Live by the sword: Here's an idea for no-show Congress members
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump and Musk are neck deep in a racist disgrace
It’s one of the greatest preventable mass deaths in modern history: around two people every minute of every day, day and night, week after week, soon to be year after year.
In the time it takes you to read this article, several dozen children will have died because of actions taken — with full knowledge of this consequence — by South African immigrant Elon Musk, Big Balls and his teenage DOGE buddies, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio.
Children who wanted to live as desperately as do yours and mine, whose parents grieve them every bit as much as we would grieve the death of our own kids, are dying as you read these words.
Even worse, Musk and Rubio keep lying about the blood on their hands. Nobody knows if Rubio is drinking himself to sleep to deal with the guilt, but according to the New York Times Musk is taking mind-numbing drugs at a level that would make Charles Manson blush.
Rubio says:
“No one has died because of USAID [cuts]. … No children are dying on my watch.”
Musk proclaimed, as theTimes notes in an article titled “Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True”:
“No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”
Musk has called the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — the agency administering programs like George W. Bush’s PEPFAR which have saved tens of millions of lives, most in Africa — “a criminal organization,” adding that it was, “Time for it to die.”
But why?
Musk and his family fled white-ruled South Africa in 1989 as the transition to majority Black rule was well underway. Could that have something to do with his antipathy toward USAID?
Back in 1986, after overturning the veto of apartheid-fan Ronald Reagan, a Democratically-controlled US Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, which empowered USAID to play a leading role in undermining South Africa’s brutal white supremacist apartheid regime.
USAID’s anti-apartheid effort was led by Timothy Bork, Mission Director, General Counsel, Director of the Office of the Sahel and West Africa, and Deputy Assistant Administrator for the agency. He spent 19 years with USAID tackling apartheid in South Africa.
Bork’s and his colleagues efforts were ultimately successful in bringing down apartheid. USAID redirected much of its South Africa funding toward supporting South African Black-led grassroots organizations, trade unions, educational institutions, and legal defense groups.
- USAID funded legal assistance for South African political prisoners and anti-apartheid activists.
- It supported Black trade unions, which were central to mass resistance against apartheid.
- It provided resources to community development and education programs that were racially inclusive.
This was all possible because the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 codified sanctions against South Africa and mandated that U.S. aid could only support efforts to end apartheid and empower that country’s Black majority.
- USAID implemented this by funding programs that strengthened the capacity of the anti-apartheid opposition, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC)-aligned civil society.
- It also funded programs in South Africa that emphasized institution-building and human rights education, thus helping prepare the groundwork for democratic governance.
In the early 1990s, USAID played a direct role in supporting the transition to democracy in South Africa:
- It helped fund election infrastructure for the 1994 democratic elections.
- It provided support for the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).
- It funded civic education campaigns to help previously disenfranchised South Africans understand their voting rights.
According to Princeton Lyman, the former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa, USAID programs were the essential core that built the non-governmental infrastructure in that country that led to the end of apartheid and whites-only rule.
USAID historical documents chronicle how over $500 million was spent between the mid-1980s and early 1990s on democracy, governance, education, and civil society development to end apartheid in South Africa. Their successful efforts, made possible by the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, included:
- Economic Sanctions: The Act banned new U.S. investments in South Africa, prohibited bank loans to the South African government, and restricted imports of certain South African goods, including coal, uranium, and agricultural products.
- Air Travel Restrictions: It barred South African Airways from landing in the United States.
- Assistance to Victims of Apartheid: The Act authorized support for Black South Africans, including scholarships, community development, and legal aid.
The act’s sanctions and USAID’s implementation efforts to support the indigenous anti-apartheid movement created massive economic pressure on South Africa, producing a decline in foreign investment and trade. This economic strain, combined with internal resistance and international condemnation, led to the end of the apartheid regime on May 4, 1990 and the formation of that nation’s first truly democratic government in 1994.
Is that why, on February 2, Musk proudly tweeted about his effort that would lead to the deaths of millions of children:
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
As Bill Gates told the Financial Times:
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money.”
Associate Professor of Global Health at Boston University, Brooke Nichols, has done the math and it’s pretty bulletproof. She estimates that at least 300,000 people have already died because of Musk, Trump and Rubio gutting USAID, most of them children. Her Impact Tracker estimates that 103 people are dying every hour.
Not only is this a human tragedy that should horrify every American (although white supremacists seem to be celebrating it), but it’s also doing very real damage to America’s “soft power” around the world. China is rushing into many of the countries where USAID operated to provide relief and infrastructure, with an eye to building relationships that could lead to new trading partners and new access to valuable minerals and other resources.
Is surrendering our political and moral leadership in Africa and other underdeveloped parts of the world, simply payback by a cabal of South African immigrants for the loss of their white-run government? Is Trump’s offering sanctuary and government-funded flights into America to white (and only white) South Africans further proof of this?
Or did they do it merely to kneecap our government’s soft power that’s kept Russia and China at bay in much of the developing world? Was it a favor to Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?
Or was it simply a drug-fueled whim? “Hey, let’s just kill a few million people for fun!”
While the death and damage Musk, Trump, and Rubio are causing is well documented, few in our media are asking the essential question: “Why?”
Why are these men celebrating the death of, so far, hundreds of thousands of children and the eventual death of millions, along with the golden opportunity for expanding political power they’re handing to Russia and China?
I don’t know their reason (the cost of USAID is pretty minimal and won’t have any meaningful effect on our deficit or debt), but it’s a pretty essential question we should all have the right to know the answer to.
What rationale or logic do you think is behind this?
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This bonkers MAGA-girl story proves the face-eating leopard lives
While poking around all the likely news sources this morning, I landed on this piece from the Associated Press: “OAN’s Pentagon Reporter Learns the Limits of Expressing Her Own Opinion.”
Here’s the subhead: “The day the face-eating leopard ate my face.”
OK, the subhead is mine, but the story is bonkers, scary, and one of the most MAGA things I have ever read.
Here’s the lede from the AP’s David Bauder, who did an admirable job of playing this one straight, even if I will predict he typed this beauty through gritted teeth:
“Assigned to cover the Pentagon for the conservative outlet One America News Network, Gabrielle Cuccia didn’t pretend to be an unbiased reporter. She describes herself as “a MAGA girl” who is unapologetically defiant in her support of President Donald Trump.
“Yet days after publicly criticizing a Trump appointee, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Cuccia found herself out of a job.”
To start with, and there are a million points of entry for a bizarre story like this one, let’s just get this out of the way quick: One America News Network (OAN) — and why isn’t it OAN-N? — is a hardcore right-wing propaganda weapon that doesn’t belong anywhere close to the vicinity of anything serious, much less in the halls of our Pentagon. Ditto, the (allegedly) drunken Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has already shared more secrets with our enemies than Trump on the patio of a Mar-a-Lago all-you-can-eat cookout with half the Russian embassy.
Here’s some background on OAN(N) from Bauder:
One America News Network makes no secret of its allegiance to Trump. When Matt Gaetz’s nomination as Trump’s attorney general fell apart following the election, OAN quickly signed him up as a contributor. OAN faced lawsuits — and negotiated settlements — for its promotion of Trump’s false theories that he did not lose the 2020 election.
So you have a MAGA propaganda network “covering” the Pentagon with a propagandist stooge, who will climb every mountain to proudly proclaim she is completely in the tank for the anti-American Trump Administration, no matter what.
Wipe that grin off your face, Vladimir …
Well, the trouble started for “MAGA girl” when she was reminded that she got her job in the Pentagon not because she is anything resembling a real journalist, but because she is, first and foremost, a power tool.
She was there on behalf of the Trump Administration-OAN(N) partnership to prop Hegseth up, not tear him down. She was there to run errands, not question his decisions.
The minute the power tool started trying to act like a real journalist she would be unplugged, and put away in some box. The last thing OAN(N) wants is any real journalism breaking out at the place.
They have their brutally dishonest brand, and the brutally dishonest White House to protect.
So when “MAGA girl” took against the Pentagon’s restrictive access issues for journalists, and rightwing propagandists like herself under the Trump regime, she wrote an endless Substack piece about it and was promptly removed from her job.
From Bauder’s piece:
“The Defense Department did not pull Cuccia’s credentials, according to a Defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues. Cuccia said OAN told her the Substack piece had been “put on their radar,” but she wouldn’t say by who. She wouldn’t speak further about what her employer told her, and OAN president Charles Herring told the Associated Press that it does not discuss personnel issues.”
This is the only part of the AP reporting that rubbed me the wrong way.
HOW can there be any confusion about whether it was the Pentagon who removed “MAGA girl” or OAN(N) when they are the same damn thing? I really wish places like AP would stop being cute about stuff like this, when they know good and damn well that the White House and places like OAN(N) are connected like a toilet to a sewer pipe.
None of the hell we have endured the past decade or so would have been remotely possible without steam shovels like OAN(N) and Fox News spreading their 24/7 manure …
As to “MAGA girl’s” Substack piece that landed her in all this hot water …
I debated whether to link to it here, because it is longer than War and Peace (get that girl six editors, a fire extinguisher, and while yer at it, another martini for Pete), and because thanks to pathetic, bought-off, anti-America power tools like herself our country is teetering on the brink, because there are actually people who swallow her s--t whole, and then spit it out to their friends.
But what the hell, here it is: If you decide you do have about four hours to waste, don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s truly gruesome, and starts this way:
“I feel like I don’t need to start this by proclaiming my love for America the Beautiful — or by saying that I was (and still am) unapologetically defiant in my support for President Trump.”
Because the first rule for any power tool is to not completely short-circuit your relationship with your true power source.
In fact, I predict it’s only a matter of time before “MAGA girl” finds herself another cushy job as a power tool, featuring far more anti-American screed to plug.
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America under attack: Trump uses dictator tactics to dismantle democracy
President Donald Trump’s critics often accuse him of harboring authoritarian ambitions. Journalists and scholars have drawn parallels between his leadership style and that of strongmen abroad. Some Democrats warn that the U.S. is sliding toward autocracy – a system in which one leader holds unchecked power.
Others counter that labeling Trump an autocrat is alarmist. After all, he hasn’t suspended the Constitution, forced school children to memorize his sayings or executed his rivals, as dictators such as Augusto Pinochet, Mao Zedong and Saddam Hussein once did.
But modern autocrats don’t always resemble their 20th-century predecessors.
Instead, they project a polished image, avoid overt violence and speak the language of democracy. They wear suits, hold elections and talk about the will of the people. Rather than terrorizing citizens, many use media control and messaging to shape public opinion and promote nationalist narratives. Many gain power not through military coups but at the ballot box.
The softer power of today’s autocrats
In the early 2000s, political scientist Andreas Schedler coined the term “electoral authoritarianism” to describe regimes that hold elections without real competition. Scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way use another phrase, “competitive authoritarianism,” for systems in which opposition parties exist but leaders undermine them through censorship, electoral fraud or legal manipulation.
In my own work with economist Sergei Guriev, we explore a broader strategy that modern autocrats use to gain and maintain power. We call this “informational autocracy” or “spin dictatorship.”
These leaders don’t rely on violent repression. Instead, they craft the illusion that they are competent, democratic defenders of the nation – protecting it from foreign threats or internal enemies who seek to undermine its culture or steal its wealth.
Hungary’s democratic facade
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán exemplifies this approach. He first served from 1998 to 2002, returned to power in 2010 and has since won three more elections – in 2014, 2018 and 2022 – after campaigns that international observers criticized as “intimidating and xenophobic.”
Orbán has preserved the formal structures of democracy – courts, a parliament and regular elections – but has systematically hollowed them out.
In his first two years he packed Hungary’s constitutional court, which reviews laws for constitutionality, with loyalists, forced judges off the bench by mandating a lower retirement age and rewrote the constitution to limit judicial review of his actions. He also tightened government control over independent media.
To boost his image, Orbán funneled state advertising funds to friendly news outlets. In 2016, an ally bought Hungary’s largest opposition newspaper – then shut it down.
Orbán has also targeted advocacy groups and universities. The Central European University, which was registered in both Budapest and the U.S., was once a symbol of the new democratic Hungary. But a law penalizing foreign-accredited institutions forced it to relocate to Vienna in 2020.
Yet Orbán has mostly avoided violence. Journalists are harassed rather than jailed or killed. Critics are discredited for their beliefs but not abducted. His appeal rests on a narrative that Hungary is under siege – by immigrants, liberal elites and foreign influences – and that only he can defend its sovereignty and Christian identity. That message resonates with older, rural, conservative voters, even as it alienates younger, urban populations.
A global shift in autocrats
In recent decades, variants of spin dictatorship have appeared in Singapore, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Leaders such as Hugo Chávez and the early Vladimir Putin consolidated power and marginalized opposition with minimal violence.
Data confirm this trend. Drawing from human rights reports, historical records and local media, my colleague Sergei Guriev and I found that the global incidence of political killings and imprisonments by autocrats dropped significantly from the 1980s to the 2010s.
Why? In an interconnected world, overt repression has costs. Attacking journalists and dissidents can prompt foreign governments to impose economic sanctions and discourage international companies from investing. Curbing free expression risks stifling scientific and technological innovation – something even autocrats need in modern, knowledge-based economies.
Still, when crises erupt, even spin dictators often revert to more traditional tactics. Russia’s Putin has cracked down violently on protesters and jailed opposition leaders. Meanwhile, more brutal regimes such as those in North Korea and China continue to rule by spreading fear, combining mass incarceration with advanced surveillance technologies.
But overall, spin is replacing terror.
America too?
Most experts, myself included, agree that the U.S. remains a democracy.
Yet some of Trump’s tactics resemble those of informational autocrats. He has attacked the press, defied court rulings and pressured universities to curtail academic independence and limit international admissions. His admiration for strongmen such as Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele alarms observers. At the same time, Trump routinely denigrates democratic allies and international institutions such as the United Nations and NATO.
Some experts say democracy depends on politicians’ self restraint. But a system that survives only if leaders choose to respect its limits is not much of a system at all. What matters more is whether the press, judiciary, nonprofit organizations, professional associations, churches, unions, universities and citizens have the power – and the will – to hold leaders accountable.
Preserving democracy in the US
Wealthy democracies such as the U.S., Canada and many Western European countries benefit from robust institutions such as newspapers, universities, courts and advocacy groups that act as checks on government.
Such institutions help explain why populists such as Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi or Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, although accused of bending electoral rules and threatening judicial independence, have not dismantled democracy outright in their countries.
In the U.S., the Constitution provides another layer of protection. Amending it requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states – a far steeper hurdle than in Hungary, where Orbán needed only a two-thirds parliamentary majority to rewrite the constitution.
Of course, even the U.S. Constitution can be undermined if a president defies the Supreme Court. But doing so risks igniting a constitutional crisis and alienating key supporters.
That doesn’t mean American democracy is safe from erosion. But its institutional foundations are older, deeper and more decentralized than those of many newer democracies. Its federal structure, with overlapping jurisdictions and multiple veto points, makes it harder for any one leader to dominate.
Still, the global rise of spin dictatorships should sharpen awareness of what is happening in the U.S. Around the world, autocrats have learned to control their citizens by faking democracy. Understanding their techniques may help Americans to preserve the real thing.
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Trump's sinister plan mirrors history's worst tyrants
Why is Trump trying to cancel “Sesame Street,” which has helped children learn to read and count for over half a century?
Why is he seeking to destroy Harvard University?
Why is he trying to deter the world’s most brilliant scientists from coming to the United States?
Because he is trying to destroy American education — and with it, the American mind.
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated public. Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music. Stalin and Pinochet censored the media.
And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not just what we do, but also how and what we think.
He has embraced one of the mottos from George Orwell’s 1984: “Ignorance is strength.” He knows that an uninformed public is easier to divide and conquer.
There are five facets to Trump’s authoritarian attack on the American mind:
1. Rewrite history
The protagonist of 1984 works in the so-called Ministry of Truth, where he’s made to literally rewrite history because Big Brother knows that he “who controls the past controls the future.”
That’s chilling in a dystopian novel. It’s far scarier in real life, where Trump and his MAGA cronies are making schools whitewash slavery and segregation, cover up the genocide of Native Americans, and erase the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
Authoritarians know that if they can convince us our country has never been wrong, they can make us believe our ruler is always right.
If they can make us forget how brave activists fought for change in the past, they can stop us from seeking change in the future.
Trump wants us to forget (or never know) that he lost the 2020 election and then instigated a coup against the United States.
He even claimed last weekend that former President Joseph R. Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone.
2. Gut education
As Trump tries to abolish the Department of Education, he’s also proposing to cut funding for K-12 public schools and to force universities to let him influence student admissions, faculty hiring, and what is taught.
As a professor, I know firsthand how education empowers young people’s minds. We can’t have a functioning democracy if people cannot deliberate critically about it. That’s why authoritarians replace education with indoctrination.
But the Trump regime doesn’t want a functioning democracy.
Instead of teaching students to think for themselves, authoritarians seek to instill blind allegiance and suppress dissent. As Trump adviser Stephen Miller said: “Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots.”
This is why the Italian and German fascists of the 20th century immediately turned their countries’ educational systems into instruments of the party.
3. Dismantle science
By freezing university research grants and attacking the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and USAID, Trump is stifling medical and scientific research.
And his cuts to the Centers For Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration put all of us at risk.
He’s also abducting and deporting international scientists who disagree with his administration. Can you imagine a crueler way to rob America of the global intellectual capital that has helped us become the world leader in scientific research?
He is now revoking visas of some Chinese college students. Some 277,000 students from China attended school in the United States last year, second only to the number of students from India. The United States employs tremendous numbers of scientific and technological experts originally from China. We need this continued pipeline of intellect and skill.
How can medical research and disease prevention be political? How can scientific research in general become political? Why is Trump afraid of science?
Because science acknowledges objective facts. Authoritarians insist that the ruler is more powerful than the facts. Trump wants to control the facts.
As George Orwell wrote, “it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”
4. Suppress the media
From suing ABC and CBS over their news coverage to threatening to strip network broadcast licenses to defunding PBS and NPR, Trump is trying to silence America’s sources of news.
As Trump repeatedly says: “I call it the fake news media.”
He wants control over what information Americans can (or cannot) get.
His regime is even going through social media accounts of people seeking visas to the United States.
A free press exists to question authority and help the public question it as well. But authoritarians insist that they must never be questioned.
Authoritarians want to consolidate state power over what the public can know.
5. Attack the arts
The arts exist to provoke us, challenge our thinking, and help us see beyond ourselves.
They arts are an important and independent aspect of an educated society, which is why authoritarians have historically attacked them.
So it’s no surprise that Trump is canceling grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, is dictating what’s displayed at the Smithsonian, and has installed himself as the chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
To limit art is to limit free speech and expression. It’s a crucial step that authoritarians use to silence anyone who dissents through creativity.
Added up, these five facets of Trump’s attack on the American mind render us less informed, less inspired, and easier to control.
They empower him to divide us with hatred and fear.
And they prevent us from discovering that we have more in common with one another than with the authoritarians who try to rule us.
This attack on our minds reduces our capacity for self-government because ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.
What you can do: Please share this essay, and help spread the truth.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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A clerical slip just exposed the whole damn game of this Republican death cult
The other night, I slept like a bear.
Before the bomb hit November 8, 2016, that would not have merited public mention, but for too many of us sleep has come hard for the better part of the last decade.
We have seen a few things.
We have internalized those things.
And try as we might, many of those things have been impossible to process.
Violent insurrections … vivid and horrid bigotry … attacks on NATO, women, children, human rights, voting rights, and our environment … lies, lies and more lies …
We live in a morally declining country, where the disintegration started in earnest the minute white and orange people started shouting they were going to make the place “great” again.
We saw how great things ended up for the people who lived on our chunk of the earth before “the settlers” arrived, and for so many others since they decided to stay. We saw how these kind of great things started in Europe in the 1930s and climaxed in the 40s.
I’ve typed before that if you are searching for the through line that led to all of this hyper-hate and madness we’ve witnessed the past decade, you need only look at this country’s racist roots that are still being dutifully watered by the deviant in the White House and inside millions of our nation’s households, where bigotry is being spoon-fed to our children with the dark hope it will continue to flourish in the generations to come …
“They’re eating our dogs and cats …!”
As many of you know, I’m in Wisconsin these days. It’s easily the least diverse place I have ever lived. Still, there is an inordinate amount of enlightenment in significant pockets of this Upper-Midwest state, where urban areas teem with outdated things like museums, libraries and concert halls.
The arts flourish in these places. Not because they are great, but because they are honest.
They make us look hard at what we’ve done and where we are as a society. They remind us that people can be beautiful, ugly and imperfect. They paint a candid picture of a nation that has reached hard to achieve its highest ideals — “One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” — only to be dragged backwards by Republicans every time there’s a shot that “all” of us will ever get that justice.
If you’re looking for greatness then go stare at your bird feeder for five minutes; or lay down on your back and watch the sky. If you are lucky enough to find a wooded trail, quietly sneak through it.
You will encounter truly great things in these places.
And all these things — our wildlife, our air, our water — are under 24/7 attack by many of the very men and women who are blanketing us with all this noxious smoke from the smoldering, racist fires they have so eagerly rekindled …
So one recent morning, fresh from that uncommon night of deep sleep, I cracked open the local paper on my computer screen and was hit with this eye-opening slammer:
Trump, and his puppy-killing, dead-inside Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem have put us "on the list" for "deliberately and shamefully" obstructing immigration enforcement.
How do you spell N-A-Z-I?
I can report to you that as a Madison resident I feel safe in saying we wear our humanity as a badge of honor, and will be toasting our success at making this list just as soon as we can.
And while the story was yet another account of the state of things in this roiling country, it also gave away the whole gruesome Republican game.
From the story:
“The administration on Thursday published a list of more than 500 "sanctuary jurisdictions" that includes the state's liberal bastions of Madison and Dane County, as well as the city of Milwaukee and Shawano County.
The department said it "demands that these jurisdictions immediately review and revise their policies to align with Federal immigration laws."
One of these things is not like the other. So enter Jim Davel, an administrator for Shawano County, who couldn’t wait to point that out. Davel told the Associated Press that the inclusion of his heavily Republican community on this list “must be a clerical error.”
He breathlessly continued:
“We have no idea how we got on this list whatsoever right at this point. I think it was just a big mix-up, probably some paperwork or something.”
Relax, sport.
After digging around a bit in some low places, I’m only too happy to expose you for being even more rotten than you want to be, and remind you that that list is reserved for decent folks, not cowards like you.
Turns out, that in 2021, in the wake of Joe Biden’s 7 million-plus win over the America-attacking Trump, the County Board in Shawano that Davel is so proudly a part of declared by bending over and breaking wind it was something called a “Second Amendment sanctuary county.” Thanks to this insidious declaration, the county sheriffs office could no longer enforce any laws which “unconstitutionally impeded on their fundamental Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.”
Because rather than accepting the results of an election that at least pointed us in the general direction of greatness in 2020, Republicans in places like Shawano went reaching for their guns in 2021.
It sure looks a lot to me like Republicans figure guns, not people, are what truly make America great, and why it’s a damn wonder any sane person can get a decent night’s sleep around here …
(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.)
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No bans, just fear: How Trump is quietly killing free speech in America
When most people think of how governments stifle free speech, they think of censorship. That’s when a government directly blocks or suppresses speech. In the past, the federal government has censored speech in various ways. It has tried to block news outlets from publishing certain stories. It has punished political dissenters. It has banned sales of “obscene” books.
Today, however, the federal government rarely tries to censor speech so crudely. It has less blatant but very effective ways to suppress dissent. The current actions of the Trump administration show how government can silence speakers without censoring them.
My quarter century of research and writing about First Amendment rights has explored the varied tools that governments use to smother free expression. Among the present administration’s chosen tools are making institutions stop or change their advocacy to get government benefits; inducing self-censorship through intimidation; and molding the government’s own speech to promote official ideology.
Using benefits to coerce speech
The Supreme Court has made clear that the First Amendment bars the government from conditioning benefits on the sacrifice of free speech.
Government employers may not refuse to hire employees of the opposing political party, nor may they stop employees from speaking publicly about political issues. The government may not stop funding nonprofits because they refuse to endorse official policies, or because they make arguments the government opposes.
The First Amendment, however, works only if someone asks a court to enforce it, or at least threatens to do so.
The Trump administration has issued orders that withdraw security clearances, cancel government contracts and bar access to government buildings for law firms that have opposed the administration’s policies or have advocated diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI. Some law firms have sued to block the orders. More firms, however, have made deals with the administration, agreeing to end DEI programs and to do free legal work for conservative causes.
The administration similarly has withheld funding from universities that embrace DEI or that, by the administration’s account, have fomented or tolerated antisemitism. Harvard University has resisted that pressure. But Columbia University has capitulated to President Donald Trump’s demands that include cracking down on protests, giving university officials more control over controversial academic programs and hiring more conservative professors.
The Supreme Court may ultimately declare the administration’s gambits unconstitutional, but it has already succeeded in leveraging government benefits to make major institutions change their speech.
Intimidating speakers into silence
First Amendment law also restricts government actions that deter or “chill” expression rather than squarely banning it.
That means the government may not regulate speech through vague laws that leave lawful speakers uncertain whether the regulation reaches them. For example, the Supreme Court in 1971 struck down a Cincinnati, Ohio, ordinance that criminalized any public assembly the city deemed “annoying.”
Likewise, the government may not make people disclose their identities as a requirement for acquiring controversial literature or for supporting unpopular causes. In the classic case, the Supreme Court during the civil rights era blocked Alabama from making the NAACP disclose its membership list.
Chilling of speech is hard to detect, but the current public climate strongly suggests that the Trump administration has plunged the thermostat.
College and university campuses, which rumbled in spring 2024 with protests against the Gaza war, have gone largely quiet. Large corporations that challenged the first Trump presidency have fallen into line behind the second. Big liberal donors have folded up their wallets.
Some of that dampening likely reflects fatigue and resignation. Much of it, though, appears to reveal successful intimidation.
The administration has proclaimed that it is deporting noncitizen students, using their lawful speech as justification. While those expulsions themselves are classic censorship, their hidden reach may stifle more speech than their immediate grasp. Noncitizens are legally attractive targets for government censorship because courts largely defer to the president on matters of national security and immigration.
The Trump administration could not lawfully treat U.S. citizens as it is treating, lawfully or not, foreign nationals. But most citizens don’t know that. The vivid spectacle of punished dissenters seems likely to chill other dissenters.
Whitewashing government speech
The First Amendment only bars the government from controlling private speech. When the government speaks, it can say what it wants. That means people who speak for the government lack any First Amendment right to replace the government’s messages with their own.
In theory, then, every new federal administration could sweepingly turn government institutions’ speech into narrow propaganda. That hasn’t happened before, perhaps because most governments realize they are just temporary custodians of an abiding republic.
The Trump administration has broken this norm. The administration has ordered the purging of ideologically disfavored content from the Smithsonian museums, implemented book bans in military libraries and installed political supporters to run cultural institutions.
None of those actions likely violates the First Amendment. All of them, however, have significant implications for free speech. In what may be the most quoted line in the First Amendment legal canon, Justice Robert Jackson declared in 1943 that the government should never “prescribe what shall be orthodox … in matters of opinion.”
A 21st-century federal government can dramatically skew public discourse by honing government speech with the flint of official ideology. Trump has assigned Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the Smithsonian’s board, the role of “seeking to remove improper ideology.” If Vance decides what the Smithsonian can and cannot say about slavery and Jim Crow, then the Smithsonian will teach people only what Vance wants them to learn about those subjects. That influential source of knowledge will push public discussion toward the government’s ideology.
When government beneficiaries agree to say what the president wants, when the government intimidates speakers to silence themselves, and when the government sharpens its own speech into propaganda, no censorship happens.
But in all those scenarios, the government is doing exactly what justifies fear of censorship and what First Amendment law exists to prevent: using official power to make speech less free.
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Judges face rising threats as Trump escalates attacks on the courts
One of our highest priorities in this darkness must be to protect the people who are doing the most right now to push back against Trump’s tyranny: our judiciary.
In some 180 judicial rulings so far, federal judges have at least temporarily stopped Trump from (1) deporting and/or imprisoning people without due process, (2) firing federal workers and closing agencies and departments without congressional approval, (3) forcing law firms to not represent people or causes Trump dislikes, (4) forcing universities, their faculties, and their students not to say or write things Trump dislikes, and (5) imposing worldwide tariffs without congressional authority.
Most of these court rulings have been temporary until the merits of the cases are fully heard, but increasingly they’re final decisions.
The Trump regime is appealing many of them. A few will almost certainly end up in the Supreme Court.
Our laws and the Constitution allow a president to contest such rulings in these ways.
But Trump and his lackeys are also using a second tactic: trying to undermine public confidence in the judiciary — even inviting threats to the safety of judges and seeking to intimidate them.
Last week, Trump on social media rebuked what he called “USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK.”
On Thursday, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, wrote on social media that the decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. trade court striking down Trump’s tariffs as exceeding his authority was a “judicial coup.”
Miller added: “We are living under a judicial tyranny.”
Miller then reposted photos of the three trade court judges. (Two of the judges, incidentally, were Republican appointees, one named to the bench by Trump.)
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the judges had “brazenly abused their judicial power,” seeking to “usurp the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.”
This is dangerous nonsense. As J. Michael Luttig, a conservative retired federal appeals court judge, says:
“This was a planned war that [Trump] had been planning since he lost the last election. From Day 1, the president, the vice president and then eventually his entire Cabinet have been attacking the courts and the judiciary because they knew to a certainty that the courts would strike down his initiatives.”
It should be no surprise that personal threats against the safety of federal judges have risen dramatically since Trump took office.
Data compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service shows that in the five-month period leading up to March 1 of this year, 80 individual judges had received threats.
Then, over the next six weeks, an additional 162 judges received threats.
That spike coincides with increasingly harsh rhetoric — often from Trump himself — against judges who have ruled against the regime.
What should be done to protect our judges?
1. The simplest solution would be for Trump and his White House lackeys to avoid such vitriol in the first place. The problem is, they won’t. So:
2. Chief Justice John Roberts must strongly rebuke Trump, Miller, Leavitt, and any other members of the Trump regime who use inflammatory language against federal judges. Roberts should say that there is no place in our constitutional system of government for accusations by an administration of “USA hating judges,” “judicial tyranny,” or “usurping” presidential authority.
He should explain why administrations must respect checks and balances built into the Constitution, why judges must be fearless and independent in their roles, and why such accusations by an administration against the judicial branch are dangerous. He should also signal that he will continuously speak out whenever the president or his White House violates these norms.
3. The Judicial Conference of the United States — the national policymaking body for the federal courts — must also speak out strongly against such provocations.
4. Congress must increase the number of marshals assigned to protect judges, boost funding for courthouse security, and strengthen legislation to shield judges’ home addresses from public view. Roberts and the Judicial Conference should demand these, and the speaker of the House and majority leader of the Senate must agree to seek them.
5. What can you do?
— Call the Supreme Court and leave a message for Chief Justice John Roberts that he must speak up against Trump’s attacks on judges. Here’s how you can reach the Supreme Court: Call the general information phone 202-479-3000, or public information office 202-479-3211 (press 1 when calling this number), or write: Chambers of Justice John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, 1 First Street NE, Washington, D.C., 20543.
— Call the Federal Judicial Center and leave a message saying that the chief justice must speak out against the Trump regime’s efforts to intimidate the courts with threats and that judges need more protection. The phone number is 202-502-4000. Address is Federal Judicial Center, Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, One Columbus Circle NE, Washington, D.C., 20002-8003.
— Tell your members of Congress they must protect our judges by increasing the number of marshals assigned to protect them, boosting funding for courthouse security, and shielding judges’ home addresses from public view. Congressional switchboard: 202-224-3121.
— Whenever you hear anyone criticize the federal courts, explain their critical role in our system of government.
— You can also express your gratitude for our judges. More than 30 retired judges have formed a group known as “Keep Our Republic’s Article III Coalition” to defend the independence of the court system and advocate for sitting judges. You can donate to them here.
Never underestimate the power of the people, especially at a time like this. We must make our voices heard.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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Lawsuits confirm Kansas lawmakers devised threatening assaults on civil rights
In their apparent eagerness to save money and do right by taxpayers, perhaps Kansas Republican leaders could try passing laws that don’t trample on the rights of their constituents.
That’s my only response to lawsuits filed throughout May that highlight the downright sloppy lawmaking that has become a hallmark of our state’s rushed, secretive legislative session. Bills are introduced and rubber-stamped in committee, testimony from experts is ignored, and the House and Senate send them through with nary a speed bump.
Afterward, the taxpayers of Kansas have to foot the bill for any carelessness.
Let’s take a quick look at the lawsuits and their subjects. Up first, Kansas Reflector editor in chief Sherman Smith, who reported the following May 28.
Two transgender teenagers and their parents are challenging a new Kansas law that bans gender-affirming care for minors.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and the national ACLU filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Douglas County District Court on behalf of a 16-year-old trans boy and a 13-year-old trans girl. The lawsuit argues the new law violates state constitutional rights for equal protection, personal autonomy and parenting.
Senate Bill 63 prohibits health care providers from using surgery, hormones or puberty blockers to treat anyone younger than 18 who identifies with a gender that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth. Health care providers who break the law may be subject to civil penalties and stripped of their license.
Next, Reflector reporter Anna Kaminski wrote about another lawsuit on May 19.
A Kansas reproductive rights advocacy group, backed by a Washington, D.C., law firm, sued state officials over a new law banning financial contributions from “foreign nationals” to support or oppose constitutional amendments.
The group, Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, argued in a complaint filed in federal court Friday that House Bill 2106, which passed the Legislature in April and is set to go into effect July 1, is broad, vague and unconstitutional. The group said the bill inhibits its ability to advocate for or against future constitutional amendments. Kansans for Constitutional Freedom and its donors have received contributions from foreign nationals, the lawsuit said.
The complaint drew a connection between HB 2106 and opposition to the 2022 ballot measure that sought to limit reproductive rights. Voters rejected the proposed constitutional amendment by a 59-41 margin.
But wait, there’s still more! Here’s senior reporter Morgan Chilson on May 6.
Three advocacy organizations filed a lawsuit Monday in Douglas County District Court challenging the Kansas Legislature’s attempt to “arbitrarily” reject advance ballots of voters if the mail system fails to deliver them by Election Day.
Kansas Appleseed, Loud Light and Disability Rights Center of Kansas are asking the court to find Senate Bill 4 unconstitutional. Defendants are Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew.
SB 4, which the Legislature passed this year, disqualifies any mail-in ballots not received by 7 p.m. on Election Day. Previously, mail-in ballots were counted if they were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within three days later.
You can read the law here. You can read the lawsuit here.
We covered all of these proposals at various stages, from twinkles in legislators’ eyes to enshrinement in the statute books. Leaders sent the anti-trans bill to Gov. Laura Kelly as their first act of business in the 2025 session. She allowed the foreign nationals ban to become law without her signature and a warning that it “went too far.” The advance-voting bill was called “pure partisan politics” by former Rep. Ann Mah.
Sure, the deluge of wastewater emanating from the Statehouse in 2025 may have overwhelmed at times. But none of this should have come as a surprise.
If people or groups believe the government has infringed on their rights — to medical care, to advocacy, to voting — no one can be surprised if they bring legal action. When senators and representatives cast votes on such issues, they decide whether the state should place a barrier in front of the people they represent. No amount of victim blaming or sanctimonious claptrap obscures the truth.
Defending the laws falls to Attorney General Kris Kobach and his office. Who pays their salaries? You and me and all the people of Kansas. We’re all on the hook for legislative foolishness.
The state may win some or all of these suits. So may those who filed them. Regardless, their mere presence suggests that our elected officials tread far too easily into the swamps of ideological overreaction. Rather than representing all, they have bowed and scraped in service to a hateful few.
We will see the consequences play out before judges in the months ahead.
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This is not the America I know — and it certainly isn't great
Autocrats and authoritarians share certain traits.
They don’t recognize checks and balances nor the institutions tasked with imposing them.
They do not recognize the rule of law. Laws that do not suit simply do not apply.
So, a country’s governing documents such as a constitution are malleable. Truth is what they say it is, facts be damned.
Critics who challenge this – journalists and the organizations they work for, law firms, universities, disagreeable judges, artists, etc. – are in for punishment and derision. They are cast as unelected elites, liars and betrayers of the country’s ideals, the better to silence or mute their influence.
But perhaps most importantly, autocrats and authoritarians must identify enemies for the rest of us to hate. Anyone who’s not part of their tribe, ideologically, ethnically, racially, by gender or sexual orientation is a target. If they speak another language, all the better.
President Donald Trump has focused for years on targeting immigrants.
Trump himself is a descendant of white immigrants and is married to one, but that’s where he makes an exception.
He has accepted white South Africans as refugees while dismantling protections for people from countries he once described as sh–holes. Which is to say, refugees who aren’t white.
He claims white South African refugees are the victims of extreme violence. As descendants of apartheid adherents, they are members of a group that has retained its privilege in South Africa. They are certainly not victims of genocide, as Trump claims. The data shows that they are less likely to be the victims of violence than Black South Africans.
Trump’s executive order to enshrine English as the country’s official language – America for English-speaking Americans only – is another example of whites-only tribalism.
Long ago, the languages of European immigrants like Trump’s forebears were thought to delay assimilation and demonstrate traitorous loyalty to other countries. But these days, the fear is rooted around Spanish of the Latin American variety and the languages of immigrants from Asia and Africa.
Around the globe, people in other countries think a populace fluent in many languages is an advantage, not a deficiency.
But Trump’s America is one of proud provincialism.
In any case, immigrants already recognize English as the indispensable language of commerce and success in this country.
Ask any child of immigrants. My parents desired that I master written and spoken English, though the price was less literacy in their native language – Spanish.
My proficiency in English brought my parents the most pride.
Now, for many people, speaking perfect English is a matter of safety. Trump is deporting immigrants of color under an assumption they are members of criminal gangs. But in many cases there is plenty of evidence that those charges are misplaced, and people are being deported without due process.
Trump is carelessly rounding people up and sending them to a hellhole prison in El Salvador and to other countries he would assuredly describe as sh—holes — even to a dysfunctional non-country such as Libya, in the midst of a civil war, without giving them time to respond to the charges against them.
He has long labeled immigrants as terrorists, although there is little discernible link between immigrants and terrorism.
Under his broad definition, importing drugs to satisfy Americans’ appetites for illicit substances is a terrorist threat, not a public health issue.
Even when the administration is forced to admit error in deporting people who have a legal right to be here, it is not returning them. See, Abrego Garcia, mistakenly deported to a notorious El Salvadoran prison.
Like many citizens of color, I’ve become hardened to Trump’s racist animus. We’ve been cast as job stealers, criminals and a threat to American culture. This is the same animus that made the civil rights movement necessary.
Not so long ago, we thought the pendulum had swung to a more equitable, inclusive country.
But then more than 77 million Americans voted for Trump for the purpose of making America great again.
A country led by an authoritarian leader who thumbs his nose at the rule of law is not the America I know. And it certainly isn’t great.
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Donald Trump's corruption is all Ronald Reagan's fault
Recently, I wrote about how the mental illness of hoarding syndrome afflicting a few hundred of our nation’s rightwing billionaires has destroyed a large chunk of the American middle class and is threatening the health of our biosphere. But the overall story is larger than just that.
Donald Trump is embroiled in a bribery scandal that has the entire world agog. The potentates and dictators of the Middle East are openly contemptuous of his willingness to defy Congress and sell them advanced American weapons systems in exchange for billion-dollar Trump hotels in their countries.
Vladimir Putin and his state-owned media ridicules Trump daily, pushing his attacks on Ukraine in Trump’s face. And federal workers and our military are aghast at the incompetence, corruption, and even the alleged alcoholism of the people Trump has scraped off the floor of Fox “News” to run their agencies and make federal prosecutors.
All of this corruption and incompetence has one major goal: the enrichment of the Trump family and the people close to them. It’s an old, old story, that dates back to the earliest days of human prehistory.
There are basically two models for social organization, regardless of all the names. They are “me societies” and “we societies.”
Russia, for example, is today a classic example of a “me society.” The nation is run by a small cabal of “me-me-me” oligarchs, who own or control basically every major company and, in most cases, entire industrial, commercial, media, and retail sectors. Each is owned by one or more morbidly rich individuals and their families, who are looking out for their own “me” interests (profits) with little regard for the public good.
The country’s leader glorifies the individual above society, arguing that governance by hyper-masculine elites (“me”) willing to use state violence against those advocating democracy and the welfare of the general population (“we”) is simply The Way It’s Always Been. (Putin refers to this as “Russia’s historic greatness.”)
And in that, Putin is right. The majority of post-agricultural-revolution history (the past 7,000 or so years) has been a narrative of what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the three great tyrannies: warlord kings, the morbidly rich keeping average people in squalor and ignorance, and violence-enforced theocracies.
As Jefferson noted in A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774):
“History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as of individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.”
On the other hand, as I lay out in detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, the majority of those societies that emerged from tens of thousands of years of trial-and-error experimentation in governance were and even today still are explicitly “we societies.”
Native American societies that informed and inspired this nation’s Founders and the Framers of the Constitution, for example, considered the accumulation of great wealth — hoarding — to be a dangerous mental illness, right up there with forcible theft, rape, and murder.
People who hoarded food or other forms of wealth were disciplined and, if they continued, often banished from the tribe altogether (which could be a functional death sentence, as no other tribes would take such twisted people in).
The Algonquin people had a word for this mental illness, as I describe in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. In today’s English, we could loosely translate their word “Wétiko” as “greed.”
The late Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis Jack Forbes told me, when I was writing Last Hours, that Wétiko literally means “cannibal,” and Forbes uses it quite intentionally to describe European standards of culture: we “eat” (consume) other humans by conquering them, seizing their lands, and consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically.
For example, the Lakota term “Wasi’chu” described individuals who hoard resources, literally translating to “he who takes the fat.” The term critiques greed and the accumulation of wealth at the expense of communal well-being.
And this was common all over the world; the Batek, an Indigenous group in Malaysia, consider sharing food a moral duty. They believe all food belongs to the forest, and hoarding is socially unacceptable. If someone hoards food, others may take it without it being considered theft. Refusing to share can lead to communal anger and is believed to cause supernatural harm to the refuser.
In Aboriginal Australian communities, “humbugging” refers to making excessive demands on family or community resources, often leading to financial abuse. While sharing is a cultural norm, humbugging is viewed negatively and has prompted legal and community responses to protect vulnerable individuals, especially elders.
In my previous column, I noted how so many of America’s billionaires are infected with this mental illness which humanity once found disgusting: Today we call it “Hoarding Syndrome,” considered a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) until 2013 when the APA gave it its own specific descriptor in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
Had they been born poor or not gotten a lucky break, they’d be living in apartments with newspapers and empty tin cans stacked floor-to-ceiling.
Instead, they’ve hoarded wealth beyond the imagination of most people. Estates all around the world, yachts, private jets: there’s never “enough” for them.
Society has known about this mental illness forever. Dante, Shakespeare, Gogol, Balzac, and Dickens all wrote of wealthy characters who disrupted society and the lives of those around them because of their own Hoarding Disorders.
Embracing that indigenous wisdom, many of the idealists who started this country explicitly rejected rule by the rich. None were dynastically wealthy: not a single one of our Founders' wealth lasted beyond a second or third generation, unlike today’s billionaires, whose families will carry their wealth for centuries to come. Several, like Jefferson and George Washington, died in or near bankruptcy.
The most outspoken in this regard were Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush: they were clear that they were trying — within the social limits of their time — to create a “we society.”
The Constitution refers to “the general welfare” of Americans twice, once in the Preamble, defining it as one of the basic reasons for the Constitution itself, and once in Article 1, Section 8, defining the powers of Congress to raise taxes and spend money “to provide for … the general Welfare of the United States…”
Over the centuries the concept of a “we society” expanded here in America, as the voting franchise and individual human rights were expanded and extended beyond wealthy, land-owning straight white men.
Progressive Republican President Abraham Lincoln, for example, enthusiastically signed the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862, giving each of the states 90,000 acres of federal land to use to fund and build 76 tuition-free land-grant colleges so young people could climb out of poverty through free education. My mother’s alma mater, Michigan State University, was one of them.
But the “me society” rich of the day kept trying to corrupt politics to their own advantage. In his 1888 State of the Union address, President Grover Cleveland pointed out:
“We view with pride and satisfaction this bright picture of our country’s growth and prosperity, while only a closer scrutiny develops a somber shading. …
“We discover that the fortunes realized by our manufacturers are no longer solely the reward of sturdy industry and enlightened foresight, but that they … are largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people. The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.”
And what was causing this crisis for America’s 19th-century working-class families? Cleveland laid it out with a surprisingly blunt vehemence in the next sentences:
“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
The people — and Congress — were listening to this critique of the “me society” that was emerging with the industrial revolution. Americans were outraged at the way corporations and the morbidly rich were behaving, and President Cleveland had given voice to their anger. A mere two years later the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was passed, criminalizing monopolies (called “trusts” back then).
A short two decades later, progressive Republican presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were using that same law to break hoarder John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust into almost 30 pieces.
Roosevelt was clear that he wanted to move America closer to the “we society” that he believed the Founders envisioned and the times demanded. On August 31, 1910, he told an audience in Osawatomie, Kansas:
“The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.”
During Roosevelt’s tenure, with widespread public support, states and the US Congress began passing powerful laws to limit the corrupting power of the morbidly rich’s “me society” money in politics.
In 1905, for example, Wisconsin passed a law (Section 4489a, Sec. 1, ch. 492, 1905) that explicitly said:
“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer, consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.” (emphasis added)
The penalty included a substantial fine, years in prison for individual executives, lawyers, or lobbyists, and the political death sentence of the corporation itself, ie being forbidden from doing business in Wisconsin.
Two years later, efforts to control “me society” bad behavior by rich people and corporations went federal with the Tillman Act of 1907. That law explicitly forbade any corporation nationwide from giving any money to politicians:
“It is unlawful for any national bank, or any corporation organized by authority of any law of Congress, to make a contribution or expenditure in connection with any election to any political office…” (emphasis added)
By 1925, the Tillman Act had been incorporated into the Federal Corrupt Practices Act, further limiting money in politics, and in 1938 we got the Hatch Act which limited contributions from rich people to $5,000 per candidate and $3 million per party and made it an explicit crime for a president to use the White House to hawk commercial property like Teslas, meme coins, or Goya beans.
Following the Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon bribery scandals we got another bunch of laws to regulate money in politics, including the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act and the 1974 creation of the Federal Elections Commission, which promulgated rules further limiting “dark money” and other forms of political bribery.
These modern efforts to establish a “we society” had deep roots in Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, and largely answer the question about why Congress got so much done for average working people (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, minimum wage, OSHA, EPA, right to unionize, etc.) between 1933 and 1978.
Expanding on the idea of that “we society,” in an August 1912 speech in Chicago, Roosevelt called for a national minimum wage and government programs for social security, saying working people shouldn’t earn so little that they must steal food and couldn’t provide for their families, deal with illness, or have a safe, comfortable retirement.
The fulfillment of his vision came a generation later when his distant cousin, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, pushed through his New Deal. He legalized unions, passed a minimum wage law, and started Social Security, among other things.
Throughout the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower expanded all of these “we society” laws and added massive national infrastructure projects with huge expenditures on highways, schools, and hospitals that jump-started the postwar economy.
In the 1960s, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson added Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing supports, and increased support for education.
America was not only on the path to becoming a “we society”: we were more than halfway there. By 1980 two-thirds of Americans were solidly in the middle class with a single income, healthcare was affordable, union membership was widespread, college was free or very inexpensive in most of the country, and the morbidly rich hoarders were kept under control with a top 74 percent income tax bracket.
The rest of the world was imitating us back then as Western Europe, in particular, expanded on the “we society” programs of TR, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, JFK, and LBJ. Even little Costa Rica provided healthcare to all its citizens with a Medicare For All type of program and nearly free college (maximum tuition $600 a year) for anybody who can pass the entrance exams.
But then came Ronald Reagan with his neoliberal “me society” sales pitch that “greed is good” and the only sure path to national and individual prosperity was to free corporations and the morbidly rich from the strictures of taxation and regulation.
With Reagan‘s help, the hoarder syndrome billionaires took over politics and began to systematically loot America’s economy.
In the forty-four years since his inauguration, America’s middle class has shrunk from two-thirds of us down to around 45 percent of us, and even at that today it takes two incomes to match the lifestyle a single income could sustain in 1980.
America’s richest people, however, have now reached a level of wealth never before seen in the history of the world, not even by kings, pharaohs, or popes.
I lay out how Reagan got there in detail in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, but the main event that made the Reagan Revolution and Reagan’s neoliberal successors (including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) possible was the Supreme Court overturning the Tillman Act and legalizing political bribery in a series of decisions that started in 1976 and peaked when Clarence Thomas cast the tie-breaking vote in Citizens United in 2010.
This betrayal by Republicans on the Supreme Court of America’s “we society” values, described in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, has caused our country to fall far behind most of the rest of the world’s advanced democracies.
For America to fulfill her promise and become the nation the majority of our citizens want, voters and Congress must prioritize stripping out of law the Supreme Court-invented doctrines of “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.”
In 2022, Democrats in Congress tried to overcome the power of the “me society’s” legalized big money bribery: the For The People Act passed the House (without a single GOP vote), but was killed in the Senate when Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema betrayed America by upholding a Republican filibuster.
Our job now, if we want America to ever again become a “we society” that produces the many social and economic benefits of democratic governance, is to get a large enough progressive majority in Congress and a Democrat in the White House, so that in 2029 we can actually pull off the revival of a truly democratic America.
That means becoming politically active, volunteering to get inside the Democratic Party so you can be a positive change agent, and spreading the good word in anticipation of elections this fall, next year, and beyond.
In other words, “Tag, we’re still it!”
EXCLUSIVE: Trump accused of new grift that puts Qatari plane in shade
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These morbidly rich babies suffer from mental illness — and there's a treatment
It happens every few generations. It’s what drove the fascist oligarchs of the Confederacy to reach out and try to conquer the entire United States in the 1860s. It caused the Robber Barons to murder union organizers and ultimately crash America into the Republican Great Depression in the early decades of the 20th century. And it’s why wages have been stagnant while billionaires’ wealth has exploded in the years since the Reagan Revolution.
What I’m talking about here is the rise of greedy oligarchs who are driven by an identifiable mental illness, what’s either a subset of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) or a defect in impulse control called Hoarding Syndrome.
Because most hoarders never invite people into their homes, it’s an almost invisible illness. But, as Drs. Randy Frost and Gail Steketee write in their book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things:
“Recent studies of hoarding put the prevalence rate at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent of the population. That means that six million to 15 million Americans suffer from hoarding that causes them distress or interferes with their ability to live.”
That’s tough enough; people afflicted with hoarding syndrome are often tortured by their obsession and socially embarrassed to the point of removing themselves from all but the most essential social situations. They’re functionally invisible. But, from a societal point of view, they’re generally only harming themselves: hoarding syndrome is considered a psychiatric condition, not a crisis for democracy itself.
With one giant exception: morbidly rich people who are also afflicted with hoarding syndrome but don’t live in or even close to poverty.
When people with hoarding syndrome are born with or come into massive wealth, suddenly what was once a personal, psychiatric issue can become a crisis for all of society.
Like Scrooge McDuck of Disney comics fame, instead of filling their mansions with old newspapers, tin cans, and balls of string they obsessively fill their money bins, overseas bank accounts, and investment portfolios with billions of dollars.
And then, driven to continuously hoard more and more money — that now being the object of their addiction — they reach out to use the power of government itself to redirect more and more cash into their greedy hands.
As historian and political scientist Michael Parenti notes:
“Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold.
“So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.”
It blots out their concern for their fellow humans. It blots out their willingness to take climate science seriously. It blots out their ability to see the damage they’re doing to their own country and its democratic institutions.
Ultimately, they don’t care about the damage they do to society; such considerations are overwhelmed by their obsession. They don’t care how many children must grow up in poverty or even die young to support their massive wealth. They don’t care about destroying everybody else’s future, so long as they can get more, more, more money!
We defeated Confederate oligarchs with this disease back in 1865. We beat money hoarders back again after the Republican Great Depression with FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. We thought we were safe, as the middle class grew from around 10 percent of us to around two-thirds of us (with a single paycheck!) by the late 1970s.
But then, in 1978, in the Bellotti decision written by “Powell Memo” author Lewis Powell himself, five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that money is actually “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” It floated Ronald Reagan into office in 1981 on a tsunami of oil and banking industry money. Five other corrupted SCOTUS Republicans doubled down on that bizarre ruling in 2010 with Citizens United, creating an entirely new form of corrupt political bribery via something they created out of thin air that are called SuperPACs.
As a result, today these morbidly rich hoarders shovel small amounts (millions) into the pockets of captured politicians who then provide them with tax breaks, profit-driving deregulation, and government subsidies that return billions to them. And the impact on average Americans over the past 47 years that we’ve been living in the Reagan Revolution has been dramatic.
While every other developed country in the world offers free or nearly free healthcare to its citizens, free or nearly free education including college, and almost universal unionization and a high minimum wage, we’re stuck living in the nation these billionaires have forced on us just to satisfy their own avaricious obsession with more, more, more money:
- Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1,000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.
- Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty, and 60% of us live in poverty, 201 million Americans. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, as CBS News reports, “For the bottom 60 percent of U.S. households, a minimal quality of life is out of reach.” (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)
- More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools have suffered from a sustained, four-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.
- Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.
- Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in the world.
And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s 40-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people that has managed to make America the nation with the world’s largest number of the world’s wealthiest billionaires.
- Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknown in any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).
- Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5,496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).
And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year going to the morbidly rich. “Dollar Bill” McGuire, the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for example, took over a billion dollars in compensation.
- The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.
- Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.
In the 42 years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich money hoarders.
As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.
In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.
As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our schoolchildren with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.
All because our courts and politicians, now well-captured by rightwing billionaires, refuse to do anything about the ravages of hoarding syndrome among the very wealthy.
Solving this problem won’t be easy but also isn’t complicated. Just like we did with the Robber Barons, the first step is to identify and publicize the problem of mentally ill people among the morbidly rich having seized control of our political system.
We did this before.
As President Grover Cleveland — the only Democrat elected during that post-Civil War period — proclaimed in his 1887 State of the Union address:
“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
And as FDR pointed out when he began to pull America out of the Republican Great Depression:
“For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things … It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself.”
FDR took on those “economic royalists” and defeated them. He explicitly called them out when the Democratic Party renominated him for president in 1936 in Philadelphia:
“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.
“Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!”
The crowd roared, delighted that he’d turned back the Republican Great Depression and put millions to work while undoing the climate-destroying Dust Bowl by creating, among other three-letter agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to plant millions of trees across the country. And he raised the top tax rate on the obscenely wealthy back up to 90 percent, while stopping an effort to kidnap him and turn the government fascist.
“In vain, they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”
Cleveland’s and Roosevelt’s work now falls to us, as a new generation of obsessively money-hoarding Robber Barons have emerged from Reagan’s tax cuts and these horrible Supreme Court decisions. It’s thus now our job to educate the American people about the mental illness that’s frozen our economy and is dismantling our democracy.
Our task in this time of crisis is to create a societal consensus across America that we’re done indulging these wealthy pampered babies’ every desire, and begin the serious reforms necessary to put an end to this crisis and, like in the 1890s and 1930s, break up monopolies and raise their damn taxes so we can begin to pay down our nation’s debt and rebuild the middle class.
It’ll take a few years, in all probability, but it’s been done before. We can do it again.
Tag, we’re it! Spread the word…
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Tide turns on Trump: Musk out, tariffs crushed, ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ crumbles
It’s easy to be depressed, discouraged, dumbfounded by the cruelty and brainlessness of Trump and the people around him.
But today I want to celebrate what may be a turn in the Trump tide.
Elon Musk had to exit Trump world not because he couldn’t continue as a special government employee (there are a hundred ways around this), but because most Americans have become infuriated with Musk’s attacks on things they value, like veterans benefits and Social Security. Musk had become a huge political liability.
I call this progress.
Musk also had to leave because Tesla was tanking, partly thanks to you and so many others who wouldn’t be caught dead in a Tesla after what Musk has done.
I call this progress, too.
The nation’s major trade court has found that Trump doesn’t have authority to impose tariffs (i.e. taxes) on American consumers. Although a court of appeals has temporarily paused the ruling, it makes mincemeat out of Trump’s attempts to “negotiate” tariffs with other nations. Why negotiate when Trump may well lose his authority?
More progress.
And Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” — which, if enacted, would be the largest redistribution of income in American history, from the poor and working class to the rich and ruling class — is bogged down in the Senate.
Republican senators are finding it impossible to accomplish three things simultaneously: protect Medicaid, deliver a huge tax cut mainly to the rich, and prevent the budget deficit and national debt from exploding. Two of the three are possible, but not all three. (Even Musk understands this.)
Which means the bill’s chances of survival are plummeting. And its poison pill to render the courts powerless to enforce orders may never see the light of day.
Even more progress. .
Trump’s polls are plummeting. The vast majority of Americans are rejecting him.
When I say the tide is turning, I don’t mean we’re out of danger. As we know only too well, Trump gets even wilder and crueler when he feels cornered — and he’s capable of just about anything.
And his main henchmen — Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and JD Vance — are as ruthless and authoritarian as he is.
We still have our work cut out for us. We must continue to be vigilant and courageous. We must stand up to his neofascism and call out those who are unwilling to do so.
We must continue to protect the vulnerable — including people in our community exposed to Trump’s dragnet, and judges whose lives are being threatened because of Trump’s vicious rhetoric.
We cannot relax.
But at least we can breathe a bit easier today. The forces of sanity, decency and the rule of law are pushing back.
Be safe. Be careful. Hug your loved ones. We will prevail.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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