Opinion
Trump's atrocious war has a direct link to his hideous ballroom
I am a very peaceful person by nature, so it’s something of a dichotomy that I’ve been fascinated by war most of my life. I’m one of those geeks who devour war books and watch documentaries whenever a new one appears.
Some wars and leaders have slipped through the cracks, but I still consider myself a novice expert on war leadership, the great, the tragic, and the catastrophically incompetent.
I’ve immersed myself in all things Winston Churchill, having read Martin Gilbert’s voluminous work on his life. I consider Churchill the greatest war leader and one of the most fascinating individuals in history. There aren’t enough words to describe him, ironically, for a man who mastered them.
Comparing Churchill to, say, Donald Trump is like comparing the crown jewels to a maggot-infested, rotting bag of garbage. But I digress.
Abraham Lincoln comes a close second. He was anguished, but also a genius, able to strategize, cajole, and persuade even his adversaries. He was a superb judge of character. And one of my favorite figures in history is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose leadership during war was historic in countless ways.
Then there are the cautionary tales, those leaders who sent men to die for muddied reasons. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush come to mind, though LBJ inherited Vietnam. Despite his achievements, Johnson will always be defined by that war, just as Bush will never escape the catastrophic blunder of Iraq.
But nothing in the knowledge I’ve accumulated compares to the spectacular, dangerous incompetence of Donald J. Trump as a wartime commander.
To me, history’s worst war leaders share a defining trait — they lack strategy and fail to understand war’s darker realities. James Madison, for example, never served in the military. He stumbled into the War of 1812 unprepared, with a tiny army, no coherent strategy, and a capital so poorly defended that the British burned it to the ground. Many historians question whether he understood what he was doing.
Now consider Trump. The reasons for war with Iran have shifted so quickly and erratically that it’s an affront to the country, and especially to our service members. Trump seems unable to remember from one press gaggle to the next Truth Social post what the conflict is about or what he’s doing as a leader — a feckless, clueless leader, I may add.
What we do know, because narcissism is Trump’s defining trait, is that he has spent his life stamping his name on everything. Most recently, The Kennedy Center. The U.S. Peace Institute. Even the facade of the Department of Justice. And, of course, his own gilded, schmaltzy ballroom.
He wanted a war — a big one. Not for America. Not to free Iranians. Not to eliminate nuclear threats. He did it for himself. He wanted the marquee. All glory to Trump, conqueror of Iran. A hero for the ages. Not.
Think about what distinguishes genuinely great war leaders. Churchill, arguably the finest in modern history, possessed qualities Trump couldn’t even spell (see: “Straight” of Hormuz), let alone embody.
Churchill mastered military intelligence. He had a real military background. He surrounded himself with brilliant generals. He was brutally honest with the British people about what lay ahead, famously promising “blood, toil, tears and sweat,” and in doing so forged unbreakable national resolve.
When Churchill was wrong, he admitted it, changed course, and marched forward. That intellectual honesty was one reason the Allies prevailed. He also recognized the human cost of war, describing its suffering as “grievous.”
Trump? The opposite in every way. Most obnoxiously, while Churchill honored the dead, Trump shows contempt, wearing a campaign baseball cap.
Like Churchill, Lincoln absorbed the trauma of war — 600,000 dead Americans. You can see it in his face, aged dramatically over the course of the Civil War.
Lincoln was almost deity-like in his leadership (Trump thinks he is the “chosen one,” but honest Abe and Jesus are having the last laugh). He held together a disintegrating republic through moral fortitude and political genius. He never confused his legacy with the national interest.
Honest Abe told the truth, consistently. When the war was going badly, he said so. When the costs were staggering, he didn’t sugarcoat them. That honesty forged the national will to endure.
James Buchanan, by contrast, is widely regarded as America’s worst war leader. Well, he doesn’t have that title anymore. Buchanan was passive, watching the Confederacy assemble itself. He failed through paralysis and denial. Buchanan at least understood the gravity of what was unfolding.
Trump appears constitutionally — both in his mental make-up and law - incapable of grasping the stakes of what he’s unleashed.
Then there’s the military contradiction. He promised no ground troops. Yet the Pentagon is now sending 3,000 troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East.
Unlike Lincoln, Trump lies and obfuscates at every turn.
And that is his most profound failure as a leader. Because everything he says about this war, from here on out, will not be trusted. It will be questioned, corrected, and dissected, while Trump plays the American people for fools.
The road ahead is ominous, not simply because wars are bloody and unpredictable, and because Trump has never possessed, and cannot fake, leadership. He has no strategic patience. He seeks no counsel, relying on his “gut.” He has zero respect for sacrifice and no humility to recognize that history is ruthless toward leaders who treat other people’s children like “losers and suckers.”
Churchill understood all of that. Lincoln bore it in the lines on his face.
And then there’s Trump. He just wants his name on it, like everything else.
That, more than any tactical miscalculation or half-baked 15 point peace plan, is why Donald Trump has already cemented his place as America’s worst war leader, as James Buchanan smiles from above.
Trump selfishly chose this war for the worst possible reason.
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The 5 ways Trump took a terrible thing — and made it so much worse
Flying already suck. Donald Trump just made it worse.
Let me count the ways.
1. Lines are getting longer at airports.
Democrats want to fund the TSA, but Trump’s congressional Republicans refuse. They want all of the Department of Homeland Security to be funded, including ICE and Border Patrol — without the safeguards Democrats are insisting on.
So TSA continues to go unfunded, TSA personnel don’t show up for work, and lines get longer. (Don’t count on ICE to do much to reduce the length of the lines.) Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee this morning, Acting TSA Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill said the shutdown has produced the longest airport wait times on record.
2. Air-traffic controllers are way understaffed and underpaid.
New York’s LaGuardia Airport is the worst but safety is an issue all over. Pilot concerns about LaGuardia were filed with aviation officials months before Sunday’s collision between an airplane and a firetruck left two pilots dead and 41 other people hospitalized.
Last summer, according to the aviation safety reporting system, a pilot using the airport wrote, “Please do something,” after air traffic controllers failed to provide appropriate guidance about multiple nearby aircraft. “The pace of operations is building in LGA,” they wrote, referring to LaGuardia, one of the busiest in the U.S. “The controllers are pushing the line.”
3. Ticket prices are soaring and flights are being cancelled because the cost of jet fuel is soaring.
Jet fuel prices in the U.S. have increased by over 60 percent since the start of Trump’s war in Iran. Airlines are putting the increased costs of jet fuel onto consumers by raising ticket prices and cancelling less profitable routes.
Why has the war called jet fuel prices to soar? Because Trump apparently didn’t consider that one of the first things Iran would do when attacked would be to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes.
4. Trump’s Transportation Department scrapped a Biden-era rule that would have required airlines to give cash refunds to passengers for significant travel disruptions and delays within the airlines’ control.
That’s bad news for passengers like you and me — and it comes at exactly the wrong time. But it’s great news for airlines, whose own data showed that they were responsible for 60 percent of major delays in 2022 and ‘23.
5. The Transportation Department is also reportedly planning to claw back other protections around passenger refunds, cut requirements for airlines to disclose junk fees, and roll back rules holding airlines liable for damaged wheelchairs.
This will be a boost to the bottom line of the airlines and a nice return on investment for Delta and United in particular, which contributed $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Oh, did I mention that Trump Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s most recent gig, before becoming transportation secretary, was … lobbying for the airline industry? But I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that he won’t lift a finger to rein in airlines’ unchecked greed and power.
Remember: Trump and his cronies in the Cabinet will always govern for their corporate donors and former clients — not for you.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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This mysterious 15 minutes smacks of insane corruption in Trump's orbit
Friends,
Margaret Ryan, the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission — the agency tasked with investigating insider trading and other illegal activities in financial markets — abruptly resigned last week, after just six months on the job.
Reportedly, Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct, including against Trump’s inner circle. But the SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, and other Republican appointees to the commission wouldn’t let her.
When Trump appointed Atkins chair of the SEC, he was co-chair of the Token Alliance, a cryptocurrency advocacy group, and he owned $6 million worth of holdings in crypto-related businesses.
During Atkins’s time at the SEC, the commission has dropped or settled numerous lawsuits with cryptocurrency companies and adopted a lax regulatory approach to fraud.
It’s also avoided politically sensitive cases — such as, let me hazard a guess, insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies.
Why do I mention insider trading by Trump’s family and cronies?
Because on Monday, March 23, at 7:05 a.m. ET, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Washington had held “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS” with Tehran over a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION” to hostilities.
Immediately, the stock market roared to life. The S&P 500 futures soared more than 2.5 percent before the opening bell. And oil futures (bets on the future prices of oil) plummeted, dropping 14 percent in a matter of minutes.
But something very peculiar happened 15 minutes before Trump’s post.
I apologize in advance for giving you a bunch of charts, but it’s important that you see exactly what happened at 6:50 Eastern Time Monday morning.
At 6:49 a.m. ET, traders placed 734 bets on crude oil contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange. One minute later, at 6:50 a.m., that number had jumped to 2,168 — equivalent to about $170 million.
At the same time — 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement — West Texas Intermediate futures also saw a huge spike in trading activity.
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The same pattern was seen in contracts for Brent crude, the other major oil benchmark. Between 6:48 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. ET, the volume of trades rose from 20 to more than 1,650. That’s about $150 million in contracts.
A similar spike in trades occurred between 6:49 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. ET in futures contracts for the Standard & Poor 500 stock index, the Euro Stoxx 50, and other stock markets.
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At 6:50 AM ET, $1.5 billion in notional value of S&P 500 futures contracts were bought.
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In other words, 15 minutes before Trump announced that the U.S. would postpone strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, the volume of stock market trades mysteriously spiked and the price of oil just as mysteriously plunged.
Yet at that time — 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement — there were no public indications that any serious talks had been taking place between the U.S. and Iran.
So this huge spike in stock market trades and drop in oil futures must have been made by someone, or some people, who had prior knowledge of Trump’s announcement.
This person or these people made a boatload of money off this inside information.
But who was the inside trader, or traders, who placed such huge bets on Trump doing exactly what he did?
Could it be, say, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who is one of the people representing the United States in negotiations with Iran, and is also operating a private-equity firm with over $6 billion in investments, heavily funded by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, especially Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund?
Or Steve Witkoff, who’s also representing the U.S. in these negotiations and who also has his own investment firm?
Or Howard Lutnick?
Or Melania?
Or all of them?
Who knows?
The Securities and Exchange Commission is in charge of policing against such insider trading. On the basis of the trading I mention above, ordinarily the SEC by now would have opened an investigation.
But so far, nothing.
This isn’t the first time spikes in betting have occurred just before Trump did something unexpected.
In January, wagers surged on Polymarket, a crypto-powered predictions platform, as bets were made on Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro being out of power by the end of the month. Hours later, he was seized by American forces. (One account made more than $436,000 from a $32,537 bet.)
Why should we worry about people with insider information profiting in the stock market, futures markets, or even crypto-powered predictions markets?
For one thing, it’s unfair. It hurts average investors while increasing the wealth of certain people who know, for example, what Trump is about to do (including Trump and members of his family).
For another, such rigging erodes public confidence in market fairness, which ultimately destroys markets. Put simply, if the public believes the market is rigged in favor of privileged individuals, they may withdraw their investments.
This is why the Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to police the market against insider trading.
And why we should all be concerned that the top enforcement officer at the SEC abruptly resigned last week because the SEC’s chairman and other Republican appointees wouldn’t allow her to be more aggressive in pursuing charges of fraud and other misconduct against Trump’s inner circle.
And why what occurred Monday morning, 15 minutes before Trump’s public announcement, is so damned troubling.
Friends, there’s a word for this. It’s called corruption.- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump is literally paying people to kill Americans
When a gentle, thoughtful, holy man like Pope Leo XIV denounces what Trump has done by killing thousands in an illegal and unnecessary war of choice — he called it a “scandal to the whole human family” yesterday — the world knows our president has descended into something truly and profoundly evil.
There’s a single through-line connecting everything happening to us right now, and it all has to do with the damaged, broken, deranged man in the White House.
— Our gas prices spiking toward six dollars a gallon and above.
— Masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs brutalizing brown and Black people, immigrants and US citizens alike, and murdering or killing almost a hundred human beings since Trump was sworn in as they build hundreds of massive concentration camps across the US.
— Trump’s tweets yesterday implying that Democrats may be their next occupants, calling members of the party “America’s greatest threat after Iran” much as Hitler did just before throwing members of opposition parties into camps in Germany in 1933/1934.
— Our grocery bills creeping higher every single week, with price explosions and famine coming as the world runs low on fertilizers now blocked in the Strait of Hormuz.
— TSA officers working without a paycheck snarling our security lines while food banks quietly open at our nation’s airports to feed those unpaid agents and their families.
— American soldiers and innocent civilians dying in an unconstitutional, unauthorized-by-Congress, internationally illegal war crime against a country that posed no imminent threat to us, with not a single ally on the planet willing to stand beside us, as over 20 countries have now been drawn in creating an eerie echo of WWI.
— And now, in one of the most breathtaking acts of strategic self-destruction in American history (it’s almost as if Putin is orchestrating the entire thing), we’re literally paying Iran and Russia billions of dollars every day to kill our men and women in uniform.
That throughline isn’t bad luck or complicated geopolitics: it’s one sick, sick man.
A man forged by a brutal, loveless father who raised his children with contempt instead of care. And a mother who was never there.
A man mentored by Roy Cohn — the most psychopathically ruthlessly and amoral mob-affiliated political fixer of the twentieth century — who taught him that reality is whatever you assert it to be if you say it loud enough and repeat it often enough, that you should never admit fault, never apologize, and always attack.
A nepo-baby who’s moved through 79 years of life without ever once having to genuinely live with the consequences of his decisions, because there was always more inherited money to paper over the wreckage, more creditors to stiff with an army of lawyers, more gullible Republican marks to con, more toady sycophants to exploit, more people so simply in awe of his wealth or afraid of his bullying that all they can do is tell him what he wants to hear.
As I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, Fred Trump didn’t raise a president. He raised a wounded child who never grew up emotionally, but learned as an adult to use naked brutality to weaponize his own psychopathy. Who delights in the deaths and killings of others, who loves to watch people’s homes and cities blow up as if he were a 10-year-old playing a video game.
And now that man has control of the most powerful military in the history of human civilization and is gleefully running roughshod over the guardrails against such power abuses that our Founders and Framers wrote into the Constitution.
Consider what this man has done to America and the world in just the past year:
He launched the largest U.S. tariff regime since 1932 (which provoked the Republican Great Depression), a chaotic, impulsive, constantly-shifting wall of taxes on our own imports that Harvard economists say have raised retail prices on clothing by more than 17 percent, building materials by more than 10 percent, and on household goods across the board.
The Tax Foundation calculates it as an average tax increase of $1,500 per American household this year (it was more last year). Walmart — not even remotely a progressive institution — reported that inflation on the general merchandise they sell has shot up more than three percent last quarter and said explicitly that Trump’s tariffs drove it. Goldman Sachs economists found that tariffs pushed inflation up by half a percentage point in 2025, and JPMorgan warned that what businesses have been absorbing is now getting passed to you, the consumer, rapidly.
Your grocery bill isn’t going up because of supply chains or some imaginary “global force.” It’s going up because a lifelong grifter who’s never read an economics textbook or the Constitution decided that tariffs were a display of strength, and strength is the only currency the wounded man raised by Fred Trump — a man once arrested at a Klan rally — has ever trusted.
He’s also used tariffs and threats of tariffs to intimidate countries into giving him gifts, bribes, and help for his boys to make billions in crypto and to build foreign hotels and golf courses in the most blatant corruption of the White House since the Republican Teapot Dome scandal (and Albert Fall was a piker compared to Trump and his family).
Then there’s the illegal war he conspired with Kushner, Netanyahu (and perhaps Witkoff’s buddy Putin) to wage against Iran. On February 28th, without a declaration from Congress, without a single NATO ally willing to join us, without any nation on Earth signing on, without going to the United Nations, and without any provocation or attack on America or American interests, Donald Trump lied our military into launching an assault on Iran falsely claiming they were about to attack the US.
This was not a targeted strike like the earlier effort to knock out their nuclear enrichment facilities: this is an actual war. A war that’s now killed at least 13 American service members and seriously wounded more than 200 (and those are the official numbers, which former military officials are already calling deeply under-reported). And thousands of innocent civilians.
A war that has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply flows, sending Brent crude to $112 a barrel — up more than 80 percent since January — and pushing retail gas prices up nearly a dollar a gallon, with United Airlines cutting 5% of their flights because they’re already planning for oil to hit $175 a barrel (the result of the destruction of oil facilities by Iranian retaliation) and stay there through at least 2027.
He’s the first Western leader since Adolf Hitler to launch military attacks against multiple countries in rapid succession, without legislative authorization, without genuine self-defense justification, and without a single meaningful ally. That’s not hyperbole or hysteria on my part: that’s the actual series of events compared with very real history.
And the Republican Party — the party that once claimed to stand for constitutional government and congressional authority over declarations of war — has largely fallen silent or, in the case of bloodthirsty fools like Lindsay Graham, cheered on what may well become World War III.
To deal with the oil price explosion his illegal war created, the billionaire who runs Trump’s Treasury Department has now lifted sanctions on Iranian oil currently at sea, freeing up roughly 140 million barrels worth over $14 billion to the government of Iran: the government whose forces are killing American troops right now.
At the same time, Trump’s also quietly lifted sanctions on Russian oil, handing Vladimir Putin — whose drones have been raining down on Ukrainian civilians for years and whose intelligence is helping Iran kill American troops — a financial windfall that European allies called a “betrayal” and that the Kremlin greeted not with thanks but with a demand for more.
An Israeli policy analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies said it plainly to NBC News: “The U.S. is funding a war against itself.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal called it “sickeningly, shamefully stupid.” Former NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor called it “the biggest, dumbest concession ever given to Iran by the US.” Even Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace posted: “Bombing Iran with one hand and buying Iran oil with the other.”
It’s like the old definition of insanity: we’re paying Russia and Iran — simultaneously — while Americans in uniform bleed and die at their hands in the theater of war that Donald Trump created without permission, without allies, and without a plan.
The families of those 13 dead Americans know that. The 200-plus wounded know that. The families of thousands of dead Middle Eastern families know that. And every American paying five dollars a gallon or more is quickly figuring it out.
This is what a lifelong grifter does when he’s never experienced real consequences for his actions in his entire life.
Not when he bullied people at prep school, not when he used a phony bonespurs X-ray to get out of serving in Vietnam, not when he cheated on every one of his three wives, not when he was tied to Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, not when he ripped off his customers and refused to pay his vendors, not when he bankrupted dozens of companies including two casinos where he was busted for money laundering (who does that??), not when he lied his way into office, not when he solicited Russia’s help to win the 2016 election, not even when he tried to overthrow our democracy on January 6th 2021.
He acts. He declares victory. And when reality pushes back he always finds someone else to blame and then figures out a scheme to monetize the mess.
When Trump kept insisting throughout the first weeks of the war that we’d “won,” even as U.S. bases burned in Baghdad, he wasn’t lying strategically; he was doing the only thing his psychology has ever equipped him to do: lie his way through a crisis and wait for the sycophants around him to pick up the pieces.
There have always been people so in awe of his wealth and power that they’re willing to do what he wants no matter how bizarre or destructive: that’s the lesson his mentor Roy Cohn taught him that’s never left him. He’s left a trail of them — people broken by their association with him — behind him; just look at the folks who served in his first administration who’re now looking at financial ruin and even prison.
Meanwhile, here at home, the TSA has been going without pay since February 14th. Over five weeks. These are the men and women who show up every single day to keep weapons off our planes, and they’re sleeping in airport parking lots because they can’t afford the gas to drive home.
A food bank opened at Pittsburgh International Airport to feed federal employees who are not getting paid. At major hubs like Boston Logan, Newark, Chicago O’Hare, Seattle-Tacoma, and Atlanta the lines are brutal, the sick-call rates are skyrocketing, and at least one senior TSA official warned this week that some airports may have to shut down entirely if the impasse doesn’t break.
Senate Democrats have put clean, standalone bills on the Senate floor to pay TSA officers — and only TSA officers, nothing else — six separate times. No tricks. No riders. No conditions beyond “pay the people keeping our airports safe.”
Six times, Republican senators — by name, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Eric Schmitt of Missouri — walked to the floor and blocked them. Every single time.
The Republican argument is that Democrats won’t vote to fund the entire DHS, including ICE. What they aren’t saying is why Democrats won’t do that: because ICE agents have been operating without visible identification, hiding their faces behind masks, busting into American homes without warrants, and murdering American citizens in the streets with absolutely no accountability.
Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others dead at the hands of masked goons who refuse to identify themselves and then flee the scene.
Democrats aren’t blocking TSA funding because they’re playing politics: they’re refusing to write a blank check for an agency that a federal judge — a Bush appointee who clerked for Antonin Scalia — found had violated court orders in 96 cases in 74 different situations in January alone.
Republicans are choosing to let TSA officers go without pay rather than agree to require ICE agents to wear a name badge or take off their masks. That’s the actual choice these ghouls have made in service to the madman in the White House.
That’s what’s happening in the United States Senate right now, in plain sight, while a psychopathic man hits little balls around at his shabby golf motel and posts to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site about his imaginary 100 percent approval rating.
This is what the death knell of a republic sounds and looks like when it’s torn to shreds from the inside. Complete with the upcoming gold coin bearing his face, like he thinks he’s Julius Caesar.
Armed, masked, anonymous stormtroopers (Stephen Miller says, “We are the Storm!”) and massive military vehicles with chemical weapons in the streets of American cities, and the steady, deliberate dismantling of every norm and institution and guardrail that stood between a wounded, entitled, pathologically dishonest man and unchecked power handed him by six Republicans on a corrupted Supreme Court.
The tariffs gutting working families. The illegal war with no consultation of Congress or the American people or our closest allies. The sanctions lifted on Iran and Russia to cover for the oil-price chaos the war created. The federal workers going without pay while Republicans block the bills that would help them.
All of it driven by the compulsions of one pathetic man who was broken in childhood, finished off by Roy Cohn, and handed the keys to American democracy by a political party that decided racism and raw power mattered more than our country.
Democracy doesn’t survive with mere passive observation: it requires enough people showing up in the streets, on social media, in the media, and at the ballot box to refuse to let it die.
The No Kings Day march is March 28th. Find your nearest event at indivisible.org and get out there. The general strike is May 1st: go to generalstrikeus.com, pledge now, and then call someone you know and ask them to do the same.
Call your senators today about the TSA, about the war, about the oil sanctions that are paying our enemies to kill Americans, about the criminal corrupt of the White House that the GOP is facilitating.
The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Call it tomorrow. Call it the day after. Call it every day until someone answers with something other than excuses. Find every official in every state at openstates.org and call them, too.
Governors and state attorneys general have considerable power as well; demand that they open investigations and begin prosecutions of violations of state laws.
This is not a moment for spectating, hand-wringing, or prevaricating. The world’s house is on fire, and we’re all inside it.
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This unbelievable investigation confirms Trump has a bullseye on everyday Americans
Friends,
The Wall Street Journal — hardly an outpost of left-wing propaganda — reported on the results of an investigation conducted by the Journal’s Hannah Critchfield and her team.
I’m summarizing it below because it deserves your attention.
Critchfield and her team found that 279 people have been accused online by the Trump administration of assaulting federal ICE and Border Patrol agents, and more than half of these people — 64 percent — are American citizens.
Of the 181 American citizens that the Trump administration has accused of attacking federal ICE and Border Patrol officers, close to half have never been charged, and none have been convicted at trial. But the public charges alone have caused them significant harm.
The investigation
The Journal’s team analyzed more than 200 videos associated with allegations of assault against ICE and Border Patrol agents, using both police body camera footage and bystander recordings from social media. Many of the videos cast doubt on the federal government’s claims that agents were assaulted.
The Journal also reviewed more than 100,000 posts on X, posts made in the last year by accounts linked to government agencies and senior government officials.
Each time the government identified a person on a post, the Journal tracked that case through the legal system to see what charges were brought, under what statute, whether the charges were later modified, and what happened to the person in the case.
One of the cases they investigated was that of Sydney Lori Reid, a 44-year-old veterinary assistant in D.C. and a U.S. citizen.
In July, Reid went to a jail to witness an immigration enforcement action. Federal officers had gone there to arrest two migrant men, and Reid said she felt a duty to document it.
As Reid began videotaping, an agent grabbed her and pinned her to a wall. Reid was then surrounded by several federal law enforcement officials. One of them was an FBI agent wearing a face covering and an FBI vest. Two others were ICE officers, dressed in plain clothes, plaid shirts, and khaki pants.
Reid was handcuffed and told she was being arrested for interfering with their operation. Videos reviewed by Critchfield and her team cast doubt on the agents’ claims.
Reid was then placed in a government vehicle and transferred to federal custody. Like many American citizens who wind up in the crosshairs of DHS, she was accused of assault.
The government alleges she assaulted an FBI agent on the basis of scrapes on the agent’s hands, but the scrapes occurred in the process of putting handcuffs on Reid.
The government later charged Reid with felony assault of a federal official, a charge punishable with up to 20 years in prison — a serious federal charge that’s being applied far more broadly now than at any time in recent history.
When Reid was being arrested, she dropped her phone, but the phone was still recording. An agent picked up the phone and put it into the same vehicle that she was riding in on her way to detention.
One officer says: “We’re at the D.C. jail. We’re at the D.C. jail. We have an agitator in custody for ...”
Reid was handcuffed in the backseat. You can hear agents going back and forth about exactly how Reid had assaulted them. First, it was a raised knee, then an elbow.
Another officer: “Yeah, it appeared that there was an elbow that was ... When she was resisting, but she definitely interfered. So we have interfering and I’m going to get ...”
One of the ICE agents called her a stupid female as he was talking to a colleague: “Hey brother, are you good? I have to return to 1D and process this stupid female now that I f---ing don’t want to process her.”
Reid was held by federal authorities for roughly two days. She wasn’t allowed to make a phone call during that time.
In the aftermath of her arrest, prosecutors tried to indict her, but that needed to be done through a grand jury, and the grand jury declined to indict her. They tried again before another grand jury, which also declined to indict her. Then they went back to a third grand jury, which declined to indict her.
This is almost unheard of. It showed both the resistance from the public to charge her based on the evidence and the government’s determination to bring charges in this case.
Prosecutors ultimately charged Reid with misdemeanor assault of an officer, a lesser offense that doesn’t require going through a grand jury. Reid was acquitted of that misdemeanor charge at trial.
The Trump Administration’s Strategy
Critchfield and her Journal team found that the push to charge more people for assaulting federal officers — as happened to Reid — is an administration-wide strategy.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and her Department of Justice have pledged to prosecute these cases aggressively. From the very beginning of Bondi’s tenure, starting on her first day in office, she issued a flurry of memos, including one that encouraged prosecutors to aggressively investigate any instances of violence against law enforcement or obstruction of law enforcement.
Gregory Bovino, then the head of Border Patrol, directed his agents to arrest anyone who touched them. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to. Those are the general orders all the way to the top, everybody fucking gets it if they touch you. You hear what I’m saying?”
In addition to an increasing number of prosecutions, the Department of Homeland Security has been using social media to exaggerate these alleged attacks, often with a warning to the public: “Don’t be like this person. If you behave in this way, we will come for you.” And they have posted people’s pictures and their full names, seeking to make an example out of these people even before they’re convicted of a crime.
This happened to Reid. A week after she was arrested, her mug shot and name went up on the official ICE account on X, along with the fact that she’s based in Washington, D.C., and a post that said, “Assault an officer or agent get arrested. It’s not rocket science.”
ICE also publicly alleged that Reid assaulted federal agents on behalf of two alleged international gang members.
The Purpose of This Strategy
The Journal’s investigation makes clear that the purpose of this strategy has been to intimidate and silence Americans who might otherwise protest what ICE and Border Patrol are doing.
ICE publicly describes many of these protesters as rioters, agitators, thugs, and terrorists.
Here’s Vice President JD Vance speaking of Renee Good’s death:
“I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making and a tragedy of the far left who has marshaled an entire movement, a lunatic fringe against our law enforcement officers.”
And here’s then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on the death of Alex Pretti:
“This individual who came with weapons and ammunition to stop a law enforcement operation of federal law enforcement officers committed an act of domestic terrorism, that’s the facts.”
Renee Good was in her car when she was killed. Critchfield and her team found that federal government officials have accused 32 U.S. citizens of intentionally using their vehicles as weapons. DHS considers a vehicle to be a deadly weapon, justifying the use of force. Of those 32 drivers, only one pleaded guilty to an assault charge. Three had their cases dismissed; the rest were never charged.
The Journal investigation found that in most cases where citizens were accused by the government, the outcome was similar to Reid’s.
181 citizens were accused by the government on X of attacking federal officers, but close to half of them were never even charged at all. When people were charged, more often than not, the cases fell apart. Either they were acquitted or found not guilty at trial.
Fifteen people mentioned in government posts pleaded guilty before going to trial. Ten of whom pleaded guilty for lesser offenses than what the government initially charged them with.
Videos have often played major roles in contradicting the government’s case. Critchfield and her team viewed videos that repeatedly cast doubt on the government’s allegations. Protesters were often called violent rioters or professional agitators and accused of making physical contact in some way with agents, but video footage often showed immigration agents being the first to lay their hands on demonstrators.
The Journal found that most of the government’s assault allegations against American protesters posted on X were unsubstantiated. Even federal prosecutors themselves acknowledged that in some cases, the evidence to back up these charges wasn’t there.
Federal prosecutors across the nation told Critchfield and her team that they are facing intense pressure to charge demonstrators and bystanders with crimes even when video evidence contradicts what officers initially claimed about what occurred, or in situations where they wouldn’t normally pursue federal charges.
The costs to those who are arrested are substantial. Even in cases where the person is exonerated, they must still deal with posting bail, securing defense attorneys, and taking days off from work to appear in court. In more extreme cases, people are doxed online and face death threats.
Reid says she’s been more hesitant about engaging in political speech, even though, as she put it, “Those are our rights as U.S. citizens and they’re being stifled.”
Conclusions
The Journal’s investigation concluded that:
“U.S. citizens are caught in the crosshairs of an aggressive government campaign to detain and demonize detractors, including by calling them terrorists, rioters, and agitators. The Department of Homeland Security, which was created in 2002 to protect Americans, has turned its force against U.S. citizens.”
By putting a public bull’s-eye on Americans whom the government accuses of assault, the Journal also found that the Trump administration is chilling First Amendment expression:
“People who had been accused publicly by the federal government of assaulting federal officers … are less likely to participate in protests and less likely to put themselves in situations where their name might be tracked…. There is a real pressure to crack down and send a message to people who the government views as perceived dissenters, even if video contradicts what agents have initially claimed happened.”
Again, let me remind you that this comes from The Wall Street Journal.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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Trump's latest disgrace forever changes how we'll remember this monster
I have long admired Robert Mueller. A Bronze Star combat veteran, a man of deep faith, and a lifelong public servant, he embodied a quiet, disciplined patriotism that has become all too rare. He bled for this country in Vietnam, graduated from Princeton, led with integrity, and spent decades serving the American people — not himself.
When Mueller died Friday night at 81, after years battling Parkinson’s disease, Donald Trump responded with this: “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!”
If “patriot” had a human definition, it could be Robert Mueller. If “pathetic” needed one, it would be Donald Trump.
Trump’s remark, while beyond crude, was in character. For years, he has spouted insults, cruelty, and bile, but even by his standards, celebrating the death of a man who served his country with honor marks a new low. It was gleeful, venomous, and utterly devoid of basic human decency.
And it wasn’t an anomaly.
Trump has repeatedly demeaned the dead, especially those he viewed as adversaries. He blew up when flags were flown at half-staff for John McCain, a war hero and former prisoner of war, and reportedly called him a loser.
He mocked Congressman John Dingell at a rally, suggesting he might be “looking up” from hell. Within hours of Colin Powell’s death, Trump dismissed him as a “classic RINO.”
He even mocked grief itself. He used Jimmy Carter’s death to take a swipe at Joe Biden. He reportedly told a grieving military widow that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”
After offering to pay for the funeral of murdered Army soldier Vanessa Guillén, he allegedly fumed over the cost, saying, "It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f---ing Mexican!”
This atrociousness - and there is more - reflects the wretchedly stinky, anti-Christ, cankled, bone-spurred excuse for an abhorrent human being that Trump is. I will say that about him while he’s alive, and when he dies.
I was raised to believe you don’t speak ill of the dead. My grandmother held that belief firmly. But I’ve written critically about repulsive figures like Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Anita Bryant after their deaths, and I didn’t soften my words. I called out harm where harm was done.
The instinct to avoid criticizing the dead exists to protect the grieving, not to shield powerful figures from the consequences of their actions. When someone has spent their life dehumanizing others, like Trump, speaking honestly about that record is not disrespect, it is a civic and moral responsibility.
But here’s what Trump cannot, or will not, grasp: Robert Mueller did not harm people. He was a public servant doing his job. His supposed “offense” was investigating Trump. That’s it.
Mueller targeted no vulnerable communities. He didn’t traffic in cruelty. He followed the evidence, methodically and professionally, as he had done his entire career. Trump’s abhorrent comments about Mueller only impressed Satan.
Trump has a compulsive need to make everything about himself, no matter how low the moment. Each time someone of genuine stature dies, someone with more dignity, restraint, and service in their smallest gesture than Trump has ever displayed, he sinks further to the depths of Satan himself.
Even some on the right seemed to recognize the line he crossed. William Kristol, editor-at-large of The Bulwark, asked on “Bulwark Takes” whether anyone would still uphold dignity and respect for those who serve in public life in light of Trump’s comments about Mueller.
The ability to possess dignity is something Trump has never possessed.
But there is a larger consequence here, one Trump has either failed to consider or arrogantly dismissed. Trump is writing the script for how the world will respond to his own death.
History offers examples. When Osama bin Laden was killed, there were celebrations. Saddam Hussein’s execution was met with relief. Even Hitler’s death, though it came too late for millions, allowed the world to exhale.
Those men built legacies of suffering, and history judged them accordingly.
Trump is not Hitler, and this is not that comparison. But Trump has caused real and lasting harm. It’s a brutal harm that is documented, measurable, and ongoing. Families separated. Rights stripped away. Democratic norms eroded. Vulnerable communities targeted. Injuries and deaths from wars he started on a whim.
So what happens when he dies?
First, I am not among those calling for or hoping for his death. That would be too easy of an escape from accountability. But death comes for everyone, including demented men like Trump who imagine themselves untouchable.
When that moment arrives, it will not be marked by quiet reflection. It will not be a universally solemn occasion. It will be something far more complicated, and far more revealing.
There will be mourning, certainly, from MAGA loyalists and true believers. There will be attempts to rewrite, sanitize, and mythologize. But there will also be something else that will be much, much more profound.
There will be an unmistakable sense of release and celebration among millions who have lived through the tyranny of Trump .
Not everyone will say it out loud. Many won’t need to. But at the same time, it will be looked at as a victory, and there will be public celebrations, joyous social media posts, and high-fives worldwide.
Because Trump has spent years exhibiting behavior that strips away the expectation of grace and comfort in death. As such, he has kicked open a door that cannot be closed.
Trump has mused that he likely won’t go to heaven. I won’t argue the point. But what matters more, and what will endure, is the legacy he leaves behind here - one that spews vindictiveness and smallness that no amount of revisionism will erase.
When Trump dies, it won’t be pretty. He won’t get a state funeral like Jimmy Carter did, that’s for sure. Perhaps the best way to “honor” Trump would be to slide his corpse down the garbage chute at Trump Tower, and let the NYC Department of Sanitation bury him in a landfill.
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This traitorous Trump plot is filtering into your home
No one entity should control the truth, especially when they’re doing it to cover up the Epstein Files.
The Federal Communications Commission was established in 1934 to regulate our airwaves (radio, broadcast television, wire, satellite, and cable), both at home and around the world.
“Regulate” does a lot of heavy lifting there. From making sure sensitive government information about World War II didn’t get into the mainstream to keeping the airwaves swear-free, the FCC’s oversight has always determined what does and doesn’t get heard and seen. But it was never meant to regulate news broadcasts to help protect a president who’s committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.
Their power was famously summed up in George Carlin’s classic “7 Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV” bit. It’s still pretty much true, although broadcast TV has figured out plenty of ways to work around the restrictions, pushing the envelope as far as it can.
Those of us who grew up in the pre-Internet era never could have imagined someone like Heritage Foundation stooge Brendan Carr being installed to control information via multiple corporate media mergers and acquisitions. Which is weird, because during Trump’s first administration, Carr still had a grasp on how the First Amendment works.
Yeah, I wonder what’s changed in the last seven years?
No one could have imagined anything like what we’re witnessing when President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a massive overhaul of what was seen as an antiquated system. While it “aimed to eliminate monopolies in local telephone service, allowing competition and deregulation to reduce consumer costs,” it actually allowed corporations to own multiple radio and TV stations in multiple cities across the country. This led to mergers between corporations, enriching the already rich, who then got to decide what content went out over the frequencies they had bought.
That’s why anyone listening to the radio in the mid-'90s suddenly started hearing a lot of the same music across the dials, no matter where they lived. More than one station in the same market could be playing the same playlists, dividing audiences while creating monopolies. The formerly powerful DJs who decided what made it onto the air were reduced to following corporate playlists packed with artists from labels with whom they had relationships. It was payola without it being exactly payola, when record label execs could still expense trips and send swag to radio stations to make sure their artists got extra airtime.
This led to radio companies losing money and then merging, and why we now have iHeart Media, Audacy, and Cumulus dominating the corporate-owned frequencies, drowning out local and community stations, and homogenizing music to the point where it all becomes like an audible McDonald’s. No matter where you are in America, the radio will now sound the same instead of giving you a local vibe.
Most significantly, it’s why right-wing talk radio exploded on the AM dial and still dominates it today. Those greedy guys at companies like Sinclair gobbled up those cheap little frequencies nobody wanted and flooded the airwaves with propaganda. The one liberal attempt to capture an audience in the same way — ah, Air America, you were so ahead of your time — was pushed out by the monopoly of what is now MAGA.
In 1996, no one could have imagined a traitor would be placed in charge at CBS News. Bari Weiss has already killed stories on 60 Minutes and scorched the earth of the news division. Now she’s pulled the entire plus on CBS Radio.
As a former alternative radio DJ, this topic is very close to my heart. I’m a GenX kid who grew up in New Jersey, and all of my earliest musical memories are tied to the New York radio stations. My first on-air gig was in 1993, when the music was still on CDs, and I recorded commercial spots on reel-to-reel, which I then physically cut with a razor blade to edit and then transfer to an 8-track cart to play on the air.
By the time I landed my dream gig on KNRK (“94/7 Alternative Portland”) in Portland, Oregon, in 2004, radio was enjoying what would be its final glory years. Everything had been computerized by then, so a station could save tons of money by essentially being a jukebox without the need for humans to tell the audience what they just heard, and the concept of voicetracking (one person in one studio in one city being broadcast to multiple stations wherever the company owned frequencies) wasn’t too far off.
During the five years I was on the air, I warned my bosses about the combination of iPods, Satellite Radio, and the internet demolishing any power terrestrial radio had left. I was sadly right about that, because no one cares about radio anymore the way I do.
That’s why I was extra worried when I learned about what Project 2025 had planned for the FCC, as well as the Voice of America ( least KKKari Lake is being deregulated, shall we say).
I spent a lot of 2024 screaming into the abyss (and directly at Brendan Carr on Twitter) about the dangers of Trump controlling the airwaves. I think you’ve all seen enough to know that “NosTARAdamus” was right about that, too.
But all is not lost, thanks to Democrats.
Oregon State AG Dan Rayfield is suing to block a merger that would leave my city, Portland, with three of our four major local stations owned by media companies that have caved to Trump. Seven other states also filed motions for temporary restraining orders a day after Brendan Carr’s compromised FCC approved Nexstar’s $6.2 billion purchase of its rival, Tegna. And more states need to get in on this ASAP, because Trump’s control of the media needs to be not just stopped, but undone.
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Florida is a lab for GOP government — and the latest experiment should terrify the nation
Back in the last century, before condos choked the beaches and theme parks displaced orange groves, I was a page in the Florida House of Representatives.
All you had to do was fetch coffee and copies of bills for men in fat ties who called you “Young Lady.”
For this, you got a week off school and $50.
It was a lesson on how the Legislature worked.
Or didn’t.
Sure, they made speeches about serving “the great people of the great state of Florida” and passed plenty of bills, but they also behaved like giddy kids, spinning in their chairs, telling jokes, playing pranks (it was mostly men in those days), yelling at each other, sometimes nearly coming to blows.
We rolled our eyes — such juvenile behavior.
We were in 5th grade.
I regret to inform you the Florida Legislature has not exactly matured.
Indeed, it has devolved to the point that it can’t even perform its one job — ONE JOB, y’all — which is to pass a state budget.
So, what have your 160 elected representatives been doing since the session began on Jan. 13 and ended on March 13?
Not much.
No state budget; no attention to making insurance or housing more affordable; no addressing the climate crisis or the monumental strain on our aquifer; no meaningful oversight of the cash-hemorrhaging school voucher program; no acknowledgment the war in Iran is driving up gas prices; no relief for food-insecure kids in Florida; no ensuring the public has a right to know if some vampiric tech bro billionaire is building an AI data center next door to you.
‘Embarrassing’
Lawmakers couldn’t even get the new state bird bill over the finish line.
Better luck next year, Flamingo.
The 2026 session limped to Sine Die, the official ending at which they symbolically drop a handkerchief on the Capitol floor and head home.
Sen. Don Gaetz called it “embarrassing.”
How did they fill those long hours in Tallahassee — other than lying to reporters, bloviating in committee meetings, and downing cocktails at the Governor’s Club?
They passed a lot of resolutions, including ones to commemorate, celebrate, and raise awareness of things like Uterine Fibroids and Women in Diplomacy.
I’m afraid you’ve missed Florida Gulf Coast University Day (Jan. 27), Space Day (Feb. 3), and Florida Kidney Day (Feb. 10), but there’s still a chance to arrange festivities for Vein Week (April 6-12) and Endangered Species Day (May 15).
Sadly, some these special days and weeks will have a pretty short shelf life.
Endangered Species Day, for example: Legislators are happy to watch Florida’s panther population numbers diminish as ranchers demand their “rights.”
Mustn’t upset Big Ag.
They refused to name the threatened scrub jay, the only bird endemic to Florida, our state bird, too. That might lead to official protection of its habitat.
Mustn’t hurt developers’ feelings.
As for Rare Disease Day, it will soon be irrelevant.
Given the state surgeon general’s hostility to vaccines and other evidence-based medicine, rare diseases won’t be rare for long.
Y’all give a big Sunshine State welcome to Hepatitis B!
When legislators weren’t declaring Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Day (Feb. 10) or Obsessive-Compulsive Awareness Week (Oct. 12-18), they were congratulating everybody they could think of.
At length.
Mean people
The Senate spent seven hours lauding departing colleagues term-limited out or (wisely) putting plenty of distance between themselves and the unseemly food fight we know as state government.
Former Senate President Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples), Sen. Daryl Rouson (D-St. Petersburg), Sen. Lori Berman (D-Boynton Beach), and the ICE-loving Trump cheerleader Sen. Joe Gruters (R-Sarasota) got a heaps of fulsome praise, even from people who hate them like poison.
The House did the same thing, verbally licking each others’ ears and sharing their Milkbones.
As if this wasn’t enough time-wasting, they embarked on a lengthy round of Bobby Bowden love.
The FSU coach has been dead for five years and has yet to have anything named for him but two football fields and a fund-raising club. The Senate means to right this injustice by designating the capital’s “International” (stop laughing) airport the Bobby Bowden Tallahassee International Airport.
Sort of: It’s an “honorary” naming.
The Legislature made a name change for Palm Beach International (seriously! You can fly to the Bahamas from there and sometimes to Montreal!) official: the Donald J. Trump Airport and Modeling Agency.
(Might have made that last bit up).
OK, I’m being unfair. While your Florida legislators generally ignore bills sponsored by Democrats, or (in the House) bills the Senate cares about, or (in the Senate) bills the House cares about, they did pass a solid 12% of bills filed.
The problem is, none of these bills will actually make schools or rent cheaper or citizens healthier or do something about saltwater invading our aquifer or guns on our streets.
What they did pass — other than the new law mandating kids learn cursive — is almost entirely guaranteed to cause harm.
These are some mean people.
Non-existent problems
Speaker of the House Daniel Perez and Gov. Ron DeSantis despise each other (Perez labeled DeSantis’ refusal to shake his hand on Opening Day “petulant”), while the Senate sees no reason to cooperate with the tiresome folks in the other chamber.
Yet they somehow suspended their antipathy long enough to join forces on voter suppression.
The governor and the Republican legislative supermajority all say 1. Florida’s elections are great, safe, damn near perfect; and 2. At the same time, sinister foreigners and other undesirables compromise Florida’s elections with their fraudulent voting.
Therefore, they’ve passed HB 991, a solution chasing a non-existent problem.
In 2025, Florida had 13 million voters on its rolls.
The state has found 198 who could have registered or voted illicitly.
Possibly, maybe.
Making it harder to vote is something of a passion project for the current regime.
If you’re a married woman who took your husband’s last name, you’d better be ready explain yourself with paperwork.
Anyone wanting simply to register will have to prove who his, her, or their (although that’s not allowed anymore) identity with a passport, a REAL ID driver’s license, a court order, naturalization papers, or a birth certificate.
Hundreds of thousands don’t have REAL ID; getting a copy of your birth certificate costs money, and older, poorer people might not even have one.
This is a poll tax.
Not only do they not want you to vote, they don’t want you and your elected city or county government to celebrate Black History Month or Pride or Women’s Equality Day or, hell, maybe St. Patrick’s Day.
Why should the Irish get DEI?
Who’s heritage?
SB 1134 threatens local officials with removal from office if they spend a penny of public money recognizing or celebrating anything deemed insufficiently “Heritage American.”
Bill sponsor Dean Black, R-Jacksonville, says DEI initiatives foster “resentment instead of good will” and “mediocrity instead of merit.”
Here are some of those “mediocre” people and resentment-provoking assertions of human rights Rep. Black’s bill wants us all to ignore: Bayard Rustin, Sandra Day O’Connor, Sojourner Truth, Harvey Milk, Malala Yousafzai, Marie Curie, Alan Turing, Simon Bolivar, James Baldwin, Helen Keller, Toni Morrison, Tecumseh, Stonewall, Selma, Wounded Knee—
If you aren’t familiar with these names, look them up.
And imagine you are female or a person of color or LGBTQ+ or disabled: Your state government now says you should sit down and shut up.
Don’t expect the rest of us to care about your struggles and your experiences.
Some Americans are more equal than others.
If you dissent, if you say Black lives really do matter, if you oppose genocide in Gaza or protest the regime’s increasing authoritarianism, if you follow a disfavored faith, you may be a criminal — at least according to the state of Florida.
It has dawned on the governor and Legislature Florida’s voucher program also supports students in accredited Muslim private schools.
Republicans from the governor’s office on down began to holler about “sharia law,” although they presented no evidence these schools promote it or even teach it, and implied (again, without much evidence) the schools have connections to foreign terrorist groups.
Sharia is based on the Quran. You could say (as plenty of politicians do) that western legal systems derive from the Old Testament.
Both holy texts endorse gender discrimination and violent punishments. Neither has the force of law in the United States or any other western nation.
Spot the terrorist
But the soon-to-be-signed HB 1471 will allow the governor and Cabinet to declare groups “domestic terrorists,” deny vouchers to certain schools, and expel students who, say, wave a Palestinian flag at a campus demonstration.
DeSantis wants to ban the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights organization. A federal judge is blocking him.
Oddly enough, nobody’s talking about banning the College Republicans.
Members of the University of Florida chapter have been entertaining themselves with Nazi salutes and antisemitic declarations, while another gaggle of white boys, mostly students (one in law school at FIU) have been indulging in a WhatsApp chat insulting Jews, calling women “whores,” making free with the N-word, and suggesting Black people should be beheaded.
To be fair, UF kicked their College Republicans off campus.
The College Republicans suing on free speech grounds.
I wish I could say the Legislature’s done all the damage it can this year, but that’s not at all the case.
They’ll be back in Tallahassee after Easter, allegedly to pass a budget. It could end up with all kinds of insane and hateful provisions slipped in at the last minute.
They’ll be back again later to fight over property taxes and redistricting.
That’s assuming they can overcome their feuding, back-biting, tantrum-throwing, and snit fit-pitching long enough to do their job.
Then again, the collective emotional age at the Capitol is about 10, so let’s not get our hopes up.
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Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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ICE deploys maximum force to keep airports safe
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Why Trump is about to surrender
Friends,
No one knows what Trump is going to do from minute to minute, least of all Trump. But it’s looking ever more likely he’ll be exiting Iran within days, declaring his “excursion” into it (as he’s termed his war) a major victory — and then changing the subject.
On Friday, Trump posted on his social media site that “we are getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts in the Middle East.”
What objectives? He never said what they were to begin with.
And, on Monday, he announced a pause in bombing attacks as he claimed representatives of the U.S. and Iran were having productive conversations.
He’s about to wind down and exit because he doesn’t give a damn about anything except maintaining his wealth and power — and the war is now costing him both.
It’s hurting his financial backers in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar — whose wealth has been seriously diminished by the war and whose vulnerability has been exposed.
It’s p---ing off Trump’s wealthy political backers at home — who are getting pummeled as the U.S. stock market sinks under the weight of the war.
It’s infuriating American voters, as gasoline sells for nearly $4 a gallon — causing Republicans to become ever more anxious about a political backlash in the midterm elections. Most were elected on Trump’s coattails in the 2024 election, in which Trump promised to reduce prices and avoid foreign entanglements — rather than do the exact opposite.
So, forget regime change. Forget freedom for Iranians. Forget “obliterating” Iran’s nuclear capabilities (which Trump claimed he accomplished last June).
Trump will say he vanquished Iran’s military and defense capacities, destroyed its economy, and decapitated its leadership.
Job over. Mission accomplished. Iran obliterated (again).
Right now, though, he has to save face. Iran has rejected Trump’s threat that if it doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz by Monday night, the United States will strike Iranian power plants. Iran says if the U.S. attacks Iran’s power plants, it will attack energy, information technology, and desalination facilities across the Gulf.
So Trump will do some more bombing this week. He’ll then leave the job of opening the Strait to other countries, claiming that the U.S. doesn’t need it because we produce enough oil on our own (which is untrue because oil prices depend on the global market, and U.S. refiners depend on foreign grades of crude).
And he’ll leave the bombing of Iran to Benjamin Netanyahu, who’d rather continue striking Iran and Hezbollah’s strongholds in Lebanon than stand trial in Israel for bribery and corruption. (Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Friday that the military campaign in Iran would “escalate significantly” this week.)
So what will America have gotten out of Trump’s “excursion”? Zilch. Actually, less than zilch because in many ways we’re worse off than when it started. We’ve lost blood and fortune.
Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed, and the war has cost the U.S. an estimated $18 billion so far, not counting the costs to American consumers of higher-priced energy and food.
The regime in Iran has changed, but there’s been no “regime change.” And the change that’s occurred has been toward a harder, more nationalist, more belligerent Islamic state.
Iran is still hiding its enriched uranium and is presumably more determined than ever to turn it into nuclear warheads.
Trump and Israel may crow about destroying Iranian launchers and missile stocks, but Iran is firing even more ballistic missiles and drones across the Middle East now than it did a week ago — launching new missile attacks on Israeli cities and damaging key energy installations in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates.
On Friday, Iran launched intermediate-range ballistic missiles at the U.S.-U.K. Diego Garcia military base 2,500 miles away. That’s far enough to hit much of Europe.
Iran figures that political and economic pressures are mounting against Trump faster than they are mounting against Iran. While Iran uses cheap drones to disrupt global supply chains, it’s generating huge profits on its sale of oil (mostly to China), reportedly $8.7 billion in additional oil profits since the war began, driven by a $47 per barrel increase in prices compared to pre-war levels.
Forget Iran negotiating with the U.S. over ending the war. Ebrahim Rezaei, spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee, says any talks with the U.S. are off the agenda as Tehran “focuses on punishing the aggressors.”
Other Iranian leaders are demanding as conditions for ending the war massive reparations from the U.S. and the expulsion of American military from the region.
They’re also talking about transforming the Strait of Hormuz into an Iranian toll booth controlling a third of the world’s shipborne crude oil.
We have no way of knowing whether America will now be more vulnerable to Iran-sponsored terrorism, but the risk seems greater than before Trump launched his war.
All told, there has been no American victory here, only tragedy — although the sociopath in the Oval Office will surely claim victory and lie through his teeth about what he has accomplished.
Make no mistake: This will be a surrender. As Vermont Republican Senator George Aiken suggested in 1966 when the U.S. found itself mired in another unwinnable war, Trump’s only real course of action now is to “declare victory and get out,” which I expect him to do momentarily.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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America is riddled with Trump poison — but here's the antidote
Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s been named multiple times in the Epstein files. He made a shocking joke in the White House, speaking with the Prime Minister of Japan last Thursday, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him.
The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.
Our country has been poisoned for decades now, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken around 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis.
First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.
Back in 1971, Lewis Powell thought he saw a communist threat in Ralph Nader. Literally: he named him in his infamous manifesto, the Powell Memo, arguing that calls to regulate auto safety with seat belts and soft dash boards (Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed) were simply the first steps toward a socialist takeover of America.
“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business,” Powell wrote, “is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”
Nader (who wrote the Foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream) and people like Rachel Carson, with the environmental movement her book Silent Spring had inspired, threatened, Powell believed, the core of America’s free enterprise system.
Regulation, Powell (a tobacco lawyer) asserted, was just step one to a total Stalinist takeover of America.
“The overriding first need,” Powell wrote, “is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”
The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that claimed billionaire and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: it was speech.
That decision greased the path for the later doubling down with Citizens United, and produced a tsunami of corporate money that flooded into the GOP in 1980 (at the time the Democrats were largely funded by labor unions; their embrace of corporate money would come in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats”), floating Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal Reagan Revolution into power.
Since then, big business and billionaires have discovered that the investment of a few million dollars into buying politicians can produce billions or even trillions in returns. When morbidly rich hedge fund guys poured a million or so dollars into Kirsten Sinema’s coffers, for example, she demanded changes to the Inflation Reduction Act that saved them fourteen billion.
That’s one hell of a return on investment, and similar deals are made every day now: the entire GOP and the “corporate problem solver” Democrats are all in on the scam.
Whether it’s money from fossil fuel, big pharma, big chemical, big banking, big airlines, big telcom, big tech, or any other billion-dollar industry in America, the entire GOP and a handful of those “problem solver” Democrats in the House and Senate have their hands out. Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.
Next came poisonous memes designed to turn working people against each other.
The morbidly rich, and the corporations that made them that way, hate labor unions, aka “democracy in the workplace.” Unions reduce their profits and inhibit their ability to maximally exploit their workers; unionized workers also demand accountability, a word anathema to corporations.
Reagan promoted the idea that “union bosses” were exploiting union members for their own advantage and, even though the argument made no sense (unions don’t have stock or bonus systems like corporations, so “union bosses” get a salary just like everybody else), it was picked up by the media that was, itself, run by corporations unhappy about being unionized.
TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s routinely featured corrupt or mobbed-up “union bosses” as parts of their plots, while state after state adopted “Right To Work For Less” legislation, authorized by a Republican Congress over Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, that makes it difficult for unions to survive.
Right-wing radio and Fox “News” echoed the message, and, since Reagan’s election, we’ve seen union representation go from about a third of all Americans to around 10 percent in the private workplace today.
Along with the poisoning death of our unions came the destruction of the American middle class. When Reagan came into office some estimates put the middle class — a single family’s wage-earner being able to buy a home, a car, take a vacation, put kids through school, and save for retirement or have a pension — at around 60 to 65 percent of American families. Today it’s under 45 percent.
Conservatives then set about poisoning American race relations.
This is not to say everything was hunky dory, but in the 1960s and 1970s we were making real progress. Politicians from both parties — with the broad support of the American people — passed Voting- and Civil Rights laws, we made good faith efforts to integrate schools and workplaces, and even television shows in the 1990s, led by Norman Lear’s genius, brought positive portrayals of non-white and queer people to straight white people’s TV screens in a big way for the first time.
First came Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” openly welcoming southern white racists into the GOP. Next, tragically, in 1988 George HW Bush proved that appealing to white racism could still win elections with his notorious Willie Horton ads, setting the stage for two generations of race-baiting Republican politics that reached its zenith with Donald Trump’s racist declaration about “Mexican rapists” when he announced his candidacy in 2015.
The GOP continues this strategy today, promoting racial and religious fear and hate with Muslim bans and ICE raids, generating hysteria about Brown refugees and fighting to block any true portrayals of American racial history in our schools.
Hustlers, with help from the GOP, poisoned Christianity next.
Reagan’s campaign hired born-again alcoholic George W. Bush to work out a deal to integrate the evangelical movement — which prior to 1980 was non-political and even supported abortion rights — into the GOP. Jerry Falwell became the face of this church-and-state merger, spewing his own brand of poison.
The week after 9/11, Falwell and Pat Robertson solemnly agreed on TV that the attack on the Twin Towers was merely their god’s punishment for America tolerating “sin.”
"What we saw on Tuesday,” Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s TV show, “as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”
Robertson replied:
“Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population.”
Falwell then doubled-down:
“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularise America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
Robertson, nodding vigorously, added:
“I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”
And now we have evangelists like the newly reinvented Mike Flynn — a convicted and pardoned secret foreign agent who spied on us from within the White House — traveling the country today calling, essentially, for replacing our democracy with an authoritarian “Christian” government like in Russia and Hungary (and Germany and Italy in the past).
“If we are going to have one nation under God,” Flynn tells audiences repeatedly, “which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God, right?”
Forget about the teachings of Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Goats and Sheep in Matthew 25; get yourself an AR-15 like Flynn recently strutted with on-stage. And let’s do something about all those Jews and Muslims, like Nick Fuentes recommends!
The NRA and weapons manufacturers then poured the poison of guns across our land.
Using the money Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, combined with Scalia’s twisted Heller decision, the Supreme Court and the NRA have unleashed an epidemic of gun violence in America.
The average of all countries in the world is 9.86 guns per 100 civilians. The United States is highest in the world at 120.5 guns per 100 people. Yemen, which is in the middle of a war with Saudi Arabia and dealing with an internal insurgency, comes in second at 52.8.
No other nation is even close; even Afghanistan and Iraq average around 20 deadly weapons in the hands of every hundred people. European and Asian countries range from 10 to as low as 1 gun per hundred people.
Over on Fox “News,” one brilliant idea to deal with the slaughter of our children in our schools was to issue “Ballistic Blankets” to every school. This is how sick and twisted the Republicans taking money from the gun industry and their allies have become.
Twenty years ago, car accidents were the leading killer of children and youth: today it’s guns. This year, almost 11 out of every 100,000 children died from guns while only 8 per 100K died from car crashes. Nothing in America kills more of our children than the 400,000,000+ guns in which our country is awash (and that have made billions for the weapons industry).
White Supremacists are doing their best to poison our police and military.
There’s an active movement among white supremacist groups to spread the poison of fascism, racism, and hate to the government employees who carry the authority to legally kill people. As ABC News reported last March:
“Based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, agents and analysts with the FBI's division in San Antonio concluded that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists would ‘very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of’ their ideologies, according to a confidential intelligence assessment issued late last month.’”
And the epicenter for this appears to be Stephen Miller’s ICE.
“Semi-Fascist” MAGA Republicans are poisoning our system of governance.
Former President Biden rightly called out the MAGA faction of the Republican Party; they are actively working to undermine our republic and replace it with their beloved autocratic strongman models of Orbán’s Hungary, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Putin’s Russia. They’re even promoting Hungary and Orbán on Fox “News,” doing fawning specials live from Budapest featuring the Big Man himself.
In multiple Republican-controlled states, legislators have made it harder to vote — particularly for low-income people, minorities, and college students — while openly working to terrorize Black voters. Ron DeSantis paraded a group of mostly Black “illegal voters” in Florida, while Texas politicians have promoted far and wide their arrests of Black “felon voters.”
It’s all about trying to terrify Black people away from the polls, if less severe efforts like outlawing “Souls to the Polls” by ending Sunday voting aren’t enough to swing elections to the GOP.
The Brennan Center documents how:
“As of January 14, legislators in at least 27 states have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrictive [voting] provisions.”
Dozens are now law, and next is their SAVE America Act, which they don’t expect will pass but they will point to when Democrats win this coming November, claiming those victories were the result of fraud.
Meanwhile, Republican appointees on the Supreme Court let Republican secretaries of state cancel the voter registrations of over 20 million Americans in the last dozen years with their Ohio decision.
The Supreme Court has also allowed Republican secretaries of state to reduce the number of voting machines and voting locations, particularly in Black, Hispanic and college town neighborhoods, to force people wanting to vote into long, discouraging lines.
And they’re poisoning our social and news media.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”
As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money and more power.”
Today CNN is about to be taken over by a hard-right nepo-baby billionaire just like CBS and TikTok (which has banned my show). There’s a network of “nearly 1300” websites purporting to be those of local newspapers but that are really rightwing propaganda operations, and dozens of actual rightwing “local” newspapers that are often stuck for free in people’s mailboxes.
Putin, Trump, Orbán, Xi, and other autocrats and rightwing billionaires are trying to poison democracies worldwide.
Donald Trump famously embraced autocrats, dictators, sheiks, and killers while snubbing leaders of democracies and working to destroy NATO and the United Nations. His family has taken in billions from the Middle East as he pursues a war against Iran that Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have lobbied American presidents to undertake for over a generation.
Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese intelligence services run disinformation campaigns that fill social media with lies and information designed to tear democracies apart; they’re having considerable success in their efforts, including putting Trump in the White House in 2016 and 2024, and pushing through Brexit.
Republicans in Congress are even openly opposing Ukraine in that nation’s valiant battle against Russia’s terror campaign: most recently it was 11 Republican Senators and 57 Republican members of the House who proudly voted with Putin over America and Ukraine.
Rand Paul, who secretly carried a stash of documents (from Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom?) to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump to hand-deliver to Putin’s intelligence service, even argued that we should end the Espionage Act, while his Republican colleagues were demanding Congress defund the FBI.
This November we can deliver the antidote to all this GOP poison.
This isn’t the first time “conservative” racists and fascists have poisoned America.
The oligarchs of the Confederacy did it in the first half of the 19th century, and progressive President Abraham Lincoln defeated them in the Civil War.
And the first third of the 20th century was haunted by the rise of the Klan and the Republican Great Depression, until progressive President Franklin Roosevelt declared political war on them, saying, “[T]hey hate me, and I welcome their hatred!”
As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.
FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower — two Democrats and a Republican — renewed the faith of the American people in the government our Founders created and many died to give us.
They taught us that civic engagement — voting and participating in our political system — is the best antidote to fascist poison.
Forty-plus years of Reaganism, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.
Steps that Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats have fought tooth-and-nail in their service to spreading the fascist poison of giant monopolies and the morbidly rich. They profit from keeping working peoples’ wages and benefits low, exploiting student debt, and forcing our public schools into crisis with bizarre anti-DEI laws and book bans.
This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Fully sixty percent of Americans will have an “election denier” Trump-humping Republican on the ballot this November.
Time is short and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.
Double-check your voter registrations (they can be challenged by Republicans even in Blue states) and do everything you can to wake up friends and neighbors to this very real danger to our republic. And get out on the streets on the 28th for No Kings Day!
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Trumpism is an abomination — and science proves it
FCC Chairman and apparent Goebbels fanboy Brendan Carr is suggesting the radio and TV broadcasters he regulates should begin airing more “pro-America” content. What he means, of course, is pro-Trump.
This illustrates a much larger reality: Republicans want a top-down, hierarchical political and economic system. Democrats want a bottom-up system with maximum participation and broad sharing of society’s wealth. Who is right?
Donald Trump just went on a rant about economics, oil, and Iran that has massive implications for the future of our nation. At the same time, a new study was published about how people lived in Mesoamerica before the European conquest that shows as many as half of all those ancient societies lived democratically and had a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth.
It seems like these are separate, disconnected stories, but they’re not. And the tale they both tell gives us a major insight into the future of America, for better or worse, depending on the political decisions we make between now and November.
The stakes are getting higher every day, and it’s critical that we all understand how cultural and political evolution and world history led us to this dangerous and opportune moment.
We tend to think of economies and political systems as separate things, but in reality they’re deeply intertwined. Both either can be fragile or resilient, and that fragility or resilience most often depends on their relationship to each other.
Resilience is the ability of a governmental system or an economy to weather stresses without “breaking.” It’s the key to understanding everything that’s happening today in both politics and economics.
One of the best and most widely cited analyses of the difference in resilience between democracy and autocracy, for example, is the paper by Wolfgang Merkel & Anna Lührmann titled Resilience of democracies: responses to illiberal and authoritarian challenges published in the peer-reviewed journal Democratization.
Noting that, “Illiberalism and authoritarianism have become major threats to democracy across the world,” they point out that:
“The more democracies are resilient on all four levels of the political system (political community, institutions, actors, citizens) the less vulnerable they turn out to be in the present and future.”
As I document in my book, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Recovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, democracy is the default system for nearly every species of animal and the historic majority of human societies prior to the so-called Agricultural Revolution.
And America’s Founders — having actually seen it being lived out by Native people — believed in it. Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all wrote about their experiences with the “Indians” extensively, and the lessons they learned from them that made their way into our Constitution.
From Putin’s disastrous attack on Ukraine to the governments of Iran and Afghanistan being controlled entirely by a small subset of religious men, we see the calamitous consequences of rule by the few.
Thus, we find that democracy — a system of decision- and rule-making that most efficiently encompasses the collective wisdom of the group — is a survival system every bit as important as technology, science, and economics.
Democracy doesn’t rule out leadership or hierarchies of wealth or power. Rather, it specifies that the power determining how those hierarchies are formed, maintained, and determined — who’s in charge, in other words — comes from, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “the consent of the governed.”
And we get there through voting.
This use of voting-based democracy to establish and maintain the resilience — the survival potential — of a group, tribe, nation, or even animal species is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.
In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph, for example, Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.
It got him into a fight with the Declaration’s main editor, John Adams, who thought it should say “the Christian God,” but Jefferson prevailed. His deist friends like George Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Ben Franklin knew what he meant: nature and “God” interpenetrated each other, and they saw the result of that in the democracy — the balancing systems that produced ecological resilience — played out in nature.
And, I discovered when researching my book, Franklin in particular believed after decades of experience working with Native American tribes that those rules of nature are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.
But was he right? Is nature actually democratic?
Biologists Tim Roper and L. Conradt at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Sussex, England, studied this issue in animals.
We’ve always assumed that the alpha or leader animal of the herd or group makes the decisions, and the others follow, like human kings and queens of old. The leader knows best, we believe: he or she is prepared for that genetically by generations of Darwinian natural selection, or ordained by an omnipotent sky god.
But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, and we’ve just never noticed it because we weren’t looking for it.
“Many authors have assumed despotism without testing [for democracy],” Roper and Conradt noted in Nature, “because the feasibility of democracy, which requires the ability to vote and to count votes, is not immediately obvious in non-humans.”
Stepping into this vacuum of knowledge, the two scientists decided to create a testable model that “compares the synchronization costs of despotic and democratic groups.”
They and their research group discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.
Wrong decisions, they hypothesized, would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs.
With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.
“Democratic decisions are more beneficial primarily because they tend to produce less extreme decisions,” they note in the abstract to their paper.
Britain’s leading mass-circulation science journal, New Scientist, looked at how Conradt and Roper’s model actually played out in the natural world. They examined the behavior of a herd of red deer, which are social animals with alpha “leaders.”
What they found was startling: red deer always behave democratically. When more than half the animals were pointing their bodies at a particular water hole, for example, the entire group would then move in that direction.
“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”
This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish.
With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm or school should move; when the 51% threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.
Dr. Tim Roper told me:
“Quite a lot of people have said, ‘My gorillas do that, or my animals do that.’ On an informal, anecdotal basis it [the article] seems to have triggered an, ‘Oh, yes, that’s quite true’ reaction in field workers.”
I asked him if his theory that animals — and, by inference, humans in their “natural state” — operating democratically contradicted Darwin.
He was emphatic:
“I don’t think it is [at variance with Darwin]. … So the point about this model is that democratic decision-making is best for all the individuals in the group, as opposed to following a leader, a dominant individual. So we see it as an individual selection model, and so it’s not incompatible with Darwin at all.“
Franklin and Jefferson were right. Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in nature’s god’s animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper.
When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail. It becomes rigid and fragile.
When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now because five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United) and then Putin-like dictatorships (where Trump, DeSantis, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP want to take us).
Similarly, research on pre-European-contact Mesoamerican societies published by archeologists Gary M. Feinman and David M. Carballo validates the extensive claims by America’s Founders that I cited in my Democracy book: the most resilient and longest-surviving aboriginal and indigenous societies were also the most democratic.
Citing a 2018 study they’d published of 26 pre-contact Mesoamerican cities, the researchers were every bit as explicit about humans as had been Conradt, Roper and Randerson about the red deer:
“We found that more than half of them were not despotically ruled and that the more collective political centers had greater resilience in the face of droughts and floods, and warfare or shifts in trade. Cities that addressed their social challenges using more collective forms of governance and resource management were both larger and somewhat more resilient than the cities with personalized rulership and more concentrated political power.”
Digging deeper into the archeological record in the five years since that publication, they wrote:
“In a later study that included an updated and expanded sample of 32 well-researched Mesoamerican cities, we found that centers that were both more bottom-up and collective in their governance were more resilient.”
Thus, the kind of bottom-up democracy advocated by Democrats — where the largest number of people can vote, pluralism is encouraged, and the will of the people is respected even when it means your party loses power — has sustained America through most of our history (and has been continuously improved, in fits and starts, through the progressive enfranchisement of African Americans, women, and naturalized immigrants).
On the other hand, restricting democracy (as the MAGA GOP is committed to with their SAVE Act) by making it harder to vote, concentrating political power from the top-down, and using hate and demonization of racial, religious, and gender minorities to acquire and hold political power leads a society straight toward autocracy, fascism, and — most importantly in this context — a loss of cultural, political, and societal resilience.
The legacy of Reagan’s rejection of classical Adam Smith economics and adoption of trickle-down neoliberalism, along with GOP big lies about non-citizens voting and the “virtue” of high-minded “brilliant” billionaires making our decisions for us, made America less resilient and more vulnerable to being shattered by internal or external shocks.
They shook our confidence in government so severely that we elected a populist psychopath as president simply because he promised to “drain the swamp.”
Americans knew something was very, very wrong; they just hadn’t figured out that it all began decades ago with Reagan’s completely reordering the American economy and the GOP consciously deciding to exploit racial hate, homophobia, and misogyny as a political weapon.
America is now, with the upcoming No Kings marches and this November’s election, on a new and brighter course, one that comports with a genuine scientific and historic understanding of how to build and maintain resilient societies and economies.
Now all we have to do is work like hell to help America reject the fascists and re-embrace democracy.
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