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Trump’s Cabinet lie blown apart by nature's own laws

The idea is as old as western civilization: “The morbidly rich are born to rule the rest of us.”

And now, with a billionaire as president, 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and rightwing billionaires installing and spiffing Republican Supreme Court justices, it’s become the operational assumption of the GOP.

Older societies used religion to rationalize it, from the “divine right of kings” to Confederate plantation owners invoking Bible verses (both Old and New Testament) to justify oligarchy and slavery.

The scientific revolution era from Edison to Einstein shifted the explanation from “God wills that the rich should rule” to “rich people have superior genes and should therefore be in charge of everything.” Herbert Spenser, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” in the late 19th century, explicitly argued against any laws or social reforms that would help the poor, as this would interfere with the “natural” process of eliminating the “unfit.” Today’s GOP continues to embrace this worldview.

Scientist (and Darwin’s cousin) Francis Galton invented the word “eugenics,” arguing that “superior” humans should rule society while “inferior” ones shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. His eugenics theories were embraced by both US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Honorary Vice President of the British Eugenics Society, and became the foundation of the Nazi-led Holocaust.

(It’s worth noting that Darwin, rather than embracing “survival of the fittest,” promoted the idea of cooperation in nature, as my old friend David Loye repeatedly pointed out in his books and lectures.)

Next came the now-discredited Libertarian experiment that animated the Reagan Revolution; it was initiated by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and argued that the rich should not only rule but should also be given maximal tax cuts and deregulation of their businesses, so the benefits would “trickle down” to the rest of society.

Finally, today, apologists for the rich are also trying to use philosophy and psychology to justify their holding power in America by attacking “socialism” and the human emotion of empathy that powers it. Billionaire Elon Musk has pinned to the top of his social media account:

“Either the suicidal empathy of Western civilization ends or Western civilization will end.”

The “Dark Enlightenment” that’s the current fad among tech billionaires and the GOP (particularly JD Vance) rebrands hierarchy as inevitability, inequality as virtue, and authoritarianism as efficiency, with their writings wrapped in tech-bro futurism and pseudo-scientific gibberish. Its leading philosophers are explicit:

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Democracy is mob rule. It is the idea that legitimacy comes from numbers rather than competence.” “The best form of government is a monarchy run like a joint-stock corporation, where the ruler owns the state.” “A stable society requires a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled.” — Curtis Yarvin
“Democracy is the political expression of herd morality.” “Selection pressures do not care about fairness.” “The history of life is not the triumph of the weak, but the relentless victory of the strong.” “Compassion is a luxury belief that only stable systems can afford.” — Nick Land

Morbidly rich people aspiring to power have always, throughout history, rationalized their ownership of politics and even other human beings by arguing that their riches prove their “fitness” to rule. It’s why the DuPont brothers and other industrialists tried to kidnap and overthrow FDR back in the 1930s, is the rationalization of every dictator in today’s world, and why so many American billionaires agree with tech billionaire Peter Theil’s assertion:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

They argue, as Yarvin said, that democracy is just another word for “mob rule,” that a nation needs a “strong leader” to overcome the impulses of the mob, and that the more democratic a nation becomes the more likely the mob is to vote themselves the wealth of the rich and use the power of the state to appropriate it through taxation.

All of this is antithetical to the core beliefs on which this country was founded, taken out of the actual period of the Enlightenment, that the larger the group making decisions the better those decisions are likely to be. This assertion of democracy as a good thing and a necessary predicate for freedom, was the foundation for our Constitution.

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 believed it.

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.

As I discovered when researching my book, Jefferson and Ben 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 were they 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 or billionaires running their social media sites, newspapers, and TV networks. The leader knows best, they 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.”

Contradicting Yarvin, Musk, and Vance, 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 percent 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 Orbán-like dictatorships (where Trump, Vance, and the other wannabee autocrats in the GOP are trying to take us).

It’s why the billionaires supporting Trump and the GOP embrace the lie of election fraud to justify gerrymandering and voter suppression, why the monarchists on the Supreme Court are supporting these apologetics for an imperial presidency and racial profiling, and why Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the plague of dark money corrupting our political system.

This wasn’t the philosophy of our Founders and Framers, none of whom considered themselves rich. They knew that we’re not a species evolved to be hoarders; we evolved to be sharers. That’s what is in our DNA: to share both wealth and power with others. To depend on others and have them depend on us, and to be reliable in that dependence.

As Jefferson, who died in bankruptcy, famously noted:

“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”

In eleven months, we’ll have an opportunity to retrieve our democracy from the clutches of the morbidly rich, the ideologues who deify them (and have for millennia), and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Get ready, double-check your voter registration, join and support organizations speaking out for democracy, and spread the good word as far and wide as you can. This may be America’s last chance.

Trump's monstrous attack grew out of a viral disease — and we're all infected

I have Trump Derangement Syndrome and so does much of America and much of the world.

That’s not a confession of mental illness: it’s an indictment of a political era defined by cruelty, division, and the deliberate poisoning of democratic life.

“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is the phrase Donald Trump and his followers love to fling at anyone who dares to object to his behavior.

But the truth is simpler and far more damning: if millions of Americans and people across the globe are reacting with alarm, anger, and outrage, it’s because Trump has spent years earning that reaction.

Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t a disease of the critics; it’s the predictable response to a leader who thrives on hate.

Just this week, after the brutal murder of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Trump responded not with empathy, not with basic human decency, but with venom. He blamed Reiner’s death on what he called Trump Derangement Syndrome and implied that Reiner’s criticism of him somehow provoked the violence.

That’s a sitting president blaming the victim of murder for his own death because he was a political opponent.

That alone should disqualify any leader from public office — even Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene were horrified. But it fits a long and escalating pattern: Trump has turned cruelty into a governing philosophy that he’s trying to spread all across America.

He goes after the press relentlessly, calling journalists enemies, liars, and traitors. He recently called a woman reporter “piggy” in a public exchange. That isn’t strength: it’s bullying from a man who can’t tolerate scrutiny and knows that undermining the free press is the fastest way to weaken a democracy that might hold him to account.

He attacks Democrats without restraint, calling them vermin, communists, and enemies of the nation. He attacks Republicans who dare to disagree with him, labeling them disloyal, corrupt, or deserving of punishment.

In Trump’s worldview, disagreement is betrayal, dissent is psychological pathology, and loyalty to him personally replaces loyalty to the Constitution.

And he’s made it clear that he believes the machinery of justice should serve his vendettas. Trump openly brags about using the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies. Not criminals: enemies. That’s the language of authoritarianism.

In a democracy, the law restrains power. In Trump’s tyrannical vision, the law is a weapon of power.

Trump’s hate isn’t abstract; it hits real communities with real consequences. Somali Americans were singled out by name, accused of stealing, of not belonging, of being a “problem” population. Immigration enforcement actions followed the rhetoric, and suddenly entire communities live under suspicion. This is collective punishment based on race, religion, and nationality. It’s racism dressed up as policy.

Trump continues to demean Black and brown countries, describing them as undesirable, dangerous, or worthless. He’s revived the same toxic worldview that says some people matter less because of where they come from or the color of their skin. That worldview has always been poison to democracy.

And then there’s the constant mockery of tragedy. After a deadly shooting at Brown University, Trump responded with a shrug and the words “things can happen.” For survivors and grieving families, that wasn’t leadership, it was indifference. It was the sound of a man so consumed by grievance and narcissism that he isn’t capable of speaking to the pain of others.

This is what creates Trump Derangement Syndrome. Not disagreements over tax policy or trade deals, but his daily assault on empathy, truth, and democratic norms.

When a leader models contempt, his followers learn it. When a leader dehumanizes others, society fractures. When a leader tells millions of people that their neighbors are enemies, eventually someone believes him enough to act.

History teaches us this lesson over and over. Democracies don’t usually collapse overnight, they erode. They rot from the inside when leaders convince people that hate is strength, that cruelty is honesty, and that only one man represents the nation and everyone else is suspect.

We’re seeing that erosion in real time today. Trust in institutions is collapsing. Political violence becomes easier to justify. The idea of a shared national identity dissolves into warring tribes.

That is not an accident. It’s the direct result of rhetoric Trump specifically intend to use to divide us against each other.

So, what do we do?

  • First, we stop accepting the lie embedded in the phrase Trump Derangement Syndrome. Being alarmed by authoritarian behavior is not derangement, it’s citizenship and love of country. It’s moral clarity. It’s the immune response of a democratic society under attack.
  • Second, we demand leaders who heal rather than inflame. Leaders who speak to our better angels instead of our darkest fears. Leaders who understand that democracy depends on restraint, humility, and respect for human dignity.
  • Third, we show up. We vote. We organize. We defend the press, the rule of law, and the rights of those targeted by Trump’s hate. Silence is the fuel of authoritarianism; engagement is its enemy.

America doesn’t need or want a strongman. We need and crave a uniter, a president who understands that power is a responsibility, not a license to abuse.

If that means the world continues to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, so be it. The real moral and political sickness is pretending this is normal.

Democracy survives only if we choose it. Now is the time to choose.

A chain of catastrophes reveals Trump’s true loyalties

America is in or on the verge of a seriously bad recession and the Trump regime is hiding the numbers — the signs are everywhere. His incoherent tariffs, massive tax breaks for billionaires, and gutting the Inflation Reduction Act are kneecapping our economy.

In response, Trump visited Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania and tried to pitch himself as a champion for the little guy, the middle class, small farmers, and working people.

Which raises the question: who do Trump and the GOP really work for?

— Vladimir Putin was furious that the Biden administration had been providing Ukraine with weapons systems, including air defense munitions and HIMARS rockets, so in March of this year Trump abruptly suspended delivery of most US military aid and Republicans in Congress never restarted it.

— American billionaires didn’t want to pay their damn taxes, so Trump and the GOP gave them trillions in new tax breaks with their Big Beautiful Billionaire’s Bill while increasing the taxes paid by the bottom 80 percent of Americans.

— After giving the Trump family gifts, trademarks, and patents, President Xi Jinping of China wanted Nvidia chips to help bring his military and AI capabilities up to where he could easily defeat a US effort to defend Taiwan, so Trump changed the rules, so Xi could get his chips and Republicans in Congress are refusing to stop him.

— Both Putin and Xi were constantly irritated by the Voice of America broadcasting truthful news and pro-democracy programming so Trump killed off the broadcasts, is shutting down the stations and transmitters, and Republicans in Congress are letting it happen.

— Massive airline monopolies hated the $200-$775 per incident that they had to pay passengers as compensation for being bumped or having flights cancelled, so Trump had his reality-star FAA head undo the rule.

— Putin and Xi hated the “soft power” America got by saving millions of lives around the world every year with anti-poverty, anti-AIDS, and famine relief programs across the Third World, so Trump killed off the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Republicans in Congress didn’t object.

— Rightwing billionaires who don’t believe they should have to pay taxes to “subsidize the little people” didn’t want Trump and Republicans to extend the taxpayer-funded subsidies of the Affordable Care Act that kept insurance rates down (House Speaker Mike Johnson called them a “boondoggle” even though they keep rates low for millions of his Louisiana constituents), so Trump and the GOP obliged by refusing to continue them.

— Saudi Arabia, massive American fossil fuel corporations, and petrostates like Russia were offended by the Paris Agreement and other United Nations and Biden efforts to phase out petroleum and mitigate climate change, so Trump and the GOP pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement and refused to attend the most recent COP30 meeting in Belém, Brazil.

— The morbidly rich wanted to be able to pass their massive fortunes to their trust-fund babies without paying estate taxes, so Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a tax cut that primarily benefits the 400 richest families in America, costing our nation trillions that will be added to our debt and paid for by working-class people.

— Fossil fuel billionaires and their corporations were worried that the money Joe Biden allocated for green energy projects might cut into their future profits, so Trump and the GOP slashed trillions from them, as well as subsidies and rebates for saving energy and electric vehicles.

— Rightwing billionaire-funded media operations were offended by how NPR and PBS kept showing up their lies, so Trump and congressional Republicans cancelled federal funding for the networks. Rightwing billionaires are enthusiastically buying up as much of the American media landscape as they can.

— Billionaire Elon Musk was reportedly facing billions in regulatory costs and fines that he was able to get rid of when Trump and Republicans hired him to start and run the DOGE program that gutted our government to the benefit of Russia and China.

— Bitcoin billionaire Changpeng Zhao was serving a lengthy prison sentence for violating federal anti-money-laundering laws, but Trump pardoned him when he promoted a new stablecoin issued by a crypto firm that made billions for the Trump family.

— Giant corporations and their morbidly rich owners wanted to screw their workers so they could increase their profits, so Trump and congressional Republicans took more than 100 individual actions that cut pay, gutted union protections, and slashed benefits for workers but helped the most massive corporations.

— Big banks that make billions every year on interest from student loans hated Biden’s efforts to pay them off and reduce interest rates, so Trump and congressional Republicans rolled them back and are ending the last of the loan forgiveness programs.

Have Trump or congressional Republicans done anything of major consequence to help out average working people or small businesses in the 44 years since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution?

Nope. Instead, the neoliberal Reagan Revolution has seen the American middle class go from over two-thirds of us to around 43 percent of us today, and it takes two paychecks to have the lifestyle a single one could produce in 1981. Only the morbidly rich have benefited from every GOP action during all these years. And Trump is making it all worse.

The 2026 elections are coming sooner than most realize, which is why Republican secretaries of state are vigorously purging the voting rolls in their Blue cities. Double-check your registration every month at vote.org and make sure everybody you know is informed and ready.

It’s going to take a huge effort to defeat these monsters, so we need everybody on board. Pass it along…

This litany of betrayals shows Trump is about to sell us out to our most dangerous enemy

Many of us have long suspected or even predicted that Donald Trump would betray America, gut our democracy in favor of a police state, and align us with Russia. You know, the country that the Financial Times reported this week tried to launch multiple terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe over the past year.

We’re now there.

It’s the most under-reported story of the year, perhaps of the century: under Trump, the United States is abandoning advocacy of democracy (shutting down Voice of America, etc), abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, and for the past year has abandoned Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Butcher of Moscow.

At the same time, Trump’s building ties to Middle Eastern dictatorships, adopting Russia’s explicit worldview, trashing civil and human rights at home, and now handing to China our most valuable military-potential technology.

In other words, we’ve been betrayed by Donald Trump and the people around him in ways that would have made Benedict Arnold blush.

A few weeks ago, Trump presented Ukraine with a so-called “peace deal” that was apparently written, in first draft, by Moscow. This week, he told that nation they have “until Christmas” to hand over more than 20 percent of their country to Putin and surrender their own military abilities forever, leaving them vulnerable to Russia’s next attack.

Trump’s brain trust just produced a new National Security Strategy (NSS) for the United States that largely abandons Canada and Europe while embracing a racist, neofascist worldview straight out of Putin’s rhetoric.

As the National Security Desk writes:

“It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation.”

Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote:

“The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of ‘patriotic parties’ and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is ‘consistent with our vision.’”

David Rothkopf, a former senior national security/trade official in the Clinton administration, was equally blunt in an article published by the New Republic:

“Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent ‘peace proposal’ for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.”

Russia expert Olga Lautman called it “Russia’s return on investment for interfering in the 2016 election,” and it sure looks like she’s right. An earlier article by her titled “America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia” noted:

“The NSS does not merely ‘shift priorities.’ It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a ‘new’ transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.”

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, rarely one to engage in hyperbole, wrote of this document in an article titled “Is This the End of the Free World?”:

“The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces ‘the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Why? Because ‘it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: ‘non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’

“But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to ‘the growing influence of patriotic European parties,’ by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.”

Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working together to destroy Ukraine, the gateway to Europe, and fielding armies of bots to fill social media and other venues with pro-Trump and anti-democracy rhetoric.

And the world’s richest man and recipient in billions in American government contracts, Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of America’s soft power via USAID, this week called for the abolition of the European Union itself.

Finally, to the shock of the western world, Trump “cut a deal” to let Nvidia sell some of their most advanced chips to China after our military and intelligence experts have explicitly warned of the danger that this could accelerate that country’s move toward seizing Taiwan and threatening us with World War III.

Add to that Trump’s bellicose and murderous actions against Venezuela that could lead to us engaging in warfare in our own hemisphere, and you have the formula to tie up our military while bringing about the final end of American influence in the larger world, exactly as Putin and Xi want.

NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured,” adding:

“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”

Trump could use such a war — as has been done before by presidents Wilson and Roosevelt — to gut civil rights in America and imprison the people he sees as his “threats” or political enemies.

And try to call off or steal the elections of 2026.

These developments, combined with the naked brutality of ICE that was revealed by this week’s report from Amnesty International, are shocking. American democracy is being gutted from within, our foreign policy is realigning away from Europe and toward Russia and China, all while dictators and corporate oligarchs openly bribe Trump and members of his family.

Where is our media? Where is the GOP? Democratic politicians are speaking out, as are some commentators, but elected Republicans and the majority of the corporate media are “business as usual.”

This is a five-alarm fire for democracy, both here and around the world.

Pass it along and help wake up our country.

Cute names for Trump's atrocities mark an awful new low

Amnesty International’s new report on the U.S. detention sites Alligator Alcatraz and Krome is a warning flare for every American who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, and the basic dignity of human beings.

We’ve seen governmental cruelty before in our history, but these facilities mark a new level of calculated dehumanization on U.S. soil, and Amnesty is calling it what it is: torture, enforced disappearance, and a deliberate system designed to break people.

What makes this report so chilling isn’t just the details, although they’re horrifying enough. It’s that the government has begun giving these places cute, theme-park-style nicknames like “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Cornhusker Clink,” as if they’re attractions instead of concentration-camp-style black sites.

Authoritarian regimes always begin by softening the language, making the abuses sound like logistics, law enforcement, or processing rather than cruelty. If you want to condition the public to accept state violence, you start with euphemisms.

Investigators found people packed into filthy tents and trailers where toilets overflowed onto the floors and into sleeping areas. Water was sometimes rationed. Food quality was lousy. Insects swarmed at all hours. Lights were left on day and night. Cameras reportedly pointed at showers and toilets, in clear violation of privacy and human dignity.

This wasn’t an accident. These were choices.

The so-called “box” at the Florida concentration camp may be the most grotesque example. It’s a two-by-two-foot outdoor metal cage where detainees, shackled and already vulnerable, were left in blistering Florida heat, exposed to mosquitos and biting flies, denied water, and forced to endure punishment sessions lasting up to 24 hours.

These are exactly the kinds of stress-position torture techniques our nation once condemned when used by dictatorships abroad. Today they’re being used in our name, by our government, on our soil.

At Krome, Amnesty documented prolonged solitary confinement, routine shackling even during medical transport, denial of legal access, and a pervasive system of intimidation and retaliation. Medical care was often delayed or unavailable. People needing lawyers were blocked from communicating with them.

This is not a “processing system”: it’s a punishment regime. It’s brutality done with your and my tax dollars and in our names.

The report makes clear that these are not isolated violations: they’re the design.

This administration has woven cruelty into policy, permitting state-run detention networks to operate as if constitutional rights simply evaporate when you cross a razor-wire perimeter.

The crisis for American democracy isn’t just that the camps exist; it’s that they’re being normalized, bureaucratized, branded, and replicated. Amnesty warns that DHS is already planning more such sites, using “emergency” authorities and no-bid contracts to create an extrajudicial detention network beyond the reach of meaningful oversight.

This is exactly how authoritarian systems evolve. They never begin with political opponents: instead, they begin with people the majority already sees as powerless. Immigrants. Refugees. The poor. Non-citizens. Those without family or money or social standing.

When the public tolerates a government treating one group of human beings as disposable, that system is inevitably expanded to inflict that same treatment on others — dissidents, politicians, people like you and me — whenever it becomes politically useful.

We’ve seen this in nation after nation that slid from democracy into authoritarianism. The first victims are always those considered “outsiders” or “threats to the order” the regime promised to maintain.

Once the public is desensitized to cages, beatings, disappearances, and secret courts, it becomes frighteningly easy to redirect those same tactics toward dissidents, journalists, labor leaders, activists, and political opponents.

This Amnesty International report isn’t just a humanitarian alarm bell: it’s a constitutional one.

When due process is suspended for one class of people, it’s suspended in principle for all. When the government can hide detainees in swamp camps with no legal representation, it’s already established the machinery necessary to detain anyone it wants to silence. When the public is conditioned to see cages and brutality and think “this is fine,” the moral system of a nation starts to collapse.

We forget that the Constitution doesn’t protect itself; it’s protected by norms, culture, public outrage, legal oversight, and a shared belief that the state doesn’t get to brutalize human beings no matter who they are.

When those norms erode, when brutality becomes invisible-but-known or acceptable, authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with a drumbeat. It arrives quietly. It arrives bureaucratically. It arrives through “temporary measures” and “emergency facilities” and “processing centers” set up for “those people over there.”

Amnesty is demanding the immediate closure of Alligator Alcatraz and any similar state-run black sites. They call for an end to emergency-authorized detention, a prohibition on outdoor punitive confinement, the restoration of access to legal counsel, real medical care, due process, judicial oversight, and a halt to no-bid construction of new concentration camps in America.

These aren’t radical demands. They’re the bare minimum for a nation that claims to believe in the rule of law.

Because if we let our government continue to create a network of secretive, cruel, extrajudicial detention facilities for one set of powerless people today, tomorrow it will inevitably turn those same systems against anyone who challenges their power.

That is how every authoritarian regime in history has done it.

And unless we stop it now, it’s how this one will, too.

This chillingly un-American Trump move threatens all our freedoms

Back in September, most Americans (and the media) thought it was so over-the-top that it had to be a joke. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke and isn’t remotely funny.

In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion or Putin’s secret police, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and more than 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.

They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
  • Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
  • Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
  • Publicly questioned Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Christian belief system or religion?
  • Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
  • Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
  • Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, or Kristi Noem?

Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents knocking on our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared four months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.

I mentioned it in an October Saturday Report and an earlier article, but, like pretty much everybody else in the media, dismissed it as virtue-signaling to the Trump base rather than an actual plan to set up a Russia-style police state here in America.

I was wrong.

Now, in a second bombshell report, Klippenstein has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Dec. 4 memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.

Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as five years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of our possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.

Just being anti-fascist is, in Bondi’s eyes, apparently now a crime in America. From her memo to the FBI:

“Further, this [anti-fascist] ideology that paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist’ connects a recent string of political violence. Carvings on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets read, ‘Hey, fascist, catch’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ — an ode to antifascist movements in Italy. … ICE agents are regularly doxed by anti-fascists, and calls to dox ICE agents appear in the same sentence of opinion pieces calling the Trump Administration fascist.”

At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or, probably, any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest or oppose their actions.

In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”

They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.

They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and using federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the agency. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:

“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”

ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.

The only clue you’ll have will probably be that your battery life seems to have dropped as your phone is pumping out to ICE your data and everything the microphone in it picks up, all without your knowledge or permission.

This Putin-style sort of “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he defined the people who protested his policies as domestic terrorists and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to what ICE is launching and Bondi is ordering the FBI to do.

It’s chillingly un-American.

Reach out to your elected representatives (Congress’ phone is 202-224-3121) to let them know your opinion of this new aspect of Trump’s imperial reign, and pass this along to help wake up others.

If Congress and the courts refuse to give serious oversight and regulation to these agencies, we may all one day soon be facing the same neofascist brutality that killed Alexi Navalny and imprisoned (to this day) so many of his supporters.

Trump's terror grew out of this uniquely American evil

When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat, Economic sophisms, 2nd series (1848)

With so little pushback to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s murders in the Caribbean and ICE’s domestic cruelty and violence that highlights Trump’s brutality, we’re watching the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.

It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions.

As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media — particularly if you are willing to lie — you can sell anybody pretty much anything.

You can even sell a nation a convicted felon, rapist, and apparent agent of America’s enemies.

America was overwhelmed in the 2024 election by billions of dark-money dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1,500 hate-talk radio stations and podcasters, many subsidized by Russia and rightwing billionaires.

Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just that election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by those corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.

They’re responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, $2 trillion in student debt, our housing crisis, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the ongoing brutality of ICE, and even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.

All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yacht experiences and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, a spouse’s employment, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.

For over two decades, according to reporting, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and mega-yacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.

Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has reportedly made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch apparently got a sweetheart real estate deal and his mother had to resign from the Reagan administration to avoid corruption charges; Amy Coney Barrett has refused to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.

None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.

As a result, we have oligarchs buying and running our media, social media, and funding our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.

Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations should take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.

In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.

In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.

The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that money is the same thing as free speech. In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:

“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”

But the Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.

Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.

Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:

“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”

But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.

That ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.

It’s no coincidence.

And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the 1800s.

Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And now it’s hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.

No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class.

It’s why people living in other developed countries can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.

It’s why — with the exception of Hungary, which Trump is now emulating — those countries are still functioning democracies.

The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed, even with the extraordinary showing in the streets with the No Kings protests.

This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.

Thus, right now we need to prepare for the 2026 elections, join with organizations like Indivisible to stand up and protest this corruption, and make sure everybody we know is registered to vote.

Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich supporters of this neofascism.

If you haven’t already, join us.

Trump's lies are pushing his rotten foundation to collapse

Young people are furious. A survey released this week by the Harvard Institute of Politics finds that under-30 Americans are “a generation under profound strain” who’ve lost pretty much any confidence in government or corporate institutions.

By a 57 percent to 13 percent margin they told pollsters America is on the wrong track, and only 32 percent agree that the US is a healthy democracy or even one that’s “somewhat functioning.”

Fully 64 percent of young American adults say the system is either in trouble or has completely failed. Pollster John Della Volpe summarized the Institute’s findings:

“Young Americans are sending a clear message: the systems and institutions meant to support them no longer feel stable, fair, or responsive to this generation.”

Which raises the urgent question: How the hell did we get here from the widespread prosperity of the postwar years?

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because they saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Richard Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS, which I had joined. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91 percent and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders focused on running their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with:

  • modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation;
  • nearly free college, trade school, and research support;
  • enforcement of antitrust laws which produced healthy small and family businesses;
  • unions protecting a third of America’s workers so fully two-thirds of us had a living wage and benefits on a single salary;
  • an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports paid for with tax dollars that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class. Young people saw a lifetime of opportunity ahead of them, and wealthy people were doing well, too.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It was a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then seize control of the institutions of America.

Those groups, inspired by Powell, decided to take his advice and infiltrate our universities, create a massive, billion-dollar conservative media infrastructure, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to collect millions of votes, and turn upside-down our tax, labor, abortion, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented, billionaire-owned GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts for the rich, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, ending Roe v. Wade, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered citizens (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them “dependent on the government”).

Their sales pitch was effective, so we’ve now had 44 years of Republicans’ so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud — as our young people are yelling at us — that it hasn’t worked. For example:

  • Republicans told us if we just cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74 percent it was in 1980 down to 37 percent it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else because, they said, the “job creators” would be “unleashed” on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over those 44 years from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 65 percent of us to fewer than half of us. Because of 44 years of Reaganomics, it now takes two full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

  • Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted, wherever they wanted, it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the Second Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill corrupt politicians. Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about American history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world. We regularly terrorize young people with active shooter drills; the number-one cause of death for American children (and only American children) is bullets tearing their bodies apart.

  • Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools, purged our libraries of books, and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

  • Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans who can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.” And forget about trying to explain to them the difference between Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, and the modern-day governments of Russia, Hungary, and China. Or what Trump and his cronies are up to.

  • Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80 percent of a student’s tuition — so that students would have “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by students’ tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families.

While students are underwater, the banksters who own Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable student loans, the consequence of legally paid-off legislators (because of Clarence Thomas‘s tie-breaking vote in Citizens United).

  • Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and thus “more efficient.”

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, inflation-causing price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s hard to find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many being sucked dry by hedge funds or private equity as we enter the cancer stage of capitalism. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants and the door to entrepreneurialism is largely closed to Zoomers.

  • Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Stock buybacks used to be called felony stock manipulation, but Reagan legalized the practice in 1983. As a result, every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives while workers, the company, communities, and even the businesses themselves suffer the loss.

  • Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small handful of billionaires and often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as young people will tell you, are generally absent.

  • Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve for payment and which they’d reject. They said this “pre-approval” process would “lower costs and increase choice.”

Instead, in all of the entire developed world — all the 34 OECD countries on four continents — there are ~500,000 medical bankruptcies a year … and every single one of them is here in America. And now, as Republicans fight to prevent the renewal of Obamacare subsidies, millions — particularly young people working low-wage jobs — will simply be forced to drop health insurance altogether.

  • Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are still lying as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization (around a third of us) we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment (now only a tenth of us have a union).

  • Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion all right; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were blown up, torn down, or left vacant because their production was moved to China or elsewhere. Over 15 million good-paying union jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

  • Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their wealthy donors in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming, a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. By purchasing the GOP, they succeeded in delaying action on global warming for at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

  • And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech and corporations are persons with rights under the Bill of Rights.” Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by those five billionaire-bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court.

So now Donald Trump tells our young people that it’s time to make take the next big step — to reject democracy — as the logical outcome of the Reagan Revolution.

He says if we just abandon the rule of law and make him an uncountable emperor for life; punish with prison his political enemies; make women, Blacks, and Hispanics second-class citizens; end immigration for everybody except white South Africans; and forge alliances with dictators around the world, that life in America will become wonderful.

It should shock no one that young people aren’t buying this GOP b------t.

The bottom line is that we as a nation have now had the full Republican experience. We’ve done pretty much everything they suggested or demanded.

And as a result, young Americans are increasingly disgusted when they hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that the GOP damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever these sanctimonious Republicans are calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women and pre-teen girls to give birth against the threat of imprisonment, hiding Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell, or burning books.

Or having masked secret police kidnap people, including children, off the streets of our cities and throwing them into god-awful hellhole prisons.

Not to mention Trump’s sinister “revenge” campaign against the Americans he sees as his “enemies,” his eliminating pollution controls that protected our environment in exchange for a billion dollars in fossil fuel industry donations, and giving his billionaire donors another massive tax cut, to be paid for by the same next generation who’re protesting against him.

America’s young people are over it, Republicans, and they’re going to reboot this nation to fulfill its potential and promise.

A new, progressive America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and the GOP and its billionaire owners can’t stop it much longer.

The Ukraine 'peace plan' clearly points to Trump corruption. Where's the outrage?

I don’t know why this wasn’t above-the-fold news all across the country over the past few days as the details of the “peace plan” Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff took to Vladimir Putin this week came out.

Kushner, it appears, had added in a provision that would have forced both Ukraine and Russia to take actions that would specifically benefit Saudi Arabia, a country that is paying the presidential son-in-law at least $25 million a year.

Can you imagine what the response would have been if George Marshall, while negotiating the 1948 Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII, had been personally taking millions from, say, Saudi Arabia, and thus inserted a provision ensuring that country could permanently benefit from the peace plan?

Given that then-President Truman and Marshall were Democrats, it’s safe to predict that the GOP would have melted down, but so would have the press. After all, the early-1920s Teapot Dome scandal — then one of the most infamous in US presidential history — only involved an oil company bribing the then-Secretary of the Interior with around $300,000.

The brutal kingdom of Saudia Arabia owns agricultural land in many far-flung places, from alfalfa farms in Arizona to 400,000 acres in Western Ukraine devoted to growing grain for export. The only way to get that grain to the Black Sea where it can enter world markets is via barges down the Dnieper River, which cuts across Ukraine.

So, as Judd Legum points out over at Popular.Info:

“Point 23 of the peace plan that Kushner helped draft fulfills Saudi’s policy objective: ‘Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.’”

Which should have provoked a collective “What the hell?!??” across the planet and ring alarm bells in newsrooms from Tokyo to Topeka to Tallinn but has instead been largely met with a shrug.

“Of course,” politicians and the press seem to be saying, “it’s the Trump family. What did you expect?”

And, indeed, the corruption and self-dealing of the Trumps is breathtakingly world-class, run at a scale beyond anything ever seen in America.

  • Remember when Jimmy Carter almost lost his peanut farm, his only major asset, because he’d put it in a blind trust and the guy he’d entrusted to run it screwed operations up badly leaving the Carters a million dollars in debt?
  • Or when Saint Ronald Reagan put his small fortune — $700,000 ($2.7 million in today’s dollars) — in a blind trust and didn’t have a clue what was happening with it for the next eight years?
  • How about when the Bulgarian president gave President George W. Bush a puppy and the dog was sent to the National Archives before placement to ensure conformity with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?

Presidents not taking and keeping gifts or money from foreign governments, in compliance with that Clause and associated federal anti-bribery laws, has a history that dates back to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. But complying with any law has never been a strong suit for the Trump Crime Family.

Donald Trump tried to convince us in his first term that he was complying with the law by calling a press conference where we were treated to huge stacks of papers and manilla file folders supposedly representing his complex estate that he was handing off to his kids, but we soon learned it was entirely a scam: Trump was getting checks to sign every two weeks in the Oval Office, and all that paper and those folders were blank.

This second term he’s not even trying. He extracted millions of dollars from his suckers followers in exchange for his and his wife’s so-called digital coins (they’re just “collectible” digital images); the value of those “coins” has now fallen by 86 percent (Donald) and 99 percent (Melania) respectively. And don’t get me started on the so-called “Trump Phones” scam.

But those are chump change compared to the billions he’s accumulated in crypto, and the billions being thrown at Trump-branded/licensed properties being negotiated or built right now in over 20 countries including India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Vietnam, Serbia, Romania, Uruguay, and the Maldives.

Or the $400 million plane Qatar gave Trump, along with the billion-dollar Trump-branded resort they’re building for him, which were followed by the US giving that country — and only that country — an astonishing NATO-style security guarantee that our soldiers will shed their blood to defend that kingdom’s potentates.

So, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that Jared, after taking $2 billion from the Saudis along with his $25 million/year “fee,” would insert a paragraph into the Russia/Ukraine deal that would benefit the Saudi crown prince who’s been his top benefactor.

And, even more astonishing, that he is serving in this position without any legal authority in violation of federal law. As Legum explains, if he’s a private individual it’s a felony crime for him to negotiate with a foreign government, and if he’s acting on behalf of our government he’s a “special government employee” and therefore subject to the Emoluments Clause.

Either way, what he’s doing is deeply illegal. As well as apparently deeply corrupt.

But where’s the press on this? And when will Democrats begin an investigation into it?

Inquiring minds want to know…

The most unlikely messenger just exposed the rotten core of Trumpism

The Trump White House just showed us something every American should find chilling, no matter what music they listen to or what party they vote for.

They took a video of aggressive ICE arrests, slapped Sabrina Carpenter’s song on top of it, and posted it like it was a victory lap. Then, when Carpenter objected and said the video was “evil and disgusting” and told them not to use her music to benefit an “inhumane agenda,” the White House hit back with a statement that sounded like it came from a playground bully, not the seat of American government.

They didn’t debate her point. They didn’t defend policy with facts. They went straight to dehumanization and insult, calling people “illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles,” and saying anyone who defends them must be “stupid” or “slow.”

That’s not just ugly: it’s a warning.

Because the biggest story here is not a celebrity clapback; it’s that the White House is using the power of the state to turn human beings into a violence-normalizing punchline, and using America’s culture as a weapon to spread it.

This is what rising authoritarianism looks like in the age of social media.

A democracy survives on shared reality and shared humanity. It survives when the government understands that it works for the people and must be accountable to the Constitution, to due process, and to basic human decency.

But what happens when a government starts producing propaganda like it’s a teenage streamer chasing clicks and the president runs the White House like it’s a reality show operation, right down to the televised Cabinet meetings?

We get a machine that can normalize cruelty. We get a public trained to cheer at humiliation. We get outrage as entertainment. And we get the steady erosion of our ability to ask the most important questions in a free society.

Was this legal? Was it justified? Was it proportional? Was it humane? Were innocent people caught up? Were families separated? Was there due process? Is it even constitutional?

Those questions disappear when the government turns an ICE arrest into a meme.

There are, of course, serious crimes in every society and violent criminals should be held accountable under the law. But that isn’t what the White House statement was doing. It was, instead, engaged in something far more ancient, cynical, and dangerous.

It was trying to paint everyone in that video with the worst label imaginable so the public stops caring about what happens next.

That’s how they get permission — both explicit and implicit — for abuses.

If the audience for Trump’s sick reality show is told, “These are monsters,” then — as we’ve most recently seen both with ICE here domestically and with people in small boats off the coast of Venezuela — any cruelty becomes acceptable.

Any killing becomes a shrug. Overreach becomes a punchline. And following the rule of law becomes something we apply to our friends while we throw it away for people we have been taught to hate.

That is exactly why authoritarians always start by dehumanizing a target group.

And it always spreads.

Trump started by demonizing and then going after immigrants. Then he demanded fealty (and millions of dollars) from journalists, universities, and news organizations. He demonizes his political opponents to the point they suffer death threats, attacks, and assassinations. And if Trump keeps going down this same path — as Pastor Martin Niemöller famously warned the world — it’ll next be you and me.

Consider this regime’s cultural warfare program. The White House has reportedly used music from multiple artists without permission and now brags that they’ve used those creators’ work to bait outrage, to “own the libs.”

All to drive attention, create spectacle, and turn governance into a constant fight as they punish anyone in public life — today it’s Sabrina Carpenter — who dares to speak up.

This is intimidation pretending to be a joke. If you’re an artist, a teacher, an organizer, or just a person with a platform, the message is simple: “We can drag you into our propaganda machine whenever we want, and if you object we’ll mock you and send an online — and often physical — mob after you.”

That’s a chilling reality, and it matters in a democracy. People start to think twice before speaking. They start to retreat. They start to self censor.

And that’s the Trump regime’s first goal.

Then there’s the distraction, particularly from a cratering economy and Trump’s association with Epstein and Maxwell.

With this strategy, borrowed from the Nazis (as my guest on the radio show Monday, Lawrence Reese, noted in his book The Nazi Mind 12: Warnings From History), culture war isn’t a sideshow anymore, it’s part of a larger strategy.

When the government posts a meme like the one where ICE used Carpenter’s music, it isn’t trying to inform us: it’s trying to trigger us. It’s trying to bait us into amplifying the clip, fighting over the celebrity angle, and losing sight of the real issue.

And that real issue is Trump’s and the GOP’s insatiable lust for state power and the wealth that power can allow, bring, and protect.

Armed agents. Detention. Deportation. Families. Fear. Mistakes that can’t be undone. Human beings who can be disappeared from their communities with the tap of a button and a viral soundtrack. Or killed by “suicide” in a jail cell when they threaten to go public.

If we care about freedom, we can’t just stand by and say nothing while this regime turns ICE’s violence into content.

Because once a government learns it can win political points by broadcasting humiliation, it’ll do it again. And it’ll escalate. It’ll push the line farther and farther until we wake up one day and wonder how we got here.

So what do we do?

  • First, stop amplifying their propaganda on their terms. Don’t share their clips as entertainment, even to condemn them without context (no links in this article). When you must talk about it, talk about the power being abused, not the celebrity drama.
  • Second, demand oversight. Call your members of Congress (202-224-3121. Demand hearings on ICE media practices and the use of official government accounts and our tax dollars to promote dehumanizing propaganda. Demand transparency on how these videos are produced, approved, and distributed.
  • Third, support civil liberties groups and immigrant rights organizations that challenge abuses in court and document what’s happening on the ground. Democracy requires watchdogs like them when the people in power act like they’re above the law.
  • Fourth, get inside the Democratic Party and vote — and help others vote — like it matters, because it does. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, governors, attorneys general, and members of Congress all shape how far this culture of cruelty can spread. Authoritarians rely on fatigue and cynicism: Don’t give them either: participate.

And finally, speak up. Sabrina Carpenter did, and she was right to. Not because she’s a pop star, but because she named the moral truth that the White House is trying to smother with what they pretend are jokes.

When a government starts celebrating the humiliation of vulnerable people, it’s telling the world that it no longer sees itself as the servant of a democratic republic. Of all the people. Instead, it now sees itself as the applause-hungry enforcer of a bloodthirsty tribe.

If we let this become normal, we will — one day soon — no longer recognize our country.

This is the moment to draw a line.

Not just for immigrants. Not just for artists. For the Constitution. For due process. For human dignity. For the idea that in America, power is accountable.

Call. Organize. Vote. Let’s not let cruelty become America’s official language.

Every time we let these people take the controls, America veers off the road

One of the greatest gifts Donald Trump and the 13 billionaires he pulled into his administration have given America is the reminder, finally and once and for all, that just because somebody is rich doesn’t mean they’re smart. Particularly if they inherited their starting capital from daddy, like Trump and Elon Musk both did.

Wealth in this country has become so intertwined with our mythologies of genius, destiny, and merit that we’ve ended up elevating into near-sainthood (and electing to high office) some of the least thoughtful, least competent, and least self-aware people ever to walk a boardroom floor. It’s a dangerous confusion, and one with deep roots.

I still remember a conversation on my radio program back in 2009 with Bill Gates Sr., one of the kindest and most grounded men I’ve hosted on the air. He told me, matter-of-factly, that while his son Bill was indeed a very smart guy, he also had the sort of upper-middle-class safety net that most Americans could only dream about. Had Bill Jr. been born poor, Gates Sr. said, the trajectory of his life (and the existence of Microsoft) would likely have been very different.

Talent exists everywhere; opportunity does not. That’s true for the brilliant, and just as true for the average or below-average minds who happen to be born into staggering wealth. Privilege — not genius — is what insulates foolish people from the consequences of foolish decisions.

Trump’s casinos went bankrupt even though casinos are literally engineered to make money. He claimed windmills cause cancer. He altered a hurricane map with a Sharpie rather than admit he was wrong. His incompetent handling of COVID caused the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and now he’s up all night ragetweeting.

Musk blew $44 billion on a website he’s turned into a global punchline, called a Thai cave-rescue diver a “pedo” because the man contradicted him, and cheer-led the destruction of USAID, an act that has severely damaged America’s international soft power, handed a huge geopolitical gift to Russia and China, and already led to what could be millions of unnecessary deaths. Mark Zuckerberg spent tens of billions on a plastic cartoon “metaverse” almost nobody asked for or used.

These aren’t the moves of geniuses. They’re the stumbles of men surrounded by people too afraid to tell them the truth. But this isn’t just about today’s crop of oligarchs. We’ve seen this movie before.

The plantation oligarchs of the 1850s South — men who were some of the richest Americans ever to live — tried to build a continent-wide authoritarian slave empire. They launched a war against democracy itself in 1861 and almost 700,000 Americans died in that Civil War as Lincoln and the Union fought valiantly to preserve our democracy.

During the late 19th-century Gilded Age, the robber barons — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould, Vanderbilt — were worshiped as industrial gods. Tesla and Edison (genuine geniuses) were hailed as saints of electricity, but it was the financiers behind them who used their inventions to create monopolies and accumulate dynastic wealth.

Only later did America realize that many of these men were less geniuses than gamblers with armies of lawyers; that they built fortunes by crushing competition, often hurting communities, workers, and even the nation itself in their unquenchable quest for more, more, more money!

And then there was the Roaring Twenties, when the super-rich were again treated like royalty. The stock market was their playground, the nation their casino. Republican Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover gave them everything they asked for, from banking deregulation to massive tax breaks.

The result was the Republican Great Depression, and an entire decade of breadlines and collapsed banks. It took FDR and a generation of reformers to remind America that letting the wealthy run wild always ends the same way: with ordinary Americans paying the price.

After Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms, after the humiliation of the Depression, after decades of regulations and high taxes and guardrails to keep the oligarchs from crashing the system again, the morbidly rich mostly kept their heads down.

For a while, at least.

But by the late 1960s and early 70s, something was happening: people were forgetting the damage that celebrating unrestrained wealth had done the last time it was allowed to dominate American politics. That’s when Lewis Powell delivered his infamous “Powell Memo” in 1971, a corporate call to arms urging the wealthiest Americans to seize control of the media, academia, Congress and the judiciary, public opinion, and the political system itself.

It worked. And over the following decades — with the morbidly rich funding right-wing think tanks, engineering media consolidation, and pouring rivers of dark money into our political system — America once again drifted back toward the worship of wealth as a sort of near-divine wisdom. We thus elected a corrupt, felonious billionaire to the presidency, twice.

Every time we let the morbidly rich take the wheel, our nation veers off the road.

Part of the problem is psychological. Extreme wealth isolates people from reality. Studies on the wealthy show declining empathy, reduced capacity to recognize others’ emotions, and a dangerous overconfidence in their own intuition.

Research on CEOs finds that around 20 percent exhibit psychopathic traits — lack of empathy, superficial charm, impulsivity — compared to about one percent of the public. These aren’t qualities that make for wise leadership, but they do let people crawl over the bodies and lives of others to make themselves rich and powerful.

They also can make for headline-grabbing blunders, cruel policies, and breathtakingly stupid decisions insulated from consequence only by inherited wealth and an army of sycophants.

And as I wrote about the “Great Secession of the Morbidly Rich,” once wealth reaches a certain scale it becomes indistinguishable from hoarding disorder. Billionaires don’t just accumulate money: they stockpile influence, lawmakers, media platforms, even entire political movements. They withdraw from the common good, then blame the rest of us for the social and infrastructure instability their own excesses have created.

The truth is that America has always been at its strongest when it remembers that great nations are built by great communities, not great fortunes. When we measure character by contribution, not by bank balance. When we demand guardrails, boundaries, and democratic accountability for everyone, especially those with the most power to do the most harm.

The morbidly rich won’t police themselves. They never have. It thus falls to the rest of us to stop confusing wealth with wisdom, and to stop granting automatic deference to people who’ve shown us, over and over again, that riches are no guarantee of intelligence, judgment, or moral clarity.

If we forget that lesson again, they’ll be more than happy to remind us … at our expense.

This unspoken threat is hastening America's downfall — and it's not MAGA

As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters. — President Grover Cleveland

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. — President Theodore Roosevelt

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. — President Franklin D. Roosevelt

In a recent Wall Street Journal report, “The Ultrarich Are Spending a Fortune to Live in Extreme Privacy,” reporter Arian Campo-Flores pulls back the curtain on a disturbing new reality: our country’s wealthiest citizens now inhabit a parallel America of private jets, members-only restaurants, “sky-garage” condos, and luxury wellness centers they can rent out entirely for themselves.

These aren’t just perks; they’re a full-blown escape from public life. The ultra-wealthy no longer wait in lines, navigate public institutions, or share community space with ordinary Americans.

And that’s the real danger: once the richest begin living outside the civic sphere, they stop caring whether the rest of society works at all. A nation where the wealthy secede into a private realm is a nation confronting oligarchy.

America has experienced this crisis before. Every few generations, a class of greedy oligarchs rise to power who are so intoxicated by wealth, so determined to hoard more, more, more, that they become a threat not just to our economy but to our democracy itself.

  • It happened in the 1850s when the plantation aristocracy rose up, destroyed democracy in the South, and then tried to conquer the entire nation.
  • It happened again when the Robber Barons of the Roaring 20s crushed unions and helped trigger the Republican Great Depression.
  • And it’s happening today in the aftermath of the Reagan/Bush/Trump Revolution, as billionaire fortunes have exploded over the past 44 years and the American middle class has collapsed.

What’s different now is that modern oligarchs aren’t just accumulating money; they’re disappearing into a privatized world where only the ultra-wealthy (and their servants) exist.

The WSJ article shows us how: private jet portals that bypass public airports and the TSA, restaurants where only the chosen enter, wellness centers rentable like personal playgrounds, condos where your car rides up the elevator with you, curated social clubs guaranteeing you never encounter an unfamiliar (or less wealthy) face.

This isn’t luxury. This is withdrawal, an intentional retreat from democratic society.

But beneath the marble floors and private butlers lies something even more sinister: wealth hoarding as a form of pathology. As I’ve argued before, extreme wealth accumulation often mirrors a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder called “hoarding disorder” in the DSM-5.

Ordinary hoarders afflicted with this mental illness fill their homes with newspapers and empty tin cans; billionaire hoarders fill offshore accounts and investment portfolios with billions they can never use, driven by the same compulsive “more, more, more” impulse.

Historian Michael Parenti described this perfectly: wealth becomes an addictive, monomaniacal hunger that consumes every other human concern.

When people suffering from this pathology then also use their wealth to seize vast political power, society pays the price. And thanks to Supreme Court decisions like Bellotti and Citizens United (as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America), these damaged hoarders can now use their fortunes to buy politicians, distort laws, functionally stop paying taxes to support the public good, and reshape our entire society just to serve their addiction.

They construct or acquire vast media properties solely to convince ordinary people that deregulating toxic businesses and cutting taxes on billionaires will somehow benefit them. They then invest millions in politicians who repay them with billions in tax cuts, deregulation, and subsidies.

As a result, Americans suffer the consequences: collapsing wages, millions without healthcare, skyrocketing poverty, underfunded schools, rampant gun violence, crumbling infrastructure, deadly pollution, poisons and chemicals in our food and water, and a middle class that’s been gutted and left gasping.

The WSJ article then reveals the final stage of this sickness: once the morbidly rich have extracted so much from society that it begins to crumble, they abandon society entirely.

When the richest Americans want nothing to do with public spaces, those spaces begin to deteriorate. Public airports, public hospitals. Public lines. Public restaurants. Public parks and neighborhoods. Public transportation. Public institutions of any kind.

A democracy can’t survive when its wealthiest citizens refuse to share a common world with the people they govern.

We’ve defeated oligarchs before.

  • President Grover Cleveland warned of corporations using their “iron heel,” to become “the people’s masters.”
  • President Teddy Roosevelt condemned the “invisible government” of the morbidly rich.
  • FDR denounced the “economic royalists” who tried to overthrow democracy for profit.

All confronted their eras’ mentally ill hoarders, broke their power, taxed their fortunes, and built the foundations for a middle class that became the infrastructure of American stability.

Now that responsibility falls to us.

Members of today’s billionaire class are richer than any kings or pharaohs in history, and — thanks to decades of Republican deregulation, four corrupt Supreme Court rulings, and Reaganomics tax-slashing — are far more politically powerful.

They’ve used corrupt Supreme Court rulings to twist America’s laws so that their wealth is protected, their taxes are minimal, their influence is enormous, and their responsibility to the public is nonexistent.

This WSJ article isn’t just a window into their private world, it’s a warning flare. A democracy where the powerful live above and beyond the public realm is no democracy at all.

The path forward is the same one that saved us in the 1890s and 1940s: name the crisis, confront the hoarders, break up monopolies, end billionaire-funded political corruption, restore progressive taxation to put the country back together, and rebuild the middle class.

We can do it. We’ve done it before. In future posts I’ll be detailing many of the steps that have worked in the past here in America and succeed today in other countries.

Tag, we’re it. Spread the word.

This outrage is too grotesque to absorb — yet it explains so much

Shocking as this moment is, none of us should pretend we weren’t warned. When Donald Trump installed Pete Hegseth — a television provocateur whose public record is soaked in belligerence, booze, and culture-war performance — as America’s Defense Secretary, the world could see exactly where it was headed.

Still, nothing prepared us for the Washington Post revelation that Hegseth personally ordered U.S. forces to “kill everybody” on a small wooden boat off the coast of Trinidad on Sept. 2.

You’d expect rogue militias or failed-state paramilitaries to speak that way. You don’t expect it from the man running the Pentagon.

What the Post reports is almost too grotesque to absorb.

After the first U.S. missile ripped the boat apart and set it burning, commanders watched on a live drone feed as two survivors clung desperately to the charred wreckage.

They were unarmed. They were wounded. They were no threat to anyone. They were simply alive; inconveniently alive for a man who had allegedly already given the order that there be no survivors.

And so, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the strike, the Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second missile. It hit the water and blew those two men apart.

History tells us to watch out for nations that lose their moral compass in real time.

It starts when the powerful stop seeing human beings as human. It accelerates when the government itself denies any obligation to justify its killings.

And when leaders begin lying to Congress and the public to cover what they’ve done, you’re no longer looking at isolated abuses. You’re staring straight into the machinery of authoritarianism.

Instead of telling Congress that the second strike was designed to finish off wounded survivors, Pentagon officials claimed it was to “remove a navigation hazard.”

That isn’t just spin: it’s an attempt to rewrite reality.

The Post quotes Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer now at Georgetown Law, saying exactly what any first-year law student would immediately recognize: because the U.S. is not legally “at war” with drug traffickers, killing the people on that boat “amounts to murder.”

Even if a war did exist, Huntley notes, the order to kill wounded, unarmed survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter,” which is defined under the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.

This isn’t an obscure legal debate. This is basic civilization. Armed states do not execute helpless people in the water.

And yet this is now U.S. policy. The boat strike on Sept. 2 was not a one-off. It was the beginning of a campaign.

The Post reports that since that first attack, Trump and Hegseth have ordered more than 20 similar missile strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing at least 80 people.

The administration insists the victims were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But in classified briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials have not provided even one single verified name of a trafficker or gang leader they’ve killed. Lawmakers from both parties say they’ve been shown nothing beyond grainy videos of small boats being destroyed from the air.

If these men had truly been high-value cartel operatives, Trump would be parading names and photos across every rally stage in America. The silence tells its own story.

Experts warn that many of the dead may not have been traffickers at all. They may have been border-crossing migrants, subsistence fishermen, or small-scale smugglers whose crimes did not remotely justify summary execution.

International human rights groups are already calling these killings extrajudicial and illegal. Some foreign governments are asking whether the United States has effectively created a free-fire zone over parts of the Caribbean, and several have limited intelligence sharing with us for fear of being complicit in prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This, too, has been part of the authoritarian playbook since ancient times.

Pick a foreign or criminal “other,” paint them as subhuman monsters, and then declare that the normal laws of war, morality, and basic decency no longer apply.

For years, right-wing media has been hyping Tren de Aragua as a kind of supercharged successor to MS-13, just as Trump once used MS-13 as a bludgeon to justify abuses at home.

The fact that the administration has produced no evidence for its claims isn’t a bug: it’s the point. When the government fabricates an omnipresent threat, it gives itself permission to kill whoever it wants.

This may also explain the ferocity with which Hegseth and Trump went after Democratic lawmakers when they reminded U.S. service members that they are duty-bound to disobey illegal orders.

Those officers weren’t being dramatic: they were issuing a warning grounded in fresh blood. And Hegseth’s and Trump’s panicked rage — calling for the death penalty for six members of Congress, including a decorated war hero and a CIA officer — now makes perfect sense: he knows perfectly well what he’s already ordered.

The strike on Sept. 2 is not just a policy failure; it’s a moral collapse. If the Post’s reporting is accurate — and multiple congressional offices say it is consistent with what whistleblowers have told them — then the United States has engaged in the deliberate killing of wounded, unarmed men floating in the sea.

That is the kind of conduct that topples governments, triggers war-crimes investigations, and leaves scars on nations for generations.

Nobody elected Trump or Hegseth to serve as judge, jury, and executioner for impoverished people in wooden boats. Nobody gave them the authority to murder suspects without trial. And nobody gave them the right to lie to Congress about it.

Congress must not let this pass. These allegations demand immediate public hearings, subpoena power, and full investigative authority.

If Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody,” he must be removed and prosecuted.

If U.S. commanders falsified reports to mislead Congress and the public, they must be held accountable.

And if Trump approved or encouraged these actions, then impeachment and criminal referral are not optional: they’re required to defend the rule of law.

America doesn’t have many chances left to prove to the world, and to ourselves, that we still believe in the value of human life and the restraints of democratic power. This is one of them.

America is in hell — but history reveals its inevitable end

Thursday was probably, politically and spiritually, the darkest Thanksgiving for our nation in our lifetimes. So how about a quick story out of America’s earliest history that eerily echoes this moment and may give us some hope?

Donald Trump has told us he’s going to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to declare a state of emergency, which will allow him to round up not only undocumented immigrants but also his political opponents, who he refers to as “the enemy within.” He came to power using Willie Horton-style ads trashing trans people and is happy to demonize anybody else who stands up to his hunger for absolute power.

In an age-old technique usually employed during wartime, Trump regularly uses the rhetoric America has employed against foreign enemies to characterize Americans who disagree with him and his policies. Remember the “raghead” slurs against Arabs from the Afghan and Iraqi wars? Or politicians referring to Vietnamese in the 1970s as “slants” and “gooks”?

My dad, who volunteered to fight in World War II straight out of high school, called Germans and Japanese “krauts” and “Japs” to his dying days. American propaganda during wartime encouraged popular usage of these racist characterizations.

In this regard, Trump’s trying to lie us into two different wars. The first is an external war against Venezuela, using America’s drug problem as an excuse. The other is something very much like a 21st-century version of a second civil war. A war by Americans against Americans, with his masked secret-police ICE army at the forefront.

Often history tells us how the future may turn out: Trump isn’t the first American politician to use lies and slanders to whip up a war-like frenzy. Or to use the language of war for political gain.

George Bush Jr wasn’t the first president to have lied to us about foreign affairs and war, or to use lies to justify eviscerating the Constitution. For example, Lyndon Johnson lied about a non-existent attack on the US warship Maddox in the Vietnamese Gulf of Tonkin. William McKinley (the presidency after which Karl Rove has said he’d modeled the Bush presidency) lied about an attack on the USS Maine to get us into the Spanish-American war in the Philippines and Cuba.

But most relevant to today's situation were John Adams’ version of Trump’s slanders when Adams sent three emissaries to France and criminals soliciting bribes approached them late one evening. Adams referred to these three unidentified Frenchmen as “Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z,” and made them out to represent such an insult and a threat against America that it may presage war.

Adams’ use of “The XYZ Affair” to gain political capital — much like Trump demonizes the pilots of small boats off the coast of Venezuela and anti-ICE protestors in his fantasized “war zones” like Portland for political gain — nearly led us to war with France and helped Adams carve a large (although temporary) hole in the Constitution. Similarly, much like Trump’s anti-media “enemy of the people” rhetoric, Adams then used that frenzy to jail newspaper editors and average citizens alike who spoke out against him and his policies.

The backstory is both fascinating and hopeful.

In the late 1790s, Adams was president and Jefferson was vice president. Adams led the Federalist Party (which today could be said to have reincarnated as the Republican Party), and Jefferson had just brought together two Anti-Federalist parties — the Democrats and the Republicans — into one party called the Democratic Republicans. (Today they’re known as the Democratic Party, the longest-lasting political party in history. They dropped “Republican” from their name in the 1820-30 era).

Adams and his Federalist cronies, using war hysteria with France as a wedge issue, were pushing the Alien and Sedition Acts through Congress, and even threw into prison Democratic Congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont for speaking out against the Federalists on the floor of the House.

Adams was leading the US in the direction of a fascistic state with a spectacularly successful strategy of vilifying Jefferson and his party as anti-American and pro-French. He was America’s first Trump, albeit nowhere near as toxic or psychopathic.

Adams’ rhetoric was described as “manly” by the Federalist newspapers, which admiringly published dozens of his threatening rants against France, suggesting that Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans were less than patriots and perhaps even traitors because of their opposition to the unnecessary war with France that Adams was simultaneously trying to gin up and saying he was working to avoid.

On June 1, 1798 — two weeks before the Alien & Sedition Acts passed Congress by a single vote — Jefferson wrote a thoughtful letter to his old friend John Taylor.

“This is not new,” Jefferson said. “It is the old practice of despots; to use a part of the people to keep the rest in order. And those who have once got an ascendancy and possessed themselves of all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means for retaining their advantage.

“But,” he added, “our present situation is not a natural one.”

Jefferson knew that Adams’ Federalists did not represent the true heart and soul of America, and commented to Taylor about how Adams had been using divide-and-conquer politics, and fear-mongering about war with France (the XYZ Affair) with some success.

“But still I repeat it,” he wrote again to Taylor, “this is not the natural state.”

Jefferson did everything he could to stop that generation’s version of Trump, but Adams had the Federalists in control of both the House and the Senate, and pushed through the Alien and Sedition Acts. In protest, Jefferson left town the day they were signed, never to return until after Adams left the presidency.

Jefferson later wrote in his personal diary how it would — like today, with California and Illinois leading the charge against Trump’s neofascist agenda — fall to the states to prevent the loss of American democracy:

“Their usurpations and violations of the Constitution at that period, and their majority in both Houses of Congress, were so great, so decided, and so daring, that after combating their aggressions, inch by inch, without being able in the least to check their career, the [Democratic] Republican leaders thought it would be best for them to give up their useless efforts there, go home, get into their respective legislatures, embody whatever of resistance they could be formed into, and if ineffectual, to perish there as in the last ditch.”

Democratic Republican Congressman Albert Gallatin submitted legislation that would repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Federalist majority in the House refused to even consider the motion, while informing Gallatin that he would be the next to be imprisoned if he kept speaking out against “the national security.”

Adams then shut down almost 30 newspapers, throwing their publishers, editors, and writers in prison. The most famous to go to jail was Ben Franklin’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache. Within a few months, Adams had effectively silenced the opposition.

Then he went after average citizens who spoke out against him.

Adams and his wife traveled the country in a fine carriage surrounded by a military contingent. As the Adams’ family entourage, full of pomp and ceremony, passed through Newark, New Jersey, a man named Luther Baldwin was sitting in a tavern and probably quite unaware that he was about to make a fateful comment that would help change history.

As Adams rode by, soldiers manning the Newark cannons loudly shouted the Adams-mandated chant, “Behold the chief who now commands!” and fired their salutes.
Hearing the cannon fire as Adams drove by outside the bar, in a moment of drunken candor Luther Baldwin said, “There goes the President and they are firing at his arse.” Baldwin further compounded his sin by adding that, “I do not care if they fire thro’ his arse!”

The tavern’s owner, a Federalist named John Burnet, overheard the remark and turned Baldwin in to Adams’ thought police: The hapless drunk was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for uttering “seditious words tending to defame the President and Government of the United States.”

It was the darkest moment in our new nation’s short history. But then a new force arose.

When Adams shut down the Democratic Republican newspapers, pamphleteers — that generation’s version of Substack writers not affiliated with national publications — went to work, papering towns from New Hampshire to Georgia with posters and leaflets decrying Adams’ power grab and encouraging the state governments to stand tall with Thomas Jefferson.

One of the best was a short screed by George Nicholas of Kentucky, “Justifying the Kentucky Resolution against the Alien & Sedition Laws” and “Correcting Certain False Statements, Which Have Been Made in the Different States” by Adams’ Federalists.

Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson. (Rembrandt Peale/New York Historical Society)

On Feb. 13, 1799, then-Vice President Jefferson had a courier hand-deliver a letter and copy of Nicholas’ pamphlet to his old friend Archibald Stuart (a Virginia legislator, fighter in the War of Independence, and leader of Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans).

“I avoid writing to my friends because the fidelity of the post office is very much doubted,” he opened his letter to Stuart, concerned that Adams was having his mail inspected because of his anti-war activities.

Jefferson pointed out that “France is sincerely anxious for reconciliation, willing to give us a liberal treaty,” and that even with the Democratic newspapers shut down by Adams and the Federalist-controlled media being unwilling to speak of Adams’ war lies, word was getting out to the people.

Jefferson noted:

“All these things are working on the public mind. They are getting back to the point where they were when the X. Y. Z. story was passed off on them. A wonderful and rapid change is taking place in Pennsylvania, Jersey, and New York. Congress is daily plied with petitions against the alien and sedition laws and standing armies.”

Jefferson then turned to the need for the pamphleteers’ materials to be widely distributed across states that might resist Adams.

“The materials now bearing on the public mind will infallibly restore it to its republican soundness in the course of the present summer,” he wrote, “if the knowledge of facts can only be disseminated among the people. Under separate cover you will receive some pamphlets written by George Nicholas on the [Alien and Sedition] acts of the last session. These I would wish you to distribute....”

The pamphleteer — today he would have been called a Substack writer — was James Bradford, and he reprinted tens of thousands of copies of Nicholas’ pamphlet and distributed it far and wide. Hand to hand, as Jefferson did with his by-courier letter to Stuart, was how what would be today’s independent progressive writings are distributed via email.

In the face of the pamphleteering and protests, the Federalists fought back with startling venom. It was led by a media machine — the remaining newspapers — largely owned by wealthy Adams backers as the Jefferson-backing newspapers had been shut down and their publishers and editors imprisoned.

Vicious personal attacks were launched in the Federalist press against Jefferson, Madison, and others, and President Adams and Vice President Jefferson were no longer on speaking terms. Adams’ goal was nothing short of the complete destruction of Jefferson’s Democratic Party, and he had scared many of them into silence or submission.

“All [Democratic Republicans], therefore, retired,” Jefferson wrote in his diary, “leaving Mr. Gallatin alone in the House of Representatives, and myself in the Senate, where I then presided as Vice-President.

“Remaining at our posts, and bidding defiance to the brow-beatings and insults by which they endeavored to drive us off also, we kept the mass of [Democratic] Republicans in phalanx together, until the legislature could be brought up to the charge; and nothing on earth is more certain, than that if myself particularly, placed by my office of Vice-President at the head of the [Democratic] Republicans, had given way and withdrawn from my post, the [Democratic] Republicans throughout the Union would have given up in despair; and the cause would have been lost forever.”

But Jefferson in the Senate and Gallatin in the House held their posts and fought back fiercely against Adams, thus saving — quite literally — American democracy. Jefferson and Madison also secretly helped legislators in Virginia and Kentucky submit resolutions in those states’ legislatures decrying the Alien & Sedition Acts. The bill in Virginia, in particular, gained traction.

As Jefferson noted in his diary, between his and Gallatin’s resistance in Washington, DC and several state governments standing up against Adams’ having shut down their newspapers and using the army to threaten their protestors:

“By holding on, we obtained time for the legislatures to come up with their weight; and those of Virginia and Kentucky particularly, but more especially the former, by their celebrated resolutions, saved the Constitution at its last gasp. No person who was not a witness of the scenes of that gloomy period, can form any idea of the afflicting persecutions and personal indignities we had to brook. They saved our country however.

“The spirits of the people were so much subdued and reduced to despair by the XYZ imposture, and other stratagems and machinations, that they would have sunk into apathy and monarchy, as the only form of government which could maintain itself.”

The efforts of that century’s truth-tellers made great gains. The states were fighting back, even challenging Adams’ massive, naked power grab and war-mongering. As Jefferson noted in a Feb. 14, 1799 letter to Virginia’s Edmund Pendleton:

“The violations of the Constitution, propensities to war, to expense, and to a particular foreign connection, which we have lately seen, are becoming evident to the people, and are dispelling that mist which X. Y. Z. had spread before their eyes. This State is coming forward with a boldness not yet seen. Even the German counties of York and Lancaster, hitherto the most devoted [to Adams], have come about, and by petitions with four thousand signers remonstrate against the alien and sedition laws, standing armies, and discretionary powers in the President.”

Americans and several state leaders were so angry with Adams, Jefferson noted, that the challenge was to prevent people from taking up arms against Adams’ Federalists. He worried out loud that the resistance may, if it erupted into violence, give Adams an excuse to declare an insurrection and totally end democracy:

“New York and Jersey are also getting into great agitation. In this State [of Pennsylvania], we fear that the ill-designing may produce insurrection. Nothing could be so fatal. Anything like force would check the progress of the public opinion and rally them round the government. This is not the kind of opposition the American people will permit.”

Like today’s progressive movement led by people like Bernie Sanders, JB Pritzker, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom, and Elizabeth Warren, Jefferson knew that peaceful protests had greater power than police violence or even threats like Trump‘s war-mongering against Venezuela today.

“But keep away all show of force,” he wrote to Pendleton, “and they will bear down the evil propensities of the government, by the constitutional means of election and petition. If we can keep quiet, therefore, the tide now turning will take a steady and proper direction.”

A week later, Feb. 21, 1799, Jefferson wrote to the great Polish general who had fought in the American Revolution, Thaddeus Kosciusko, a close friend then living in Russia. War for political purposes was the great enemy of democracy, Jefferson noted, and peace was its champion. And the American people were increasingly siding with peace and rejecting Adams’ call for war.

“The wonderful irritation produced in the minds of our citizens by the X. Y. Z. story, has in a great measure subsided,” he noted. “They begin to suspect and to see it coolly in its true light.”

But Adams was still President, and for him and his Federalist Party even a “little war” with France would have helped tremendously with the upcoming election of 1800. And in France some leaders wanted war with America for similar reasons.

Jefferson continued:

“What course the government will pursue, I know not. But if we are left in peace, I have no doubt the wonderful turn in the public opinion now manifestly taking place and rapidly increasing, will, in the course of this’ summer, become so universal and so weighty, that friendship abroad and freedom at home will be firmly established by the influence and constitutional powers of the people at large.”

And if Adams’ rhetoric led to an attack on America by France?

“If we are forced into war,” Jefferson noted, “we must give up political differences of opinion, and unite as one man to defend our country. But whether at the close of such a war, we should be as free as we are now, God knows.”

The tide was turned, to use Jefferson’s phrase, by the election of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I document in our book, The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction — and What This Means Today.

The abuses of the Federalists were so burned into the people’s minds when Jefferson's party came to power in 1801 and he freed the imprisoned newspaper editors, that the Federalists disintegrated altogether as a party over the next two decades.

As may well happen to Trump’s GOP two or four years from now.

All because average citizens and pamphleteers — and a handful of progressive politicians and states — stood up and challenged the lies of a fear-mongering president, and politicians of principle were willing to lead.

America has been burdened by lying presidents before, and even one who tried to destroy our Constitution like Trump is today threatening to do. But in our era — like in Jefferson’s — we are fortunate to have radical truth-tellers and political allies to warn us of treasonous acts for political gain.

If we stand in solidarity with today’s truth-tellers, and more politicians step forward to take a leadership role, then it’s entirely possible that with the elections of 2026 and 2028 American democracy can once again prevail.

How Thanksgiving helps America deal with this current chaos

Practicing daily gratitude is a habit I picked up from my spiritual mentor, Gottfried Müller; when Louise and I took a long hike through the trails of Forest Park here in Portland on Wednesday, for example, we stopped a few times to look around at the forest and just notice what an amazing world we live in and then to say “thank you” to all the life around us.

Every day, when we take our daily walk, we do this. Sometimes it’s our amazement at the clouds or the geese or the river or just the fact that we’re alive. I think of what my parents or my deceased brother would give for just a few minutes of what I’m experiencing and it fills me with awe and appreciation.

And I’m so grateful to you for reading and sharing my writings. You’ve helped build a real and meaningful community here. Thank you!

I always suspected that this daily practice of gratitude helped keep me sane in these insane times, but now I’ve discovered there’s actual science behind the mental health impacts of it.

As we celebrated Thanksgiving this week, science is revealing that our annual tradition of giving thanks might be more powerful than we ever imagined. Research shows that expressing gratitude doesn’t just make us feel good momentarily: it actually reshapes our brains in ways that enhance our well-being long after the holiday dishes are cleared away.

When you take a moment to count your blessings, your brain releases dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that create feelings of pleasure and contentment. It’s like turning on a happiness switch in your mind.

But what’s really fascinating is that this isn’t just a temporary boost; these moments of thankfulness create a positive feedback loop, training your brain to look for more reasons to be grateful.

Brain imaging studies have captured this process in action. When people express gratitude, they activate the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s command center for decision-making and emotional regulation.

This triggers a cascade of beneficial effects, including sharper attention and increased motivation. Think of it like building a muscle: the more you exercise gratitude, the stronger these neural pathways become, making it progressively easier to access positive emotions.

Perhaps even more remarkable is gratitude’s effect on stress. When you focus on appreciation, your brain actually dials down the production of cortisol, your body's primary stress hormone. This helps explain why grateful people often seem more resilient in the face of life's challenges; their brains are literally wired to handle stress better.

But the benefits don’t stop there.

Research conducted at Indiana University found that practicing gratitude can actually change the structure of your brain, particularly in areas linked to empathy and emotional processing.

It’s as if giving thanks regularly renovates your brain’s emotional architecture, creating lasting improvements in how you process experiences and relate to others.

These changes ripple out into nearly every aspect of life. People who practice gratitude regularly report sleeping better, probably because they’re replacing anxious thoughts with appreciative ones before bedtime.

They tend to have stronger relationships, likely because gratitude activates brain regions involved in social bonding and empathy.

Many even report improvements in their ability to solve problems and think creatively, suggesting that a thankful mind is also a more flexible one.

Want to harness these benefits for yourself?

Science suggests several effective approaches. Keeping a gratitude journal helps reinforce positive neural pathways, training your brain to focus on the good in your life. Expressing appreciation to others not only strengthens your relationships but also activates reward centers in your brain.

Even simply pausing throughout the day — my favorite practice — to notice and appreciate positive moments can help reshape your neural circuitry.

The most encouraging aspect of this research is that gratitude’s effects appear to be cumulative and long-lasting. Studies have found that people who regularly practice gratitude experience positive changes in brain function that persist months after they begin the practice. It’s like compound interest for your emotional well-being; small investments in gratitude today yield increasing returns over time.

As your brain becomes more adept at recognizing and appreciating positive experiences, you may find yourself naturally adopting a more optimistic outlook on life. This isn’t about ignoring life’s challenges or pretending everything is perfect. Rather, it’s about training your brain to maintain a sense of appreciation even while acknowledging difficulties.

So this Thanksgiving, as you shared what you were grateful for around the holiday table, you were doing more than participating in a cherished tradition.

You were engaging in a scientifically validated practice that can transform your brain and enhance your well-being. Each expression of thanks is like a small deposit in your neurological bank account, building toward a richer, more appreciative way of experiencing life.

In a world that often seems designed to highlight what’s wrong, cultivating gratitude might be one of the most powerful tools we have for training our brains to notice what’s right. And that’s something truly worth being thankful for.

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