All posts tagged "immigration"

We were warned Trump's abuse of power would prove lethal

When I read that the young mother who was executed at point-blank range by one of Trump’s ICE goons Wednesday was named Renee Nicole Good, it sent a chill down my spine.

As the pain and outrage was washing through me, it also struck me as almost too much of a coincidence that she was there protesting state violence and Ben Franklin had been using the name “Silence Dogood” — as in “Do Good” — to warn American colonists about the very same dangers of state violence.

When 16-year-old Franklin slipped his first Silence Dogood essay under the door of his brother’s print shop in 1722, America had few police departments, no body cameras, no qualified immunity, and few militarized patrols prowling city streets. But young Franklin already understood the danger.

Writing as a fictional widow, Franklin warned that “nothing makes a man so cruel as the sense of his own superiority.” The remark was in the context of self-important ministers, magistrates, and petty officials, but he was also talking about raw state power itself as we saw with the execution of Renee Nicole Good.

Power that is insulated, Franklin taught, answers only to itself and believes its very authority excuses the violence it uses.

Franklin’s insight didn’t die on the printed page but, rather, became the moral backbone of the American Revolution. As Do-Good, he repeatedly cautioned us that power breeds cruelty when it’s insulated from consequence, that authority becomes violent when it believes itself superior, and that free speech is usually the first casualty of abusive rule.

In Essay #6, in 1772, Dogood wrote:

“Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.”

Renee Nicole Good was on that Minneapolis street to express her freedom of speech, her outrage at the crimes, both moral and legal, being committed by ICE on behalf of Donald Trump, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Stephen Miller.

Thomas Paine took Franklin’s warning and sharpened it into a blade. Government, Paine said, is a “necessary evil” but when it turns its legally authorized violence against its own people, it becomes “intolerable.” Authority doesn’t legitimize force, Paine argued; instead, the ability to use force without accountability inevitably corrupts authority.

And here we are. This is the ninth time ICE agents have shot into a person‘s car, and the second time they’ve killed somebody in the process.

For Paine, violence by agents of the state isn’t an aberration, it’s the default outcome when power concentrates without clear accountability. Where Franklin warned about cruelty born of a sense of superiority (as armed, masked white ICE officers search for brown people as if they were the Klan of old), Paine warned us that force will always be directed against the governed unless that power is aggressively constrained.

James Madison — the “Father of the Constitution” — then took both men at their word. He didn’t design a constitution that assumed virtue; instead, he designed one that assumed abuse.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” he wrote in Federalist 51, adding, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Because we and our politicians and police aren’t angels, Madison pointed out, state power must be restrained, divided, watched, and continuously challenged. Which is why the Framers of the Constitution adopted the checks-and-balances system — splitting the government into three co-equal parts — that Montesquieu recommended, based on what he had learned from the Iroquois (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy).

Franklin himself became even clearer about the threat of unaccountable state-imposed violence as he aged. Governments, he repeatedly warned, always claim violence is necessary for safety and we saw that yesterday when puppy-killer Kristi Noem claimed that Renee Good was a “domestic terrorist.” Her comment is the perfect illustration of Franklin’s assertion that state violence, once normalized, always tries to claim justification.

To add insult to murder, Trump pathetically waddled over to his Nazi-infested social media site and claimed:

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. … [T]he reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis.”

Silence Dogood would have confronted him head-on, as she/Franklin repeatedly did with the petty, self-important officials of colonial New England. He repeatedly noted that surrendering liberty for a little temporary security not only doesn’t prevent state brutality but actually it invites it. In a 1759 letter, Franklin explicitly warned us about men like Trump and the siren song of “law and order”:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Once a state teaches its agents that force is the solution, force becomes their habit. That’s how police states are formed out of democracies, as the citizens of Russia, Hungary, and Venezuela have all learned. And now, it appears, we’re learning as America becomes the world’s most recent police state.

This isn’t an uniquely American problem: it’s older than our republic. And Franklin told us exactly how it happens: when state authority stops serving the people but instead lords over them, stops being questioned by the media and the people, and stops fearing consequences because it lives behind a shield of immunity, a police state is inevitable.

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz noted, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis wasn’t a “tragic anomaly.” It was the predictable outcome of systems Franklin would have recognized instantly; the kind of corrupt strongman systems that reward domination, excuse cruelty, and punish dissent.

Trump wants us on the “radical left” to shut up and go away. But Ben Franklin taught us that silence in the face of power isn’t neutrality but is, instead, an extension of permission. He wrote as Silence Dogood precisely because he understood that abuse flourishes when citizens turn their eyes away and lower their voices.

If we want to live in the democratic republic Franklin, Paine, and Madison imagined where power is given by “the consent of the governed,” then outrage isn’t enough. We must demand accountability, insist on transparency, and refuse to accept state violence and a firehose of official lies as the price of order.

Three centuries ago, a teenage printer’s apprentice warned us that silence enables abuse. He was right then. He is right now.

Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and radio host. His Substack can be found here.

Another day, another horror, another grim step in Trump's war on humanity itself

It seems appropriate right now to try to clarify one of the most basic questions America is (or should be) struggling with: What does it mean to be a human being?

The confusion is mounting.

Three illustrations:

1. Corporations

Corporations are not human beings. That should be self-evident.

But in 2010, the Supreme Court ruled (in its Citizens United case) that corporations are the equivalent of “people” under the First Amendment to the Constitution, with rights to free speech.

This ruling has made it nearly impossible for the government to restrict the flow of money from giant corporations into politics. As a result, the political voices — and First Amendment rights — of most real human beings in America are being effectively drowned out.

But in coming years, states will have an opportunity to circumvent Citizens United by redefining what a “corporation” is in the first place.

Absent state charters that empower them to become “corporations,” business organizations are nothing more than collections of contracts — between investors and managers, managers and employees, and consumers and sellers.

In the 1819 Supreme Court case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, Chief Justice John Marshall established that:

“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible [that] possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it …. The objects for which a corporation is created are universally such as the government wishes to promote.”

Montana is now readying a proposition for its 2026 ballot that would empower organizations that sought to be corporations there to do many things — except to fund elections. (I’ve written more on this, here.)

2. Artificial Intelligence

AI is not human, although it’s becoming increasingly difficult for many real people to tell the difference between “artificial general intelligence” and a real person.

As a result, some real people have lost touch with reality — becoming emotionally attached to AI chat boxes, or fooled into believing that AI “deepfake” videos are real, or attributing higher credibility to AI than is justified — sometimes with tragic results.

In his typically ass-backward pro-billionaire way, Donald Trump has issued an executive order aimed at stopping states from regulating AI. But some governors — most interestingly, Florida’s Ron DeSantis — have decided to establish guardrails nonetheless.

DeSantis is calling on Florida’s lawmakers to require tech companies to notify consumers when they are interacting with AI, not to use AI for therapy or mental health counseling, and to give parents more controls over how their children use AI. DeSantis also wants to restrict the growth of AI data centers by eliminating state subsidies to tech companies for such centers and preventing such facilities from drying up local water resources.

In a recent speech, DeSantis said:

“We as individual human beings are the ones that were endowed by God with certain inalienable rights. That’s what our country was founded upon — they did not endow machines or these computers for this.”

I never thought I’d be agreeing with Ron DeSantis, but on this one he’s right.

Corporations are legal fictions. Human AI is a technological fiction. Neither has human rights. Both should be regulated for the benefit of human beings.

3. Non-Americans and suspected enemies

The third illustration of our current confusion over what is a human being is endemic in Trump’s policies toward immigrants and many inhabitants of other nations, now especially in and around Venezuela.

On Wednesday, a federal agent shot and killed a 37-year-old woman during an immigration raid in Minneapolis. Despite what Trump and Kristi Noem say, a video at the scene makes clear that the shooting was not in self-defense.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said: “We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety,” adding that it cost a person her life.

ICE agents are arresting and detaining people on mere suspicion that they are not in the United States legally — sometimes deporting them to foreign nations where they’re brutalized — without any independent findings of fact (a minimum of “due process”).

Meanwhile, Trump and Stephen Miller, his assistant for bigotry and nativism, are busy dehumanizing immigrants. For example, Trump describes Somalian-Americans as “garbage.”

Last weekend, the U.S. killed an estimated 75 people in its attack on Venezuela, as it abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The U.S. has been bombing and killing sailors on small vessels in the Caribbean and off the coast of Venezuela on the suspicion they’re smuggling drugs into the United States — on the vague pretext that they’re “enemy combatants,” although Congress has not declared war.

Trump’s justification for all such killings has shifted from preventing drug smuggling to “regaining control” over oil reserves that Venezuela nationalized 50 years ago.

In all these cases, the Trump regime is violating fundamental universal human rights considered essential to human dignity.

Corporations and AI are not human beings, but people who come to the United States seeking asylum indubitably are human. So too are undocumented people who arrived in the United States when they were small children and have been here ever since. As are our neighbors and friends who, although undocumented, are valued members of our communities.

As are the Venezuelans who have been murdered by the Trump regime.

So, what does it mean to be a human being?

It means the right to be protected from the big-money depredations of giant corporations, and from the emotional lure of AI disguised as a human.

And it means to be treated respectfully — as a member of the human race possessing inherent, inalienable rights.

These are moral imperatives. But America is doing exactly the reverse.

Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
Robert Reich's 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

This day of Trumpist darkness and violence told us something awful about our future

I grew up in Pittsburgh. When I was a kid, my father brought home the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette every evening. He carried it under his arm as he walked into the house, and handed it to me. He knew, even at a young age, I was enthralled by the news.

I spread it out on the living room floor and read about the world. I learned how a free press reported about democracy, how the stories were always grounded in facts. I never imagined that one day I’d be lucky enough to write, on occasion, for that paper.

I also never imagined I’d live to see the day it went dark. My hometown is without a newspaper.

The news that the Post-Gazette is closing isn’t just personally heartbreaking. It’s chilling. Because media outlets don’t vanish in isolation. They disappear alongside something else, something far more dangerous. When the press goes dark, democracy surely follows.

Astonishingly, it seems that the press and American democracy are folding almost simultaneously, withering and suffocating together.

On Wednesday, the confluence of this darkness came into horrifying focus. We watched a venerable American newspaper shut its doors while the country absorbed acts of authoritarian violence, deception and hegemony, any one of which would have dominated the national conversation at any other time.

Instead, they competed with one another for dwindling space and attention. The last of the grand finale fireworks of democracy descending, leaving a blackened sky.

As the media shrinks, power grows more reckless. Across the country, ICE agents are being sent into cities, to detain people without transparency, without accountability, often without cause.

Yesterday, that recklessness turned lethal. Agents opened fire on an innocent woman as she drove through her neighborhood in Minneapolis. Witnesses said she was warning others ICE was nearby. Early reports and video made clear she posed no threat. She was trying to protect her neighbors.

As she pulled away from the aggressive agents attempting to enter her car, she was shot at, at least twice, and died. Her airbag soaked with the blood of tyranny.

And yet, almost immediately, the President of the United States declared, without evidence, that the agents acted in self-defense. The Secretary of Homeland Security, dressed up in a cowboy hat, lacking seriousness or law enforcement background, quickly echoed the claim. She said the woman "attempted to run [the agents] over and rammed them with her vehicle.”

It was a lie. They were both lies. Lies told in the face of video evidence. Lies delivered reflexively, because this administration has learned it no longer needs to wait for facts. The untrue narrative materializes instantly, corrections never follow.

This is what happens when there are fewer reporters to ask hard questions, fewer editors to slow the spin, fewer institutions left to insist on truth before being subsumed in falsity. Fewer newspapers to report the facts.

As if this weren’t enough, political talk shows were debating whether Donald Trump might invade, forcibly take over or buy Greenland, against the will of its people. It is territory governed by Denmark, one of America’s closest allies.

These conversations were treated as policy discussions, and yes, they came with warnings about the danger of such action. But imperialism pertaining to the U.S. government was being hashed-out in the U.S. media. And, our allies in Europe were intertwining imperialism and the United States in the same menacing sentence.

Over the weekend, Americans got a crash course on what all this means when the U.S. invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. Now we’re openly entertaining the seizure of land from a NATO ally. The implications are bewildering.

In Trump’s first term the theft of Greenland was bandied about as a joke. No more. Trump will carry through on his commination because he feels emboldened. Seizing Greenland will fracture NATO, and shatter alliances that have defined global stability for eight decades.

It will recast the U.S. not as a defender of democratic norms, but as a predator willing to discard them.

Any one of these stories — the death of a major newspaper, state agents killing a civilian, a president lying about it, open talk of territorial conquest — would once have been a five-alarm fire. Yesterday they arrived all at once. And because they arrived together, none fully broke through.

Democracy doesn’t usually collapse in a single coup or one dramatic announcement. It erodes when its guardrails fail concurrently, when the press dries up, when violence becomes routine, when truth is wiped away, and when despotic ambition is discussed without shame.

It erodes when citizens are forced to absorb too much horror at once, until outrage gives way to exhaustion. We are watching that erosion in real time.

America once prided itself on a free and vibrant press that restrained power, on law enforcement meant to protect rather than terrorize, on leaders who valued democratic ideals abroad. Today, newspapers disappear. Armed agents patrol cities like occupying forces. And the language of conquest replaces the language of freedom.

When the lights of democracy go out completely, when there is no newspaper to hand to the next child in Pittsburgh, and when accountability disappears, who will be left to tell us what’s being done in our name?

John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”

This media tale goes beyond irony to tell us something very dark about America

According to the concept of “manufactured consent,” elaborated by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman in the 1980s, the media carries out a propaganda function in support of the dominant political system. In the United States, this consent has favored particular governments beyond the US government itself — for instance, Israel in its conflict with Palestinians. A recent example has been CBS, owned by David Ellison’s Paramount and under Bari Weiss’ editorial leadership, which has systematically suppressed Palestinian voices in favor of Israel and President Donald Trump.

In another example of manufactured consent, Weiss’ CBS rejected a 60 Minutes story that made the Trump administration look bad on El Salvador. Incidentally, since the end of last summer, the US State Department has dropped criticism of both Israel and El Salvador in its human rights reporting, merging the interests of CBS with the politics of the current administration. When journalist Sharyn Alfonsi wrote the segment about the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador and what life there is like, the content was pulled at the last minute because Weiss said it needed more reporting and balance, even when journalists at CBS invited all sides for a comment. They insisted that the decision was political and not editorial.

Jeffrey St. Clair for CounterPunch recently stated that “CBS under [Bari] Weiss may be worse than Fox News, because nobody takes Fox seriously as a news source and many do CBS, though not for much longer, one suspects.”

Andy Borowitz pointed out that, “When Bari Weiss and CBS decided to censor the report on El Salvador’s brutal prison, they didn’t realize that bootlegged copies would surface.” Indeed, as reported by Variety, the “report yanked by Weiss about the horrific treatment of detainees deported from the US to a prison in El Salvador … leaked online after appearing on a Canadian-TV app.”

Alfonsi did not hold back in her criticism:

Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now — after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one. We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a veto. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.

Alfonsi further explained:

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient. If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state. These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.

Back in 2020, Weiss, in her resignation letter to the New York Times, stated that “self-censorship” and “fitting a predetermined narrative” to satisfy “a narrow audience rather than allowing a curious public read,” led her to quit.

Just before that, in 2018, she authored in the Times, “We’re All Fascists Now,” a right-wing lament that basically talks of a center-left discourse threatening free speech by its mere interrogation of the hard right.

In essence, Weiss complains of the left trivializing fascism only to cover up the fact that she accepts hard power and state authority and structural violence as forms of conventional wisdom beyond criticism. Cultural norms are not really “left leaning,” but it is certainly useful for her to present them this way. Weiss is in the business of providing security to dominant groups in advancing and advocating the consensus required by the state-corporate news nexus.

Weiss might discount how popular fascism was and is in the context of US history in the first place. When you factor in the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan, which peaked at 6 million-plus members in the early 20th century, American admiration for Mussolini, and the regional popularity of the German Bund, the United States has a horrific past with extreme right affiliation. Just over 1 in 3 Americans listened in the 1930s to Charles Coughlin, an outspoken supporter of Nazism.

But you don’t even need to go far back in history to see the US role in El Salvador’s deterioration or Trump’s subversion of US asylum law, all to promote fascism and militarism. Currently, the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelans in violation of international humanitarian law is well known as an emerging crime against humanity. A federal judge has just issued a ruling that requires the United States to grant due process to deported Venezuelans. Additionally, the entire matter has the potential to be examined by the International Criminal Court.

CBS certainly knows that CECOT is a large, high-security prison in El Salvador that has been cited by Human Rights Watch, the UN General Assembly, and the Yale Global Health Review for its harsh conditions and human-rights related concerns. HRW’s report in November 2025 was entitled “You Have Arrived in Hell,” a concept reiterated by Spiegel International. Amnesty International and Relief Web's coverage of the expulsions, which entail people deported from the U.S. and sent to CECOT. It is illegal under international humanitarian law to send refugees to known places of human rights abuse.

Weiss seems to believe that the flagrant nature of Trump’s actions requires the press to yield and to ignore facts that “seem radical.” Additionally, Weiss encourages apolitical journalists to engage in self-censorship and to dismiss the buried segment as a “workplace dispute.”

All the while, 60 Minutes remains entirely mainstream and conventional. As reporter Dave Zirin points out, 60 Minutes was never perfect, it’s been a mouthpiece for war and empire many times over the decades.” He aptly explains how Weiss canceled “the brave testimonials of Venezuelans, tortured in Trump’s El Salvadoran slave labor prison.”

To Zirin’s point, Weiss, a loyal commissar to corporate statism, has internalized the belief that her job is to reinforce the corporate rather than the contrarian brand of 60 Minutes and avoid coverage of geopolitical issues that might make her job more difficult. When she undermines actual reporting and denies the labor, dignity, and courage found in solid reporting, she is trafficking in the politics of organized forgetting and silence.

What Weiss does worst of all, of course, is to provide cover for Trumpian structural viciousness, what policy analyst Khury Petersen-Smith has called the “era for spectacular violence.” This all comes as International relations expert Stephen Zunes recently pointed out how “the United States is now ranked 57th in political freedom,” behind dozens of nations and territories according to Freedom House.

Weiss is only helping to contribute to the trend, and this backlash is likely to continue.

Daniel Falcone is a historian, teacher, and journalist. In addition to Foreign Policy in Focus, he has written for The Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, The Nation, Jacobin, Truthout, CounterPunch, and Scalawag. He resides in New York City and is a member of The Democratic Socialists of America.

This Trump bigot deserves ridicule but the history he cites has darkness of its own

Stephen Miller misses no opportunity to exult in racism and xenophobia. This Common Dreams headline gets right to the point: “‘Horrible Racist’ Stephen Miller Slammed for Using Classic TV Christmas Special to Bash Immigrants.”

Apparently Miller spent Christmas Day watching a 1967 holiday special called Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras and, being the miserable misanthrope that he is, the show — featuring Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, two very famous children of first-generation Italian Americans — prompted him to wax nostalgic about a world in which America was Great and there was no mass immigration.

Everything that Miller says or does deserves outrage, and his X post was no exception. One form the justified outrage has taken recently crossed my Facebook feed:

The Sinatra video that has gone viral is a clip from a 10-minute film short that premiered in November 1945 called The House I Live In. It’s a powerful film, featuring a young and very charismatic Sinatra both speaking and singing against bigotry and for toleration and cultural pluralism.

The film begins with Sinatra, playing himself, in the studio recording a love song. He then takes a break, goes outside, and encounters a group of boys on an unnamed American city street who are very much modeled on Hollywood’s 1940s Dead End Kids. He finds them taunting a young, somewhat different-looking boy who is pretty clearly Jewish, and stops to interrupt the taunting and to engage them in conversation about the meaning of “America.”

When the boys inform him that they are bullying the (Jewish) boy because “we don’t like his religion,” Sinatra teases them: “You must be a bunch of those Nazi werewolves I’ve been reading about.”

When one of the boys incredulously suggests he is “screwy” to think this, Sinatra replies: “Not me, I’m an American.”

When the boys insist that they too are Americans, and one of them volunteers that his father had indeed been wounded in the war, Sinatra points out that the dad had probably needed a blood transfusion, and then points to the excluded boy: “Maybe his pop’s blood saved your dad’s life.”

Sinatra then delivers a monologue:

Look fellas. Religion makes no difference, except maybe to a Nazi or somebody who’s stupid. Why, people all over the world worship God in many different ways. God created everybody. He didn’t create one people better than another. Your blood’s the same as mine, mine’s the same as his. Do you know what this wonderful country is made of? It’s made up of a hundred different kinds of people and a hundred different ways of talking. A hundred different ways of going to church. But they’re all American ways. Wouldn’t we be silly if we went around hating people because they comb their hair different than ours?... My dad came from Italy. But I’m an American. But should I hate your father because he came from Ireland or France or Russia? Wouldn’t I be a first-class fathead?

He then tells them a story about how, after Pearl Harbor, American airmen had inspired the entire country by bravely bombing a Japanese battleship: “They sank it, and every American threw his head back and felt much better. The pilot of that plane was named Colin Kelly, an American and a Presbyterian. And you know who dropped the bombs? Meyer Levin, an American and a Jew. You think maybe they should have called the bombing off because they had different religions?”

Sinatra then heads back to the recording studio. But before entering, he stops to sing for the boys the song he is recording inside, “The House I Live In.” Here are the lyrics:

What is America to me?
A name, a map, the flag I see,
A certain word, “Democracy.”
What is America to me?

The house I live in,
A plot of earth, a street,
The grocer and the butcher
And the people that I meet,

The children in the playground,
The faces that I see;
All races, all religions,
That’s America to me.

A place I work in
A worker by my side
A little town or city
Where my people lived and died
The howdy and the handshake
The air of feeling free
And the right to speak my mind out
That’s America to me

The things I see about me
The big things and the small
The little corner newsstand
And the house a mile tall
The wedding and the churchyard
A laughter and the tears
And the dream that’s been a growing
For 180 years

The town I live in
The street, the house, the room
Pavement of the city
Or a garden all in bloom
The church, the school, the clubhouse
The millions lights I see
But especially the people
That’s America to me.

Sinatra then smiles, returns to the studio, and the boys walk off together, inviting the Jewish kid to join them, while the music of “America the Beautiful” plays in the background.

The film is very powerful and uplifting. It is emblematic of the spirit of American liberalism in the immediate aftermath of WWII, a spirit perhaps symbolized by the stardom of Sinatra, the child of working-class Italian immigrants who grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. Critics of Miller, and of President Donald Trump, are right to invoke the film, and to evoke the idealism of Rooseveltian liberalism, as a reproach to MAGA xenophobia.

At the same time, there are at least three important ways that the film exemplifies the limits of Rooseveltian idealism and the depth of the forms of illiberalism repudiated in the very lyrics of “The House That I Live In” — forms of illiberalism with which we are still reckoning today.

The first relates to the political circumstances surrounding the song itself. The music was written by Earl Robinson, a composer and folk musician from Seattle who belonged to the Communist Party from the 1930s through the 1950s; collaborated with Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and other well-known leftist artists and performers; and was blacklisted during the McCarthy period. And the lyrics were written by Lewis Allan, the pseudonym of Abel Meeropol, also a Communist at the time, who also composed the lyrics to “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching song made famous by Billie Holiday, and later adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their parents were executed as Soviet agents in 1953.

Robinson and Meeropol were two of the hundreds of writers, artists, musicians, and performers who made seminal contributions to American culture during the 1930s and 1940s in connection with the Popular Front, described by historian Michael Kazin as “a vigorously democratic and multiracial movement in the arts and daily life that was sponsored but not controlled by the Communist Party.” The patriotic rhetoric of “The House I Live In” — both the song and the film — bears the traces of Popular Front leftism even as the connections to the left, and to anti-capitalism, were as disguised, and erased, as the actual name of the lyricist.

The second is the way in which the film’s repudiation of antisemitism, and its message of tolerance, is advanced — through an understandable anti-fascist patriotism that is juxtaposed to evil “Nazi werewolves” and invading “Japs.” Sinatra’s uplifting story of the bombing of the Japanese battleship Hiruma three times uses the racist term “Japs.” Erased from the story are some very memorable recent events: the wartime incarceration of well over 100,000 Japanese Americans; the 1945 American fire-bombing of Tokyo that killed over 100,000 Japanese civilians; and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, months before the film’s release.

(It is worth nothing that the film’s producer-director, Mervyn Leroy, also produced the 1944 film 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, a glorification of the 1942 “Doolittle Raid,” the first US bombing of Tokyo, starring Spencer Tracy).

The film’s valorization of American democracy is thus linked to a racially-tinged narrative of American innocence with increasingly illiberal ramifications as the Cold War evolved.

And there is, finally, the striking fact that while Sinatra powerfully gives voice to the idea that “God created everybody, he didn’t create one people better than another,” and that “your blood’s the same as mine, mine’s the same as his,” every person in the film — Sinatra, the boys, the studio orchestra — is white.

To point these things out is not to disparage The House I Live In, a very important cultural creation that contained genuinely progressive elements while also condensing some of the contradictions of its time. It is simply to note the complexity of the recurrent historical contests over what it means to be “an American,” and the lack of innocence of even the most appealing episodes of the past.

Trumpism is xenophobic, racist, deeply anti-liberal, and literally reactionary. Looking back at exemplary moments of American liberalism to counter MAGA rhetoric is an entirely understandable and even comforting move to make. Rewatching The House I Live In this holiday season was genuinely uplifting for me. But post-WWII liberalism at its height was no Golden Age, and we can no more return to it than we can to the time of Andrew Jackson, or William McKinley, or 1920s racist Madison Grant, or George Wallace, or Bull Connor, or whoever it is that warms Stephen Miller’s deformed and shriveled heart.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include: "Democracy in Dark Times"(1998); "The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Liberal Decline" (2003), and "Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion" (1994).

Nobel Prize winner warns MAGA faithful they will 'eat their own' over one major issue

A warning has been issued to MAGA supporters by a Nobel Prize winner who says followers will eventually "eat their own" over one issue.

Divisions are already starting to show within the "MAGAdom" as economist Paul Krugman called it, with even those in lofty political positions at risk of being pulled into the in-fighting. Nobel Prize winner Krugman suggested not even a strong political record will "protect" those from the splintered MAGA sentiment.

Writing in his Substack, Krugman predicted, "But I would also serve a warning to MAGAdom: Movements centered on bigotry eventually eat their own. Don’t imagine that your political record will protect you."

"Consider how JD Vance, while spouting Christian nationalism, has to defend his Yale-educated Indian-American wife from racist, anti-Hindu attacks. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-endorsed Republican senatorial candidate for Ohio, is now pleading for an end to the bigotry and hate directed at him by other Republicans."

"And now we have Ben Shapiro, of Jewish descent and a long-time MAGA stalwart, calling out Tucker Carlson for platforming the antisemitic and anti-Indian Nick Fuentes. Because who could have seen the movement’s antisemitic turn coming — other than anyone who knew anything about history?"

Krugman has since dubbed this infighting "Immigrant Derangement Syndrome", and he says it comes from the top down, rather than from unrest in the public.

He explained, "IDS isn’t even popular among the broad public. Granted, Biden created an opening for immigrant hostility by failing to adequately secure the border during 2021-2024."

"Trump’s immigration policy has grown increasingly unpopular as Americans see its brutality in action. According to AP-NORC, by December only 38 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Trump’s handling of immigration, down from 49 percent in March, while 60 percent disapproved."

"Immigrant Derangement Syndrome is therefore a top-down phenomenon, not a broad popular movement. It reflects the perverse obsessions of MAGAdom, with racism a key component. If you are an immigrant with brown or black skin, you’re a target regardless of how exemplary your behavior – as the growing attacks against Indian-Americans show."

This brazen cruelty bodes ill for victims of the Trump regime — and for every American too

According to the Washington Post, the Trump regime plans to renovate industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time.

The plan is for newly arrested detainees to be funneled — let me remind you, with no due process, or independent magistrate or judge checking on whether they are in fact in the United States illegally — into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be “staged” for deportation.

The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.

America’s immigrant detention system is already the largest in the world.

With the $45 billion Congress appropriated for locking up immigrants, the regime has revived dormant prisons, repurposed sections of military bases, and partnered with Republican governors to build immigrant tent encampments in remote regions.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, according to the Arizona Mirror.

The administration’s goal, he said, was to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”

The logistical problems of converting warehouses into detention camps are significant. Warehouses are designed for storage and shipping of things, not people. They are often poorly ventilated and without precise temperature controls, and they lack access to the plumbing and sanitation systems needed to support thousands of full-time residents.

Beyond logistics is the dehumanization.

Ninety-three years ago, in March 1933, the Nazis established their first concentration camp in what is now Dachau, Poland. Other camps were soon established in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

Initially, the Nazi’s put into these camps Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and others deemed a threat to the Nazi regime.

After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to these camps in a mass, large-scale action that targeted them for being Jewish. The systematic mass murder of Jews in camps designed as extermination camps did not begin until late 1941 and early 1942, as part of the “Final Solution.”

The U.S. began forcibly moving Japanese Americans into America’s own camps in early 1942, following President Roosevelt's signing of Executive Order 9066 of Feb. 19, 1942, which authorized military exclusion zones. Initial roundups of Japanese Americans, deemed "enemy aliens," started immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941.

Around 120,000 people of Japanese descent, mostly U.S. citizens from the West Coast, were incarcerated in ten camps in remote inland states and temporary Assembly Centers. Hundreds more were imprisoned in Hawaii.

Once dehumanization begins, it’s hard to end.

As I noted, ICE is arresting, imprisoning, and deporting people it accuses of being in the United States illegally — but there is no due process, no third-party validation of ICE’s accusations.

ICE now holds more than 68,000 people in detention facilities, according to agency data. Nearly half — 48 percent — have no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, ICE data shows.

ICE’s biggest current facility is a tent encampment at the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in Texas, which now holds around 3,000 people but was expected to have a capacity of 5,000 by year’s end.

The largest proposed ICE warehouse would hold up to 10,000 detainees in Stafford, Virginia. Another with capacity for up to 9,500 is planned for Hutchins, near Dallas. A third, with space for 9,000, in Hammond, east of Baton Rouge.

There is no place in a civilized society for the warehousing of people.

There is no justification in a society putatively organized under the rule of law to imprison people without due process.

There is no decency in removing hardworking members of our communities from their families and neighbors and imprisoning them and then deporting them to other countries, some of which are brutal dictatorships.

When the history of this cruel era is written, the shame should be no less than the shame we now feel about the roundups and detention of Japanese Americans in World War II.

Hopefully, the dehumanization of the people that the Trump regime aims to warehouse will not result in the sadistic cruelties of the Nazi’s starting 93 years ago.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
Robert Reich's 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

Question for Governor DeSantis: what have all these foreigners ever done for us?

Foreigners! What have they ever done for us?

I grant you there was that 18th-century guy, that Marquis de Lafayette, who convinced the French government to back us against the British and used his own money to help fund the War of Independence.

You could argue the Chinese who came over in the 19th century to build the railroad also had their uses.

They worked for practically nothing, rarely whined about getting dynamited on the regular or not being eligible for citizenship.

But the foreigners clogging up our colleges don’t help make America great again.

While some would say Albert Einstein was the kind of foreigner you want hanging around, what with him being smart at science and all, he took a job at Princeton that could have gone to a real American.

Why couldn’t one of us have come up with theories about the universe that were just as good or better than his?

We’re the ones who invented the quarter-pound hamburger, the microwave oven, the credit card, and Spanx.

To be fair, immigrants obtain patents at about twice the rate of regular Americans, and OK, gave us video games and doughnut machines.

Plus, I guess we have to mention that foreign-born researchers represent 25 percent of America’s Nobel Prize winners.

But so what? Is any of this really great?

‘Pull the plug’

Not according to our fearless governor, who vows to rid us of annoying people with their strange accents and peculiar habits, especially in Florida’s institutions of higher education

Ron DeSantis demands the state Board of Governors “pull the plug” on those H-1B visas that allow practically any Tomás, Didier, or Haoran with a fancy degree and a slew of top-drawer publications to get a gig in our colleges.

“Universities across the country are importing foreign workers on H-1B visas instead of hiring Americans who are qualified and available to do the job,” said DeSantis. “We will not tolerate H-1B abuse in Florida institutions.”

Colleges are, as the governor says, “doing social justice.”

We don’t do social justice in Florida.

DeSantis’ Exhibit A: “A clinical assistant professor from Supposed Palestine,” the West Bank, now teaching at the University of Florida.

Of course you realize “Supposed Palestine” is one of the most feared places on earth, full of teenagers armed with slingshots, so vicious that Israeli settlers are forced to burn mosques, villages, and olive trees just to keep them in line.

The university would probably argue that professor is a super-brain and the most qualified for the job, but do we really want young Floridians exposed to ideas that could confuse them about who they’re supposed to hate in the Middle East?

Diversity gone wild, clearly.

UF’s got too many foreigners; FSU has a long history of coddling them, too.

In 1949, Florida State’s School of Music hired a Hungarian named Ernst von Dohnanyi.

He was renowned as a brilliant composer and pianist, called a “Romantic master,” and had been a courageous anti-Nazi fighter who also hated the Soviet regime.

But come on: Wasn’t there an American who had more or less the same resumé?

‘Ignorant, naive, blindsided’

In the 1980s, FSU brought in one Paul Dirac, a former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University

That’s a supposedly big-deal position once held by Isaac Newton, the one who got the idea about gravity by watching apples fall out of trees.

Science nerds call Dirac, a Nobel Prize-winner, the Father of Quantum Mechanics, which is all very well, but I’ll bet FSU could have got a Ph.D. from, say, the University of Alabama to do the same thing, and cheaper, too.

Take a look at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory there in Tallahassee.

It’s like the UN.

Take Dr. Likai Song: an M.D. and Ph.D. who works on cancer and HIV vaccines.

He went to Harvard and got his doctorate in Biophysics at FSU.

He’s won a bunch of NIH and NSF grants and fancy research awards, but he was born in China.

China, people.

Or what about Peter Gor’kov, a native of Russia, who makes magnetic resonance probes, instruments that tell you what’s going on inside magnets (or something like that)?

Who understands that stuff? Not red-blooded Americans!

Now I don’t know if any of these folks became citizens, but the point is there must be gazillions of native-born people with normal-sounding names like “Smith” and “Henderson” who could do those jobs.

If you listen to the professors and the students, you’d think the governor is a nasty, angry fellow who wants to destroy academic freedom and deny students perspectives from across the world while telling Floridians this will make us great again.

One uppity prof said, “I think people are ignorant, naive, blindsided or just generally racist to accept that perspective.”

He claimed international educators “add so much value, provide so much to citizens, whether it be health care, education, engineering,”

Oh contrarywise!

Picky, picky, picky

More than 60,000 egghead types work for Florida’s colleges and universities, and of those a full 1.7 percent are foreign.

That’s about 1,020 jobs stolen from Americans!

How hard can it be to become qualified in, say, immunology and microbiology like USF’s Hossam Ashour, born in Egypt and ranked among the top 2 percent of researchers worldwide?

There’s probably a TikTok video you can watch.

But the lefty-wokey academics claim there aren’t enough qualified American scientists around.

At the University of Miami, a big chunk of the biochemists, biophysicists, medical researchers, and molecular and cellular biologists are on H1-B visas.

According to the Miami Hurricane newspaper, some of UM’s obviously spoiled students aren’t happy about removing the foreigners. One said, “The STEM departments at UM could definitely struggle from a loss of international professors.”

A sophomore studying microbiology and immunology (aren’t we getting rid of those stupid vaccines?) seems to think the H1-Bs are a good thing: “It was interesting to experience [international professors’] teaching styles because they’re different from professors I’ve had before.”

American STEM not good enough for these kids?

Anti-American Americans like to bring up “the law” and “the Constitution,” pointing out that H1-B visas actually fall under the control of the federal government and Ron DeSantis can’t just wave them away.

Picky, picky.

Doesn’t matter: President Trump will help by charging $100 grand per new H-1B visa.

That ought to slow them down.

Of course the “that’s illegal” crowd, fringe types such as unions, 20 state attorneys general, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are pitching a fit over our great America First Forever A+++++ policies and suing the government.

‘Filthy countries’

Nevertheless, Trump will not waver from his determination to rid America of foreigners — unless they’re incredibly sexy or incredibly rich.

Take our well-dressed First Lady. She was a model who arrived in New York on an EB-1, often called the “Genius Visa.”

How about Elon Musk, one-time student visa holder? Sure, he dropped out of Stanford and probably worked illegally, but so what?

Without him, Mars will always be a cold, obscure planet with an unbreathable atmosphere instead of a potential vacation spot.

We need him, just like we need those oppressed white South Africans whose only crime was appropriating land belonging to the people who may have lived there for millennia but were failing to monetize it properly.

What we don’t need is so-called “experts” from countries with names we can’t spell.

No worries: Like DeSantis, the president is on the case.

He’s going big, too, planning to strip an untold number of so-called “naturalized” Americans of their citizenship.

The Justice Department says it’ll go after people who may be criminals, misrepresented themselves on their applications, or sneakily obtained citizenship during the Biden administration.

Just last year, 800,000 people, mostly from India, Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Dominican Republic, took the oath.

Come on: Where are the Norwegians?

As for all these students pouring into our country and our state, many from “filthy” countries, Trump wants their social media inspected for any sign of terrorist tendencies such as making fun of him and deny their visas.

DeSantis says Florida’s public schools shouldn’t educate kids here without legal status, nor admit any undocumented student to one of our universities.

He will make sure the Sunshine State, home of the Cuban sandwich, is free of foreign influence.

It’s the patriotic thing to do.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

This may be the lowest this monstrous regime can go

“Ms. Rachel, can ICE take me?”

“What about my dad? Can they take my dad away?”

“I feel so angry about how ICE is grabbing people out of my neighborhood.”

“I feel traumatized ever since ICE stole my sister.”

“I’m afraid to walk to school. I’m afraid to leave my house.”

“I want my mom back.”

These are real questions and comments I’ve heard from the kids I work with at Project Libertad in recent days, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terrorizes their communities daily.

While newcomers have always faced higher rates of anxiety, depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and other mental health challenges than their US-born peers, the divide is becoming more apparent each day. These conversations with my kids represent a stark increase in fear and anxiety among immigrant children — and it’s not just an anecdotal shift. The data are clear: The Trump administration’s increasingly hostile immigration policies are irreversibly harming children.

Pediatricians Susan Kressly and Michelle Barnes warn of the lifelong impact these policies have on children’s development and health into adulthood:

Witnessing harm to others and living in constant fear is traumatic to all children in the community. These stressors disrupt brain development and have long-term negative effects on the health and well-being of impacted children. Ultimately, the cumulative effects make these communities less healthy.

Similarly, nonprofit newsroom CalMatters documents strained mental health among schoolchildren across California after a summer of widespread, aggressive ICE raids and warns of the long-term harm to children:

Experts say these raids and their aftermath may also have long-term consequences. Constant vigilance and worry puts children at greater risk of developing chronic anxiety and depression. Those who are separated from a parent face a host of social and emotional challenges.

A 2025 study in the Children and Youth Services Review showed that childhood exposure to “severe immigration enforcement” — which includes not just deportation, but also things like fear or arrest — is “significantly associated” with having anxiety as a young adult. The study’s authors call for “reforming immigration policies that unnecessarily harm members of families … and encourages social workers and allied professionals to recognize exposure to enforcement as a traumatic experience ...”

A new report in Psychiatry Online highlights the long-term, generational trauma caused by immigration enforcement and calls for the mental health community to not only improve treatment for immigrant youth and families, but also to join advocacy efforts in support of their immigrant patients.

Another recent study out of Florida from the from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows a 22 percent increase in student absences since January, a direct result of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement there. The study blames fears of deportation and family separation for the decrease in school attendance. That same study showed a decrease in students’ test scores linked to immigration enforcement.

ICE officers and child Federal immigration officers speak to a child at a court in Manhattan. REUTERS/David 'Dee' Delgado

The trauma of mass deportation also impacts US-born children of immigrant parents, who live in constant fear of being separated from their parents. For many, that nightmare has now become a reality. CNN identified over 100 US citizen children who were left behind after a parent was deported, ranging in age from babies to teens.

The research is clear; there is no debate to be had: US immigration policy is hurting children. All that’s left to do is decide what type of society we want to be. Are we a society that cares about the well-being of children? It’s a yes or no question. There’s no “but” or “if” or “only certain children” or “they should’ve come here legally” (don’t even get me started — you can read more on that faulty argument here). We either care about human rights — or we don’t.

James Baldwin wrote in The Nation in a 1980 essay:

The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.

His words ring truer today than ever before. If you care about children; if you say you’re “pro-life;” if you consider yourself a good or moral person: The children are ours. They are yours. And history will hold you responsible for how you did (or did not) protect them.

Rachel Rutter, Esq., is the founder and executive director of Project Libertad, a nonprofit providing holistic legal and social services to immigrant youth. She was named a Top 5 CNN Hero in 2024 and a 2025 WHYY Good Souls Honoree for her leadership in supporting vulnerable immigrant communities.

Trump and the GOP should be terrified after this historic loss

“There is no place in the world today for the idea that some people are born to rule and others to be ruled.” — the late Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley

If Miami’s mayoral race is an indicator of the national mood, color that mood surly.

The ripple effect of widespread dissatisfaction felt by Americans because of the high cost of food, appliances, rent, and mortgages is reflected in political races this year during Donald Trump’s second presidential term. In almost every case, voters have delivered beatings on Republican candidates.

Last week, the trend continued when former Miami-Dade County Commissioner Eileen Higgins trounced her conservative opponent, former city manager Emilio González.

Higgins, who also broke the glass ceiling for women, garnered 59.5 percent of the vote.

“Tonight, the people of Miami made history. Together, we turned the page on years of chaos and corruption and opened the door to a new era for our city — one defined by ethical, accountable leadership that delivers real results for the people. I am deeply honored by the trust voters have placed in me to serve as the next Mayor of Miami,” Higgins said in a statement.

“As Mayor, I will lead a government that works for everyone — one that listens, acts, and delivers. From safe neighborhoods and affordable housing to clean parks, thriving small businesses, and a City Hall that finally earns the public’s trust, we’re ready to get to work. Tonight, we celebrate not just a victory, but a new beginning for Miami — a city that belongs to all of us, and a future we will build together. ¡Vamos a trabajar!”

Political shift

Higgins spoke powerfully against the dubious DeSantis-Trump-powered immigration crackdown that has upended the lives of undocumented and documented immigrants, including U.S. citizens.

“This is the first year ever where residents have told me they’re afraid, right?” Higgins said in an earlier interview with CNN. “I can’t go an hour when I am at community events without meeting someone whose brother, sister, aunt, uncle, was either taken to Alligator Alcatraz or who knows where? They don’t even know where they are.”

In the aftermath, political pundits muse that Miami’s mayoral runoff likely illustrates a broader national political shift, with Democrats not only breaking lengthy Republican stranglehold on the seat, but also because it is the latest momentum boost ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Seats have flipped blue in West Palm Beach as well as in Georgia, Mississippi, Iowa, and several mayoral seats in Connecticut.

It is not lost on Republicans, MAGA and otherwise, that González lost despite being endorsed by President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, and U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Ted Cruz.

In the back of Republican and MAGA minds, what’s concerning to them — even as they try to mask their fears with bravado — is the potential for an unsettling Democratic sweep in next year’s midterm elections.

This year, Democratic candidates secured:

Gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia.
The surprise election of a young, bold democratic socialist powered by young, multi-ethnic, disaffected voters in New York.
Passage of Proposition 50, a measure that gives California legislators room to redistrict congressional seats and give Democrats the opportunity to potentially capture five additional U.S. House seats.
Defeat of a measure in Maine that would have restricted voting.
Re-election of three Pennsylvania Supreme Court judges to retain a Democratic majority.

‘Dehumanizing and cruel’

Just about all the races revolved around affordability issues, analysts said. They noted that voters responded positively to Higgins’ criticisms of the DeSantis-driven policies allowing ICE agents to arbitrarily stop, harass, detain, and deport immigrants and U.S. citizens, plus her calls for affordable housing in an area of the country struggling with soaring housing costs.

“We are facing rhetoric from elected officials that is so dehumanizing and cruel, especially against immigrant populations. The residents of Miami were ready to be done with that,” Higgins said in an Associated Press interview following her victory speech Tuesday night.

Interestingly enough, Trump, during a swing through Pennsylvania to discuss Republicans’ steps toward countering inflation, assured the audience that his policies were driving down prices even as he characterized the “affordability issue” as a “Democratic hoax.”

Florida Senate Democratic Leader Lori Berman, of Boca Raton, said during a recent news conference in the Capitol: “I’m hopeful that, as this session goes on, we in the House and the Senate in both parties are able to work together and do things that really do affect affordability and that affect peoples’ lives.”

Berman described affordability as her caucus’s top priority next session.

“Prices are rising, period. And we are seeing Republican politicians pander to D.C. and squabble amongst themselves instead of fixing the problem, so Democrats are offering ideas,” House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell, of Tampa, added.

Moneywise, WalletHub, Forbes, and Yahoo Finance reported recently that Florida is the second most-distressed state in the union in terms of its residents’ debt obligations, with a 23 percent increase in the share of people with distressed bank accounts between 2024 and 2025. In addition, Florida holds the sixth-highest overall share of people with accounts in distress, at 7.3 percent.

Economic distress

In human terms, this reflects a sharp increase in bankruptcy filings; residents with accounts in forbearance or deferred payments; America’s lowest average credit scores; and higher prices for groceries, rent, mortgages, gasoline, and health care.

Americans are struggling to pay their bills, even turning to credit to pay for essentials. A recent LendingTree survey found that one-quarter of buy-now-pay-later users have used these loans to buy groceries.

“The last few years have been a whirlwind for Americans’ finances, with inflation, fluctuating unemployment, public health crises and natural disasters making it hard for people across the country to pay their bills,” the WalletHub website says.

In the last presidential election, Americans voted for Trump because of their deepening anxiety and escalating frustration with the cost of everything.

Democrats have finally figured out a winning message and have been relentlessly hammering Republicans on affordability.

Author and political consultant Avis Jones-DeWeever told me in a recent interview she is elated at the prospects.

“These wins were critical because it showed that people will fight back even though the Democratic Party is spineless. It was a powerful rejection in multiple states in multiple ways. It was a full-fledged rejection of (the Trump administration’s) autocratic ways,” Jones-DeWeever said.

The comprehensive wins across the country, she said, illustrate that “we are still a two-party system. We can’t allow these criminals to maintain power.”

Power of pragmatism

DNC finance chair Chris Korge, a Florida resident and major donor and volunteer for Higgins’ campaign, agreed.

Higgins’ “victory is proof that a pragmatic Democratic leader who addresses the electorate’s everyday concerns can rewrite electoral history,” he said.

In a sensible move designed to position themselves competitively, Florida Democrats offered Higgins support and national Democrats also showed up to campaign for her. This includes former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who encouraged voters in a video to make a plan to vote for Higgins; U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who joined her Sunday for early voting stops; and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who appeared at a Higgins rally the Monday before the election.

Higgins’ win is a well-placed boot in the backside of MAGA Republicans who focus on culture wars; continue to ignore the crucial needs of ordinary Floridians; bully and try to intimidate opponents; exhibit poor leadership; and reward their friends and punish their enemies.

For people tired of DeSantis’ and Republicans’ abuse of power and unlawful and immoral activities, these Democratic wins are a welcome breath of fresh air.

Journalist Barrington Salmon lived and wrote in Florida (Miami and Tallahassee) for 20 years. He is a 2017 Annenberg National Fellow (University of Southern California) who currently freelances for publications including the National Newspaper Publishers Association/Black Press USA, Trice Edney Newswire and Al Jazeera. He was educated in the United Kingdom, Jamaica and the U.S. Salmon lives in the nation's capital and can be heard on his Livestream video blog “Speak Freely with Barrington Salmon.” Connect with Barrington on Speak Freely + follow him on Twitter/X (@bsalmondc), Instagram and on his Facebook pages, Barrington Salmon & BarringtonSalmonWrites.