife and plants; landscape and conservation health; the Migratory Bird Treaty; and accounting for the benefits to public health, property, and agriculture of reducing climate-related pollution.

In a recent interview on Fox News, Secretary Burgum said he was “completely embracing” the massive shrinking of the federal workforce by the Department of Government Efficiency, a cruel act that means he is just fine with DOGE’s 2,000 job cuts at Interior, including 1,000 in the chronically understaffed National Park Service, which has a $23.3 billion backlog for deferred maintenance.

Climate Mockery at Department of Energy

And then we have the reported layoff of between 1,200 and 2,000 workers at the Energy Department, now run by Chris Wright, a former CEO of one of the nation’s largest fracking companies. In President Trump’s Cabinet, Secretary Wright is the most blunt in dismissing the effects of the climate crisis. In 2023, he said the “the hype over wildfires is just hype to justify” climate policies. He said, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition.”

He has doubled down on his rhetoric during his first month in office. Wright told a conservative policy conference in February—without evidence—that net zero goals for carbon emissions by 2050 were “sinister” and “lunacy.” Wright also went on Fox Business in February to say that climate change is “nowhere near the world’s biggest problem today, not even close.”

Despite all the evidence already unfolding that climate change is a factor in the increasing number of billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S., and despite a major 2023 study projecting that 5 million lives a year could be saved around the world by phasing out fossil fuels and their pollution, Wright said a warmer planet with more carbon dioxide is “better for growing plants.” Never mind the communities living in the crosshairs of contamination and climate catastrophe or conservationists who are concerned anew about endangered species.

Wright spent his first month in office postponing Biden-era energy efficiency standards for home appliances, claiming without evidence that they have “diminished the quality” of them. His office announced the canceling of $124 million in contracts, many of them connected to diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives. He said those contracts were “adding nothing of value to the American people.” When asked if he wanted fossil fuels to “come back big time,” Wright responded, “Absolutely.”

Behind the Pablum of Confirmation Hearings Was an Iron Fist

And over in the Commerce Department, the 6,700 scientists and 12,000 staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are reeling from the recent first wave of hundreds of layoffs. Many more job losses are threatened, with sources telling major media outlets that the Trump administration and new Secretary Howard Lutnick are considering a 50% cut in staff and a 30% cut in the agency’s budget.

It is irrelevant to the Trump administration that NOAA is a bedrock agency that protects the public with its real-time tracking of dangerous storms. It is at the center of long-term federal analysis on climate, the toll in property and life of global warming, the health of our oceans, and the state of our fisheries. Instead of being placed on a pedestal for this central role, NOAA is as much a bullseye for polluters and plunderers as the EPA. Project 2025 calls for the breaking up of NOAA because it “has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

Lutnick, a billionaire Wall Street financier, told senators in his January confirmation hearing that he had “no interest” in dismantling NOAA. The firings suggest the dismantling has begun.

When Lee Zeldin promised at his confirmation hearing that he would “defer” to talented scientists on climate change data, it was a mere six days after NOAA and many other weather agencies around the world confirmed that Earth had its hottest year yet in 2024. That was obviously lost on him. In just one month, the only demonstrated deference of Zeldin, Burgum, Wright, Duffy, and Lutnick is to President Trump’s mantra of “drill, baby, drill” and the deregulation of toxic industries.

Left in the wake are demonized and demoralized federal scientists.

In his address to Congress this week, President Trump boasted about ending “environmental restrictions that were making our country far less safe and totally unaffordable.” Hopefully it will not be one hurricane, one contamination, or one disappearing species too many to realize we cannot afford to be without those scientists. We will be far less safe without them.