In the past, many Palestinians and Arabs followed Israeli elections closely.

They did so not because they entertained illusions that a Zionist leader would deliver peace and justice, dismantle the occupation or remove illegal settlements. Rather, they feared that some Israeli leaders were worse than others. They hoped to avert the worst-case scenario.

Over time, however, that distinction gave way to the belief that all Israeli leaders were essentially the same. This is not pessimism. It is experience.

Consider, for example, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements during the Oslo peace process under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Between 1992 and 1995, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, increased from 111,673 to 140,235 - a rise of more than 25 percent, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, drawing on Israeli statistical records.

The same pattern continued under the Labor government of Ehud Barak.

Within his first six months, Barak’s government issued tenders for 3,196 settlement housing units, exceeding the annual average under his right-wing predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Naftali Bennett formed a coalition government in June 2021 that included the Arab party Ra’am, settlement expansion continued unabated.

According to Peace Now, the Bennett–Lapid government advanced plans for 7,292 settlement housing units during its first year, a 26-percent increase over the annual average recorded under previous Netanyahu governments.

The settlements are themselves a driving force behind the occupation. They require land, and therefore land confiscation; protection, and therefore an expanded military presence; water, roads and infrastructure, and therefore the appropriation of Palestinian resources. Together, these elements deepen dispossession and generate further Israeli violence.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the West Bank contained 645 Israeli settlement sites, outposts and other occupation installations by the end of 2025, including 350 settlement outposts.

The Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission reported that Israeli authorities targeted approximately 29,335 dunums of Palestinian land through declarations of so-called “state land” between October 2023 and August 2026—one of the largest waves of such land appropriation since Oslo.

By September 2026, the Commission had also documented the advancement or consideration of plans for more than 18,000 additional settlement housing units across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

Alongside this expansion is the violence unfolding across the West Bank.

By the end of 2023, the West Bank had experienced its deadliest year for Palestinians since the UN began systematically recording casualties in 2005.

The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission documented 23,827 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinians and their property during 2025 alone. In the first seven months of 2026, settler attacks increased by 63 percent compared with the corresponding period of the previous year.

Typically, this violence, carried out by the Israeli occupation army and armed illegal settlers, is contextualized within the ongoing genocide in Gaza. But violence in the West Bank also serves another purpose beyond collective punishment: the confiscation of Palestinian orchards, the annexation of land, the expansion of settlements and the crushing of Palestinian resistance, including nonviolent opposition to this colonial enterprise.

Any Israeli candidate in the October 27 elections who supports settlement expansion does so with full knowledge of its consequences: further dispossession, military occupation, annexation and violence.

The difference between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and politicians presented as less extreme, is often one of language, strategy and timing.

Former Israeli military chief and Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, for example, openly supports the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite his reputation as a more ‘moderate’ alternative to Netanyahu.

What, then, about Gaza?

Who among Israel’s leading political figures is promising to end the genocide, lift the siege, ensure unrestricted humanitarian aid, restrain the army or investigate violations of international law? None.

Israeli media have spent the past three years reporting on major disagreements between the government, military establishment, intelligence agencies and political opposition over what should happen in Gaza.

Yet, Eisenkot has pledged to end Hamas’ rule in Gaza within 18 months of taking office, whether through the Trump framework or through continued war.

For his part, opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid has proposed placing Gaza under Egyptian administration for 15 years, effectively shifting responsibility for Israel’s actions onto Arab states.

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, supports continued Israeli military control until Palestinian groups are disarmed.

The disagreement, therefore, is often over how Israel should achieve its objectives, rather than whether those objectives should change.

Other major disagreements primarily concern Israeli society: the conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews, judicial reform, accountability for the failures of October 7.

But these disputes should not be confused with the questions that matter most to Palestinians.

If Netanyahu succeeds in forming another right-wing coalition, the policies of occupation, settlement expansion and military confrontation will continue, potentially with renewed momentum.

If Israel produces a broader coalition, its members may reach compromises over judicial reform, conscription and other domestic disputes. The occupation, however, is unlikely to become the central point of disagreement.

More troubling still, even a government leaning toward the center-left might succeed in presenting Israel to the international community as a country ready to move beyond the image it acquired during three years of genocide, without fundamentally changing its conduct on the ground.

The international community must therefore remain vigilant. It cannot allow a future Israeli government to present itself as a peacemaker, or sell the illusion of a newly reformed Israel, while continuing to invest in settlements, occupation, war and genocide.

One of the paradoxes of American electoral politics is the obsession with making sure that your vote is counted—i.e., tallied—rather than working to ensure that our votes actually count by being taken into account by elected representatives.

The post Vote Counted, Not Counted appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For months, President Donald Trump has watched his grip on power collapse. It’s the consequence of self-inflicted wounds.

• Trump’s intransigence over releasing the Epstein files created fissures in his MAGA base.
• The Iran War worsened that fracture.
• Lifting crippling sanctions on Russia and abandoning Ukraine in its fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression drove the wedge between Trump and his most fervent supporters even deeper.
• The price of oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel soared, thanks to the war that Trump alone thinks America has won.
• Inflation and the national debt are moving in the wrong direction, while Trump’s illegal tariffs made everything more costly for Americans.
• The incompetence of the people he appointed to the most important cabinet positions, including Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., created havoc and killed innocent Americans.
• He destroyed alliances that have endured since World War II and compromised America’s international stature.
• His approval rating has plummeted to historic lows as independents deserted him.
• And ordinary citizens are finally fed up with the naked corruption of his pay-to-play administration. Trump, his family, and friends have made billions on the presidency while most Americans have struggled to survive.

Trump promised an “October surprise” that presumably would blind voters to his malfeasance and grift. What was it? A hollow promise of $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans maintained control of Congress after the midterms? Overtly siding with Putin in the Russia-Ukraine war? A last-minute award of $8 billion to farmers suffering under his idiotic economic policies?

I think it’s something far worse.

Avoiding Accountability

Trump is desperate to avoid accountability, and that makes the most dangerous president in American history more dangerous than at any previous point in his presidency. A Democratic majority in either chamber of Congress will begin investigations that will reveal the depth and breadth of his abuse of power to enrich himself and his cronies. Trump’s priority now is to prevent voters from electing Democrats. Period.

Trump can’t rely solely on the voter suppression techniques that Republican-controlled states have adopted over the past several years. Restrictive voter ID laws and an unprecedented gerrymandering effort aren’t likely to yield the GOP results that he needs. And his flurry of executive orders seeking to nationalize elections met hostile federal court decisions—even from his own appointees.

Attorney General Todd Blanche will continue to do Trump’s bidding. But in the end, the Constitution empowers the states to control the administration of elections.

So what will a desperate Trump do?

No one knows. But state and local election officials have been training poll workers to deal with previously unthinkable possibilities:

• Could Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) show up at polling places? In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said: “ICE isn’t there to patrol the polling places. We’re there to enforce specific threats.” But he added that reports of specific undocumented immigrants at a location could be a reason for ICE to deploy. That’s a pretty big qualifier.
• Will other federal officials show up at polling sites?
• Will federal officials seize ballots, as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia?
• Will Trump seize voting machines as some of his advisers have urged in the past?
• Will Trump invoke the Insurrection Act and summon the military under sycophant Pete Hegseth? (He hasn’t ruled it out.)

A Citizen’s Remedy

Trump is relying on a combination of legal challenges and voter intimidation to complete his term without accountability. Courts may continue to provide some check on his most egregious actions, but Trump moves with such dizzying speed that the courts often cannot keep up with him. Trump is relying on that too.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ lamented that Trump’s demolition of the White House East Wing and replacing it with a ballroom that was already more than half finished “was likely unlawful” because Congress never appropriated the funds to do so. But without reaching the merits of the case, five other justices gave him a pass anyway.

The best chance for beating Trump is to heed his rallying call: “Pretend I’m on the ballot.”

Vote accordingly.

In a play by Bertolt Brecht, the persecuted astronomer Galileo says: “Unhappy the land that needs heroes."

Right now, the United States is unhappy enough to need a lot of heroes—and during this election year, many have emerged. Here are five of the notable ones.

Abdul El-Sayed

No other major candidate this year has been the target of so many shameless and racist smears as Abdul El-Sayed, a 41-year-old Muslim American who is one of the most articulate and persuasive campaigners to arise since Zohran Mamdani. The former health official in Michigan is in a toss-up race for the U.S. Senate against former Rep. Mike Rogers, who is a nonstop fountain of MAGA talking points and deceptive campaign messaging—reinforced by President Trump—that tries to cast El-Sayed as a terrorist “jihadist.”

Countering this barrage is a grassroots campaign that El-Sayed started to build during the Democratic primary, which he won by overcoming a nearly 10-1 funding deficit, including more than $30 million spent against him by AIPAC. Whether explaining Medicare for All (which he literally wrote the book on) or the genocide in Gaza or the affordability crisis at home, El-Sayed conveys a strong progressive agenda with clarity, depth and wit. While Republican donors and AIPAC are dumping vast amounts of money into propping up Rogers and attacking El-Sayed, some corporate or Israel-aligned Democrats evidently wouldn’t mind if El-Sayed loses.

Angie Nixon

A longtime community activist, labor organizer and fighter for human rights, 42-year-old Angie Nixon is now fighting for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Florida. In November 2023, as a member of the Florida legislature, Nixon sponsored a Gaza ceasefire resolution that went down to defeat, 104-2. Absurdly vilified as “antisemitic,” she stood firm, insisting that caring “about thousands of innocent lives lost makes nobody antisemitic.” Prophetically, Nixon said: “Continued attacks will only lead to more suffering and more death.”

In 2024, Nixon opened a remarkable bookstore/coffeehouse as a community hub in Jacksonville’s African-American community, offering books banned by Florida school districts thanks to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state legislature. Five months ago, Nixon was arrested for civil disobedience while trying to meet with DeSantis over the state’s new gerrymandered congressional maps.

Aligned with the Working Families Party and Democratic Socialists of America, Nixon was a longshot in the Democratic Senate primary against the establishment favorite. Vastly outspent, she outorganized the opposition and stunned the power structure two months ago to become the Democratic nominee. If she were to win another upset victory on Nov. 3 in a state that Trump carried by 13 points in 2024, she’d be a force to reckon with on Capitol Hill.

Melat Kiros

In early summer, when Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent Democratic congresswoman in Denver’s deep-blue district, the win by the democratic socialist sent political shockwaves nationwide. Her victory crushed the myth that a socialist electoral insurgency could only succeed in the Northeast.

Kiros, who arrived in the U.S. from Ethiopia as an infant, is an attorney who will enter the U.S. House of Representatives in January at age 29. She lost her job at a major law firm over her advocacy for pro-Palestinian protests. She chose as a keynote for her campaign: “Establishment Democrats are beholden to the same billionaires who keep our prices high, burn our planet, and profit from a genocide. We can change that. It starts by changing who we send to Congress.” Kiros has not committed to supporting Hakeem Jeffries for speaker if Democrats take over the House, where she says she’ll push for a full progressive agenda, including federal rent control and a moratorium on data centers.

Mai Vang

For the first time in memory, a genuine progressive is on the verge of ending the Matsui dynasty that has represented the Sacramento area in Congress since the 1970s. Doris Matsui has held the congressional seat for 21 years, ever since her husband Robert Matsui died after 27 years in office. In sharp contrast, 41-year-old Mai Vang is committed to upsetting the pro-corporate, pro-war apple cart instead of riding on it.

She grew up poor, the eldest of 16 children. After stunning achievements as a community organizer, she has been a pathbreaking member of the Sacramento City Council since 2020.

Vang is running on a platform that includes abolishing ICE, enacting improved Medicare for All, establishing a federal Renters’ Bill of Rights, and taxing billionaires. If she wins her seat in Congress and Democrats win the House, Vang has said that she's not committed to supporting Jeffries as speaker.

With emphatic positions that include “stop the genocide in Palestine” and “repeal the blank check for war,” Vang explains: “My family fled the CIA’s Secret War in Laos as Hmong refugees. I carry the memory of what happens when our government chooses war over diplomacy: families torn apart and trauma that haunts generations. Today, as conflict devastates communities from Gaza to Iran to Ukraine to Sudan, our mission must be to protect life—not fund its destruction. We need a representative who refuses to profit from the industries fueling this violence. I will fight to redirect our tax dollars from endless wars abroad into healthcare and housing here at home.”

Ro Khanna

Along with his regular appearances in national media discussing the Epstein Files or his opposition to the Iran War, Rep. Ro Khanna has emerged as the most high-profile politician in California advocating for the billionaire tax measure on the state’s Nov. 3 ballot. Although his congressional district includes much of Silicon Valley, he has clashed with Big Tech billionaires and their supporters who want to defeat Proposition 40, which would generate state tax revenue to backfill the huge upcoming hole in California’s healthcare programs expected to reach $100 billion in losses of federal Medicaid funding over the next five years due to the Trump regime’s draconian cuts. Khanna has been willing to publicly denounce Gov. Gavin Newsom for siding with billionaires against the measure that would raise tens of billions from those who can easily afford it.

Khanna has not shied away from clashing with establishment Democrats for lacking conviction and moral principle. When he toured the West Bank in July, Khanna was confronted and detained by armed Israeli settlers. He later said: “If you're unwilling to speak up for Palestinian human rights, if you're unwilling to speak up against the genocide in Gaza, the apartheid in the West Bank, then you are morally compromised.”

It’s really cold living in a home with no heat or running water in December. That was a hard lesson I had to learn as a kid when my family was struggling.

Now, as a healthcare case manager, I’ve seen firsthand even more unnecessary human suffering caused by bad policy choices. We need change, and voting is part of how we make it.

I grew up in a large family. My dad was a convoy driver during the Iraq War and was gone from us for nearly a decade. During that time, we struggled to afford the medication to manage my sister’s Type 1 diabetes. My mother stayed home so often to care for her that she lost her job.

Even as prices rise, they’ve also chosen to take help away from those who need it the most—and give it to those who need it least.

My family filed for bankruptcy, hoping for a clean slate. Instead, with no credit, we couldn’t find a stable place to live. We lost our home and spent time bouncing around trying to find housing.

Those hard years inspired me to serve people struggling in circumstances like ours, which are all too common. And as prices rise and safety net programs get cut, they’re becoming more common every day.

When my family experienced homelessness in the early 2000s, the Urban Institute estimated that between 500,000 and 600,000 Americans experienced homelessness on any given night. Now the Department of Housing and Urban Development reports that number is over 745,000.

Today, between 50-60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck or report being financially strained. This has worsened in recent years as pandemic-era financial help has expired.

Part of the pain comes from the Trump administration’s sweeping tariffs and war of choice in Iran, which have increased inflation and spiked the cost of gas and groceries. But even as prices rise, they’ve also chosen to take help away from those who need it the most—and give it to those who need it least.

The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which this Congress passed last year, slashed Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and shifted those investments to tax cuts for the ultra rich. So far, over 5 million people nationwide have lost SNAP, and at least 10 million people nationwide are expected to lose Medicaid coverage by 2034.

These changes will affect you even if you aren’t on Medicaid. Rural hospitals rely heavily on Medicaid patients. As these patients lose coverage, rural hospitals are at risk of closing, which could deprive entire communities of access to care. Nationwide, estimates suggest 400 to 700 rural hospitals are now vulnerable to closure, with nearly 300 at immediate risk.

These Medicaid cuts have also significantly compromised care coordination in rural areas. Care coordination lets case managers like me help families find wraparound care for intersecting hardships, from housing to food to healthcare. Since the Medicaid cuts, several providers have withdrawn services that help my clients with daily needs, like laundry or transportation.

My wife and I experienced firsthand how critical care coordination can be when our beautiful baby boy was born with terminal brain damage. Our care coordinator was invaluable in helping us determine his care and its costs. She was compassionate with our anguish.

Even though I’m a case manager and my wife works in human services, we struggled to navigate the system while grieving. How can a family less familiar with the system possibly cope?

Meanwhile, vulnerable people are losing help left and right. I’ve had clients like a woman with a sight disability get denied Medicaid renewal because she could “still walk and talk.” I’ve had clients with missing limbs denied disability benefits outright and then have to go through a lengthy appeals process.

We are all hurting, but together we can start to fix this. Voting lets us hold elected officials to account—and choose representatives who will fight for our housing, healthcare, and food assistance. Our lives depend on it.

The empty spaces inside Colombia’s National Museum in Bogotá offer a dramatic, if not painful introduction to its new, right-wing government. Several dozen objects related to the peace process with the M-19 rebel group; the historic 1991 Constitution; and mementos of social movements, LGBTQ rights, and other artifacts of the country’s complex history have disappeared from public view. Those objects included a Carlos Pizarro campaign poster, an armband from the political movement that emerged from the M-19’s demobilization, and the student ballot associated with the constituent process that produced the 1991 Constitution.

These histories record how Colombians previously excluded from national power fought to enter public life in a country governed for generations by a white, economically powerful, and politically exclusionary elite. Critics say removing them from the public view diminishes the evidence of that decades-long struggle. Museum anthropologist Andrés Góngora described it in El País as a “mutilated museum.”

The unexpected decommissioning of these items sparked a spontaneous citizen’s protest outside the museum in mid-October, where hundreds of angry people gathered with signs that read, “Poetry is necessary, military domination is not!” and “We’re artists, not terrorists.”

In both cases, political leaders claim authority to determine which historical interpretations belong in public institutions, a unilateral, authoritarian approach to erasing history.

Not surprisingly, the protesters were quickly confronted by highly armed riot police using heavy-handed tactics to block off the entrance to the museum, a show of force designed to demonstrate who was now in control. Barely three months into Abelardo de la Espriella’s presidency, the fight over who belongs in the country’s history has become a fight over who has the right to openly challenge its current trajectory.

The parallel with Donald Trump’s campaign against the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions is unmistakable. Trump’s March 2025 executive order seeks “to remove improper ideology” from the institution. In both cases, political leaders claim authority to determine which historical interpretations belong in public institutions, a unilateral, authoritarian approach to erasing history.

This is just one of a list of concrete policy decisions made by De la Espriella that indicate that Colombia’s first-ever Republican president is going full-on MAGA as he settles into his new executive office.

Seriously.

Deep Ties to Conservative Leaders in US

De la Espriella’s connections to the US Republican Party are concrete and extensive. A naturalized US citizen since 2023, he has donated to Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida and publicly endorsed her reelection. He’s met with Colombian American Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) on several occasions, including when Moreno visited Colombia during the runoff election explicitly to endorse his candidacy, what some critics saw as direct US meddling in the electoral process.

The new president’s social media posts during the campaign included images of him and his family proudly waving the “Stars and Stripes” while sporting MAGA caps. It’s no secret that Colombia’s president has become an active and vocal participant in the partisan politics of his adopted country, while moving his actual homeland ever closer to Trump.

De la Espriella’s young administration has enthusiastically embraced Washington’s interventionist security agenda while, like Trump in the US, advancing its own confrontational eradication campaign against progressive institutions and social movements. His unwavering genuflection to Donald Trump goes far beyond the familiar, decades-long accommodations that Colombian dependence on its more powerful ally has required of its elected leaders. He appears intent on making the MAGA approach to government his own, but with a distinct criollo flavor.

Like Trump, his highly mediated performances invite viewers to mistake that victory for a license to dominate everything.

The danger is that in the Colombian context of generational political violence, the consequences could be pretty severe for those sectors at the receiving end.

De la Espriella’s over-the-top, high-volume theatrical delivery makes the bilateral relationship with the US easier to sell to his enthusiastic followers. The roaring “Tiger” persona he has adopted, the inflated rhetorical threats and melodramatic public scoldings directed at his detractors, resembles the stereotyped performance of a B-list actor playing out strongman omnipotence in a low-budget narco-telenovela. As a former defense attorney of accused drug traffickers and paramilitaries, he’s had ample time to rehearse the part, which today he is playing out on a much grander stage.

He’s done photo ops with corpses in body bags and captured prisoners in handcuffs, trophies of his self-declared war on “narco-terrorists.” On October 22, the presidency released a video showing him authorizing an aerial bombardment against the ELN, one of Colombia’s many armed groups he's declared open war against. Military command becomes an opportunity for content creation, with the president—decked out in army greens and walkie-talkie in hand—cast as its indispensable protagonist.

The circus-like spectacle carries a deliberate political message. More than 12 million Colombians supported his opponent, the left-wing Senator Iván Cepeda, in June’s runoff election. It was the closest election in Colombia’s history. This extremely narrow victory gave De la Espriella the presidency, so, like Trump, his highly mediated performances invite viewers to mistake that victory for a license to dominate everything. Trump’s own campaign endorsement of “el Tigre” promised him the “total support and strength of the United States,” something De la Espriella is quick to remind audiences about regularly on live television and social media posts. For the new president, Washington’s stamp of approval helps project power over a country that remains profoundly divided.

Political Approval Comes With Concrete Material Commitments

In September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Colombian Foreign Minister Omar Bula signed memorandums in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla covering critical minerals and civil nuclear cooperation. News reports of the encounter situated the initiative within Trump’s competition with China and Washington’s effort to secure strategic mineral supplies, especially through its obedient neighbors to the south.

The documents signed in Barranquilla establish a nonbinding framework for technical cooperation, investment, and processing. While they do not necessarily hand ownership of Colombia’s deposits of rare earth minerals to the United States, their significance lies in the extractive development priorities they encourage: Colombia is positioning its resources within Washington’s strategic supply chains, radically reversing the previous government’s efforts at ecological sustainability and economic diversification. Opposition leaders in the Congress, excluded from any consultation in this process, argue that the public deserves to know how communities near these proposed projects will participate, what environmental protections will apply, and who will capture the benefits. Up to now, it’s anybody’s guess, and De la Espriella is in no rush to explain.

As if the extractive collaboration with Washington weren’t enough, the strategic security alignment between the US and Colombia is even more explicit, and alarming. Speaking in Panama on August 12, the bellicose US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia had requested US participation, authorizing “joint military operations to destroy terrorists and terrorist networks.” Colombia also joined the US-led regional counter-cartel coalition, known as the Spear of the Americas. Critics of these announcements—left-wing lawmakers, progressive political analysts, and human rights workers—focused on national sovereignty and the constitutional role of the Senate in authorizing foreign troops.

De la Espriella’s proposals for more coca eradication, aerial bombing, extraditions, and building enormous prisons, a crackdown The New York Times refers to as the “Bukelization” of Colombia, offer the promise of heavy-handed solutions. But they also risk renewing familiar cycles of violence that have shaped Colombian history since the 1950s.

Hegseth’s announcement does not necessarily mean that US soldiers have already carried out attacks inside Colombia, although that is always hard to determine. It does establish the Colombian government’s willingness to invite a deeper military role for Washington in its internal strategic affairs, a trend we’ve already seen in Ecuador, Peru, and El Salvador.

The designation of the declared enemy as “narco-terrorists” makes that invitation sound straightforward and even justifiable, obscuring complex questions about who they are targeting, civilian protection, and accountability. It’s important to point out that the term “narco-terrorist” has been employed by Colombian security forces and government officials repeatedly for almost 40 years to deliberately target opposition and social movement leaders, human rights defenders, and even independent journalists. The probability of this repressive history repeating itself today is very high, considering the current belligerent leadership in both Washington and Bogotá.

Combined with De la Espriella’s public applause for the illegal bombings of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific by US forces, attacks which have resulted in over 235 deaths since last October, the current rules of engagement on the ground amount to the worst-case scenario that any of us who have fought against direct US military involvement in Colombia could have imagined.

There’s no question that the security crisis De la Espriella inherited is real, and in many ways led to his narrow election victory in the first place. The policy of “total peace” carried out by former President Gustavo Petro failed to halt the expansion of armed organizations throughout the country. Rural communities continue to endure displacement, extortion, and child recruitment despite Petro’s sincere efforts at negotiating with at least 14 different armed and criminal groups during his mandate, according to the International Crisis Group.

But if history has taught us anything, there are no guarantees that military escalation will work to bring the country security. In the past, the crackdown and capture of leaders of armed groups led to the fragmentation of those organizations, resulting in further, more widespread territorial warfare, while bombardments and sweeping arrests resulted in high levels of civilian casualties and other human rights violations. De la Espriella’s proposals for more coca eradication, aerial bombing, extraditions, and building enormous prisons, a crackdown The New York Times refers to as the “Bukelization” of Colombia, offer the promise of heavy-handed solutions. But they also risk renewing familiar cycles of violence that have shaped Colombian history since the 1950s. People living under armed coercion in high conflict areas need a range of protections and guarantees. And that protection must last beyond the next televised military operation or social media post.

Other MAGA-like Moves by the New Administration

There are other examples of policy decisions that demonstrate how radically De la Espriella has pivoted toward a MAGA agenda. One recent rupture relates to international human rights policy that aligns closely with MAGA’s obsessive anti-wokeism. In mid-September, Colombia withdrew from the Equal Rights Coalition, an intergovernmental alliance which promotes LGBTQ+ rights and which Colombia had been co-chairing with Spain. The Foreign Ministry explained that participation in the coalition “was not a priority.”

The positioning of Colombia as an uncompromising and committed ally of Israel is another stark shift from Petro’s open and vocal criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu for the genocide in Gaza. This pro-Israel stance coincides with an almost fanatical fascination with and embrace of Christian Evangelicals within Colombia, with the formerly self-described atheist president regularly performing the rituals of a true believer in front of the cameras during his first several weeks in office, openly declaring, “Long Live Christ the King!”

De la Espriella’s admirers may enjoy watching the Tiger perform. Colombians, particularly the most vulnerable and traditionally marginalized, will have to live with the policies enacted between those mediated appearances.

It’s hard to understand how any of these policy shifts will materially benefit the Colombian people, including those who voted for him. But there’s no question that these decisions put the new government even further into the good graces of the Rubio-Vance-Trump sphere of influence that the US citizen-turned Colombian president so fondly desires.

Resistance has already complicated the Colombian government’s plans. For example, a judge ordered the removed objects from the National Museum protected and barred further removals pending review.

These kind of decisions give the political opposition compelling reasons to continue to organize and mobilize. On October 14, unions, students, and Indigenous organizations took to the streets in large and small cities all over the country, speaking out against De la Espriella’s authoritarian dictates. It is already clear that popular sectors will not easily abandon their demands because the president commands the cameras. A larger call for a general strike in November is already in the works. Repression could deepen the confrontation, especially if security officials treat resistance to economic, cultural, and social policy as a security problem.

De la Espriella’s admirers may enjoy watching the Tiger perform. Colombians, particularly the most vulnerable and traditionally marginalized, will have to live with the policies enacted between those mediated appearances.

It would be naïve to think they will not stop demanding their rights and livelihoods be protected.

A president who treats those demands as obstacles to his authority is giving the country ample reason to resist.

“Will you disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?” A young white man, "Tommy," asked Dr. Abdul El-Sayed this at a campaign event in Michigan. El-Sayed’s answer was a question of his own: “Why are you asking that question? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?”

Though Tommy asserts he’s asking because he hasn’t heard Dr. El-Sayed disavow this terrorist group, Dr. El-Sayed knew—as did a whole lot of folks in that room with them—that the real reason Tommy was asking is because Dr. El-Sayed is Muslim.

It has since been revealed that “Tommy” is Thomas Teepell, and not only is he a former employee of a far-right Republican senator who openly identifies as a Christian nationalist, and is himself directly connected to a white Christian nationalist group, but both he and his father are Republican strategists. And that actually matters, because this wasn’t just some misguided citizen asking his possible future senator a question; this was a political operative deploying anti-Muslim bigotry as a strategy to win an election.

Jews should be on the front lines of pushing back on Islamophobia when we encounter it, and feel both an empathy and a personal stake in the safety of our neighbors.

As a Jewish leader, that chills me to my bones, because it is the other side of the coin of the intentional strategy to appropriate and twist Jewish fear of antisemitism in order to win elections and divide communities. President Donald Trump’s administration is going on tour in battleground states talking about fighting antisemitism, while on that same tour they are using supposed concerns about antisemitism as a smokescreen to justify their dangerous immigration policies in ways that meaningfully threaten Jewish safety.

The right’s antisemitism and Islamophobia come from the same ideology: white Christian nationalism. In this ideology, both Jews and Muslims are the “other,” the threats to society and a way of life. This ideology holds Jews responsible for the “great replacement” of white people with immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color and uses antisemitism to deflect blame for the failures of those in power, to remove fundamental freedoms, and to weaken democracy. It is a certain brand of Christianity that seeks to supersede the Constitution, while wrongly accusing religious minorities of holding dual loyalty to their texts and teachings.

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are intertwined in the white Christian nationalist ideology, and Jews and Muslims must be intertwined in our collective fight for our safety. That means Jews should be on the front lines of pushing back on Islamophobia when we encounter it, and feel both an empathy and a personal stake in the safety of our neighbors.

Tommy is unfortunately the avatar for far too many people. It is incumbent upon each of us to fight the dangerous conflation of the beliefs and actions of everyday American Muslims with those of terrorist organizations. As Jews, we can certainly understand that danger when far too many people regularly conflate us with the beliefs and actions of the Israeli government.

The Islamophobic rhetoric being levied against Dr. El-Sayed—or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani or Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for that matter—threatens Jewish safety, and threatens our neighbors with a precarity we know far too well. Our community must reject it.

Even more importantly, we must see Tommy for what he truly is—a cog in a political machine that weaponizes our fear and thrives on our division. We must dismantle that machine by fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia together and making bigotry a losing strategy. This November, let’s elect leaders who will work for our collective safety, rather than for our division.

So we’re using a woman’s rape by her stepfather at age 12 to win elections now?

The headline out of Ohio this week took my breath away. As I read the details, all I could think about was what it felt like to be 12 years old, worried I wouldn’t be believed. And I wondered what had happened to shame.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio governor, released a campaign ad featuring his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton’s estranged mother, calling her a liar.

It’s 2026. After #MeToo and after years of survivors fighting to be heard, we’re still watching someone’s childhood sexual abuse being used as a political weapon.

What the ad doesn’t mention is that Amy hasn’t seen her mother since 1978, when she was 12 years old. That’s when she and her younger brother were removed from their mother’s custody after their stepfather was charged with raping Amy. Her mother remained married to Amy’s stepfather until his death in 2004.

So here we are, almost 50 years later, where a political campaign has brought a sexual abuse survivor’s estranged mother back into the picture. Not to reconcile, not for healing, but to publicly question her own daughter’s credibility.

It’s astonishing to me what Amy has accomplished despite everything she endured as a child. She became a doctor, built a career, and went on to make a life that wasn’t defined by her past. But no amount of success or distance from childhood trauma makes someone immune to being hurt all over again. Especially when the person questioning your credibility is someone who was supposed to protect you.

As an incest survivor, I can tell you that one of the greatest fears is not being believed. Someone questioning what happened, suggesting we’re lying, or deciding that the person who hurt us is more credible than we are can keep children from speaking up and getting help.

The bravery it took for 12-year-old Amy to come forward and testify against her stepfather is astounding. Her younger brother has said that she endured even more abuse trying to protect him. Most of us will never know that kind of bravery.

But I’ve seen it in the survivors I’ve met through my work with organizations trying to break the silence around incest. Some of these organizations teach children to recognize abuse and tell a trusted adult.

Amy did exactly what we ask children to do. She spoke up. But what message are we sending our children when a woman who told her story in a courtroom at 12 has her credibility publicly questioned nearly 50 years later? And all because she’s running for political office.

But this didn’t happen in a vacuum. And it’s not just a mother-versus-daughter situation.

Someone in Vivek’s campaign had the idea and thought, “Yes, let’s do it.” Other people in the campaign agreed it was a good idea. Calls were made. Emails were sent. An ad was produced. And at every step along the way, someone could have said, “No, we’re not doing this. It’s a terrible idea.”

But no one stopped it.

The ad surfaced, the backlash began, and Vivek’s campaign announced it would spend $4 million promoting it anyway. Vivek defended the ad, and the vice president of the United States, JD Vance, said, “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern.”

Really?

Fortunately, not all political leaders agreed. Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, publicly called for the ad to be taken down. And Lydia Mihalik, a member of his cabinet, said, “I don’t have to agree with Amy Acton’s politics to believe that exploiting someone’s childhood trauma is wrong.”

Having support matters whether it’s right after the abuse or years later. In my case, when I told my mom that I’d been sexually abused, she believed me and immediately got me into therapy. And I’m grateful for that.

But being believed didn’t erase what happened. The shadow of the abuse still follows me, just like it does for many survivors. Even with support, I spent years learning to trust myself and make sense of what happened. It’s impacted my relationship with my husband, how I communicate, how I show up at work, how I parent, and how I see the world. The effects of the abuse from decades ago don’t just disappear with time. And seeing a story like Amy’s play out in the news brings those feelings right back to the surface.

I think what upsets me most about this story isn’t just what Amy endured as a child or her painful relationship with her mother. It’s that all of it is now being used against her.

Think about it. A 12-year-old girl was raped by her stepfather. She found the courage to explain what he did to her in a courtroom. And nearly 50 years later, her estranged mother appears in a political ad questioning her credibility.

And somewhere along the way, people decided this was a good way to win votes.

It’s 2026. After #MeToo and after years of survivors fighting to be heard, we’re still watching someone’s childhood sexual abuse being used as a political weapon.

This should never have happened.

But it did. And even after the backlash, people are still defending it.

Shame on them.

The US National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), by texting "START" to 88788, or through chat at thehotline.org. RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or by texting "HOPE" to 64673. Both offer 24/7, free, and confidential support. DomesticShelters.org has a list of global and national resources.

Two years ago, Serbian students started their protests, endorsed by many citizens, in an honest, almost naive way. They declared that they wanted the end of corruption, press freedom, prosecution of the culprits behind the collapse of the Novi Sad rail station canopy, and, ultimately, another Serbia altogether. Students persistently claimed that entering politics was not their aim. But given all the issues they called in question, politics remained the name of the game. Nevertheless, they managed to stick with their grassroots methods of organization, and their influence spread.

For the last two years, students continued to act without leaders, and all decisions have been made in plenary meetings, a horizontal, non-hierarchical form of decision-making. This has been direct democracy at its best. It also represents an authentic form of political expression that transcends the impotence of the outdated options available within the existing system.

The ”Student List“ that appeared on the ballot in the recent Serbian elections emerged from the massive protests known as “Students in Blockade,” founded on September 9 with the slogan Students Are Winning. It became No. 3 on the ballot for the parliamentary election. Its program, the 11-point “Student Plan,” centers on the fight against corruption and organized crime and endorses new social measures in education, housing, and healthcare. It has been written in cooperation with experts from various fields, including farmers, doctors, teachers, social and cultural workers. According to its statute:

it is a voluntary, non-governmental, non-partisan, and non-profit association established for a fixed period to raise civic awareness of the importance of democracy and free and fair elections. Its goals include greater youth participation in democratic processes, monitoring elections and referendums, promoting the rule of law and freedom of speech, and holding those who break the law accountable.

The Student List consists not of students but of 250 academics, professionals, and public figures selected by student plenums, and is headed by cardiologist Ilija Srdanović. However, he is not, in the words of the students, the leader. In his own words, he is the first name on the Student List—though not its lead candidate. As he put it:

I don’t think that the invitation to the Student List was an invitation to be a candidate for deputy in front of a political option, but literally an invitation to get involved in the endeavour of Serbia’s victory over the mafia. The mafia stole our country, drove tens and hundreds of thousands of young people abroad, and ravaged the budget, eventually causing a tragedy in which 16 of my fellow citizens died.

In the last month, however, some actions and proclamations of the students gave pause to sympathetic observers from Serbia and neighboring countries. Such commentators are asking about students’ positions toward Russia, the EU, Kosovo, and war criminal Ratko Mladić. In an excellent article published in the Serbian independent media, Dejan Ilić describes how the younger generations are infected by their upbringing in Serbia, which has been prone to selective memory and to a victim mentality. But he continues:

There is little that can be done about that overnight. All we can do is marvel at how courageously those children stood up and confronted an arrogant, heartless regime with an excessive propensity for violence. Now that they have risen, all we can do is stand beside them and try to protect them from excessive repression… We have elections ahead of us. And in those elections, there is one, and only one, important, shared objective: to be freed from the regime headed by Vučić… These are elections for liberation… we should fight for the chance to create a normal and decent Serbia… There is a well-known rallying cry of militant democracy: no democracy for the enemies of democracy. Something similar should apply to Vučić during this campaign: no polite conversation with an enemy of all conversation and all decency.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić was by no means sitting around idle during the grassroots mobilization. Over the years, he seriously damaged independent media. He placed supporters with murky, often criminal background in tents known as Ćaciland, in Pionirski park in front of the Parliament in Belgrade as an intimidation tactic, and he used all known propaganda mechanisms to label students dangerous foreign agents ready to destroy Serbia. He recently stepped down as president of Serbia with the intention of becoming prime minister.

He continued a danse macabre that has ruined all the values of a democratic, civilized country, achieving everything which he has accused students of wanting to accomplish. He sucked up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, flattered US President Donald Trump, cozied up to China as a partner, and lied to the EU.

For good measure, he manipulated his own supporters mercilessly. Vučić told them that WWIII was inevitable. He warned that Croatians were intervening in the Serbian elections, together with unnamed foreign powers. Following Trump’s recipe, he bragged about his enormous achievements and the bright future that would soon come under his leadership At the last pre-election rally of his party, he roared: “Let us never forget how they tried to bring down our state. Let us always protect and defend it… Let us go out and defeat them! Defeat them decisively!”

While Vucic was addressing this rather sparsely attended rally, at least 150,000 people gathered at Slavia, one of Belgrade’s main squares, which had witnessed innumerable protests over the years. In a completely different atmosphere, one of the student speakers said, “Today is the last rally, and it’s important that we all come here to send a message of love and peace and that we see each other on the 25th at the polling stations.”

Before Serbia’s 6.45 million voters went to the polls on October 25, several different scenarios were discussed in the press at home and abroad. One was that Vučić and his right-wing populist Serbian Progressive party (SNS) would win but that mass unrest would ensue. According to another scenario, Vučić would lose and not accept the results, which could lead to state violence against opposition activists. The third was that Student List would win and face numerous challenges in their effort to dismantle the long standing and thoroughly corrupt authoritarian bureaucracy. Government manipulation, civil unrest, and institutional paralysis figured in virtually all of the analyses.

Much also depended on the turnout. If turnout went above 70 or even 80%, the Student List could benefit. According to one Dutch commentator:

If there are long lines in front of the polling stations on Sunday morning—just like earlier in Hungary this year—the elections could lead to a historic upheaval for Serbia. If many voters stay at home, there is a good chance that Vučić has weathered the biggest protest storm in years, and the autocratic leader will be able to move the country further to his hand.
On Election Day

From early morning, citizens lined up in front of the polling stations, promising a hefty turnout. The turnout was 70%. From the outset, observers reported numerous irregularities, including suspicions of vote buying.

Tough guys with balaclavas and dressed in black began to appear as the voting day progressed. More and more physical attacks on citizens and journalists in all parts of Serbia have been reported. The possibility of violence provoked by the state and the ruling party was on everybody’s mind.

But the supporters of the Student List were in high spirits. As always, they made a lot of noise, including songs, and waved red-and-white balloons and banners. But at the same time, they called on citizens not to gather near places like the center of the capital where more and more police and non-uniformed persons were gathering.

The polling stations closed at 8:00 pm, and the waiting started. Croatian political analyst and philosopher Žarko Puhovski said, a few minutes after:

In Serbia, it is very important for that regime to leave, because I really think that Vučić’s regime is not only autocratic, but has also caused damage to Serbia by primitivizing those parts of Serbia that were not primitivized even during Milosevic’s time. In all countries you have primitive and backward regions, but Vučić primitivized the whole of Serbia. And that is why it is good that this country and its citizens finally get rid of him.

And they did.

After the Elections

At 9:35 pm, Aleksandar Vučić addressed the headquarters of the Serbian Progressive Party and admitted defeat. The Student List had won with 53% of the votes, which means 141 seats in the parliament. The United Serbia party of Vučić captured only 38.8% of the vote, which amounts to 103 seats. No other parties secured seats in the parliament except for a few very small parties representing minorities.

Outside, throughout Serbia, the singing immediately increased. The blaring of car horns became deafening as citizens filled the streets to celebrate the victory, many barely believing what had just happened. While celebration round the country was gaining momentum, cameras in Belgrade filmed the men in black running away from Ćaciland, while police forces watched in silence. The only time when citizens came close to violence was when they dismantled the Ćaciland tents, which had become the symbol of Vučić’s style of governing.

Vučić’ didn’t wait long before revealing his true nature. His further comments in his concession speech are telling:

This was the validation of a revolution carried out with the direct support of various European countries and the American "deep state"—the faction that opposes President Trump… I congratulate them—though they are merely the ones carrying out the work, the "dirty work" devised by someone else to bring down a sovereign nation… You’ve succeeded for the moment. But for how long?… We will defeat this evil sooner than they think.

The Student List offers a lesson to all progressive movements around the world. Their success is the result of rebellion, energy, persistence, solidarity, courage, humor, nonviolence, utopian aspirations, and strong bottom-up organization. Their victory differs in two main respects from other comparable electoral efforts in other parts of the world. Serbian students formed a movement and not a party, and they do not have a strong, charismatic personality that could function like a father figure. And they succeeded.

The task in front of them is enormous, and it is hard to predict what the future will bring. As the poet Branko Miljković wrote, “Will freedom be able to sing as the slaves sang about her?” One can hope so.

With the nation’s focus on the upcoming midterm elections, the Trump administration is quietly proposing changes to rules for the 2030 census that would threaten American democracy for decades to come. If we don’t act now, the next census could erase millions of people from the count.

The last Census in 2020 undercounted Latinos by almost 5%, three times the undercount of the 2010 Census, making this racial-ethnic group second only to American Indians and Alaska Natives in undercount. Latinos are now at even more risk of being undercounted by the next Census. The Trump administration has created fear and mistrust of the government by unleashing Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) terror on our communities and is now scheming to strip us of political power and economic resources.

For the first time in history, Trump's Census Bureau has proposed removing questions on race and ethnicity from the census and excluding noncitizens without a green card from the census count. The proposed rule changes are part of this administration’s racist and anti-immigrant agenda to unravel civil rights protections and erase immigrants from our nation.

Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.

Our organization, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, is sounding the alarm on how these changes would harm Latino and immigrant communities. Census undercounts have real world consequences, not only in the loss of congressional representatives, but also in the reduction of lifesaving resources like funding for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) as well as funding for public education and school lunches. More than 300 federal programs allocate resources based on Census data.

The constitution mandates a numerical count of every person living in the United States every 10 years, regardless of immigration status, and requires that congressional seats and federal tax money be apportioned based on the number of people living in each state. The census has included questions on race since it was first initiated in 1790.

Removing questions on race and ethnicity would make it harder to track whether Black and brown communities have equal access to education, housing, and healthcare, and make it more difficult to monitor and address racist exclusion from resources and opportunities.

The proposed rule to exclude noncitizens without a green card would not only exclude undocumented immigrants but also exclude refugees, asylees, and residents with pending immigration applications. LatinoJustice objects to treating such residents as absent from our communities for purposes of representation.

Excluding immigrant residents would harm every person in the communities where they reside, including US citizens. States with substantial immigrant populations could receive fewer congressional seats.

Adding a question on immigration status to the census would further discourage Latinos—regardless of their immigration status—from participating in the count at a time when trust in the government is at an all time low in our communities. ICE terror has made many immigrants afraid to interact with the government in any way—whether to report being the victim of a crime, access medical care, or accept disaster assistance. A census designed to heighten those fears could erase millions from the count.

The Trump administration is proposing another rule change that would cause even more confusion and lead to an undercount of students, snowbirds, and those in non-traditional housing by using tax records to establish residence. All of these proposed changes seem aimed at reducing census participation and undercounting vulnerable communities.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF has worked to promote participation in the census—as imperfect as it is—because we know what a huge impact the count has on our communities. We submitted commentary opposing the dangerous rule changes proposed by the Trump administration. It’s not too late for you to submit your objections, too. But you need to act now.

The open comment period on the proposed census rule changes ends on November 2. We’re calling for the comment period to be extended at least another 90 days so that advocates and experts have the opportunity to weigh in, but we don’t know if the extension will be granted.

Latinos’ enormous contributions to our economy and society make America what it is. Each and every one of us deserves to be counted.

When I first ran for the Princeton school board, I did something I doubt my opponents ever considered. Before knocking on a single door, I asked respected leaders in my community to vouch publicly for my character. I wanted voters to hear from people they trusted that I was a mother, a neighbor, and a public servant, not a threat.

I lost anyway. In a down-ballot race, where many voters know little about the candidates beyond their names, I believe mine worked against me the moment voters read it.

My experience is not unusual. Since 9/11, Muslim American candidates have been held to an impossible standard: we must be flawless, and even then, we are viewed through the lens of terrorism. A new report from the Rutgers Center for Security, Race and Rights, Punished for Participating, documents this pattern across more than 31 case studies from 2001 to 2026. Despite historic gains (more than 255 Muslim Americans held elected office by this summer), Muslim candidates face a mainstreamed backlash built on conspiracy theories of a "Sharia" takeover, gendered stereotypes, political violence, and presumptions of antisemitism. The report's core finding is painfully simple: Muslims are punished for doing one of the most American things there is, running for office.

Islamophobia is not a Republican monopoly. Some self-styled centrists in the Democratic Party reach for the same smears, and for the same reason: they feel threatened by the rise of progressive Muslims who are winning.

Recent election cycles proved the point three times over.

In New York, Zohran Mamdani was branded "a jihadist candidate" by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, while former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, mused on the radio about Mamdani in City Hall during "another 9/11." The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding's new toolkit on countering Islamophobia cites an analysis of more than 35,000 posts on X targeting Mamdani, with an estimated reach of 1.5 billion people. Seventy-two percent framed him as an extremist or terrorist.

In New Jersey's 12th Congressional District, which includes Princeton, Democratic candidate Dr. Adam Hamawy is a retired Army combat surgeon who once saved Senator Tammy Duckworth's life after she was wounded when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq. Dr. Hamawy was called a "radical extremist" by a Democratic primary rival over testimony he was subpoenaed to give as a witness in a trial three decades ago.

In Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has been called a "jihadist" by President Trump himself, who has taken to calling him "Muhammad," and Republicans are making false allegations about his associations with terrorist groups.

Here is the reason for hope: All three won their primaries, and Mamdani went on to become New York's first Muslim mayor. American voters are growing more sophisticated at spotting Islamophobia and are more willing to reject it.

But winning does not erase the toll. ISPU's research finds that 63% of American Muslims reported religious discrimination in the past year. Its Islamophobia Index, which measures how strongly the public endorses anti-Muslim stereotypes, jumped from 25 in 2022 to 33 in 2025. After the 2024 election, Muslims were the faith group most likely to fear for their personal safety.

Every Muslim candidate carries that weight onto the campaign trail, and the CSRR report warns that this hostility discourages other Muslims from running at all. Living under constant accusation is grueling.

What stuns me most is who is doing the accusing. Islamophobia is not a Republican monopoly. Some self-styled centrists in the Democratic Party reach for the same smears, and for the same reason: they feel threatened by the rise of progressive Muslims who are winning. There is nothing moderate about recycling the far right’s oldest slander. When a so-called centrist calls a Muslim candidate an extremist, they are borrowing a right-wing script and selling it as common sense.

Voters are tired of elected officials who answer to wealthy donors, corporate special interests, and foreign governments instead of ordinary people and our most vulnerable communities. Progressive Muslim candidates are winning because they speak to that frustration: Hamawy on Medicare for All and medical debt, El-Sayed on rejecting corporate influence, and Mamdani on affordability. Rather than shift their allegiance back to everyday voters, some entrenched politicians would rather cast suspicion on the people beating them. It is a game of thrones, played with our names.

Voters are tired of elected officials who answer to wealthy donors, corporate special interests, and foreign governments instead of ordinary people and our most vulnerable communities.

This is not a new American fight. In 1869, Frederick Douglass argued that the nation’s strength lay in being a “composite nation,” open to people of every race and creed. In 1915, Louis Brandeis, who would soon become the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, told an audience at Boston’s Faneuil Hall:

Let us not forget that many a poor immigrant comes to us from distant lands, ignorant of our language, strange in tattered clothes and with jarring manners, who is already truly American in this most important sense; who has long shared our ideals and who, oppressed and persecuted abroad, has yearned for our land of liberty and for the opportunity of aiding in the realization of its aims.

Douglass and Brandeis believed American ideals should reach beyond ethnicity, skin color, or religion. The question before us is whether America will fulfill the aspiration they championed, or fall back on the creed of the Confederacy and the defenders of Jim Crow. The nativists and bigots never went away. They simply found new targets until the country was roused to fight for its ideals. Now is the time to recognize that this collective courage is needed again.

There are concrete ways to end this bigotry. CSRR calls for state and federal task forces on Islamophobia, modeled on those confronting antisemitism, and for law enforcement training to protect Muslim candidates and officials, who are frequent targets of threats. ISPU urges civic groups to train, equip, support, and protect Muslims who run for office. It also poses a question every leader should answer honestly: Do you use the words "radical" and "extremist" only when you talk about Muslims?

But the most immediate solution doesn't require a task force. We need our friends, neighbors, and allies to call out Islamophobia whenever they see it. We especially need elected officials at every level, from school boards to Congress, to speak up when a Muslim candidate or colleague is targeted, no matter which party the attack comes from. When allies stay silent, these smears look acceptable. When a colleague pushes back publicly, voters learn that these attacks are out of bounds.

Voters can keep doing what they did last year and this year: judge candidates and elected officials by our records. But let us be honest about what is under attack. It is not only our names. It is our faith. The smears insist that a devout Muslim cannot also be a faithful public servant. The opposite is true. My faith teaches that every person carries dignity, that justice must be upheld even when it costs us, and that a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable. Those values are why so many of us run: to fight for health care, fair wages, good schools, and equal protection for every neighbor. Our faith is not a threat to American democracy. It is the reason we show up to serve.

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• Alex Pretti’s parents slam the US government for staying silent and misleading them about the investigation into their son’s fatal shooting by immigration agents in Minneapolis last January. Michael and Susan Pretti say officials ignore their questions, refuse to share basic facts, and shield the agents who fired at least 10 bullets into the 37-year-old nurse’s back. Their lawyer says the Justice Department’s stonewalling violates the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota and the Justice Department still have not answered the family’s letter or disclosed the shooters’ names. Homeland Security still stands by its early claim that Pretti planned to massacre law enforcement. The parents call the response abnormal and unjust.

Jamarl is out today on vacation. Filling in is Jeff Dornik, the founder and CEO of Pickax, a free-speech social media platform. He co-founded Freedom First Network, hosts The Jeff Dornik Show, and writes on politics, culture, censorship, and technology. He has co-authored books and speaks at conservative events.

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

Today we also discuss:

• Exit polls show Israel’s election in a tight race as Eisenkot’s bloc ties Netanyahu’s. Neither side grabs a majority. Arab parties surge to record gains while vote counting continues. Middle East nations expect little change from Israel.

• ICE holds a mentally ill US citizen in an Indiana prison for nearly a year and pushes to deport him to Jamaica. Records and family prove he was born in Florida, yet he insists otherwise. Meanwhile, a jury convicts Halima Salman of taking ISIS weapons training after her father brought her to Syria as a teen and married her to a fighter. She faces up to 10 years in prison.

• RFK Jr. claims Arab Muslims produce no prize-worthy science or literature and blames the Muslim Brotherhood. The comments spark sharp backlash as he campaigns for GOP candidates in Michigan.

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The post Government Ghosts Family of ICE Murder Victim | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

On a glowing September day in Vermont, most people were working or taking a walk in the woods or raking leaves or just being thankful for the beauty. Instead, seven faith leaders blocked the entrance to Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center with their bodies.

Protesting wanton and intentional cruelty all around the country, the seven prayed, sang, and spoke about how their beliefs—Methodist, Congregational, Unitarian, Episcopal, and Quaker—compelled them to obstruct access to the Targeting Center which launches many ICE raids. The seven stood up and witnessed to the universal principles that all major world religions teach us: Do no harm, love your neighbor, care for the needy, and welcome the stranger in our midst. They read the names of some who died in ICE custody, or were murdered by agents. For these actions they were arrested, carried off, and booked, then prosecuted and arraigned in late October.

The leaders’ civil disobedience action spotlights the fact that, as some protesters put it, “ICE violence begins in Vermont.” Many ICE raids start in Williston, where 2 of the 3 national ICE Targeting Operations Division Centers are lodged in unmarked buildings. In the inconspicuous White Cap mini-mall surrounded by pine trees, the Targeting Center where the leaders protested sits next to a dentist, a medical imaging office, a café, and the local newspaper’s circulation staff. As if the ICE center were just one more office. But its job is surveillance of social media and multiple databases to help ICE target which individuals to pursue everywhere, leading to thousands of people being hunted down and whisked away, sometimes injured or even killed. In the second Trump administration, more than 600,000 have been detained.

“We are not the first of the people arrested there and we will not be the last. We will continue as long as it takes to stop ICE for good.”

After the faith leaders’ blockade, more people rallied, and October began with a full Week of Action to expose and protest the ICE presence in Williston, a former Abenaki hunting ground which became a dairy and agricultural center, then urban sprawl. The first of the week’s actions was a nationally publicized funeral for those who have been murdered or died in ICE custody, and the week culminated in a peaceful protest on the front porch of the ICE Law Enforcement Resource Center (the second Center in Williston). The festive scene was set with a floral couch, a rug, music, and song—plus lots of chalked admonitions on the building and driveway like, “You don’t have to erase this,” and handwritten notes taped to the windows.

Rather than confront the peaceful protesters, ICE withdrew; the word was that many local personnel had been sent home for the week. Only two local police kept a respectful distance in the almost empty parking lot, appearing briefly and politely when a camera had been covered up. It was a far cry from the debacle of March 12, when ICE officials insisted on precipitating a massive confrontation involving their own officers plus dozens of state troopers and local police—to pursue three people for whom they didn’t have a warrant, who were ultimately released.

Last week, the focus was back on the faith leaders, who were arraigned in Vermont Superior Court. The State Police (who arrested them) bypassed the local prosecutor Sarah George, who earlier said she has better things to do with taxpayer dollars than prosecute people who are peacefully protesting ICE. At that time, the Democratic State Attorney General, Charity Clark, disagreed, even though she herself has engaged in public protest at times, including at ICE. She feels that she cannot pick and choose whom to prosecute for political reasons. Her decision to go after a number of anti-ICE activists has riled up some of her supporters, particularly those who applaud her relentless pursuit of more than 70 lawsuits against Trump.

The faith leaders’ arraignment was much lower key than the prominent cases in nearby Federal District Court (such as those of Rumeysa Ozturk, Kseniia Petrova, and Mohsen Mahdawi). Spectators could even keep our phones and car keys. Outside the courtroom, a young Black man in dreads wearing a T-shirt with a clenched fist told me and a couple of men in clerical garb which door was ours. The benches inside were less comfy than the feds’, but the greater closeness to Judge Colin Owyang made up for it. Soon the court was packed with supporters for six women and one man: a United Methodist minister, two United Church of Christ ministers, an Episcopal priest and the archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, a Quaker leader, and a Unitarian Universalist minister (in alphabetical order Catherine Bock, 78; Jessica Derise, 54; Rebecca Girrell, 47; Elizabeth Gleich, 36; Karen Johnston, 58; Earl Kooperkamp, 69; and Susan McMillan, 65). People were chuckling and chatting as they rarely do in the more formal federal court.

The faith leaders were called on one by one, each pleading not guilty. The rulings were uniform. The leaders were not to visit the ICE facility except in the context of their “lawful pastoral duties.” They were to avoid contact with the property manager. They were not to discuss the case among themselves except with a written joint defense agreement (which they executed before leaving the courthouse).

One moment of humor occurred when the visibly pregnant Rev. Gleich appeared. After the judge stated the followup court date, he said “subject to contingencies” with a smile.

“If I’m actively giving birth, I won’t be here,” said the Rev. Gleich with a sparkle in her voice.

“In that case,” said the prosecutor, “the state would not seek a warrant.”

Coming out of the courthouse, a huge “ICE OUT OF WHITE CAP” sign greeted us across the street, as well as numerous supporters. I was especially moved to see the 90-year-old daughter of a Dutch resister to the Nazis, an indefatigable presence for democracy all her adult life. When the faith leaders emerged with their noted human rights attorney Robert Appel, there was a huge cheer. They spoke sequentially to reinforce their message, each in a strong, bold voice accustomed to a pulpit. They said that the rulings represented an “escalation of judicial tactics” versus the fewer conditions meted out to earlier protesters.

Their words were powerful: “Join us in standing with our friends and neighbors against the lawlessness of ICE.”

“Violating human and civil rights is the real crime which must be stopped.”

Bringing people to court on these minor charges “is a poor use of resources and an ineffective scare tactic.”

“We will not be deterred. We will continue to sit and stand and kneel and pray.”

They emphasized the importance of this particular Targeting Center in terrorizing communities and persecuting people with no criminal history: “We are not the first of the people arrested there and we will not be the last. We will continue as long as it takes to stop ICE for good.”

To be continued, as the days darken and winter sets in. And if the last few months are any indication, they will be far from alone.

On Long Island there are four contested races for the House of Representatives. Two are currently held by Democrats and two by Republicans. The outcome on Long Island could well determine which party has a majority in the House. If you vote Republican for the Senate and House of Representatives, you are voting against congressional roadblocks on Trump.

If you vote Republican this is the kind of country you are voting for.

In a campaign speech in Port Huron, Michigan, Donald Trump accused the Democratic nominee for Senate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of being a terrorist and claimed that if El-Sayed and the Democrats win, “they will open the floodgates and invite hordes of jihadis to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.” Trump also told American Jews that “any Jewish person that supports this guy should be ashamed of themselves.”

Meanwhile the Trump crime family and its allies are using the United States government to enrich themselves, often betraying the interests of the country.

In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech billionaire Republican candidate for governor, ran a campaign ad attacking Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton featuring Acton’s estranged mother calling her a liar. Acton has had no contact with her mother since she was 12 years old and was raped by her stepfather who fled the state to avoid prosecution. Acton’s mother abandoned her children and left the state with him. Current Republican Gov. Mike DeWine described the ad as “deeply, deeply troubling” and called on Ramaswamy to take down the ad, but he refused. Donald Trump accused politicians who condemn the ad of whining, said he would run an ad like that, and advised Ramaswamy to stick with it. No Long Island Republican officeholders or candidates, including Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman who is running for governor, has publicly condemned Ramaswamy or the ad.

On the same day that Trump Justice Department Homeland Security agents invaded the Washington DC home of congressional Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), at a rally in Ohio, Trump insulted Somali immigrants, calling them “low-IQ people” and claiming they “don’t have pants to wear.” Trump also celebrated removing protected status from thousands of Haitians who sought refuge in the United States.

Meanwhile the Trump crime family and its allies are using the United States government to enrich themselves, often betraying the interests of the country. The website Center for American Progress has an update counter showing Trump and sons raking in almost $3 billion from shady deals, including almost $2.5 billion from cryptocurrency. The family has profited from new foreign luxury real estate and golf developments; Ivanka Trump’s husband’s investment firm negotiated a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia; Melania Trump received a $40 million payout from Amazon for a documentary project; the president secured an immunity deal from the Internal Revenue Service for past due taxes; and the president claims as his own a $400 million Boeing 747 jet “gifted” by Qatar to the United States

In 2022 Eric, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Donald Trump were sued by New York State for fraud.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington recently to meet with President Donald Trump, discussions over Artificial Intelligence were hotly anticipated as an urgent matter of national relations, as it was this past May during the previous US-China summit. Disappointingly, little of substance has come of this meeting as well, despite fresh worries over AI doomsday scenarios from industry insiders, and pleas for both regulation and international cooperation.

Once again, instead of hashing out guardrails to contain a fever-pitched “AI arms race,” the discussion revolved primarily around trade and resources. This discouraging result comes amid an atmosphere in the US in which tech CEOs and politicians claim that China winning the “race” would spell the end of Western civilization. Given the proclaimed stakes, an apparent lack of substantial AI discussion during the summit appears either as baffling incompetence, or an indication that the “arms race” threat may not be what it appears.

In reality, mounting evidence seems to indicate that the “China threat” is nothing more than a performative manipulation, wielded by tech CEOs and White House officials to justify their deeply unpopular AI program. The real threat, in Americans’ eyes, seems to be coming from the inside, as huge majorities remain concerned over data centers encroaching on their communities, AI-driven job loss, and other harms borne from the unregulated technology.

Deeply Unpopular AI Needs Justification

Pew Research reported in March of this year that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI use in daily life. Gallup polling found in the spring that 71% of Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers. It is only earners of $200,000 or more, according to a Quinnipiac poll, who consider AI in daily life as more good than bad. Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found last week that 3 out of 4 Americans feel that AI companies are not doing enough to ensure that their products do not inflict serious harm on society. Meanwhile, Americans are watching as companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce lay off thousands of employees, arguing that AI can step in, contributing to 80% of Americans saying they want the government to fund workforce transition programs, according to a May Harris poll.

In spite of the disturbing World Cup commercials and the endless billboards, the AI industry has a trillion-dollar messaging problem that may cast it into the “death valley” of start-ups, where profitability doesn’t arrive in time to make up for balking venture capital.

The “China threat” is a handy solution.

Business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.

This “threat” builds on a long history of Sinophobia in America, from “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, to anti-immigrant lynching, and since 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it has been combined with Red Scare hysteria. China’s economic rise in the past 50 years has come with enhanced military potential in the region, as it brought Hong Kong to heel, and began projecting power in the South China Sea and beyond. Some analysts believe we are already in a “New Cold War.”

Today, anti-Beijing rhetoric is a rare area of bipartisan agreement in Washington. And while some analysts believe that the US and China are running qualitatively different “AI races,” business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.

China’s “Existential Threat” to Democracy

Businessman and television personality, Kevin O’Leary, who is facing strong opposition from residents of Box Elder County, Utah, where he plans to build a 9 gigawatt data center, proclaimed on a CNN panel, “If you want China to lead, take over… our democracy, our free speech, how we live with technology, just stop building data centers, it’s that simple.”

Equally breathless rhetoric from Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir referred to China’s technology landscape as a “Borg-like thing that’s controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” Alex Karp of Palantir also asserted the urgency of his own corporation being given greater leeway to operate in spite of concerns about privacy rights: “So when people are worried about surveillance, of course, there are huge dangers there, but you know, you will have far fewer rights if America’s not in the lead.”

The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.

This rhetoric is also the official stance of Washington. In the Trump White House’s “AI Action Plan,” titled “Winning the Race,” the authors are explicit: “As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” This type of language is evocative of the Manhattan Project in World War II, and the space race during the Cold War.

But as in those equally propagandized endeavors, the existential threat posed by Chinese AI supremacy is unclear. Advances in AI-driven operations have increased the capabilities of militaries to generate and rapidly attack targets, but visions of autonomous robotic warfare remain far away. The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.

Rhetoric of the “Race” Will Have Consequences

It is irresponsible and dangerous to use anti-China “AI arms race” rhetoric. During Trump’s last term, his anti-China narratives attempting to cover up the administration’s Covid-19 blunders had devastating impacts as violence increased against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, and the “China Initiative” chilled intellectual exchanges and disrupted lives. Similar rhetoric during the Cold War led to persecution of academics, activists, and professionals during McCarthy’s Red Scare. If this Trump administration doubled down on the anti-China narrative, we may see similar repression and hate foment again—tactics clearly already in the administration’s wheelhouse.

Worryingly, it does not appear that the “AI Arms Race” will slow down any time soon. Signs are emerging that increasingly powerful AI systems are frightening both Washington and Beijing in their potential to disrupt the global economy, incentivizing the two to consider some high-level guardrails. But even with the recent PR frenzy surrounding Jacob Coxon’s “whistleblowing” against Anthropic’s lack of safety considerations, CEOs and politicians do not seem to be backing down from using China as a spur in the race—arguing to instead balance beating China with skirting AI-induced doom.

As the US economy becomes increasingly supported by AI promises and projections, a collapse of the “bubble” may even be accompanied by increased anti-China rhetoric as justification for Silicon Valley’s need for a bailout.

We must incorporate critique of this narrative into the popular resistance against AI; in the movements against data centers, AI encroachment into education, IP theft, and more.

It’s a tradition that goes back at least to the Vietnam War: when the United States finally admits it’s losing a war, it calls for peace talks but, in order to try to get a better position at the negotiating table, ramps up the killing machine right beforehand. It’s not fooling anyone and it only makes the adversaries angry, but they’re trying the same thing in Iran.

The post Stop the War; Fight More appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva lost the first round of the Brazilian election and fell behind in the polls, I thought he would lose the election. So, the fact that he won is a stunning comeback. It took the three weeks between the two elections, hundreds of hours of street and online mobilization by Lula’s Army of Supporters, to defeat the conservative candidate, Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro. Another member of the Bolsonaro family, of course!

Lula’s winning magic was helped by a video. It’s a clip between the two men from their debate that rightfully deserves to be immortalized. In it, Bolsonaro asks him: “Why are 73% of the prisoners voting for you?” And the wise Lula answers: “I want 100% of the prisoners’ votes. Including your dad’s vote!” The people in the studio laughed. This exchange made Brazilian society laugh too, wake up, and think, after seeing a dynamic performance by Lula on live TV. It was the opposite of former US President Joe Biden in that infamous debate.

Bolsonaro (son of the ex-president Jair Bolsonaro who is imprisoned), who had pledged to join President Donald Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” security and political initiative, is the big loser. Flávio reportedly fled Brazil after losing. Nobody has to be a genius to advise him: “Flávio, you lost. Concede with dignity. Don't follow Trump's infamous playbook. Show some grace in defeat.” But Bolsonaro losing is great news not only for the people of Brazil, but also for the flora and fauna of the Amazon rainforest.

Thus, Lula, who is a former worker, a unionist, and a pragmatic politician, prevents the return to power of the far-right with the Bolsonaros.

Thus, Lula wins a fourth term as Brazilian president, after a dramatic run-off. The crucial matter is that Lula, alone, defeated Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, and Flávio Bolsonaro together. After all, defeated are those who stop fighting! Musk said Brazil's presidential election results do not “add up.” Relax, Mr. Trillionaire! Next to Lula, the Amazon rainforest won big time, ensuring it will not become a place for giant companies worth billions who want to mine for diamonds, gold, and extract petrol from its lands. And Anne Applebaum wrote in an X post: “In one day, two politicians—Bolsonaro in Brazil and Vucic in Serbia—with ties to Trump and his family have lost surprise elections, thanks to high turnout. The rise of the international far-right is not inevitable.”

Lula has four fingers on his left hand! The one finger that's missing, he lost at 17 years old when he was working as a metalworker and a mechanical lathe crushed his pinky finger. As he has said, “I arrived at three in the morning [at the hospital] smelling like work overalls, smelling like grease” and he looked so bad that the doctor didn’t bother to save his finger. In his eyes, that was the result of poverty.

During his years in power, Lula has supported democratic institutions and made important progress on protecting the forest—there is a web of laws protecting the Amazon now–and local communities who depend on it for their survival, but of course, for a few analysts, he had a mixed record in other areas. The economy has problems, but the same happens in countries like Germany and Japan.

Someone must acknowledge that deforestation has dropped drastically under Lula’s government, which has “set a target of completely halting illegal deforestation by 2030.” It reactivated the Amazon Fund, which is a mechanism backed by countries like Norway to finance conservation and monitoring, and stepped up enforcement through satellite imagery and policing. Lula also launched on November 6, 2025 the Tropical Forests Forever Facility to help developing nations to keep their forests intact.

The win in Brazil, the win in Serbia, the probable win in Israel against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s disastrous far-right coalition, and the upcoming midterms in the US, which will also test control of Congress, show that the power belongs to the people. That’s democracy in other words, and the people must have the final say.

Thus, Lula, who is a former worker, a unionist, and a pragmatic politician, prevents the return to power of the far-right with the Bolsonaros. So, this is a great result not only for the workers and democracy, but also for the giant Amazon lung. An electoral win for all the species that have lived there for thousands of years! Money is not above everything as capitalism’s big corporations teach, while in the end, the poor get crumbs if they’re lucky. The “pro-worker” left, headed by Lula, may have its own problems, but it is far better for society and the environment. The right thinks mainly of the plutocrats and the big profits; it leaves barbarism, which is a society in ruins.

The tireless Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said about Lula’s victory: “He will continue to fight for Brazilian workers and democracy over the next four years.” All the progressives and their grassroots movements around the world breathed the fresh air of the Amazon again.

I’ve read The New York Times since I was a teenager. It was once a way to keep up on the news. It’s now a daily way to experience a living nightmare of a world.

I’m thinking, of course, of Donald Trump’s world—although it could be Vladimir Putin’s, too—and that’s just to start down an ever-lengthening grim list. This, in all honesty, is not the world that anyone should want to be on at a time when humanity has discovered at least two ways of doing this planet in, the slow-motion version known as climate change and the (more or less) instantaneous version of nuclear war. And in this strange world of ours, who honestly knows what Artificial Intelligence, or AI, might be able to do when it comes to creating a potential third pathway to ultimate destruction? (Not this old man, that’s for sure.)

Consider it strange, given that nuclear weapons are clearly also doomsday ones, that, in the 80-plus years since the US dropped two of them on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with devastating effect, including the deaths of more than 200,000 people (almost 40,000 of them believed to have been children), nine countries have come to possess far more devastating versions of just such weaponry. It’s now estimated that there are more than 12,000 nuclear weapons on this planet, with the US and Russia each believed to possess more than 5,000. That’s enough, of course, to destroy any number of planets, with most of those weapons six to 50 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Worse yet, their cumulative numbers only continue to grow in this world of ours, and they are ever more devastatingly powerful.

Can you explain to me what kind of creatures would plan for, pour funding into, and work to create anything-but-obvious or easy-to-produce ways of bringing about their own extermination, not to speak of that of all life around them?

Given our history over all these centuries (and the global hellscapes we’ve already created), what could possibly go wrong? Count on this (if you’re still counting): In the near future, the number of countries in possession of such weaponry will undoubtedly only rise again.

Once upon a time, end-of-the-world scenarios were nightmarish fantasies of fiction, the sort of thing that novelists like George Orwell or Aldous Huxley came up with and that I read with fascination in my youth.

Now, who needs a dystopian novel when, just sitting down each morning (or evening) to read the Times, as I still do (one day late, of course, since I read the paper version, which says plenty about this old man), has a strangely end-of-world feeling to it? After all, we humans have come up with at least a second (slow-motion) way to do in ourselves and every other living thing on this planet that has gained the all too mild label “climate change.” Why it’s not “climate devastation,” “climate destruction,” “climate catastrophe,” or something even worse? Change, really? Gee, climate mutation doesn’t sound so bad either, does it?

In mid-October, as I was starting this piece, I went out on my daily early morning walk in New York City, wearing just khakis, a long-sleeved shirt, and a light jacket. By 8:30 am, I had already tied my jacket around my waist and rolled up my shirt sleeves—and I still felt slightly uncomfortable.

I know, I know, any passingly hot day or even a warm few weeks doesn’t truly prove a thing. Still, only recently, record highs were “forecast to stretch all across the central and eastern United States, with temperatures running about 20°F above average, according to Weather.com meteorologist Rob Shackelford.”

In addition, the British medical magazine The Lancet‘s Commission on 21st Century Global Threats recently offered this apocalyptic scenario (as reported by The Guardian): “’Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years,’ the report said, adding that, while their likelihood remained low, they had the potential to end humanity in the case of nuclear conflict by injecting enough particles into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and cause famine, or via AI-created biological weapons.”

And as Jeet Heer recently pointed out at The Nation magazine, “AI is clearly the most dangerous technology that humankind has developed since nuclear weapons, and our current lack of oversight for it is a travesty.”

Am I surprised? Not really... sigh...

Living in a Dystopian Novel of a World

In truth, I’m already too damn old to genuinely grasp that third possibility for ultimate destruction, involving AI—though anything AI-related makes me instantaneously anxious as hell. Though it’s not possible anymore to avoid AI if you’re simply looking for something online, I still do my damnedest (so to speak) to avoid it otherwise, since I prefer to be on a planet where the best and worst things in life aren’t caused by some almost unimaginable computer-created irreality—or do I mean surreality, since this world seems (thank you Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin!) ever more surreal in all too many ways?

Of course, here’s the truly strange thing: Can you explain to me what kind of creatures would plan for, pour funding into, and work to create anything-but-obvious or easy-to-produce ways of bringing about their own extermination, not to speak of that of all life around them?

I know, I know, that first way of doing us all in, atomic weaponry, still passes for war. But explain to me, what a country could possibly win with more than 5,000 nuclear weapons? Honestly, how mad can you be to purposely create ever more world-ending weaponry to—yes!—(theoretically) defend yourself?

In truth, if this heavily nuclear-armed world of ours and leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin weren’t our reality, this piece would be the most unbelievable kind of dystopian fiction around.

And then, of course, we humans put in power characters like Donald Trump, who, at the United Nations this September, implicitly threatened to use such weaponry to “annihilate” Iran, or Vladimir Putin, who has actually threatened to use nuclear weapons in any future conflict with other European powers that might develop out of his war on Ukraine. Ask yourself, would you really choose to put either of their trigger fingers on the American or Russian nuclear arsenals?

And how much madder do you have to be, as president of the United States (no less), than to put so much of your extra energy into promoting anything that will burn down (or do I mean burn up) this planet of ours? That, of course, is what “our” president is now doing when it comes to the full-scale promotion of the ever greater use of oil, coal, and natural gas. And, of course, he not only continues to essentially deny that climate change is even happening, but at the UN last year called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” Consider him nothing short of a promoter (of course, who doesn’t know that he’s a promoter?) of a world-ending reality—or do I mean surreality?

Honestly, I’d like to bring George Orwell and Aldous Huxley back from the dead so many years later, because I’d love to read Orwell’s next novel: 2030 or Huxley’s Brave New Trump (or, for that matter, Brave New Putin). And give me some credit here, since I haven’t even bothered you with the possibility that India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed, could someday engage in a globally devastating “limited” nuclear war, creating what’s known as a “nuclear winter” on this planet that might kill not just Indians and Pakistanis but billions of the rest of us.

In truth, if this heavily nuclear-armed world of ours and leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin weren’t our reality, this piece would be the most unbelievable kind of dystopian fiction around. And yet, keep in mind that, at this very moment, given climate change, we’re already experiencing a slow-motion version of nuclear-style disaster on this planet of ours. Hopefully, I’m (mis)reading the times (as well as the Times) when it comes to our future nuclear peril. Unfortunately, when it comes to the slow-motion version of nuclear war, which we call climate change and the overheating of this planet of ours, a distinctly dystopian future is already well underway.

“Nothing is inevitable but everything is possible.” My friend and comrade once said that in reference to the vibrant movement moment of the Black Lives Matter uprisings after the heinous Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

These words have been a mantra for me since I read them. Like many of you, I’m terrified of the state of the world and my country's role in its suffering. When I consume the news, take a tally of the rights our people have lost, and hold the memory of those who are no longer here, I am at times resigned to believe that “it’s over” and that “nothing matters.” When the onslaught is constant, giving up becomes alluring.

Hope is a necessary and useful tool for our social movements in the struggle against authoritarianism. My attempt here is to share my perspective on possibility and the role it plays in tumultuous times like these.

Winning this election means stopping authoritarian consolidation within our government, which clears the way for defeating the MAGA movement for a second time in the 2028 presidential election.

Authoritarianism always tries to abolish memory—capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, evangelical Christian, fascist imperialists want us to be trapped in their now. As if their now is inevitable. Authoritarianism wants us to believe that only one thing is happening.

While destruction and great loss has occurred in President Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, it does not mean that it is inevitable that it will continue to occur in perpetuity. Since the colonists first came to this land, horror has followed. And so have miraculous acts of resistance, political gains, and life-altering wins. That’s because human beings chose resistance and strategy in the face of oppression. Abolitionist movements of the past engaged in highly sophisticated, multi-century, strategic political struggle to free enslaved Black people from bondage (movements composed of enslaved people and abolitionists like Fredrick Douglas). In hindsight, people over and over again made the conscious choice to engage in the long arc of protracted struggle.

Nothing; not a moment, administration, movement, law, nor empire lasts forever, nor is any of it inevitable. Or more relevant to the point I’m trying to make, nothing is one thing constantly and always. Change will occur. History is never one note. There are variations over time and in those variations are the inspirations for interventions where dominant ideas are changed. These changes, or fluctuations and fissures, are opportunities of possibility to exploit to use against our enemy.

Capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, evangelical Christian, fascist imperialists want us afraid and isolated. We are facing a multi-pronged attack. MAGA and billionaire oligarchs are launching attacks in a variety of ways. Using electoral intimidation and rigging, tech over-dependence and surveillance, and right-wing takeovers of media through monopolization, to name a few. Billions of dollars are being spent to keep us apart and to internalize a false narrative: “It’s over,” “Nothing matters."

This false narrative of the inevitable has begun to make its way into some contemporary American movies. Movies like Don’t Look Up, A House of Dynamite, and Bugonia. All were released within a few years of one another, the latter two came out the same year (2025). Each of these movies come to similar fatalistic conclusions: Doom is inevitable.

This is not true, but it does serve a strategic purpose. This fatalistic view is both a real felt experience of perceived reality and a constructed reality, created by fascists and tech oligarchs. David Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery into Skydance Media to form the far-right Skydance Corporation is Trump’s fascist administration controlling the narrative (literally by having the reins to CNN, TikTok, HBO, and movie studios like Warner Bros.) to attempt to further sow disillusionment toward sociopolitical change, hopelessness, and a belief that MAGA is invulnerable.

I am not arguing a promise. “Change” and "possibility” are neutral. Neither is inherently good for our social movements or means sure defeat for the opposition. Change and possibility do not mean that things will get better tomorrow or that things will only get worse forever. Octavia Butler teaches us through her writing that the only lasting truth is change. This onslaught will end, the impact we’re being hit with by this administration will stop. Though the consequences of those blows will linger. As a result of this administration's actions, suffering will continue, people will continue to die. Whether that lasts a few years or many decades, at least in part, is dependent upon what our social movements do when an opportunity presents itself to strike our own blow(s). I see these midterm elections as one of those opportunities. Elections are strategic interventions. Winning this election means stopping authoritarian consolidation within our government, which clears the way for defeating the MAGA movement for a second time in the 2028 presidential election.

A far-right authoritarian political movement (MAGA) is controlling the government. In other words, the United States has a fascist federal government. Democrats and Working Families Party candidates winning a majority in the House and Senate will shorten the reach of this fascist administration. That matters. Like it mattered for Black people not to be considered three-fifths of a human in the Constitution, like it mattered when Roe v. Wade was won, and how having political power matters to ensure a sitting congressperson’s house isn’t raided. The MAGA movement is positioning itself toward one-party, minority rule that can't be challenged through democratic channels (that is fascism). Disenfranchising voters serves authoritarianism. Losing the midterm elections serves the strategy of our enemy.

Our social movements are tasked with quelling the further consolidation of power of this authoritarian regime.

Y’all, our social movements need to win majorities in the US House and Senate to slow the rise of fascist law. Races like Angie Nixon in Florida, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Will Lawrence in Michigan, and Justin Pearson in Tennessee are so important for building a line of defense to save our lives.

Fascism is here. The position we find ourselves in isn’t one that sets us up for immediate liberation. The fight of the rest of this decade is to defang authoritarianism.

There is a difference between forever and experiencing the current reality. History tells us that forever does not exist in the political sphere. We are swimming in the waters of this decade's dialectics, wading in the multiple truths of our given moment in time. Contradictions can be generative if strategy leads the decisions of our social movements when opportunities present themselves.

Some things are inevitable. If my phone slips out of my hand it will fall. Gravity ensures that. Fascism is a powerful force, but it is not gravity.

I grew up believing that fidelity to language is fidelity to truth. Scripture taught me that truth is a form of prayer and that naming is part of justice. Then I learned how language is trained to look away. In the American conversation about the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza and Palestine, words are rinsed until they shine with neutrality, while the bodies they describe grow dim. The result is a strange theology of news, where grief must pass an examination before it is shared, and where power writes the glossary.

In the weeks after October 7, anchors found an ease of speech they rarely grant Palestinians. Faces from southern Israel filled our screens—named and mourned. By mid-October, Israel had killed thousands in Gaza, many of them children. The camera kept its distance. The word that leapt to the teleprompter was caution. Images blurred and numbers hedged, context was treated as suspicion rather than care.

The grief of one people became a national ceremony; the grief of another, a footnote.

I want a common speech that lets readers feel that a child pulled from rubble requires no preface.

If language is a vessel for conscience, these choices matter. A hospital becomes a “compound,” bombardment becomes an “operation,” a family under rubble becomes “collateral.” Such phrasing allows atrocity to appear as policy, and policy to pass as inevitability. We are told this is balance, when in reality it scolds both the arsonist and the burning house.

As the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz once observed, “In the typical Western two men fight desperately for the possession of a gun that has been thrown to the ground: whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies. In ordinary life, the struggle is not for guns but for words; whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim.” The stakes of language decide whose grief is recognized and whose life is made expendable.

What we call balance often conceals allegiance. The United States supplies weapons, funding, diplomatic cover, and ideological shelter to Israel. Washington fast-tracks munitions while vetoing cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations, demanding the press describe the result as a “cycle.” Institutions obey through habits as much as manufactured consent because the script is already written.

Editors learn which nouns invite trouble. Reporters learn which verbs are preferred. Freelancers learn the cost of clarity.

The money is not incidental. Contracts enrich the usual firms as careers rise in their shadow. The casualties are an afterthought. The ledger sits backstage, while the performance onstage goes by the name of neutrality. The empire supplies language and weapons, while it is language that returns the favor by laundering intent.

Every culture keeps a book of sorrows. In ours, some sorrows earn public sympathy more readily than others. When a Palestinian journalist is killed, headlines bend into the passive voice, and the subject disappears. When a Palestinian American is beaten at a checkpoint or murdered, procedure replaces justice. Families who bury their children must clear a test of civility, then defend the right to weep without a preface.

To mourn openly is treated as a provocation. To ask for equal mourning is to be accused of provocation.

This is how imperial culture works. If Palestinian grief is marginalized, policy can proceed. The audience is soothed by the idea that tragedy has no author, that rubble is a natural event, and that history began yesterday. In such a world, the right dead receive sympathy, while the living must demonstrate moderation.

If the prophets have any lesson for journalism, it is this: Speak without fear where the truth is plain. Refuse to wrap cruelty in fine phrases. Follow conscience where it burns, even when it threatens comfort.

We were told that social media would democratize speech. Instead, many Palestinians and their allies discovered another border regime. Posts vanish without explanation and archives dissolve, as certain words trigger shadow bans. Meanwhile, coordinated networks flood platforms with talking points until the algorithm mistakes noise for truth.

People adapt. They speak in code. They smuggle testimony through poetry. They post with patience. The work continues because memory continues. Forgetting is the most dangerous technology.

Before my essays, I wrote sanctioned paragraphs inside large institutions. I learned how official speech is constructed, and how clarity is stripped from a sentence . . . One is encouraged to prefer symmetry over accuracy.

The effect is spiritual and does violence to one’s soul. Conscience is taught to whisper. The room obeys, when it should sound an alarm.

Our grief must first earn a hearing; our dead are assigned numbers rather than names. Empires hold territory and vocabulary alike. As such, recovering our speech is part of recovering our dignity.

The phrase “U.S. imperialism” may sound antique, but the reality is current. It lives in supply chains, military aid, diplomatic vetoes, and the expectation that our media will avoid language that might complicate partnership. It governs which deaths are described and which are rendered abstract. It shapes curriculum, philanthropy, and the scope of respectable debate. Above all, it trains the public to treat Palestinian life as a question, not a fact.

Imperial culture does not announce its arrival with banners. It moves through careful renaming. It borrows the aura of reason while pruning history. It requests deference in the name of complexity, and it rewards those who provide it with access.

Say occupation where there is an occupation. Say siege where there is a siege. If a journalist is killed, name the bullet and the chain of command. If a neighborhood is erased, name the policy that permits erasure. Then listen to survivors.

Such speech is an act of repair. It gives words back to the people who have lived under them. It restores trust between the public and the page.

There are journalists in the United States who begin from testimony rather than performance; who respect context over an alibi; who resist the symmetry that mistakes management for justice. Chris Hedges and Moustafa Bayoumi are among them. Their work does not flatter power. It honors the living by telling the truth about the dead. It remembers that language can also be occupied, and that freeing it is part of the same struggle.

To name is a civic and spiritual duty. Will you reflect? Will you testify? Will you remember the stranger? These are disciplines of attention. When we choose the word compound for a hospital, or incident for a massacre, we are answering those questions in the negative. When we choose accurate names, we widen the circle of humanity.

I do not write to police the language of others. I write to examine mine. I want a Western vocabulary that does not reduce Palestinians to a problem or political question in need of management. I want a common speech that lets readers feel that a child pulled from rubble requires no preface.

Empire teaches us to treat reality as talking points. Faith teaches the opposite. If the prophets have any lesson for journalism, it is this: Speak without fear where the truth is plain. Refuse to wrap cruelty in fine phrases. Follow conscience where it burns, even when it threatens comfort.

I offer these lines in the name of tenderness and law, memory and justice, which belong together when language is healthy. Violence is asymmetrical, just like truth. The world deserves words that admit as much.

Support journalists who center Palestinian testimony with patience and respect. Hold editors to their standards. Share stories that restore names and faces. Each act strengthens the possibility of a public language that does not betray the people who must live under it.

This is the work of citizens and of writers. It is the work of the heart.

Excerpted from If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness by Yahia Lababidi. Copyright © 2026 by Yahia Lababidi. All Rights Reserved.