Even as President Trump’s unpopular wars and perceived disregard for a flagging economy weigh on the GOP’s 2026 midterm prospects, critics argue that the risk-averse, corporatist-dominated Democratic Party has been slow to propose bold, transformative changes on key voter issues.

Democrats’ early policy blueprint group, Project 2029, recently unveiled its first major proposal—”Kids Over Clicks”—which calls for banning social media for children under 16, stronger privacy protections, and addressing mental health impacts of tech and AI on youth. While this aligns with bipartisan efforts on kids’ online safety, skeptics note the relative absence of equally prominent, detailed plans so far on major economic pain points like healthcare affordability or broad job growth amid ongoing inflation and war-related pressures.

This approach reflects a cautious strategy that prioritizes achievable, consensus issues while larger structural reforms remain underdeveloped heading into the post-2026 cycle.

The post Roots of the Democratic Party appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

More than 3,800 people have died in Venezuela’s June 24 double earthquake, with 16,700 injured, according to current government reports. A medical crisis has emerged for thousands of survivors, and 17,800 are homeless.

There are heart-wrenching reports of people trying to dig survivors out of the rubble with their hands, with dozens of children suffering amputations because they could not be reached in time.

At a time like this, Venezuelans and the international community shouldn’t have to fight for an end to the sanctions that have destroyed the nation’s economy and that hobble its recovery, nor for the country to have access to the billions of dollars worth of assets that belong to it. But we do, because the role of sanctions and frozen assets has received far too little public attention.

From 2012 to 2020, Venezuela suffered what is likely the most severe economic contraction in a depression that has occurred without a war. Data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) show a 74 percent decline in its GDP during that time. This is a loss of income about three times larger than what people here in the United States experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This was not a natural disaster like the earthquake, but a man-made one. IMF data show that 88 percent of this loss took place following US economic sanctions that began in 2015. The destruction accelerated with the Trump sanctions, starting in 2017, that cut the country off from most international finance and then from the vast majority of its foreign exchange earnings. These shocks would have pushed almost any country into a severe crisis, and that’s exactly what happened, demonstrating to the world how sanctions really could destroy an economy.

As a result, Venezuela was already facing a humanitarian crisis before the earthquakes hit. According to data from the European Commission, before June 2026 there were 7.9 million people (of a population of 28.5 million) who were in need of humanitarian assistance. Forty percent of Venezuelans were facing moderate to severe food insecurity, and about 56 percent of the population was in extreme poverty. Eighty-six percent were dependent on contaminated water sources.

Nearly half of Venezuela’s doctors, and many health professionals and other skilled workers — including 200,000 teachers — left the country as the economy fell apart.

A study I coauthored with Francisco Rodríguez and Silvio Rendón, with results published last July in The Lancet Global Health, estimated that broad unilateral sanctions like these — the vast majority of which are imposed by the United States — cause an additional 564,000 deaths annually. This is comparable to the lives lost worldwide due to armed conflict. A majority of these deaths were estimated to be among children under 5 years old.

The death rate among Venezuelans grew throughout Venezuela’s depression, with more than 100,000 additional deaths during the years (2015–20) of the economic collapse that had sanctions.

Venezuela has crucial resources that it is not being allowed to access. The United States and Europe are blocking the nation from more than $11 billion dollars that Venezuela should legally have. About $4 billion is sitting at the Bank of England; it was frozen there from Venezuela’s Central Bank as part of a regime change effort in 2019 led by the United States. Of course the UK has no right to seize and hold these assets that belong to Venezuela.

About $4.5 billion is at the IMF in the form of international assets (called Special Drawing Rights), Venezuela’s share of an allocation made to member countries in 2021. Access was blocked as part of pressure for a regime change, but the United States removed the president of Venezuela in January and has since recognized the current government of Venezuela. The IMF followed. But it is not clear how much of these assets Caracas will be able to use, and when. Venezuelans need this money — and also the gold that the UK is holding — right now in order to save lives, avoid the spread of disease, and rebuild.

There are some billions of dollars more that are being held by the Trump administration, despite an executive order stating that these funds “constitute property of the Government of Venezuela.” This is cash from the sale of Venezuela’s oil, over which the Trump administration has taken control.

The United Nations now estimates that the post-earthquake reconstruction of Venezuela will cost about $37 billion, which is an enormous sum for this country, 33 percent of current GDP. Economists and other scholars have called for the lifting of Venezuela’s “ongoing economic and financial sanctions, asset freezes” and, via a debt jubilee, “onerous debt burdens.”

An end to the economic sanctions is needed. The US Treasury has issued a license for four months that allows for earthquake relief, but that is not nearly enough. The Central Bank in Caracas is still under sanctions and these will continue to interfere with the post-earthquake recovery.

It is also well-documented that important financial transactions and even relief work can be prevented because of what is called “overcompliance.” Banks, financial institutions, and other companies avoid transactions because of real and perceived risk from sanctions, including the ambiguity of the US executive orders that authorize them.

The largest life-saving action in the near future of post-earthquake Venezuela will come from getting the biggest players in the world — the United States along with its European partners — to stop blocking access to Venezuela’s billions of dollars of assets. And to stop causing further damage and loss of life through economic sanctions.

That is how these sanctions actually work. They target and punish the civilian population in pursuit of a political goal. Once relatively rare, they have become a “tool of first resort,” according to the US Treasury — probably because the resulting fatalities are mostly unseen.

But more people each year, including members of Congress, are recognizing the economic violence, collective punishment, and lethal human consequences of these sanctions and are pushing back. As the illegality and human toll of these sanctions become more widely known, the US government will be increasingly forced to abandon them.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.

Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.

Today, we’re there.

Why do you think Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin our country?

On the morning of June 10, 2026, the FBI, together with an ensemble of local and state police departments, including the University of Michigan Police Department, conducted a series of simultaneous raids and arrests in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin in spectacular militarized fashion. The operation targeted eight individuals engaged in Palestine solidarity activism at the University of Michigan.

That afternoon, FBI director Kashyap Patel announced that the targeted individuals “engaged in a coordinated campaign of violent, criminal acts seeking to pressure University of Michigan leaders and other businesses in the Eastern District of Michigan to cut off all ties with Israel.” The alleged violent, criminal acts in question? Property damage. The coordinated campaign in question? Per their indictment, “using encrypted messages, social media, and overseas collaboration platforms […] [and] the internet and social media to broadcast their message.”

To be clear, the Michigan Eight are not being charged with property damage or vandalism. Instead, they are facing charges of conspiracy to transmit a threat, conspiracy to tamper with a witness, and destruction of property to prevent seizure. Less than a week after the raids against the Michigan Eight, 15 individuals were similarly indicted in Minnesota on various conspiracy charges for their participation in community activism and mutual aid in the context of Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) Operation Metro Surge that saw 2,000 ICE agents deployed in Minnesota, leading to over 3,000 arrests, two protesters shot by ICE agents, and one individual dead in ICE custody. The conspiracy charges faced by the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15 carry a maximum sentence of 5-20 years and, when there are multiple counts of it, defendants face potentially decades in prison. A week after the Minnesota 15 indictments, anti-ICE protesters were sentenced to between 30 and 100 years in prison after being convicted of various conspiracy charges related to protest activity at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas.

These are just three out of several other recent cases involving social movements and conspiracy charges. What links them is not the recurrence of some crime called “conspiracy,” but the conversion of ordinary political association into proof of unlawful intent. Conspiracy charges are among the most common charges brought against social movements precisely because they represent an extremely broad, far-reaching, and powerful tool of the state. You do not need to have taken any action, nor do you need to know the other alleged co-conspirators to be found guilty. Federal prosecutors simply have to establish that at least one alleged conspirator has taken an overt (legal or illegal) act toward the alleged plan. Needless to say, virtually anything can be claimed to be an overt act.

The only conspiracy related to the Michigan Eight or the Minnesota 15 is the one that has been constructed by the federal government.

Aside from formal charges of conspiracy, there is also the more diffuse concept of conspiracy that the prosecution in these cases use more generally to paint activists as dangerous, terroristic individuals engaged in a plot against the state. For example, during the detention hearing on June 12, 2026, for four of the Michigan Eight, one of the federal prosecutors, Margaret M. Smith, assistant United States attorney at the Department of Justice, made several references to the defendants being part of a revolution and a “revolution organization.” This language, as we shall see, has a long association with conspiracy charges. It does more than just describe the alleged beliefs of defendants. It represents the bridge by which belief, affiliation, and collective organization can be made to stand in for actual evidence of particular criminal acts.

But what does the nebulous concept of conspiracy mean and why does the government keep using it and who is it meant to target? The late Michael Parenti once noted that “conspiracy means to collude together in secrecy for what are potentially illegal or immoral ends and [the ruling elites] do this all the time and they talk about the necessity of it and they even give it a name, they call it national security.” Indeed, the only conspiracy related to the Michigan Eight or the Minnesota 15 is the one that has been constructed by the federal government. In fact, across more than a century of American history, the recurring pattern that has shaped the state’s response to dissent and protest has been the tendency to treat collective organization itself as a crime. The First Amendment may protect the freedom of speech and assembly as the very conditions of democratic politics, but conspiracy charges have long made these supposed rights conditional.

The Long History of Conspiracy Charges

The state has a long history of using the concept and charge of conspiracy as a weapon against social movements that have sought to expand democratic freedoms. We must therefore place the particular case of the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15 in a longer history that involves the Haymarket Trial (1886-1887), the Espionage Act (1917), the Smith Act (1940), the Anti-Riot Act (1968), RICO (1970), and more contemporary post-9/11 developments such as the Patriot Act (2001). These historical moments represent the cumulative expansion in what the state can make conspiracy mean: from attributing responsibility for an unidentified act to an entire radical milieu, to treating speech as dangerous, group membership as suspicious, mundane logistical organization as evidence of criminal intent, and decentralized movements as racketeering enterprises. While, in case of the Michigan Eight, the targets are Palestine solidarity activists, and while in the case of the Minnesota 15, the targets are anti-ICE organizers, the tools that have been assembled and are still being expanded and perfected can and will be applied to other groups. What is at stake here is no less than ability to collectively organize to create a better and more just world and to resist oppression.

In 1941, the legal scholar Albert J. Harno wrote that, due to its “elasticity” and “vague boundaries,” the concept of conspiracy “presents serious potential dangers of abuse.” Only, there is nothing “potential” about its dangers. From some of its earliest applications right to the last two weeks, the charge of conspiracy has been the bane of organized labor and other broad social movements that the state has sought to repress. One facet of the seemingly endless elasticity of the concept of conspiracy relates to the category of unindicted conspirators. In the case of the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15, this term is constantly invoked in the indictments. Aside from the fact that unindicted conspirators cannot testify on behalf of the defense, prosecutors can introduce the out-of-court statements of unindicted conspirators in court as evidence against the defendants without these statements considered hearsay. Prosecutors can thus introduce texts, emails, phone calls, et cetera, involving unindicted conspirators as evidence against the defendants even if the defendants were not a direct party to these communications. Moreover, the shadow of not knowing whether one is or is not an unindicted conspirator introduces even more fear into social movements. This uncertainty is a feature of conspiracy law and one of its political effects, thus extending the coercive reach of an indictment beyond the courtroom.

Conspiracy and Labor Repression

Nineteenth-century labor cases show where this logic first acquired its legal form and political function. Labor Studies scholar Risa Lieberwitz notes that the charge of conspiracy has historically “provided a powerful weapon against groups advocating political and social change [and] the labor movement [in particular] was the target of many criminal conspiracy prosecutions during the 19th century, beginning with the Philadelphia Cordwainers’ Case of 1806, which was both the first criminal conspiracy trial in the United States, and the first recorded labor case.” If the Cordwainers’ Case demonstrated that workers coming together to demand higher wages could be a criminal conspiracy, the trial of the Haymarket Eight showed how conspiracy could make an entire political milieu culpable for an act that the state could not directly attribute to any one defendant.

On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown during a labor demonstration at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Till this day, no one can say for certain who threw that bomb. During the trial, prosecutors could not prove who threw it nor prove that the defendants had planned the bombing. They could not even, in some cases, prove that they had been present when the bomb was thrown. What they could prove was that the Haymarket Eight had given speeches, written articles, edited newspapers, belonged to radical organizations, and broadly advocated for a social revolution.

The concept of conspiracy was what allowed the prosecution to transform this into evidence of collective responsibility for the bombing. The prosecution did not need to identify the bomber; it only needed to argue that the Haymarket Eight had been part of a conspiracy to create the conditions in which such a bombing became likely. In other words, the defendants were guilty of belonging to and contributing to a radical workers’ milieu that the state had defined as dangerous. Haymarket helped established what would become a recurring pattern where membership in particular groups (whether well-defined or as vague as “antifa”) and speech (like posting messages on social media) and acts (like organizing a meeting or using the internet) can become evidence of a conspiracy.

Conspiracy, Speech, and Political Organizations

Haymarket thus supplied the basic argument that the state would repeatedly adapt: When direct proof of individual action was absent, prosecutors could substitute much fuzzier ideas. World War I expanded this basic framework under the sign of national security. The federal government used the Espionage Act of 1917 against socialists, labor organizers, anti-war activists, and others who opposed conscription or otherwise criticized the war. During this time, the Department of Justice conducted a series of mass raids and arrests, collectively known as the Palmer Raids (1919–1920), in more than 30 cities and towns, targeting thousands of individuals, particularly Italian-American and Jewish-American socialists, the so-called “hyphenated Americans” that President Woodrow Wilson railed against, warning that “any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court unanimously held that the First Amendment did not protect Charles Schenck, who had distributed anti-draft and anti-war flyers to draft-age men, from prosecution under the Espionage Act precisely because, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded, "The words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that otherwise lawful speech could be punished if it was thought likely to obstruct or encourage resistance to government aims.

In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court did not expressly overrule Schenck v. United States, but it effectively superseded Schenck's clear-and-present-danger standard and, on the surface, introduced a more expansive interpretation of the First Amendment, holding that advocacy of illegal action cannot be punished unless it is “directed towards inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Yet, the so-called Brandenburg test still reveals the subjective nature of, well, law in general, its interpretation, and its enforcement. In this case, the key subjective terms are “imminent” and “likely.” Whether an action is imminent and whether speech is likely to produce an action requires a level of guesswork that is wholly reminiscent of the trial of the Haymarket Eight.

Described as a “prison for ideas” by the National Committee to Win Amnesty for the Smith Act Victims in 1954, the Smith Act of 1940 would extend this logic within the context of the Cold War. Among other things, the Smith Act criminalized “knowingly or willingly advocate, abet, advise, or teach the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing any government in the United States by force or violence.” In the late 1940s and 1950s, communists in particular were prosecuted under the law, not because they had launched an armed insurrection, or even taken material steps toward an armed insurrection, but because they belonged to organizations that taught Marxist theory and advocated for communist revolution.

Like their predecessors in 1886 who did not have to prove that the Haymarket Eight had thrown the bomb, prosecutors in these cases did not have to prove that communists had entered into an agreement to commit a crime (the most basic definition of conspiracy), but that the Communist Party itself was a criminal enterprise. The state did not need to demonstrate that any communists had agreed to carry out a specific unlawful act in the near future. Instead, their membership in the party and their ideological beliefs were sufficient proof of criminal liability. Charisse Burden-Stelly summarizes it well, writing that “membership in the CPUSA automatically meant conspiracy of insurrection.”

Conspiracy and Protest

In the context of popular protests and anti-war mobilization, the Anti-Riot Act of 1968 made it a federal offense to cross state lines or use interstate facilities with the intent to incite, organize, or encourage a riot. If the Smith Act treated membership as evidence of insurrectionary conspiracy, the Anti-Riot Act adapted the same logic to the mass movements of the 1960s by treating travel, communication, planning, and assembly as evidence of an intention to produce disorder. The Chicago Seven would be the first to be prosecuted under the Anti-Riot Act and charged with conspiracy to incite a riot and crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot. Again, we see the danger in the elasticity of the key terms of the act that allowed the federal government to frame lawful activities taken to organize a protest, in this case at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as evidence of unlawful intent, namely, to incite a riot.

On February 18, 1970, seven defendants were acquitted on conspiracy charges, two were acquitted on all charges, and the remaining five were convicted of travelling across state lines with intent to incite a riot and sentenced to five years in prison. Over two years later, those convictions would be overturned by an appeals court panel that found numerous errors made by the judge. Yet, the damage to the defendants’ lives and to the broader public had been done. Even when defendants are acquitted or have their convictions overturned, conspiracy charges succeed in the ideological work for which they are perhaps best designed, leaving behind a public narrative in which dissent and protest are not cornerstones of democracy, but dangerous, hidden plots conducted by shadowy figures.

Even unsuccessful prosecutions impose a real material and mental cost on defendants and, more generally, they impose a heavy cost on the public at large, forcing all of us to consider whether participation in collective protest or forms of dissent may expose us to repression.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act of 1970 would give an even more expansive tool for prosecutors to bind heterogeneous individuals and acts under the label of a single, criminal enterprise. RICO has increasingly been used by federal and state prosecutors to target labor unions and broad social movements. The statute’s breadth gives prosecutors considerable flexibility in defining a criminal enterprise and explaining how otherwise separate acts fit together.

In September 2023, Georgia prosecutors brought a sweeping state RICO indictment against dozens of activists associated with opposition to the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, commonly known as Cop City. The indictment alleged that a broad protest movement constituted a criminal enterprise and cited a wide range of activities, including alleged acts of property destruction, distribution of literature, mutual aid, reimbursements, fundraising, communications among activists, and protests and demonstrations.

Prosecutors used the flimsiest of evidence to rope even more people into this “conspiracy” as “co-conspirators.” Signing a petition was enough to get a visit by the police and having mud on one’s shoes in a forest was taken as evidence of participation in alleged acts of property damage at a construction site. The significance of the Stop Cop City case lies less in the specific allegations, but in the indictment’s construction of a broad social movement as a unified, organized criminal enterprise. Social movements are almost by definition heterogenous and decentralized. They always comprise individuals with different goals, tactics, and levels of commitment.

The dismissal of the RICO charges against the defendants in December 2025 does not make this case any less troubling (the state could refile charges or repeal the dismissal). On the contrary, the dismissal sharpens the stakes of indictments like this. While the dismissal shows how weak the charges were in the first place, the state successfully punished the defendants. Even unsuccessful prosecutions impose a real material and mental cost on defendants and, more generally, they impose a heavy cost on the public at large, forcing all of us to consider whether participation in collective protest or forms of dissent may expose us to repression. From this perspective, it does not matter much that a court may eventually reject prosecutorial overreach when the threat of prosecution may shape the way we behave.

Responding to Repression with Trust and Solidarity

One lesson that we can learn from the historical continuity between each of these episodes is that movements for economic and racial justice, movements against wars and imperialism, and anti-fascism as a concept (through the targeting of “antifa”) have all been described, in different moments, as threats to public order. In each case, the state and its prosecutors have been able to portray individuals participating in these movements as public enemies. The language of conspiracy is especially useful in this process because it turns ordinary features of collective life into suspicion. Each of these historical cases has contributed to the ever-expanding use of conspiracy charges in state repression of social movements. Across these cases, the object of prosecution moves further and further away from identifiable unlawful acts to the social relations that make collective action possible. This past should inform our understanding of the recent cases and remind us not to take at face value the charges against the Michigan Eight and the Minnesota 15.

Like the cases from the past, the present charges are an attack on political speech and, more broadly, all those who seek to collectively work toward a more just and freer future. Isaac Sant, one of the Minnesota 15, has noted that what they are facing is “not a normal criminal trial; this is a political case, this is political repression against organizers.” The long history of conspiracy charges and state repression suggests that political repression cannot be defeated alone in the courtroom. This is because conspiracy cases do not just target the named defendants; the broader targets are concepts like trust, collective organization, and solidarity, that is to say the very bases of social movements.

Like previous generations of workers faced with political repression, we must seize the current crises as an opportunity to revitalize the labor movement from the ground up. That revitalization is not going to come from union leadership, but from you and other rank-and-file worker-organizers. As the veteran labor organizer Daniel Gross recently noted, in Unions of Our Own (2026), “A truly just society with reliable economic security, where we can live freely on a healthy planet, simply cannot happen without organized workers and liberatory unions.”

This moment threatens our very ability to collectively organize for a better world at the same time as it represents an opportunity for workers everywhere to double down on collective organization, whether it is to keep our fellow workers safe from abductions; to organize toward divestment from companies profiting from war and genocide; or to fight the daily struggles of autonomy, respect, and dignity on the shop floor. In all cases, every victory, big or small, is not a concession, but a privilege that workers have wrested from state and capital. The stakes of not meeting this moment could not be heavier.

Correction: The piece has been updated to reflect the fact that Brandenburg v. Ohio superseded, rather than overruled, Schenck v. United States.

Much of the time, it seems as if the war machine runs on autopilot. Indeed, the United States has been engaged in warfare for almost the entirety of our 250 year history. It feels overwhelming to most people to attempt to intervene, yet we are all involved, as our tax dollars feed endless wars, interventions, and weapons transfers fueling violent conflict around the world—and at home, as evidenced by the murders of US citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So, intervene we must, if we want our government to pursue more productive, life-affirming policies and priorities.

This week, the Senate will vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to set those war policies and priorities for the next fiscal year. The Trump administration, enabled by many in Congress, is proposing an outrageous 66% increase in Pentagon and related spending, to over $1.5 trillion per year. While this is a boon to weapons manufacturers, it is to the detriment of everyone and everything else. We must stop this madness.

On the other side of the guns vs. butter ledger, Trump has already slashed over $1 trillion in funding from healthcare and food assistance programs over the next decade. And he wants to make even bigger cuts to healthcare, climate, housing, food, and other human needs. Trump recently said we can’t fund childcare because we’re fighting wars, in the context of his (and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s) illegal war of aggression against Iran. Sometimes he says the quiet part out loud.

So the task is simple—to tell the Senate to vote “no” on this misappropriation of our tax dollars. It is easy enough to dial the US Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224-3121, and ask to be connected to your two senators (requiring two calls).

Politicians in Washington, and the masters of war (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and company) count on a complacent citizenry accepting business as usual to keep their endless war gravy train running.

In addition to demanding they vote against this gargantuan war budget, tell them to reject the proposed US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, and a related Intelligence cooperation agreement, both of which would further entangle the two countries’ war machines, at a time when the government of Israel is deservedly unpopular for its never-ending wars, and its occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people.

If you can do more than call, please write to your senators with the following message, with thanks to the People Over Pentagon coalition:

Dear Senator,

I urge you to vote against President Donald Trump’s request for a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget, to oppose any increase to the Pentagon budget for 2027, and to vote for any amendment to cut that budget.

Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion budget for the Pentagon would be a stunning 66% increase over last year’s already enormous $900 billion Pentagon budget. Trump is cutting funding for healthcare, housing, food, education, and climate action. He is using this money to dramatically increase funding for the Pentagon.

Trump has already cut over a trillion dollars from funds for Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and SNAP, which helps low income people buy food. Millions of people are expected to lose healthcare coverage and food.

The Pentagon is unaccountable to American taxpayers and has never passed an audit. More than half of the Pentagon’s budget (54%) is paid to corporate military contractors, whose profits are rising. Further gigantic increases would be grossly irresponsible.

Please oppose Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget and oppose any increase in Pentagon funding this year. This money should be invested in meeting basic needs in our communities.

Please encourage friends, family, and colleagues to call or write as well, and you can tag your senators on social media, with this simple message:

Dear @ Senator (fill in their names), I urge you to vote against Trump's $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. Please oppose any increase in funding for the Pentagon. This money must be spent on human needs, including healthcare, housing, food, education, and climate action. #PeopleOverPentagon.

Politicians in Washington, and the masters of war (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and company) count on a complacent citizenry accepting business as usual to keep their endless war gravy train running. Let them know this outlandish war budget is unacceptable, and that we will be watching and holding them accountable.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• Senator Mitch McConnell’s office released a photo Sunday night to answer weeks of questions about his health. In it, the 84-year-old Kentucky Republican smiles beside his wife, Elaine Chao, while holding what appears to be that day’s Washington Post Sports section. But the image did not end the speculation. Instead, it prompted more theories and even accusations that the image was fake, the latest reflection of public distrust in the age of artificial intelligence.

• Trump’s proposed 20% levy on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz could further reduce traffic through the vital waterway, which has already ground to a halt again in recent days, according to the Baltic and International Maritime Council, the world’s largest shipping association.

• The ICE shot that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, last week in Houston was fired into the front passenger side window, according to a local congresswoman and a lawyer who spoke with witnesses who were in the vehicle. Meanwhile, another ICE agent shot and killed a Maine motorist, marking at least the ninth death since the start of Trump’s mass deportations campaign.

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

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post Reaction to McConnell’s “Proof of Life” Photo Reflects Public Distrust | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

June 24 marked the start of the biennial Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, exercises, the world's largest international naval war games. Led by the US, the military exercises bring together 31 countries and include more than 25,000 personnel, 40 surface ships, five submarines, and 140 aircraft. The event, which will run until July 31, marks the newest escalation of US preparations for war on China, further militarizing the Pacific and normalizing the prospect of conflict through increasingly large-scale exercises and an ever-expanding web of alliances and military bases.

At the same time, the US and partner nations kicked off the 10-day Valiant Shield 2026 exercises across Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Japan, and surrounding seas, submerging the entire Pacific into an intensive military operation zone.

At a moment of intensifying climate disasters and growing economic insecurity, the message from Washington is clear: There is always more money for war. RIMPAC comes as Congress is attempting to approve a staggering $1.5 trillion war budget, even as communities across the world are facing deadly heatwaves, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters.

This past week, while US military vessels practiced war off their coasts, super typhoon Bavi pummeled Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Coming only a week into the typical typhoon season, this is already the second major typhoon to hit the islands. Many locals were still without power from the last super typhoon Sinlaku, which killed 17 people and caused over $1.5 billion in damages.

Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.

Climate scientist Kristina Dahl remarked, “In both of these cases we can see the fingerprint of climate change on the storms and that has really devastating consequences for the people who are repeatedly in their paths.”

These overlapping crises reveal a profound imbalance in priorities. As Pacific communities contend with increasingly severe climate disasters, the United States continues to invest staggering sums in military expansion and war preparations. The irony is especially stark given that the US military is the world's largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and one of the largest institutional greenhouse gas emitters, while decades of US military activity have caused lasting environmental and human harm across Pacific Island communities.

Instead of pouring resources into preventing climate change and protecting people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, the US continues to pump money into its bloated war budget. In the Pacific, military expansion is justified by the increasing push toward war on China. The 2026 National Defense Strategy committed to "deterring China in the Indo-Pacific through strength” by “erect(ing) a strong denial defense along the First Island Chain” so that “Joint Force always has the ability to conduct devastating strikes and operations against targets.”

The US conception of “deterrence” is both illogical and hypocritical in nature. In the name of “protecting” the Pacific from a future imaginary threat, the United States is harming the very communities it claims to defend through military buildup, environmental degradation, and the transformation of islands into staging grounds for war. The narrative of an imminent Chinese takeover of the Pacific is often treated as a foregone conclusion despite there being no evidence that China seeks to invade or occupy Pacific nations. Rather than making the region safer, the pursuit of “deterrence” risks turning the Pacific into a battlefield while diverting resources away from the urgent challenges that communities are actually facing today.

A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the US military's economic benefits to Hawaiʻi have been significantly overstated and that local communities bear enormous hidden costs from its presence. The report estimates that military demand for housing drove Oʻahu rents up by 7.1% in 2024 alone, costing non-military renters an additional $234.8 million. It also found that cleaning up PFAS contamination at just three military installations could cost at least $493 million, with broader health and environmental damages potentially reaching into the billions. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has leased more than 46,000 acres of Hawaiian land for just $1 leases, despite the land's estimated fair market value reaching as high as $133.7 billion. Far from protecting Pacific communities, the US military buildup has contributed to housing insecurity, environmental contamination, and the dispossession of Indigenous lands.

Similarly, US militarization of Guam has severely impacted local communities. The US military controls roughly 27% of the island's land, while decades of military activity have left behind contaminated groundwater, hazardous waste, and damaged ecosystems. PFAS "forever chemicals" linked to military firefighting foam have been detected in Guam's drinking water wells, threatening the island's primary freshwater source. Military expansion has also endangered coral reefs, sensitive coastal habitats, and wildlife.

These events, which are just a few of many examples of the environmental and human costs of militarization, reveal the deep hypocrisy of the US strategy of "peace through strength." Rather than protecting local communities, militarization leaves them more vulnerable. All the while, massive military spending diverts resources away from urgent needs such as climate relief.

The proposed $1.5 trillion war budget will only deepen these harmful priorities, while large-scale military exercises like RIMPAC intensify US-China tensions, heighten the risk of dangerous encounters at sea, and increase the possibility of pulling the Pacific into a devastating war.

The Palestinian national soccer team isn’t playing in this year’s World Cup. But despite a national and global crackdown on pro-Palestinian protest and speech, the games have witnessed an outpouring of support for Palestinians. Fans, players, and coaches from the likes of Egypt, Scotland, Brazil, South Korea, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey, Norway, Senegal, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Algeria, Spain, and perhaps all 48 countries playing have publicly shown support for Palestinian lives and their struggle for freedom and a return to lands taken since 1948.

This comes after nearly three years in which the world has watched the Israeli government respond to October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, which killed around 1,200, with a war that has killed more than 73,000, mostly civilians, and is widely considered a genocide by international experts.

Games have featured Palestinian flags held aloft in stadiums and by players and coaches on the fields. Chants of “Free Palestine” have come from the stands and the streets surrounding games. People have attended games wearing the Palestinian national team jersey. Others have flown banners reading, “Kick Israel Out of FIFA” and “Red Card Israel.” (FIFA is the infamously corrupt international organization that runs the tournament; a red card is given to soccer players ejected and banned from games for foul play.)

The support shown for Palestinians has been especially inspiring at a World Cup that, like others, has been tainted by more signs of corruption. Most recently, President Donald Trump called FIFA’s president to overturn a red-card ban for a US player so that he could participate in what turned out to be a lopsided loss for Team America. The FIFA president also awarded Trump a meaningless “peace prize” not long before the United States joined Israel in an illegal and historically unpopular war in Iran.

“Palestinian families don’t get their homes back because people flew a flag in a stadium. But movements build over time and through moments of visibility, through the accumulation of pressure, and through the refusal to let the issue disappear.”

Expressions of solidarity at soccer games don’t change anything on their own. During the days of the tournament alone, the Israeli government, which receives extensive military backing from the US government, has killed dozens of people in Gaza. Before a match between Argentina and Egypt, Israel killed Mohammed al-Wahidi, a representative of an Egyptian humanitarian organization in Gaza, along with two children and another person, on the day al-Wahidi was organizing a Gaza City viewing party to watch the game. (Al-Wahidi is one of more than 1,000 Palestinians, including hundreds of women and children, reported killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since the officially declared “ceasefire” last year.)

A soccer tournament, alone, doesn’t solve anything, Palestinian journalist Dina El-Kurd has said: “Palestinian families don’t get their homes back because people flew a flag in a stadium. But movements build over time and through moments of visibility, through the accumulation of pressure, and through the refusal to let the issue disappear.”

Egypt’s coach Hossam Hassan has been one of the most bravely and consistently outspoken. “Before being Arab, Muslim, Christian, or anything else, I am a human being,” he said in a press conference when he might have only spoken about playing against probably history’s greatest-ever player in Lionel Messi and Argentina. “Through football—the world’s soft power—I want to send a message,” he said. “Please let the Palestinian people live. I ask athletes and journalists everywhere to help deliver that message.”

Along with coaches, journalists, and players—including, one hopes, the likes of Messi—isn’t that a message to share at viewing parties, bars, and family gatherings during the World Cup’s final matches—and beyond?

The red, green, and black colors of the Palestinian flag are easy enough to apply as face paint. I’ll be taking some small steps by wearing a Palestine jersey and using the games to raise funds for humanitarian relief in Gaza. Discussing the morality of continuing US military support for the Israeli government is a start.

Journalist El Kurd says she’s felt a kind of hope seeing the flag waived in stadiums: “It’s not the hope that this will be resolved soon or easily, but the hope that says Palestinians are not alone and the cause is not forgotten.”

Right-wing Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, former Senate Majority Leader and key senior legislator, went missing for weeks. No one—including President Trump and the governor of his home state—knew whether he was sick, wallowing in depression like a recently MIA congressman from New Jersey, on a wild incognito adventure, alive, dead, kidnapped, or in a coma. His office refused to clear up the mystery until this past weekend, when they released a “proof of life” photo, complete with old-school newspaper, that only aroused further suspicion.

Pressured to explain this bizarre situation, Republicans responded to their constituents and fellow citizens the way leaders of any major political party in the world’s oldest and most powerful representative democracy typically do when honesty and transparency are clearly called for: they plotted a cover-up.

A really stupid cover-up.

If you read GOP accounts on social media platforms like X, you know that Republican- and MAGA-related feeds are coordinated to a ridiculous extent. Whether talking points are distributed to the various politicians and media influencers or they are directly managed from a central right-wing boiler room operation—overseas in many cases—I do not know. The results, however, are clear. Images and words—exactly identical or lightly edited—are spammed out by dozens of accounts at the same time.

Clearly, the word went out to the MAGA-verse: we need “proof of life” for McConnell.

As usual, MAGA World slavishly complied.

As McConnell, 84 and hospitalized since June 14, faced growing speculation and rumors about his health—including unverified claims that he was in a vegetative or deceased state—Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY), and conservative commentator and former McConnell aide Scott Jennings issued a laughably coordinated set of public statements on July 6 and 7.

“Leader Thune spoke with Sen. McConnell yesterday by phone,” Thune’s office said. “They had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security.”

Then Barrasso:

“Senator Barrasso and Senator McConnell had a lengthy conversation early this afternoon. Their phone call lasted roughly 20 minutes. They caught up about the latest news impacting Senate races, the Graham Platner scandal, and the recent Supreme Court ruling on coordinated spending limits. They also discussed the Senate’s July work period, including the need to pass the NDAA and confirm President Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence. Senator McConnell was fully engaged and is eager to get back to the Senate.”

And Jennings:

“I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning, the senior senator from Kentucky. He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about Iran, Ukraine, the unfolding situation in Maine, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history. I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible.”

Adding to the hilarity, Jennings’s employer, CNN, said it could not confirm its own employee’s statement. (Note for readers under age 70: CNN used to be a news-gathering organization on cable TV.)

If this were Japan, the shame of it all would drive these three clowns to do a swan dive in front of a bullet train. (Note for American readers: Industrially advanced nations have high-speed rail.)

Charades like this are hardly new in America. Political hacks covered up the fact that Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, and Joe Biden were physically and/or mentally incapacitated for parts of their presidencies. Culturally, however, we associate lying to the public about their political leaders’ fitness to serve with authoritarian regimes like Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and, most of all, the Soviet Union.

With this farce’s tragicomic, not-so-carefully coordinated lies, the McConnell mess is nothing if not Sovietish.

As is the American people’s lack of reaction. Like the Soviets, we are accustomed to being bullshitted by the authorities and their pet journalists who, once again, dutifully and unquestioningly transcribed official lies despite their outlandish improbability. We are experiencing “epistemic nihilism,” the belief that objective truth is fundamentally unknowable or does not exist. Americans are withdrawing into cynicism, concluding that searching for facts is pointless since everyone is lying.

A democracy requires a well-informed electorate in order to function well. That includes transparency. If you can’t believe the White House when it claims the president is 6’3″ and 224 pounds (6’0” and 290 pounds is more like it) and , how much will they lie about Israel or emoluments?

We would be terribly remiss if we omitted the nearly equivalent absurdity of the actual death (reportedly, probably true—who knows?) of another right-wing bold-face name, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who passed over the weekend after a “brief and sudden illness” (a burst aorta) at age 71.

Graham—never married, no kids, effeminate—fit the classic profile of the closeted rightist politician. D.C. insiders have long said that Graham’s homosexuality was an open secret.

I don’t know. I hardly care, except that if he was gay, it takes a terrible human being to vote against every LGBTQIA+ bill just to keep your job.

On the evening of Saturday, July 11, D.C. emergency services received a 911 call around 8:30 p.m., reporting a person suffering chest pains at Graham’s Capitol Hill residence. Who placed the call? An “unidentified woman in Baltimore,” about an hour’s drive away.

Graham may have been straight (or asexual), and that call may have been placed by a political aide or household staff member. The timing, opaqueness and likely cover-up of Graham’s sex life, in the midst of the McConnell story, naturally feeds the feeling that we are being lied to—as usual.

Does it matter? Only if we want to believe that we live in a democracy.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

 

The post McConnell, Graham and Epistemic Nihilism appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

It's called Section 219. Tucked away in the massive congressional spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, this provision of the law would effectively require our nation to permanently entangle the American military with the Israeli military.

Among other things, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative would require the US to share intelligence with Israel and establish a system of weapons research, development, and production, particularly in the domains crucial to warfare in the modern age: artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, and various other fields of high defense technology.

The House provision, which has a Senate version known as Section 1217, would also forbid the president of the United States from limiting intelligence collaboration with Israel over its human rights abuses. If the President ever wants to limit such collaboration, he or she must tell Congress and can only cite American national security as a basis.

In other words, these bills would connect the US and Israeli militaries in unprecedented ways and make it exceedingly difficult for any future president to unwind this partnership with a foreign government.

There’s a reason why members of Congress are trying to sneak this bill through right now, buried in a massive and must-pass defense spending bill: This might be their best, last chance to thwart the will of the American people.

If these bills pass in their current form, the US military would be more integrated with Israel’s than with that of any other country, including America's NATO allies.

There’s a reason why members of Congress are trying to sneak this bill through right now, buried in a massive and must-pass defense spending bill: This might be their best, last chance to thwart the will of the American people.

Over the past three years, American public opinion has turned sharply against the Israeli government.

Thanks to the modern miracle of social media, Americans were able to directly see the human carnage as the Israeli military slaughtered and starved, by the most conservative estimate, over 73,000 people in Gaza.

Americans were also able to see the consequences of the Israeli military's ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, which has destroyed ancient cities, including Christian towns, and displaced a million people from their homes.

Most recently, the American people watched as the Israeli government openly convinced the Trump administration to launch an unnecessary, illegal and failed war on Iran that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians, over a dozen American soldiers, and a global economic crisis, including a sharp rise in gas prices.

The American people are simply fed up.

Members of Congress who recognize American sovereignty and respect American democracy must join Rep. Smith and others in opposing these provisions, and all Americans should call on their members of Congress to do so.

According to recent Pew data, 60% of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 42% in 2022.

Majorities of voters under 50 in both parties feel this way: 57% of young Republicans and 84% of young Democrats.

Most Americans oppose further unconditional US military aid for the Netanyahu government.

Recent election results, in which candidates who staked their campaigns on investing American taxpayer dollars here at home instead of overseas in the Israeli military, have also shown that the tide is rapidly changing.

Even prominent conservatives like Tucker Carlson have decried the Israeli government's influence on our political system while once-dominant conservative voices like Ben Shapiro known for supporting Israel have flailed and bled support.

Instead of respecting the clear will of the American people, members of Congress dedicated to maintaining unconditional US support for Israel have introduced bills meant to ensure changes in American public opinion never become changes in American public policy.

This should be unacceptable to everyone in our nation.

Although the US-Israel merger bills are currently making their way through Congress, the fight to strip these provisions from the NDAA is not over.

Just this week, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.)—the ranking member on the House Armed Services committee—announced that he was withdrawing his support for the provision.

“I cannot support endless conflict even though I support Israel’s right to exist,” said Smith. “For these reasons, I will vote to remove Section 224 from the National Defense Authorization Act if it comes to the Floor.”

If the joint technology development, intelligence sharing, and weapons production are enshrined in law, they would become extraordinarily difficult for future presidents or Congresses to undo, regardless of changing public opinion or policy priorities.

The United States would be permanently locked into a strategic alignment with a foreign government, taking away the American people’s ability to decide on the future of the relationship.

Members of Congress who recognize American sovereignty and respect American democracy must join Rep. Smith and others in opposing these provisions, and all Americans should call on their members of Congress to do so.

If joint technology development, intelligence sharing, and weapons production are required by law, they would become extraordinarily difficult for another Congress or future presidents to undo, regardless of changing public opinion or policy priorities.

Our nation would be trapped a strategic alignment with a foreign government, taking away the American people’s ability to decide on the future of the relationship.

The US military is meant to protect American interests, and Congress is meant to serve the American people.

That's why Section the US-Israel merger bills must go.

Several observations can be made regarding Rahm Emanuel’s recent speech at Tel Aviv University: what he said and didn’t say, and what impact (if any) his words might have.

For the past 35 years, Emanuel has been a fixture in US politics. After a short stint as a volunteer with the Israeli Defense Forces in 1991, he returned to the US to work on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, then joined the White House staff in 1993. He went on to serve three terms in Congress, leaving to serve as President Obama’s Chief of Staff. Emanuel then ran and won two terms as mayor of Chicago. Finally, in 2021 he was appointed by President Biden as US Ambassador to Japan.

With such an expansive resume, it’s not surprising that Emanuel would consider running for president. At the same time, given the dramatic shifts in Democratic voters’ attitudes toward Israel and Emanuel’s long history of support for Israel (e.g., his father was born there, his uncle served in the terror group, Irgun, and he volunteered with the IDF during the first Gulf War), questions were immediately raised as to how he would navigate these turbulent waters in a presidential primary.

The way out of this bind for Emanuel was to heed the maxim: “Shine a light on your problem.” Instead of ignoring Israel and how out of sync he might be with the majority of Democrats, Emanuel decided to go Tel Aviv to deliver a major speech that laying out his bona fides as a long-time supporter of Israel, while delivering a sharp rebuke to that government’s policies.

It was, however, a strange hodgepodge of a speech. After noting his family ties with Israel, Emanuel launched into the Israeli historical narrative of the post-Oslo period, echoing the well-worn “Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” As a member of the Clinton team, he appears comfortable repeating their false claims that Palestinians turned down “the best deals ever” offered by former Prime Ministers Rabin, Barak, and Olmert and then unleashed violence against innocent Israelis. While this fabrication served the Clintons’ electoral purposes, it doesn’t jibe with what actually happened.

I was in the Occupied Territories in the ‘90s working on a project created by the Clinton administration, and saw firsthand how the Israeli government was expanding settlements, blocking Palestinian economic development, and establishing cruel and humiliating restrictions on Palestinian movement and employment. After the first few years of Oslo, Palestinians were poorer, less free to move about, had less control of land, and were losing hope in peace. As a result, Palestinian support for their leaders who had signed agreements with Israel was collapsing and support for rejectionists was on the rise. And so, it’s true that Hamas used terror against innocent Israelis in order to sabotage Oslo and discredit the Palestinian Authority. Instead of strengthening peace, the Israeli government sidelined the PA, treated all Palestinians as guilty, and in the process created more anger. Because the Clinton administration did nothing to challenge Israel’s role in sabotaging Oslo, it is inexcusable for Emanuel to blame Palestinians and absolve Israel.

As for Barak’s offer, Palestinians never rejected it. They continued to negotiate with Israel at Taba until Barak, facing electoral defeat, ended the negotiations leaving Palestinians in the lurch. Olmert’s offer of 98% was indeed enticing, but—as he was facing imminent removal from office and a prison term—his “offer” was dismissed by Palestinians as not serious.

From here, Emanuel launches into a full-throated criticism of Israel’s recent policies in the Occupied Territories which he laments have made the country a “territorial pariah” in the world. It is hard to argue with his cataloguing of the horrors Israel has visited upon Palestinians or with his assessment that the US’s coddling of Israel with unconditional support has contributed to the sense of impunity that has fueled Israel’s inhumane behaviors. Even more interesting is Emanuel’s embrace of the threat of applying sanctions not only to settlers who violate Palestinian rights, but also to government ministers, banks, and contractors as well.

While Emanuel’s criticisms are harsher than those of his fellow mainstream Democrats, instead of seeing the problem as systemic, he focuses blame on Benjamin Netanyahu. In fact, much of the speech sounds like a plea to Israelis to see how Netanyahu’s policies have damaged their reputation in the world. It was less a US campaign speech than a plea to Israelis to rid themselves of the leader who has damaged their international standing.

But ridding themselves of Netanyahu isn’t enough, as those who are running against him do not oppose his overall approach to Palestinians. That will not change until the US takes measures to punish Israel’s bad behaviors. Threats won’t do it. Only by shocking the Israeli polity with punitive sanctions will a new Israeli leadership emerge that is willing to both abandon their fantasy of Greater Israel and embrace Palestinian humanity.

Instead of taking this direct approach, Emanuel sidesteps it, embracing what is an equally dangerous fantasy of a broad regional peace between Israel and the 21 Arab states as the way forward. In this liberal Zionist vision, the Arabs, instead of exploiting Palestinian suffering for their own ends, would be assigned the responsibility of getting the Palestinians to stop rewarding those who kill Israelis and to stop teaching hatred of Israel. In this fantasy world, Israel would become the center of global trade between East and West and once again admired for its genius and accomplishments.

As compelling as this vision might be to liberal Zionists in Israel and the US, it fails to address existing realities. Instead of turning the corner by first imposing restraints on Israel, the burden is placed on Palestinians. Emanuel falls silent on what will be done: to compensate Palestinians for their losses of lands, homes, and lives; to rein in the Israeli military and border police in the occupied lands, Lebanon, and Syria, or the out-of-control settler movement that is rampaging and terrorizing Palestinians; to force the Israeli government to free the thousands of Palestinians hostages detained for years without charges or trials, and take down the abusive checkpoints, remove the hundreds of thousands of settlers living on stolen lands, free up the Palestinian tax monies they collect (which by treaty should turned over to the PA), and end the impediments to economic development that have impoverished Palestinians for decades. About all of these steps, Emanuel says nothing.

In the end, instead of being a “groundbreaking” speech that changes the US debate over Israel, Emanuel’s speech only serves to define what has emerged as the new conventional wisdom: Netanyahu is bad, the US shouldn’t be paying for Israel’s misbehavior, and if only the Arabs would step in and control the Palestinians and make peace with Israel all would be well. This is, as we say, “nice, but no cigar.”

Despite its well-advertised tensions and tectonic geopolitical changes, this week’s NATO summit demonstrated that NATO has survived and is resilient. It remains committed to reinforcing US hegemony across Europe and globally. Not a lot has changed since former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that US global dominance relies on controlling the periphery of Eurasia: NATO in the West, in Southwest Asia to the South, as well as its Asia-Pacific allies from South Korea and Japan through the Philippines and Australia. In the 21st century, military planning as well as trade is deeply integrated across these three regions.

The Summit served to reinforce what is emerging as a new bloc system for our yet to be named era. Threatened by the US and NATO, as John Mearsheimer remarked, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea each see the US as a mortal enemy. While each of these nations’ situations and ambitions are vastly different, they share an interest in fending off threats from the US. They are thus increasingly binding themselves to one another economically, militarily, and diplomatically.

There were four major dimensions to the summit: 1) NATO’s survival despite its fault lines, 2) the first day’s focus on expanding and integrating European and US military production infrastructures and weapons sales contracts. 3) The final declaration celebrated and committed to still more European military spending. And 4) support for Ukraine was manifest.

The move to what is termed NATO 3.0, with European nations assuming greater responsibilities for the European theater, reflects the United States relative decline, something which has been glaringly demonstrated in its failed war against Iran. Trump and his coterie understand that US “leadership” is only possible with NATO. Despite his rhetoric, Trump and company value NATO because it allows them to do what they want to do elsewhere, especially in the most economically dynamic part of the world: the Indo-Pacific.

The transatlantic and increasingly global NATO alliance remains strong despite its fault lines due to what the elites understand as overlapping US and European shared interests, if not values.

NATO Secretary General Rutte and his allies insulated the alliance from Trump, from his madness, his dementia, his claim that US ships have been attacked by the Islamic Republic of Japan, demands for Greenland, and his complaints that European nations didn’t deliver all that he wanted in his war on Iran. Toward that end, the summit was convened and adjourned in less than a day, and the final declaration was limited to just six paragraphs, leaving little room for debate.

In fact, although not widely reported, during the war European allies have allowed US warplanes and ships to operate from bases across the continent, and they have provided access to their facilities for repairs and refueling.

As we could read in Carnegie Europe, “…trans-Atlanticism was never only a values project. It was—and remains—a convergence of security, economic, and technological interests between two regions that together account for roughly 43 percent of global GDP and comprise the world’s most capable alliance.”

The best way to understand what transpired in Ankara may be to use the lens of transactional dealmaking among Mafia families. Trump and Colby got what they wanted: European elites signed onto NATO 3.0 with increased European military spending and preparations to militarily contain and press Russia, so that the US can focus on containing China’s ambitions and reinforcing its 21st century Indo-Pacific hegemony. Remember, this has been a US goal that began with Obama’s “pivot to Asia.”

With NATO 3.0, the US intends to gradually reduce its ostensible role in guaranteeing European security. It is worth noting that European NATO members already massively outspending Russia on their militaries. They have conventional military superiority over Russia. And with NATO 3.0 these differentials will only become greater.

In time, the US will provide only what its European allies cannot: nuclear threats and high-tech intelligence. But it is also worth noting is that Trump said nothing in Ankara about pulling more troops out of Europe. The announced 5,000 troop reduction in Germany has yet to begin, and a commitment for increased US troop rotations in Poland was made. The Hegseth-Colby campaign for major US force reductions in Europe has been slowed by the two-month review won by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In the end, Trump, and no one else, is the decision maker. Remember too that despite Trump ranting about NATO’s limited support for his war against Iran, the US would be very limited in its Southwest Asian and North African power projection without it bases still in Europe.

The West wasn’t shattered. In the transactional exchange, the US joined the dominant European narrative forged by the Baltic states and Poland about Russia and signed onto the summit’s final declaration with its commitments to support Ukraine in the war with Russia. This includes blessing Ukrainian debilitating attacks on Russian energy infrastructure deep within Russia. The declaration identified Russia as a long-term threat and reinterred the Treaty’s Article V commitment to come to the aid of any NATO member that is attacked. Ukraine won’t be joining NATO any time soon, but its advanced military technologies and warfighting experience make it an increasingly powerful adjunct to NATO.

In fact, the arms sales announced as the summit began serve as glue for the alliance’s future. Fifty billion dollars in weapons contracts were signed, with commitments made to Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Palantir, Anduril, Germany’s Rheinmetall, French Airbus, Sweden’s Saab, and Turkey’s Aselsan. Even Denmark, despite Trump’s Greenland threats, will be buying US Hellfire missiles and ships to patrol the Arctic.

NATO 3.0 makes it possible for the US to reinforce its lattice-like military alliance system and its military buildup across the Indo-Pacific. Note that the RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific) naval show of force was held at the same time as the NATO summit. It includes the forces of 10 of 30 NATO nations. Almost one-third of all NATO countries sent military forces: land, air, and sea to Hawaii to participate in the RIMPAC 38-day war drills.

The summit also demonstrated Turkey’s increased role in NATO, both in relation to Southwest Asia, but also via its increased weapons production capacity for the alliance. Trump tossed Erdogan what may prove to be only a symbolic military bone with his offer to endorse the sale of F-35s to Turkey. There remain two major obstacles to those sales: Turkey’s S-400 air defense systems which were purchased from Moscow and the need for Congressional authorization for those sales.

On the subject of weapons sales, in his ostensible tilt toward Ukraine, Trump authorized the much-ballyhooed licensing for Ukraine to produce Patriot missile defense systems. This is too little too late to be meaningful. It will take at least a year to get such a complex weapons manufacturing system up and running. And Putin would certainly make these weapons facilities a primary target while they are being built. Moreover, to defend the construction of these facilities the already beleaguered Ukraine would need to divert its very limited missile and drone defenses to protect the construction, leaving the country still more vulnerable.

Reinforcing the global commitments of NATO, at a meeting on the sidelines of the summit the Japanese government called for deeper cooperation between NATO and its Indo-Pacific partners Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand at a meeting on the summit sidelines. Japan, which hosts more than 100 US military bases and installations, and has its most militarist government since 1945, has a security and defense pact with the EU. In recent months, Tokyo has created or deepened strategic partnerships and weapons development agreements with countries including Britain, Germany, Italy, and Sweden.

Tokyo is in the process of doubling its military spending. It is moving to trash Article 9, the heart of its Peace Constitution. It has deployed conventional preemptive strike missiles that can reach China and North Korea. And it has declared its readiness to go to war for Taiwan.

Despite the still open wounds of Japanese conquest and colonization of Korea in the last century, the US backed Japanese-ROK alliance is the strongest it has ever been. And there is increasing discussion in South Korea about returning US nuclear weapons to the Peninsula or developing its own nuclear arsenal.

Filling out the network of Indo-Pacific alliances, the US has been deepening military ties with its former colony, the Philippines. Add to this AUKUS (Australia, Britain and the US) and the QUAD (US, Japan, Australia, and India).

Several other points are worth noting. Europe’s massive military spending increases, trending at an annual rate of 20%, have been financed by increasing debt. That can’t continue. As Stop Re/Arm Europe network warns, if this increased spending continues it can only come at the expense of essential social services. Those cuts, and the suffering they cause, will further open the way for far-right wing political gains.

In truth, we are still a long way from an operational NATO 3.0. As the French and German refusal to cooperate on development of the next jet fighter indicates, continuing divisions among the leading European powers remain very real. Issues of command and control and many other concerns will be challenging for NATO to address. And while not widely reported in the US media, US and European national security mandarins have been remarking about the failure to announce a NATO summit in 2027. The absence of a NATO summit next year may serve to prevent a new round of headlines and reports about US-NATO divisions, and it will also allow for more backroom deals.

For more than 60 years (1945 – 1980) humanity was plagued by the clash of competing block systems. The Cold War was not always cold, and on several occasions, we were confronted by the specter of nuclear annihilation.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy and his advisors believed the odds were 50-50 that the crisis would end in a thermonuclear exchange.

Computer and human errors were not uncommon. NATO’s 1983 Abel Archer military exercise sparked fears that they were under attack. That same year computer Soviet systems mistook a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds for incoming US nuclear armed missiles. Most of us are alive today because Soviet Colonel Petrov, believed it to be a false alarm, defied his standing orders, dismissed the nuclear alert, and was later reprimanded for his courageous act.

Millions, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Greece to Mozambique died in proxy wars between the US and Soviet led blocs. As President Dwight Eisenhower warned, the US military-industrial complex threatened democratic values and practice. And trillions of dollars, rubles, francs and other currencies were wasted on weaponry at the cost of essential medical care, education, housing and more.

One definition of stupidity is doing the same thing twice but expecting different results. With the creation of a new bloc system, the expansion and upgrading of the world’s nuclear arsenals, the climate emergency’s fires and rising seas, and uncertainty over where new high-tech weaponry will lead, it appears that NATO, Russian, and many other elites failed to learn the Cold War’s existential lessons.

But there is still time. It should be obvious that the only way to end the war between Russia and Ukraine is with a dirty deal that includes a ceasefire in place, security guarantees for both Ukraine and Russia, and a commitment to negotiate the status of currently occupied territories over time. How many more Russian and Ukrainian lives should be sacrificed in the killing fields of Donbass? How long should we tolerate spiraling military spending at the sacrifice of our living standards which in turn opens the way for fascist forces on the right?

There is also the lesson of Common Security diplomacy which thankfully provided the foundation for détente and the end of the Cold War. We can take some hope from off the record Track II discussions and others among elite Europeans, Russians, and US figures that there are increasing references to building on the traditions and surviving resources of the Helsinki process and the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) to build a post-war Common Security European and transatlantic strategic architecture. Too few among us now remember that three decades ago the Cold War came to an end when NATO and Russian leaders finally came to understand that security cannot be achieved against a nation’s rival, but only through hard won win-win diplomacy that addresses the fears of all parties to a conflict.

For all practical purposes, the US-Iran Memorandum of (Mis)Understanding is over. The dispute over how to manage the Strait of Hormuz in the interim has pushed the two sides back into open war. But to what end?

There is little reason to believe another round of fighting can alter the fundamentals enough to change the reality from which the two sides must ultimately negotiate. If they are fortunate, the MOU’s collapse may yield another round of talks in which the allure of reshaping facts on the ground through force has finally faded.

As I have written elsewhere, the dispute over the Strait turns, at least on the surface, on Paragraph 5 of the MOU: whether Iran is responsible for safe passage throughout the Strait for the duration of the agreement, or only for the waterway’s northern corridor.

Beneath the surface, however, lies a more fundamental strategic disagreement. Even before the MOU was signed, Tehran believed Washington's objective was to establish a southern shipping corridor through Omani waters that would gradually erode Iran's control over the Strait. Such a corridor would require Oman's cooperation, which may explain why Trump at one point threatened to bomb Oman unless it abandoned its proposal for joint management of the Strait, with administrative fees collected by Muscat and Tehran.

The corridor would remain operational even if war resumed and Iran sought once again to close the Strait. From Tehran's perspective, Washington used the MOU to strengthen this alternative route, and the US military's escort of commercial shipping without coordinating with Iran marked a significant step in that direction. If successful, the strategy would deprive Iran of its most important source of leverage — which is precisely why it appeals to Washington.

This is why Tehran has insisted that all ships transiting the Strait — regardless of the corridor they use — coordinate with Iran, consistent with its reading of Paragraph 5 of the MOU. Washington, by contrast, argues that the MOU merely assigns Iran responsibility for ensuring the safe passage of commercial vessels, without granting it operational control over all maritime traffic.

Before the funeral of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, the two sides explored a compromise under which ships would coordinate their transit with both Iran and a designated Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state. As I wrote in my Substack, “Under such an arrangement, ships would notify Tehran while also reporting to a GCC maritime authority, balancing Iran's demand for oversight with Washington's desire to avoid granting Tehran exclusive control.” But no agreement was reached before diplomacy was suspended for the duration of the funeral.

Accounts of what transpired in Muscat over the weekend naturally differ, but three proposals emerged. Iran advanced a variation of the earlier compromise: a dual-notification system for all vessels transiting the Strait. Qatar proposed three channels—an Iranian corridor in the north, an Omani corridor in the south, and a neutral corridor in the middle. For Tehran, this was a nonstarter, as it would effectively restore the Strait to its pre-February status.

According to Tehran, the United States and Oman favored separate management of the Iranian and Omani corridors: Iran could require coordination for vessels using its corridor, while Oman's would remain unrestricted.

Tehran saw this as an attempt to formalize what it had long suspected was Washington's strategy: creating a southern corridor through the Strait beyond Iran's influence, leaving Tehran no means of challenging it short of war with Oman. Iran also contends that Muscat advanced the proposal only under intense US pressure, noting that Oman had previously supported a joint management system.

Washington disputes this account. US officials maintain they were open to several arrangements, provided commercial vessels could transit the Strait safely. According to the American version, the talks unraveled only after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi consulted Tehran regarding a joint Iranian-Omani statement declaring the Strait open. From Washington's perspective, negotiations had been progressing until Araghchi was overruled by hardliners in the IRGC, who chose confrontation over compromise.

Whether such a fracture proved decisive in this instance is unclear. What is clear is that the outlook of Iranian strategists has hardened markedly in recent weeks as they have become increasingly convinced that Trump intends to restart the war. Several developments have reinforced that belief. First, Trump's rhetoric shifted dramatically: he called the Iranians "scum," declared the ceasefire over, and said he might resume bombing to "finish the job."

Second, as I argued here, Tehran believes Washington brokered the Lebanese-Israeli agreement — which contradicts the US-Iran MOU by conditioning Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon on Hezbollah's disarmament — to enable Israel to retain key positions that would weaken Hezbollah's ability to support Iran in the next war.

Third, White House officials leaked the US demand that Tehran declare the Strait open and, at least implicitly, accept responsibility for attacks on shipping. Rather than seeing the leak as political posturing to make Trump appear tough, Tehran increasingly viewed it as a deliberate attempt to derail the talks and steer the crisis back toward military confrontation.

Taken together, these developments convinced Tehran that Washington was preparing to resume the war. From that perspective, Iran's best option was to close the Strait immediately. Rather than an attempt to extract additional concessions or an instance of overplaying its hand, Tehran's decision appears to have been driven by the fear of losing its most important source of leverage before the next round of fighting.

In the view of Iranian decision-makers, closing the Strait would not trigger war because war was already coming. (If their assessment was incorrect, however, Tehran’s own actions have likely created a self-fulfilling prophecy by taking actions that made a military response from Washington next to inevitable).

Still, much indicates that another round of war will not fundamentally change realities on the ground or the balance between the US and Iran. Trump, in particular, does not have time on his side when taking into account both economic and political realities, and even some military factors.

By almost every meaningful measure, the global oil inventory position is materially weaker today than it was before the February war. Since the end of February, observed global oil inventories have fallen by roughly 360–370 million barrels, with only about 21 million barrels rebuilt after the US-Iran MOU—recovering just 5% of the wartime draw.

More importantly, the apparent recovery reflects oil in transit rather than replenished storage: oil on water increased by 117 million barrels, while onshore inventories fell by 96 million barrels. OECD inventories declined by another 62 million barrels in June alone, including roughly 44 million barrels released from government emergency stocks.

The United States also enters any renewed conflict with a substantially smaller strategic cushion. It has fallen from about 415 million barrels before the war to roughly 337 million barrels, while commercial crude, gasoline and distillate inventories all remain below their five-year seasonal averages. Consequently, Washington has significantly less capacity than in February to absorb another major disruption to global oil flows.

In addition, the United States is now only four months away from the midterm elections, dramatically shortening Trump's economic and political pain threshold. In February, the administration could plausibly argue that the oil shock was temporary and that prices would normalize before voters went to the polls. A renewed conflict today would push its most visible economic consequences directly into the campaign: higher gasoline prices, inflation, interest rates, and rising food, airline, freight, and utility costs.

As a Pentagon source told me last year, Iran builds missiles faster than the United States produces missile interceptors. And while Washington must divide its attention and resources among multiple theaters—from Ukraine to Taiwan—Iran has only one.

Thus, although the United States could, given enough time, degrade Iran's ability to threaten shipping in the Persian Gulf, there is little reason to believe it could do so before the economic and political costs became prohibitive for Trump. It is essentially the same strategic reality he confronted in February. The difference is that he lacked the benefit of hindsight then. Now he has it—though it does not appear to have mattered.

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The United States is a plutocracy. Its economy works for the wealthy and powerful at the expense of working people. It is a broken politico-economic system in need of major repairs, but as leading progressive economist Gerald Epstein points out in the interview that follows, there is indeed an arsenal of bold policies to “defeat fascism, preserve democracy, and help create a greener, stronger and fairer economy for American workers.” Epstein is professor of economics and a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

C.J. Polychroniou: It’s often been said that progressives are good in offering stinging critiques of the status quo and even making appealing policy proposals, but there is still a short supply of game changing strategies. I take it that this is the aim of Game Changers: Economic Polices for a Working America, an exciting new project from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. You conceived of the project and serve as its director, so tell us more about it. Why now the launching of such a project, what are the major issues covered, and what do you hope will be achieved?

Gerald Epstein: I launched the Game Changers project, along with my colleagues James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Juliet Schor of Boston College, because of the emerging perception that progressives in the United States could not gain political power and defeat the fascists and MAGA simply by leveling criticisms and epithets against Trump and his associates. Working people in the United States are hurting and angry after decades of neoliberal economic policies implemented, with some exceptions, by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Looking for answers to their legitimate problems, many American voters either simply sit out elections, or pull the lever for extreme candidates that seek to manipulate them by identifying scapegoats—such as immigrants—as the source of their problems.So, we launched Game Changers to be a positive source of real answers to real problems facing working Americans. The idea is to offer activists, political candidates, and government officials with policy ideas that bridge the gulf between the transformative and the practical, ideas that can envisage the way to an economy that is fairer, greener, more productive and more democratic. These are ideas, we believe, that are also practical enough to offer hope to those who want to help to mobilize the political forces that can help bring them into fruition.

Importantly, though, we are not intending to offer a comprehensive program for the American left. We felt that would be presumptuous for us to do and beyond our competence and standing. Ours is more of a menu of ideas that can be picked up by those who need them and who want to mobilize on their behalf.

We geared the timing of this project so that the policy ideas would be ready by the Congressional elections in November of 2026. In fact, we are launching policy proposals this month of July 2026. They can be found at https://gamechangerspolicy.org. Some of these ideas might be taken up by candidates. If they win, they might be taken up when they serve in Congress. Some of these ideas may percolate and emerge in future campaigns and legislative actions, as well as be taken up by progressive organizations. That is our hope, anyway.

The Game Changers project consists of 9 teams of experts and practitioners, (about 45 people in total) working on a range of subjects: Care, Finance and Financial Regulation, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Macroeconomics, Trade and Labor, and Work and Jobs. All in all, these teams have developed about 25 different policy proposals.

The range of policies is striking. They include: “The Wealth of Welcome: Immigration Reform that Works for America”; “America’s Workers Deserve a Four-Day Week”; A Universal Basic Income for Children”; “Medicare for All”; “Polluters Pay - The Extreme Weather Superfund”; “Democratize North American Trade”; “Housing as a Human Right”; “National Rent Control”; “Public Banking”; “No More Bailouts”. (For the whole list, see GameChangersPolicy.org).

C.J. Polychroniou: Since the project is about advancing progressive economic alternatives to the problems and challenges facing the US economy, one would assume that the economists invited to be part of the project represent a common tradition in the discipline. If so, how would you define this tradition, and is it important that there is a consensus among them as to what constitutes progressive economic policies over key issues? We know that the Left has always been divided over ideology and policymaking. It is divided over the scope of government intervention in capitalist economies, and there is even disagreement over several specific issues, such as the Universal Basic Income, how to reduce inequality, and how to combat the climate crisis.

Gerald Epstein: What unites the economists and other experts involved in Game Changers is a commitment to defeat fascism, preserve democracy, and help create a greener, stronger and fairer economy for American workers. We did not invite experts based on a theoretical, methodological or ideological litmus test. Indeed, I would say that is one of the strengths of our project. The left often has great difficulties uniting sufficiently to engage in practical tasks like winning elections, or even achieving small practical goals, because they are riven by ideological, theoretical or methodological differences. We are not subject to that problem. Big egos are also a problem in politics -left, right and center and, for sure, in academia. Thankfully, we have avoided that problem as well. For us, the litmus test was a commitment to the ideals of Game Changers, expertise in their subject areas, and, for the most part, a willingness to volunteer their time.

C.J. Polychroniou: The 1930s posed the biggest and most severe challenge in US economic history. The New Deal was a response to the calamity of the Great Depression and reshaped the United States in a major and profound way. But the New Deal ultimately gave way to the neoliberal order and the results have been nothing but catastrophic for working-class people. Is the US today in a similar state of affairs as it was in the 1930s in the sense that the system is badly broken? Is this the message behind the launching of Game Changers? If so, can different issues still be addressed separately or does the entire system need restructuring before anything meaningful can be done?

Gerald Epstein: You are certainly correct that the neoliberal order wreaked havoc on America’s workers, but now things are even worse. In the U.S. we are facing a particularly pernicious form of capitalism, an authoritarian, and profoundly corrupt version that is dominated by a self-seeking Presidential family and a lethal coalition of techno-fossil-fuel-financialized capitalists. While our specific issues and policy proposals stand on their own terms, we see them as part of a broader vision of what our economy needs to overcome this lethal form of capitalism. The antidote is to recognize the equal dignity of every human being and working to guarantee their right to economic security, the opportunity to thrive, a livable planet, a world free of racism, and democratic governance of our lives, societies and economies.

More specifically, Game Changers is posing a set of policies to help defeat this form of capitalism by “changing the game”, based on three principles.

Changing the game means (1) investing in each other, through public provisioning of care, health care and other critical services; (2) securing our future by, for example, breaking the power of the fossil fuel capitalists and addressing climate change; and (3) righting the rules, by ending reckless and predatory financial practices, changing tax policies so that the super-rich have less wealth and contribute a bigger share for the operations of our government, preventing capitalists from firing workers arbitrarily and without just cause.

At one level, these, of course, are not revolutionary demands in a traditional sense. But if widely implemented, they would bring about a revolutionary improvement in the lives of working people, not only in the short term but in the longer term as well.

C. J. Polychroniou: In your view, what are the most pressing issues facing today the US economy and working-class people?

Gerald Epstein: While the US economy’s productivity has grown significantly over the last 40 years, the standard of living of American workers has, for the most part, barely budged. This is especially true if one includes American workers’ ability to acquire many of the most important basics of life: housing, time and the wherewithal to care for children, family members and their communities; a sustainable environment in the face of climate change and degradation; quality health care and education; and dignity, respect and a voice in their workplace. American capitalists, especially but not exclusively those on Wall Street, engage in speculative and extractive activities, rather than investing in socially productive assets for the future. Even when a new technology is developed that could improve workers’ lives, such as AI, these are weaponized by big capitalists in their efforts to control and extract wealth from American workers. We have a bailout economy, whereby Wall Street financiers undertake highly risky investments, grab the rewards, and when these threaten themselves and the economy, they get bailed out by the government. All of this has led to an obscene level of income and wealth inequality. And we have a political economic system where those at the top use xenophobia, and racial and ethnic baiting and oppression to try to divide and conquer America’s workers in order to stay in control.

At Game Changers, we are trying to do our small part to help overturn this immoral and destructive system.

People want to elect fighters. They want affordability. They want security. Accountability. Voters want to fight corruption. Voters are starving for somebody who’ll stand up to power on their behalf. Yet, almost every time, that sentiment gets pointed at one target, Donald Trump. Fighting Trump, fighting his administration’s grab at our rights, fighting the handful of people at the top who’ve piled up about as much wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent of the country combined. I’m for the fight. But a fight needs an opponent, and you have to be clear-eyed and correct about who the opponent is, or you can’t defeat them. Right now, too many politicians and too many voters have decided their opponent is one man.

Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, and his administration is a threat to people the world over. But you don’t solve that threat by standing up to him, or legislating around him, or writing some new law that says he can’t do the thing he’s already doing. Because we’ve watched a Supreme Court bless this behavior. We’ve watched laws get ignored. Judgments ignored. Courts ignored. So it isn’t a question of who sits in the chair. It’s a question of power, and a question of accountability, and almost nobody with any standing is asking for accountability.

Our enemy isn’t the man. Our enemy is the system in which he’s operating, and that system runs on one thing, a lack of accountability.

Let’s start with what should be the clearest. We have been funding and arming a genocide of the Palestinian people, carried out by a rogue regime in Israel, in plain sight, and none of us can do a thing to stop it. You might think that has nothing to do with your life in Des Moines or Knoxville or wherever you’re reading this. It has everything to do with it. Because a system that lets war crimes happen in broad daylight with no consequence is the same system you live under, and if genocide can’t be stopped then what can? The powerlessness we feel isn’t just a side effect, it’s the point. An inspiration to quit.

Unlike money powerlessness does trickle down. It’s the Epstein operation, where the names are known, and not one person who mattered has answered for any of it. It’s Ken Paxton in Texas, whose office took over the case of a man who admitted to years-long sexual abuse of a young boy, a first-degree felony that carried up to life in prison, and after a mistrial cut him a deal down to two misdemeanors, thirty days in jail, and no spot on the sex-offender registry, and that same Ken Paxton is now his party’s nominee for the United States Senate. It’s an economy that minted its first trillionaire off the backs of American workers, American innovation, and resources we all paid to build. Different stories, same disease. Nobody pays.

The centrists have a ready answer for all of this. They’ll say, “That’s your problem, you’d rather go after the Democratic Party than fight Trump.” The “centrists” are wrong. Working to transform and restore the Democratic Party is one of the few solutions that might work.

There’s not really a center for them to occupy. There’s no neutral ground when the government is actively working to dismantle democracy and we have an economy failing the overwhelming majority of the people inside it. There is no center on genocide. To stand in the middle is to work with the people who currently hold the power, and the people who hold the power are Trump, and Palantir, and private equity, and the billionaires, the ones doing the extracting and the oppressing, here and across the planet.

So when a Democrat says I’m not willing to take on the system itself, the economic system, the justice system, the whole machine, what that Democrat is saying is that the machine gets to stay. And the machine is what empowers Trump. Going after Trump the man instead of the system isn’t a step toward fixing anything. It’s the false option, the move that lets you feel like a fighter while you don’t solve anything. You cannot be a centrist in this moment, because in this moment the center is just a way of siding with Trump.

I don’t see how a centrist can honestly think of themselves as “a fighter.” You can’t both fight for people and not fight to take power away from the institutions and companies that hold it and use it to harm people. You can’t fight against Trump by attacking socialists.

There’s a poem most of us know, written about what Germany allowed to happen. I won’t paraphrase it. It does its work whole.

First, they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And by then there was no one left to speak out for me

We are doing it again, right now, in the open. Both Trump and centrist Democrats are coming for the socialists, by which they mean anybody standing to the left of a tax cut. They are coming for the immigrants. They are coming for the unhoused and the disabled and the people with the least power to stop them. And, just like in Weimar Germany, the people who should be blocking authoritarianism are instead siding with it to attack the left. Josh Gottheimer. James Carville. The whole Promise to America crowd, the centrists on every channel, lining up with an administration they swear they want to fight, against an ideology whose only crime is refusing to say that things are fine the way they are.

And I don’t mean any of that as a figure of speech. I mean, there’s already a system built and running. ICE has opened more than 150 new detention facilities since this administration came in, the daily detention population has passed a record seventy thousand people, and the plan on paper is to spend thirty-eight billion dollars building toward a hundred thousand beds, in mega-camps run by the same for-profit prison companies that make money off everybody they hold.

In the Florida Everglades, they built a camp they nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz, where the conditions are so bad detainees went on hunger strike and Amnesty International called what was happening there torture. Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year, the most in two decades, and this year is worse.

Think you’re safe? It isn’t only immigrants. ICE and Border Patrol agents have shot multiple U.S. citizens and killed several of them, including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both gunned down in Minneapolis this January. Good’s death was ruled a homicide, and the Justice Department declined to investigate the agent who shot her and opened an investigation into her widow instead. That’s what no accountability looks like.

And the same machine runs at home. In March of last year, they stood up a federal task force to flood Washington with police, sweep the unhoused out of public space, and run immigration enforcement through the middle of the city. In July came an executive order to make it easier to round up homeless people and commit them to institutions against their will, on the claim that most of them are addicts or mentally ill. In August, they declared a crime emergency and pulled DC’s own police force under federal command, and over the past year, we’ve watched National Guard troops and even Marines pushed into American cities against protesters.

And this June, the Justice Department put out a legal memo arguing that disabled Americans have no right to live in their own communities at all, tearing up twenty-five years of settled law and quietly reopening the door to warehousing disabled people in institutions, right as the Medicaid cuts pull the funding from the services that keep them out. That isn’t a slope we might slide down someday. It’s a machine, already built, made to remove the people the state has decided are a problem.

And the billionaires aren’t standing off to the side, they’re cheering it on. Two weeks ago, the richest man alive, Elon Musk, used his platform to give away for free a film that German censors had refused to certify because, by the director’s own account, they found it incited violence against migrants. Then Musk posted that the sequel will be even better. That’s where we are. The man with more money than most nations is out promoting vigilante violence against immigrants and calling it a movie.

And all of it sits on top of a surveillance system we’ve been building since 9/11, more and more of it run by private companies and now being supercharged with AI, the cameras and the license plate readers and the face scans, pointed at us. People will tell you the lesson is that we let the government get too big. That’s not the lesson. The problem was never the size of the government. The problem is that we let unchecked power pool in the hands of a few, the few who own the system, run the camps, write the memos, and answer to no one.

So no, I’m not interested in fighting Donald Trump. I’m interested in fighting the thing that made him and will outlast him, the system that lets a genocide run, lets the Epstein names stay buried, lets a child’s abuser walk and then promotes the man who walked him, mints fortunes off our work, and rounds up the weakest people we’ve got while calling it order. That’s the enemy. Not a man. A system.

And the first thing we can do is quit pretending there’s a safe place to stand while it runs. There isn’t. Knowing the enemy doesn’t fix anything by itself, it just tells you where to put your shoulder, and the work after that is bigger and longer than anything a single election can fix. But it starts with saying the plain thing the center exists to avoid. You cannot be a centrist in this moment. Pick a side.

LIVE 9:00 am Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

Today we discuss:

• Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, ally of Trump/Netanyahu/Zelensky and a consistent neocon, dies of a “brief and sudden illness” at age 71.

• Speculation swirls as a “proof of life” photo of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a far-right stalwart of the GOP, emerges after weeks of cover-ups and misdirection about the 84-year-old’s health.

• U.S. and Iranian forces exchanged strikes over the weekend and issued conflicting accounts over whether the Strait of Hormuz remains open to shipping. Iran’s strikes targeted American military bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman and Qatar.

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

https://x.com/tedrall

https://x.com/JamarlThomas

#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

The post R.I.P. Evil Man | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Democratic Party, including even its progressive left wing in recent years, has become fixated on recruiting hypermasculine candidates—particularly military veterans—to counter Republican narratives portraying Democrats as effete coastal elites. This strategy aims to project strength, patriotism, and relatability to working-class and swing voters. A stark illustration of the risks of this strategy emerged with Graham Platner, a Marine Corps and Army veteran, oyster farmer, and progressive-backed candidate who won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary with 72% of the vote. Platner, who emphasized his combat tours and working-class background, suspended his campaign in July 2026 after facing sexual assault allegations.

The post Breaking: Soldiers Can Be Violent appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5:00 am, kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.

He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.

By 7:00 am he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.

What we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.

The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”

The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”

The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.

Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”

I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread.

I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)

My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Adolf Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work.

And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist.

Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in—to the shows and to the police—and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.

The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization.

Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.

There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.

So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:

1. A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.

In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract.

Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after President Donald Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.”

Federal agents physically blocked state investigators holding a valid judicial warrant from the scene of the Pretti shooting. Federal prosecutors who wanted to pursue the Good case as a civil rights matter were pressured until they resigned. Today, Good’s car sits shrink-wrapped and unexamined in an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, and the state has been forced to sue the federal government just to learn the names of the agents who killed two of its citizens.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.

2. A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.

On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years.

Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.”

And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment.

For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.

3. A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.

Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover.

In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants.

The FBI has since retooled its roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their 4,000-plus personnel toward the American “left” and stood up a new Joint Mission Center that’s investigating the funding of anti-Trump protest movements and payment of bounties while actual crime fighting goes begging.

When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.

4. A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.

In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis.

“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”

The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice.

Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway.

He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next.

That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.

5. A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.

Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all 50 states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms.

Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting, “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval.

Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutsstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.

6. A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.

Last month the Justice Department approved Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, placing CNN, CBS News, HBO, and two major studios under David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s nepo-baby and a Trump ally who, The Wall Street Journal reported, privately assured administration officials he’d make “sweeping changes” at CNN if he got that network, too.

7. A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects. As George Orwell wrote of fascism, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: The National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry.

In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there.

Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.”

That’s the same slogan under which 20,000 American Nazi sympathizers rallied at Madison Square Garden in 1939 beneath swastikas and a three-story portrait of George Washington, a chapter of our history this crowd would clearly prefer you never learn.

Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: Within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.

8. And finally, a police state controls the vote.

In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents.

On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all 50 states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost 11 straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls.

On Thursday, citing last week’s Supreme Court decision giving him essentially unlimited firing power, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency that, along with the now-paralyzed Federal Election Commission, have the power to call out election fraud; illegal campaign tactics and spending; and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. Both are now effectively shut down.

And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.

So, are we in a police state yet?

Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question—or at least at the wrong moment—because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”

Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.”

Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview 10 “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.

The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day:

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”

As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter...

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop… [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “One doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next…"

"But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D."

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.

Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:

The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.

So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: Every component is now built, tested, and humming.

But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.

That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.

So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections; demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo; and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls.

Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in red states.

Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer.

Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it.

Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general.

And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize.

At least not yet.

It’s been an eventful year since Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos tapped Adam O’Neal for the prestigious job of Post Opinions editor. O’Neal was an unusual hire, a 33-year-old with little by way of managerial experience. But O’Neal had a redeeming quality: He was ready to shill for Bezos, and the man Bezos has been desperately wooing, President Donald Trump.

It’s remarkable how far Bezos has come since 2013, when he said he purchased the Post from the Graham family out of a sense of civic duty.

Bezos was still singing a similar tune nearly midway through Trump’s first term, telling Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner (4/28/18), “I would be humiliated to interfere” with the Post’s coverage. “I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red… It would feel icky; it would feel gross.”

But days before the 2024 election, with Trump looking like he might return to the White House, Bezos apparently got over his queasiness and personally spiked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris (FAIR.org, 10/30/24). “Trump was thrilled, advisers said, and later thanked Bezos,” The Wall Street Journal (7/2/26) reported.

It’s a jarring listen; like the keys to a once-storied newspaper have been turned over to the manosphere.

Bezos followed up by declaring that Post Opinions would now promote “personal liberties and free markets,” while “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Coming a month into Trump’s second term, this came across as another gift to the president (FAIR.org, 2/28/25).

‘Unapologetically Patriotic’

To lead the newly oriented Opinions page, Bezos tapped O’Neal, who had been a correspondent for The Economist, editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal, and executive editor at the conservative Dispatch for just one year.

In that last role—apparently O’Neal’s only newsroom managerial experience—he quickly alienated the Dispatch staff. “He was a competent editor who had no idea how to talk to another human being,” a former associate of O’Neal’s told Status (7/18/25):

He was tough on reporters, sure, but that’s common in newsrooms. He just couldn’t express even the most minor thing without being abrasive, hostile, or raising his voice.

After being named to his post in June 2025, O’Neal declared that Post Opinions would be “unapologetically patriotic” and “communicate with optimism about this country.” This echoed Bezos, who declared a month into Trump’s second term, “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so.” Bezos was, of course, echoing Trump’s “America first” rhetoric.

O’Neal has demonstrated his patriotism by overseeing an editorial page that has backed Trump in destroying the East Wing of the White House (10/25/25), kidnapping the Venezuelan president (“one of the boldest moves a president has made in years”—1/3/26), militarily taking over DC (8/11/25; FAIR.org, 8/14/25), and unprecedented gerrymandering (8/20/25). (When Democrats responded in kind, the Post decried the “power grab”—4/21/26).

The Post’s pro-Trump boosterism under O’Neal has been so over the top, wrote Chris Lehmann (The Nation, 2/4/26), it’d “be a stretch for Pravda to pull off.”

“I try to avoid reading what the opinions section publishes,” a current Post staffer told Status (5/10/26). “I can’t tell if some of these arguments are being made in good faith or not. Sometimes it just seems like rage bait.”

‘Being Reconciled Is Not Enough’

While O’Neal’s predecessor, David Shipley, did everything Bezos could have asked for—spiking the Post’s Harris endorsement and a cartoon depicting Bezos and other tech moguls as Trump supplicants (FAIR.org, 1/7/25)—he did it without zeal, which Bezos found intolerable. “I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’” Bezos wrote, in explaining Shipley’s February 2025 resignation.

Shipley had voiced concern over the direction Bezos was taking the Post, warning the billionaire that spiking the Harris endorsement days before the election and yanking Opinions rightward could turn off subscribers. “I don’t care,” Bezos replied (New York Times, 3/14/26). (Shipley proved correct; Bezos’ interventions led to over 375,000 Post readers canceling their subscriptions—NPR, 1/30/26.)

Replacing Shipley, O’Neal wasted little time in transforming Opinions’ editorial outlook, and its personnel. In his first email to the Opinions desk, O’Neal encouraged his colleagues to get with the program or quit, mimicking Bezos’ message to Shipley. “Simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” O’Neal wrote. “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”

Seeing the writing on the wall, many of the Post’s centrist and left-of-center columnists took the generous buyouts on offer (which some had been contemplating since before O’Neal was hired). Gone in quick succession were Perry Bacon Jr., Philip Bump, Jonathan Capehart, Joe Davidson, Marc Fisher, Glenn Kessler, Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Catherine Rampell, Eugene Robinson, Eduardo Porter, and others. “It’s just an absolute exodus,” a Post staffer told Politico (7/28/25).

The paper’s last full-time Black Opinions columnist, Karen Attiah, was fired in September 2025 (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; FAIR.org, 9/23/25). (Theodore R. Johnson of New America writes roughly once a week as a contributing columnist, but is not on staff.)

Bezos hollowed the Post out further in February when he laid off nearly half of the newsroom, in what “may have been the biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation” (Washingtonian, 2/9/26).

Publicly, Bezos claimed he was doing this for the long-term viability of the paper. To be relevant, the Post has to be a “profitable enterprise that stands on its own two feet,” Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin (CNBC, 5/20/26). Otherwise, “it would be like poetry without rhyming.”

Privately, however, Bezos told Trump that Post employees “are terrible…. They don’t listen. My other companies, they listen,” according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book Regime Change.

To make the Post more like his other companies, Bezos needed “hell yes” management, like Adam O’Neal (and former publisher Will Lewis).

O’Neal, in turn, needed fellow travelers, and seems to have hired exclusively MAGA-friendly columnists. According to media critic Adam Johnson (Real News Network, 5/22/26), the Post

purged its opinion page of its actually popular writers and replaced them with charmless Economist and Wall Street Journal also-rans so they can spew libertarian cliches [and] tedious anti-woke screeds.
‘A Whole Bunch of Incredible Miracles’

O’Neal’s fealty to Bezos is most blatant in Opinions’ approach to artificial intelligence.

“All of the things that I work on today have something to do with AI,” Bezos told the Financial Times (6/11/26). “We’re in the middle of multiple golden ages right now, certainly with AI,” he continued, sounding every bit the snake oil salesman. “I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of incredible miracles unfold here in the next decade.”

And Bezos is banking on these miracles to expand his empire on Earth and in space. Despite being worth a quarter-trillion dollars, Bezos is presently scouring the globe to raise $100 billion for a new fund that plans to buy companies in industrial sectors and improve them using AI (Forbes, 3/19/26). Bezos’ latest effort aligns neatly with his new role as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a low-profile AI company that’s raised $18 billion in funding (Morning Brew, 6/12/26).

Meanwhile, Amazon—the company Bezos founded, where he remains the largest shareholder and executive chair—“recently placed a series of staggeringly expensive bets on artificial intelligence, audacious even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s ongoing trillion-dollar AI bacchanalia,” Bloomberg reported (5/14/26).

With so much on the line, Bezos has little patience for doomsayers who fear AI will cause mass job loss—the very thing Wall Street is salivating over. Sure, AI will be “shrinking the number of people needed by 10x,” Bezos told The Wall Street Journal (6/11/26). But the technology will in fact create “more than 10x” as many jobs, he said. The suggestion seems to be that more than 90% of us will soon be in hitherto unimagined job categories made possible by artificial intelligence. (Bezos’ fellow tech titans recently started following his lead and saying similar things about AI job losses.)

Despite Bezos’ rosy outlook, “the public isn’t so reassured,” the Journal reported (6/13/26) two days later, citing a Pew Research Center survey from March. “Only 17% of Americans say AI will have an overall positive effect on the US over the next 20 years.”

And the data centers needed to power AI fare little better. “Americans have changed their minds about data centers. Decisively,” reported the outlet Heatmap (6/2/26), which conducted a recent poll. “At least 7 in 10 Americans would now oppose a data center being built near their home… a record low.”

Opposition to data centers—and their insatiable demand for power and water—has become “The Most Bipartisan Issue Since Beer,” according to a New York Times headline (5/1/26).

‘Data Centers Don’t Deserve So Much Hate’

With the American people on one side of the AI divide, and Bezos and his fellow tech oligarchs on the other, O’Neal has rushed to his boss’ rescue (FAIR.org, 11/20/25). Here are some recent Opinions headlines (a couple have been subsequently altered):

• “Why the AI Jobs Panic Is Misplaced” (2/17/26)
• “Halting Data Center Construction Will Entrench Inequality” (3/24/26)
• “High Energy Bills? Blame the Trial Lawyers” (4/24/26)
• “Blocking the Construction of Data Centers Is a National Security Risk” (5/28/26)
• “AI Backlash Threatens to Hold Kids Back” (6/21/22)
• “AI Is Sparking a Boom in Blue-Collar Jobs…” (6/22/26)

Beyond the dutiful headlines themselves, the editorials also fail to disclose Bezos’ AI ties—which is not unusual. “What the Post’s data-center cheerleading only intermittently mentions is its owner’s vested interest in the topic,” noted Paul Farhi (Washingtonian, 6/23/26), the Post’s former media reporter. “I was unable to find a single editorial or opinion column opposing [AI data centers’] construction over the past six months.”

One of O’Neal’s top deputies, James Hohmann, took things a step further (while also failing to note Bezos’ ties to AI). Hosting an episode (5/26/26) of Opinions’ new flagship podcast, Make It Make Sense—headlined “Why Data Centers Don’t Deserve So Much Hate”—Hohmann “described climate activists as a ‘cult’ and argued that the media is ‘guilty’ of fueling ‘hysteria’ over climate change,” Status (6/7/26) summarized. It’s a jarring listen; like the keys to a once-storied newspaper have been turned over to the manosphere.

Even as Bezos hollows out the rest of the Post, money is flowing to Make It Make Sense, which has a well-appointed new studio. So far, however, “the investment has produced an astonishingly small audience,” Status reported (5/11/26). “It does feel like this is just for an audience of one,” a former Post staffer told the outlet.

Bernie Sanders, ‘Leading Luddite’

As grassroots fights against AI data centers spring up from coast to coast, opposition in the Senate is led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who introduced a bill to place a two-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers.

Already a bête noire of the Post (FAIR.org, 3/8/16), Sanders’ critique of data centers has led to a renewed thrashing. In a March editorial (3/25/26) headlined “Bernie Sanders Doubles Down on His Dumbest Idea,” the Post placed Sanders at “the lunatic fringe” of society for “throwing sand into the gears of progress.” The editorial also called Sanders “the leading Luddite of the 2020s.”

Two weeks later, the Post (4/8/26) returned to the “L” word, this time in an editorial that didn’t mention Sanders, but did associate opposition to data centers with domestic terrorism:

The mob-like movement against data centers that’s been gaining traction across the country took a dark turn this week. Indianapolis Councilor Ron Gibson (D), who supports a project to build such a facility in his district, woke up early Monday to the sound of 13 gunshots fired at his home. The gunman left a note on the lawmaker’s doorstep: “NO DATA CENTERS.”

No one was injured, but the incident illustrates how opposition to artificial intelligence can metastasize into an irrational frenzy. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that deranged Luddites turn to violence to fight the advancement of frontier technology.

Later that month, the Post’s editorial page was back to attacking Sanders. Under a scowling picture of the senator, a Post editorial (4/30/26) charged that Sanders

is as naive now as he was during the Cold War. Rarely, if ever, has the socialist met an enemy of the United States who he doesn’t think he can partner with to advance his agenda. The same impulse that led Sanders to cozy up to the Soviets, the Sandinistas, and Fidel Castro in the 1980s was on display again Wednesday night at the Capitol as he invited two Chinese academics to urge Americans to slow-roll our pursuit of artificial intelligence.

“Of course that’s what Beijing wants Washington to do,” the Post continued, in a brazen attempt to paint skepticism of AI data centers—a view held by most Americans—as anti-American.

The Post’s inflammatory editorial mentioned neither Bezos or Amazon, per usual.

The Billionaire Project

It’s not just Bezos’ financial interests that are advanced by O’Neal’s Opinions page, but also Bezos’ and his fellow billionaires’ broader ideological project (Real News Network, 5/22/26).

Under O’Neal’s watch, no tax on the wealthy seems to go uncensured. “The Post has weighed in on tax policy everywhere from Switzerland to Seattle, lambasting every attempt to reduce the grotesque inequality of our times,” Nathan Robinson wrote in a detailed review of the Post Opinions page for The Nation (4/21/26):

Almost no tax on the rich around the world escapes the paper’s notice—one might wonder why capital gains taxes in the Netherlands are a priority for a DC paper.

And no social program appears too small to earn O’Neal’s ire, not even diapers. In providing 400 free diapers to new parents, “California’s nanny state is taking infantilization to a new level,” decried a Post editorial (5/12/26).

Other recent Post editorials have “opposed minimum wage increases, tenant protections, social housing, rent control, free buses, caps on credit card interest rates, caps on the prices of staple foods, congestion pricing, and even the Railway Safety Act,” wrote Robinson.

But when government largesse flows to the rich, the Post is more open minded. The Trump administration’s request for another $200 billion for the Iran War, as well as a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget for next year, both received the Post’s blessing (3/21/26, 5/12/26). “Peace doesn’t come cheap,” the Post wrote.

Left unmentioned in the editorials is that Bezos’ empire—via his space company Blue Origin and Amazon’s cloud computing arm, AWS—holds billions of dollars worth of Pentagon contracts.