This is an attempt to answer the question, "What’s going on in the world," in the broadest possible terms. To do so, two sides, or two viewpoints, must be clearly and fundamentally separated. This will necessarily eliminate our national political parochialism of Democrat-Republican, woke-antiwoke, even liberal-illiberal.

The premise here is that the answer to the posed question lies in finding a form of opposition that underlies the others, namely, progress-regress. We identify it politically as radical-reactionary, revolution-counterrevolution, leftwing-rightwing.

The rightwing worldview holds that things are the way they are because at all times society has tested itself and found alternatives to be lacking. The present arrangement—the current state of society—is regarded as the natural order of things. Change is therefore to be resisted.

By the time the European fascisms of the previous century were fully recognized, it was already to late.

The leftwing worldview holds that societies, however formed, are, in each state, imperfect. Therefore, the present arrangement merely reflects the biases that formed it—one part of society gaining at the expense of another—an injustice that must be changed.

We look around the world and see a lot of looking back, not much looking forward. This tells us the rightwing worldview is presently dominating. We see it throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Germany is a particular cause for concern because of the recent regional successes of the far-right AfD, built upon remnants of National Socialism, or Nazism.

At the limits is ultra-right Israel. It commits a genocide and says it was only a response. The other side started it. Started what? Nobody starts a genocide except its perpetrator. From a leftist’s perspective, October 7 was a prison break, and, yes, prison breaks can involve atrocities. A question to consider: Are prison breaks illegal? They are if the prison was legal, but the Palestine prison has been illegal since 1967. Take away the United States, and Israel’s high officials would be in front of the dock.

How did we get to living under fascism? And how did it happen so fast? For example and perspective, let’s go back a few years and note a time when great change failed to come, even when it was dangled before the large majorities that had been clamoring for it.

Before he was a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was a strong critic of our public healthcare system. He favored single-payer universal healthcare. Shortly after being elected, President Obama met with leaders from the insurance-hospital-pharmaceutical complex that makes up our healthcare industry. What was missing? No single-payer representatives were present.

A moment aside about that term, “single-payer”: It is an industry term of obfuscation, confusing Americans about how the system works. How many people really know what it means? Contrast it with the simpler term, “universal,” or the even simpler and more direct, “national.” National healthcare. We have it for older people. It’s called Medicare.

By now, though, President Obama had tempered the “change you can believe in.” His new idea was that if we were starting from scratch, single-payer would be the way to go, but since we are not starting from scratch, the change would be too “disruptive.”

Logical thinkers, scratch your heads. Every change is disruptive. That’s the point! To disrupt the old. Medicare started from scratch, and national healthcare could as well, if the will was there.

Back to our fascist life, and here’s where you have to give credit to President Donald Trump. The rightward drift of our country began decades ago, and not just under Ronald Reagan. John Mitchell, appointed Richard Nixon’s attorney general in 1969, at the time infamously said, “This country is going to go so far to the right you won’t recognize it.” Yeah, that’s right. Both parties have become business parties. Wall Street clearly won the class war.

Trump came into the present rightward drift and accelerated it to a full fascism. He did it just like that, and he didn’t start from scratch. He caught it in the middle. Tell people that you are returning the nation to its rightful place, and pretty soon masked federal police are shooting people in the streets. Blasting speedboats on the high seas out of existence because we can. Placing people in detention-concentration camps under horrible and humiliating conditions, with or without proof of criminality. The federal government was not drowned in a bathtub. It survived to mask itself, clothed in riot gear.

And, just recently, Trump threatened to “annihilate” Iran at the United Nations General Assembly, flaunting in the forum of its creation his own criminality for the “supreme international crime” enshrined in the UN Charter, Chapter VII: Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.

Billions of words have been written about Trump’s character deficiencies. Okay, we get it by now. Only it’s not about what he is. It’s what he’s doing, and what his heel-clicking order takers do for him. Trump is a political malignancy. In this case, it’s not cancer. It’s fascism, as far right as you can go. Like any malignancy, you remove it, and this removal can’t come too soon. Can you remove the fascism without removing Trump? You can, because he’s only a figurehead.

But first fascism must be recognized and called by name. Meaning in the headlines. Regarding it simply as a weakening of democracy, as so many are quick to concede, is a recipe for doing nothing. Waiting for the next election.

Some recent editorials from respected media have gone a little further, describing the situation as “alarming,” which fails to alarm on two counts. They don’t specifically state that we’re living under a fascism, and they don’t attempt to rally people for a remedy. Because it’s getting late.

By the time the European fascisms of the previous century were fully recognized, it was already to late. National pride is fascism’s selling point. Presently, we have entirely too many buyers.

Ever wonder why, more often than not, progressive candidates for public office lose to the most venal, corrupt, right-wing politicians? It is not just that progressives don’t have enough money. Too often, they run cookie-cutter campaigns—tediously monotone, without exciting and compelling activities. They also fail to draw a vivid contrast between their records and commitments to the public and those of Republican corporatists. Here are some suggestions that can be implemented quickly in the remaining three and a half weeks before Election Day, November 3.

1. The GOP is the Party of NO, NO, NO. As the party of big corporations, it has repeatedly resisted efforts to protect the public from corporate abuses. In the 19th century it opposed regulation of the railroads and the banks, resisted the organization of unions and women’s suffrage. In the 20th century, Republicans opposed the progressive agenda of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—among them were Social Security, the minimum wage, and unemployment compensation—and, in the 60s and 70s, the GOP fought to weaken or stop consumer, worker safety, and environmental health protections that have saved millions of lives.

Under President Donald Trump, the Republicans have gone crazy, leaving people unprotected and defenseless against the corporate crooks, the avaricious health insurers, the deadly polluters, and the freeloading corporate welfare kings. Trump has eradicated or starved the agencies protecting you as consumers and eliminated or weakened consumer regulations and the agencies responsible for enforcing them, including protections involving auto safety, fuel efficiency, and vehicle emissions, for example.

Bad as the past GOP has been, it would be much worse for people here and abroad in the next two years of Tyrant, Greedy, Violent, Cruel, Corrupt Trump who repeatedly breaks the law.

How can these GOP candidates deserve your votes? All people bleed the same color in red and blue states. Trump’s Republicans drove Congress in 2025 to weaken Medicaid and Medicare and increase the cost of coverage under Obamacare, leaving millions of families, including children, losing health coverage at an accelerating rate into 2027. Similarly, millions of people are being pushed off food assistance programs.

2. Bad as the past GOP has been, it would be much worse for people here and abroad in the next two years of Tyrant, Greedy, Violent, Cruel, Corrupt Trump who repeatedly breaks the law. A new Congress must stop him, by impeaching and convicting Trump and telling him, “You’re fired.” (His favorite bullying words inflicted on millions of innocents.)

3. Gather your policies into a pledge or compact for the voters, reflecting common left-right values of your citizenry that are opposed by your opponent. (See Ky. Values vs. McConnell published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, 2014). The core “kitchen table” issues are raising the minimum wage, now at the frozen federal $7.25 per hour; instituting an authentic child tax credit; increasing Social Security benefits, frozen since 1971, paid for by raising the income cap for Social Security taxes on the wealthy; cracking down on corporate crooks who exploit workers and consumers; and ending the tax escapes of the plutocrats and big corporations, so that the revenues can return to communities to fund better public services and infrastructure. (See Robert Reich’s 10-Point Plan to Make America Affordable and my Compact for American Workers). You may wish to add the looting of private pensions (see pensionrights.org) and the latest Trump restriction on 40 million student loan debtors.

4. Show how much you care for workers by midnight campaigning to reach the many midnight shift workers who rightly feel excluded from electoral campaigns. Hospital, nursing home, factory, fire, police, EMT, all-night stores, and guard workers among them, should be listed in your news release thanking them and announcing your campaign stops.

5. Trump’s dictatorship has left our country unprepared for pandemics, climate catastrophes, and the AI Frankensteins. He ignorantly calls warnings of perils on the horizon “hoaxes,” while he undermines and suppresses solar and wind energy in favor of the homicidal oil, gas, and coal companies. So, challenge your opponent to defend or disavow these failures of presidential responsibility. Any candidate who tolerates Trump’s dangerous abdications of presidential duties, along with his crazed statements about not “caring for Americans’ financial conditions,” urging Republicans to “cheat like hell” regarding the elections, and saying in January, “There shouldn’t be elections in November” certainly does not belong in Congress.

6. Call out the GOP for throwing millions of families off Medicaid, Obamacare, and Medicare through various mechanisms and press for Medicare For All, as Canada, Western Europe, and Taiwan have had for many years. A recent Yale School of Public Health study found a “single-payer universal healthcare system could cover every American, save more than 113,000 lives a year, and still cost over $1 trillion less than the system it would replace.”

For more ready-to-use, winning get-out-your-vote ideas, see what 24 civic leaders are proposing in their winningamerica.net presentations. If you have any further questions, you may wish to contact them directly about their articulate nonpartisan mission of advancing justice for all.

See my book Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.

As scholars of democracy, we are watching America’s warning signs flash red. We expect America’s long-building constitutional crisis to soon escalate.

Earlier this year, we hosted a national workshop to assess the threats facing our society in the months leading up to and following the November midterm elections. We also studied the preparations of American social movements, communities, and institutions to meet those threats.

Our basic goals were straightforward. Every qualified voter should be able to vote and have that vote counted. We must head off and block political violence. Duly certified winners should be able to take office without obstruction.

To our fellow Americans: This is not the time to look away. More than ever we need the kind of courage that history books heroize.

One product of that workshop, published this fall and signed by dozens of scholars, is The American Crisis report. The American Crisis analyzes the likelihood of the administration thwarting electoral due process; escalating military and paramilitary occupations of US cities; and other emerging threats that would worsen any electoral, constitutional, or military crisis.

It’s not hard to see the shape of what may come. In the weeks preceding Election Day, we anticipate that election administration responsibilities could be seized from states and cities, and attempts made to disrupt, sabotage, or otherwise capture their administrative powers.

Alongside this, we see a high risk of dangerous physical escalation in our streets. Federal military forces are being deployed domestically without the consent of American cities and states. These federal deployments are often coupled with a rhetoric that treats communities as territories to be occupied and controlled rather than as constituencies to be protected.

We also expect efforts to obstruct or delay the swearing-in of newly elected officials. These efforts might include the removal of the clerk in the House of Representatives or the refusal of the US vice president and outgoing House speaker to swear in newly elected Members of Congress to the US Senate and House of Representatives, respectively.

In our report, we address in detail these military, electoral, and constitutional crisis points—as well as how American communities, movements, and institutions are preparing to respond.

Neighborhoods, communities, and their governments have been thrust forward to protect themselves against federal repression and dysfunction. In the process, they have demonstrated remarkable resilience.

If sufficiently connected with each other and backed up by labor unions; state governments; and major public, faith, business, and community institutions, municipalities offer our best hope for avoiding authoritarian takeover.

However, they are often fragmented. Neighborhood networks, labor organizations, community businesses, faith communities, public institutions, and local governments frequently operate without shared language or protocol, trusted coordination, or practiced ways of acting together.

The central preparedness challenge is not only to build more capacity, but to connect, test, and mobilize what already exists. Intermunicipal communications and coordination systems will serve as critical crisis infrastructure in the months ahead.

The report draws one other major conclusion. Following the November elections, the US Congress must fully assert itself as the primary branch of the federal government. The generation of 1776 gave Congress supremacy over the rest of the federal government. This is the reason the legislative branch is described first in the US Constitution, as Article I.

Over many years, much of congressional supremacy, representing the sovereignty of the American people and their States, has been abdicated or stolen. At this moment, without Congress, there is no republic, only dictatorship. If the US is to remain a republic in 2027, members of Congress must honor their oaths to uphold the Constitution by ensuring a successful democratic transition of power.

To our fellow Americans: This is not the time to look away. More than ever we need the kind of courage that history books heroize. We implore you to step forward and face the crisis. The full report is available: americancrisis.report.

This article introduces you to nine contemporary heroes.

All nine were on the frontlines of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian attack on our democratic society.

All nine had careers serving the American people in socially essential government jobs. All nine could not tolerate seeing their career work undermined, and even outright destroyed, by DOGE and MAGA’s contempt for science, the rule of law, public safety, and the welfare of the common person.

If we want to continue living in a society guided by scientific knowledge with a government that provides for and protects the education, health, and safety of all Americans—these are the candidates we need to elect to Congress.

All nine are fighting back in the best possible way.

They are running for federal office.

They are running to preserve popular sovereignty and our constitutional democratic republic.

All nine won their primaries and, if they win on November 3, they will enter the US House of Representatives on January 3.

Their goal is to rebuild the best traditions and practices of the US government so that it once again serves all the people not just a kleptocratic elite.

The nine candidates are Sam Forstag in Montana’s 1st District, Zach Dembo in Kentucky’s 6th, Lauren Reinhold in Kansas’ 1st, Mike Masuda in California’s 5th, Alissa Ellman in New York’s 24th, Trina Swanson in Minnesota’s 8th, Dr. Kristin Hook in Texas’ 21st, Tom Perriello in Virginia’s 5th, and Chris Backenmeyer in Nebraska’s 1st.

Together, along with two non-federal candidates (Tamara Bavendam in Tennessee’s 66th House District and Chuck Borges in Maryland’s 29th Senate District), they are endorsed by an ad hoc group called Federal Workers United Congressional Slate. They are also all endorsed by Progressive Democrats of America (PDA).

All Americans who want to continue living in a democratic society need to know about these candidates and support their campaigns.

Why? Because these nine candidates know how a healthy US federal government operates; and the essential services it, and only it, can and must deliver for the people. Better than any group of people, honest, hard-working federal employees know how to rebuild our government in the wake of the self-serving destructiveness of DOGE and Trump.

If we want to continue living in a society guided by scientific knowledge with a government that provides for and protects the education, health, and safety of all Americans—these are the candidates we need to elect to Congress.

No group of non-incumbent candidates have ever been so experienced in these essential matters. These nine patriots have the experience and knowledge to guide the rest of Congress as we make our government whole again.

If you don’t believe me, read the following platform, which all nine candidates have endorsed. In my opinion, it is as eloquent an expression of faith in our democratic republic, as laid out in the constitution, as anything I have read in the 21st Century:

Federal Oversight and Accountability Platform

This policy platform was drafted by federal workers across the Executive Branch and represents a shared vision for partnership between Congress and the federal workforce. Through this partnership, federal workers will help Congress fulfill its oversight responsibilities, protect its Constitutional powers, and ensure the Executive Branch delivers for the public good as Congress intended. Federal workers will provide insight into developments at federal agencies that require Congressional attention, offer technical expertise to inform legislation, and share strategies borne from lessons learned on the ground to help preserve the legislative and budgetary rights and responsibilities established by the Constitution.

This platform is organized into three "programs of tactics" for Congressional partners, as outlined below.

Program 1: Information and technical expertise. Position federal workers as a steady source of information and technical expertise to help Congress deliver oversight and effective legislation.

Program 2: Checks and balances. Strengthen the ability of federal workers to uphold their responsibility to ensure that laws, regulations, and legal policies are followed, to report wrongdoing when they see it, and to impede actions that undermine Constitutional checks and balances.

Program 3: Institutional capacity and workforce protections for the public good. Provide broad labor protections and unemployment supports for federal workers to address the loss of institutional knowledge and ensure the long-term strength of the civil service for the benefit of the public.

These programs contain a mix of legislative statutory components, non-legislative statutory components, and non-statutory components. The legislative statutory components can be implemented when majority support in Congress has been attained or when bi-partisan negotiations provide an earlier opportunity. Non-statutory components allow Congress to act without majority support.

Please support Sam, Zach, Lauren, Alissa, Trina, Kristin, Mike, Tom, and Chris.

Sam Forstag was a fire jumper with the Forest Service; Zach Dembo, an assistant US attorney; Lauren Reinhold, an attorney adviser with the Social Security Administration; Alissa Ellman, a program support assistant in the Department of Veterans Affairs; Trina Swanson was a director of international operations in the Refugee and International Operations District, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services, in the Department of Homeland Security; Dr. Kristin Hook is a biological scientist, who was in the US Government Accountability Office and, previously, was a science and technology policy fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Senate; Mike Masuda is an engineer and was a Foreign Affairs officer in the US Department of State, and American Association for the Advancement of Science Science & Technology Policy fellow; Chris Backenmeyer, a deputy assistant secretary for Assistance Coordination-Regional and Multilateral Affairs in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, US Department of State; Tom Perriello, a US special envoy for Sudan, Bureau of African Affairs, US Department of State; (Tamara Bavendam, a senior adviser, NIH; and Chuck Borges, a chief data officer, Social Security Administration, and retired US Navy commander).

The amount of scientific knowledge and technical expertise represented by just these 11 people is staggering. Now multiply that by the thousands for all the excellent, upstanding federal workers—people of integrity who were excellent at their jobs serving the American people—who lost their jobs in DOGE purges.

These 11 are not only representing the more than 300,000 federal workers who were abruptly fired, or were forced out of their jobs, in the most unjust and life-destabilizing purge in recent US labor history; they are representing millions-upon-millions of Americans they served directly—and truly all of us, since everyone of us benefited from their work.

Every federal worker takes an oath of office similar to the president’s. Unlike the current president, these 11, like federal workers all across the country, take that oath seriously.

The nine congressional candidates were impacted by Trump, Elon Musk, and all their corruption. They found themselves on the other side of their federal careers. Instead of licking their wounds and turning their back on a system that betrayed them, they are standing up to preserve, protect, and defend their country, which is our country, and its Constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic.

That’s why they’re running for Congress.

Let’s lift them to victory; for the benefit of all Americans!

For more information on all nine congressional candidates go to the Federal Workers United Congressional Slate website.

This is an excerpt from The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, whose wholly updated edition has just been released.

Sometimes we achieve the impossible sooner than we expect. Knowing that can stiffen our resolve. But relying on quick victories can also tempt us to place too much emphasis on outcomes; it can cause us to become unduly impatient, brittle, with our will easily broken by defeats. A deeper, more farseeing hope, by contrast, combines realism with resilience, acknowledging setbacks and despair without giving in to them.

The answer may lie in what we could call “hope beyond hope.” It comes from being willing to act whether or not we ever see the results. By letting go of the need for immediate victories, we can persist no matter how hard it gets. Certainly, these victories matter immensely; if we’re facing an important election, for instance, we need to do everything possible to ensure that more humane values prevail, even if the candidates are less than ideal. Lives, and the continuation of democracy, can depend on the outcome. But we still don’t control the results.

The only way to discover what’s achievable is by taking action, trying new approaches, expanding the bounds of the possible.

Whatever we take on, our chances are better if we’re intentional. That means thinking about how we’ll best convey our story, approach crucial allies, expand our reach, and pressure the people or institutions we’re targeting. But since we won’t always win, we need ways to continue regardless of short-term outcomes. The more we accept that we can’t always dictate the results of our actions, the more we free ourselves to keep doing the necessary work.

Ian Bassin, who co-founded the cross-partisan coalition Protect Democracy, explores this paradox in “The Hard-Won Hope of the Long Defeat.” Using a phrase from The Lord of the Rings, Bassin takes lessons from the US Civil Rights movement and from Polish democracy activists who found ways to persist after the Communist dictatorship crushed the Solidarity movement that had embodied their hopes. Bassin explores the kinds of approaches that allow groups and individuals to continue to act even when progress is elusive, or has been reversed.

In “Staying the Course,” Mary-Wynne Ashford echoes Bassin’s perspectives: If we let go of immediate expectations, yet refuse to quit when our plight seems bleakest, she says, we can maintain our own sense of meaning and purpose—and also a deeper and more grounded hope. Ashford, former president of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, begins by exploring her own temptation to despair. She compares the experience of working for change to that of Sisyphus as he endlessly rolls his rock up the hill, but with one crucial difference: Sisyphus acted alone. “We sustain each other in dark times,” Ashford writes, “sometimes simply by being present together... Whether or not we succeed in pushing the rock up the hill, there is meaning in the journey, not in the hope that one time we’ll be able to shed the rock forever and live in a perfect world.” We can’t predict the future, she says, but for all our doubt and hesitation, we can choose how to live and what to fight for. She therefore urges us to join with others in the pursuit of what may seem impossible, drawing strength from community, as Sisyphus, acting alone, could not.

Taking action together is essential if we’re going to keep on, both to exercise power and for the community that sustains us. We’ve explored this theme before: Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners passing news from cell to cell on toilet paper, Norwegian teachers standing strong, John Lewis’ image of children holding hands in a storm, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo communing in silent witness, people coming out of their homes to challenge masked ICE agents.

There’s no more important lesson if we’re going to learn to persist: Isolation, whether physical or psychological, starves the human spirit; connection feeds and heals it. In her book Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver draws on this sense of connection to resist those “who say it’s ridiculous to imagine that the world could be made better than it is. When I come down to this feeling that I am an army of one standing out on the broad plain waving my little flag of hope, I call up a friend or two and offer to make dinner for us. We remind ourselves that we aren’t standing apart from the crowd, we are a crowd. We’re a prairie fire, a church choir, a major note in the American chord... We’re the theater of the street, the accurate joy of children’s hearts, the literature of tomorrow’s wisdom arrived today, just in time... In the long run, the choice of life over death is too good to resist.”

Embracing life also means opening ourselves up to grief. Though we heal best through community, we’re taught to keep our pain to ourselves, especially when it’s the product of powerful political or economic interests. Yet sharing outrage and grief is a critical part of keeping going. In “The Elm Dance,” Buddhist activist Joanna Macy describes the post-Soviet city of Novozybkov. A decade after the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, residents were riddled with cancers and birth defects. The superintendent of schools carried a Geiger counter in his car so he could tell children where not to play on a given day. Surrounding forests remain so radioactive that generations to come will never be able to walk safely among the trees.

Yet those affected found they could begin to recover from their losses by grieving together publicly, talking about the spring day when white ash fell from a clear sky. A mother asked what good her tears were if they couldn’t protect her daughters. “It feels like my heart is breaking open,” she said. “Maybe it will keep breaking again and again every day, I don’t know.” The simple act of telling what happened made her feel more connected to others. Through public mourning, she found another kind of community.

But what if we’re torn away from our communities? Under Stalin, prisoners were deliberately isolated in Siberia. Putin continues this tradition. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls struggling to avoid drowning in despair when she and her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, were deported to a Stalinist labor camp. They didn’t know whether they’d ever be released, but Nadezhda refused to resign herself to the fate the dictatorship had assigned to her. Silence, she concluded, “is the real crime against humanity.”

Most of us will never experience conditions remotely as bleak and unforgiving as those endured by the Mandelstams or Alexei Navalny, even as the United States has been sending deportees to nearly equally brutal prisons in El Salvador, Eswatini, Rwanda, and South Sudan. But we still wrestle with powerlessness, particularly when so much is being attacked or destroyed. When this overwhelms us, it’s tempting simply to give up, or to rage at the world, convinced that no matter what we do, nothing will change. One way out of this dilemma is to identify modest actions we can undertake together with others, since we never know where they’ll lead.

History, in short, remains contingent. Nothing is guaranteed. Anything can happen.

While doomscrolling news stories, for example, I’ll often feel helpless before vast political forces. I’ll read about another assault on human dignity or abuse of power and clench my gut in rage. Then I’ll stop, take a breath, and think of some small way to act—a vigil I can join, a phone call I can make, some person or community I can fruitfully approach. Whether or not my efforts achieve their immediate goals, concentrating on these doable tasks helps me shift gears and put whatever strengths I can contribute in service of what I believe. At least, as Howard Zinn would say, I’m back in the game.

The “Tesla Takedown” boycott is an example of small actions mattering at a point when many felt helpless. Elon Musk played a huge role in electing Donald Trump for his second term, giving his campaign $290 million and promoting him endlessly on Twitter/X. In return, Trump made Musk the head of what they called DOGE (the so-called Department of Government Efficiency), which gutted critical federal programs in healthcare, scientific research, the environment, veterans’ services, education, and consumer protection and wholly eliminated the US Agency for International Development (USAID). DOGE also accessed citizens’ private governmental data, including Social Security records. The scale and speed of the cuts was likely intentional—Trump adviser Steve Bannon talked of “flooding the zone” to leave potential challengers dislocated and demoralized. And initially it had that result.

People began to protest in various ways, but aside from court challenges were scrambling to respond to the DOGE cuts and everything else the administration was doing. Then, in February 2025, three days after the first modest national days of protest, Boston University media studies professor Joan Donovan posted on Bluesky: “If Musk thinks he can speed run through DC downloading personal data, we can certainly bang some pots and pans on the sidewalks in front of Tesla dealerships. Bring your friends and make a little noise.” Donovan linked to a list of Tesla locations.

The post drew only 175 likes in the first four months. But actor and activist Alex Winter, who played Bill in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, reposted to his much larger list and created a website to promote a boycott campaign. Larger groups, including local Indivisible affiliates, spread the idea or took it up as a project. People began protesting in front of Tesla dealerships in hundreds of cities, chanting, carrying signs, wearing the soon-ubiquitous inflatable animal costumes, and presenting the clear message that buying a new Tesla meant supporting all that Trump and Musk were doing. Current Tesla owners joined as well, displaying bumper stickers or magnets saying things like “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy” or “Anti-Elon Tesla Club.” The protests engaged people who’d never participated before, renewed the spirits of others, and spread globally.

Through the first three quarters of 2025, the campaign helped decrease Tesla’s net income by 61% from the year before, drove its share of the US electric vehicle market to an eight-year low, and decreased European Tesla sales nearly 40%. As the pressure built, Musk said he was withdrawing from politics (although his donations still dwarf those of all but a few individuals). The ripples of Tesla Takedown seem a high-tech version of my friend Lisa and her handful of friends standing pathetic and bedraggled in the rain, and accidentally inspiring the political involvement of famed baby doctor Benjamin Spock.

When hope does seem elusive, it helps to cultivate what we might call radical stubbornness. As Jane Goodall reflected in The Book of Hope: “Sometimes I think, ‘Well, why on Earth do I feel hopeful?’ Because the problems facing the planet are huge. And if I analyze them carefully, they do sometimes seem absolutely impossible to solve. So why do I feel hopeful? Partly, because I’m obstinate. I just won’t give in. But it’s partly also because we cannot accurately predict what the future might bring... No one can know how it will all turn out.”

I remember one of the weeks when nothing was going right for my student voting project that I’ve mentioned. Anticipated donations fell through. Sympathetic contacts at major foundations unexpectedly left. Health issues hit key staffers. At one point, dealing with yet another personnel crisis and a looming shortage of funds, I was close to tears. But then I thought about the importance of what we were doing. I went out for a run. And then I got back on the phone the next day. Our community of existing supporters began to come through. The following week, we got the largest contribution in the history of the project and were able to hire some amazing new organizers.

In struggles for justice, neither victory nor failure is certain. As K. C. Golden writes in “The Inevitability Trap,” what we often call preordained becomes so only through our resignation. So the only way to discover what’s achievable is by taking action, trying new approaches, expanding the bounds of the possible. Climate Solutions, where Golden was policy director, mixes environmental advocacy with climate-change consulting for Pacific Northwest corporations, small businesses, and local governments. The sponsors of the group’s annual breakfast recently included Boeing and Alaska Airlines, with which Climate Solutions has been working to develop algae-based and other sustainable biofuels—a partnership that would have been nearly unimaginable a short while ago.

Will efforts like these and those Bill McKibben describes be enough to continue shifting the dynamics of this immensely challenging issue? In “Is There Hope on Climate Change?” David Roberts, of the Volts podcast, considers this question in light of the fact that we remain in a race to deploy the more sustainable alternatives despite the progress we’ve made. Echoing Howard Zinn, Roberts takes heart from community, from the intrinsic value of acting, and from the very uncertainty of prediction. Hope isn’t “about the future,” Roberts argues, “as much as it is about the present.” In other words, it’s the choices we make here and now that have the potential to alter a common future. “We don’t know when history might unlock the door,” Roberts concludes, “so we have no choice but to keep pushing on it.”

History, in short, remains contingent. Nothing is guaranteed. Anything can happen. As Barbara Ehrenreich observed, we’re given “no operating manual, no step-by-step instructions.” But what if we assume that our own seemingly small actions could, when joined with those of others, actually change history—and act on that assumption even when the odds seem impossible? That belief unites everyone in this book and is key to their powerful lives and words. It’s also why it’s so critical to refuse to accept the apparent limits of particular historical moments, particularly in hard times.

Wheatley suggests concentrating less on the measurable impact of what we do, and more on the value and appropriateness of our work and on the communities we build in the process.

As my longtime friend Atlanta activist and trainer Sonya Vetra Tinsley reminds us, in “You’ve Got to Pick Your Team”: “We’ll never know who’s really going to prevail.” So I just have to decide which team seems happier, which side I’d rather be on.” For herself, she’s chosen the team that keeps working for change over the team of manipulation, fear, and cynical resignation.

Ta-Nehisi Coates believes in the struggle for justice, but cautions that “if you hope that in your lifetime things will be necessarily improved... you’re setting yourself up for false hope... If you hope that your struggle might in your children’s generation, your grandchildren’s generation, your descendants’ generation, actually lead to a better world... I think that’s a hope based on history and rooted in something very, very real."

Coates remembered being taken as a child to various political events in the African American community. Stressing the struggles and sacrifices of people before him, he said, “There was this whole tradition of saying libations where you poured water into a plant representing the earth and folks who had gone back to the earth. And you would say names, and those names could be anybody from Malcolm X to Toussaint L’Ouverture to your Aunt Grace to whoever it was who you felt had somehow sacrificed for you to be there.” However we believe things will turn out, that connectedness between past, present, and future can help keep us going.

Even in the bleakest situations, we still need to continue acting however we can, if just by standing up for our fellow humans. In “Next Year in Mas’Ha,” Starhawk wrestles with her own fury, bitterness, and despair after an Israeli soldier drove an armored bulldozer over one of her comrades, Rachel Corrie, and Israeli soldiers shot two others. Corrie was killed in the city of Rafah in Gaza while volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement, a nonviolent resistance effort uniting Palestinians and Jews. After the deaths, Starhawk felt in a mood to “smash something.”

Instead, she traveled to the threatened West Bank village of Mas’Ha, on an Israeli settlers’ bus “full of elderly women who could have been my aunts and old men who could have been my uncles,” eventually reaching a Palestinian town where ancient olive groves were about to be uprooted and buried to make way for one of Israel’s ever-advancing “security” walls. Surrounded by anguish, she experienced an unlikely moment of possibility during a Seder that brought together Palestinians and their young Israeli supporters. Watching “people who, faced with utter destruction of everything they need and hold dear, [open] their hearts to the children of the enemy and [ask] for help,” Starhawk felt the remote possibility of hope.

That hope has gotten far more elusive. Since Starhawk wrote her piece, Israeli settlers on the occupied West Bank have continued to destroy homes, cut down olive groves, attack farmers, and do everything they can to eliminate the possibility of a future for those who’ve lived there for generations. In October 2023, Hamas conducted a horrific and unconscionable attack on Israel, killing 1,210 people. Within two years, the Israeli military killed more than 70,000 people in Gaza, comparable to over 10 million deaths in a country the size of the United States. They also systematically destroyed Gaza’s cities and infrastructure, bombing and demolishing apartments, hospitals, schools, and water and sanitation systems. Starhawk grew up collecting pennies to plant trees in Israel. Now, she writes: “Forcing children to starve will not make Israelis safe. It will, in fact, destroy Israel.” She has continued working for peace nonetheless, and a world where we reach beyond our tribes.

Hope endures when we persist despite sorrows and defeats, even the darkest ones. The son of Mexican poet, journalist, and Catholic social justice activist Javier Sicilia was murdered by drug cartels. In response, Sicilia founded the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, which organized silent marches and caravans across Mexico and the United States. The caravans demanded government reform and an end to a “war on drugs” strategy that Sicilia said only fed the cycles of violence. As Sicilia said in those marches, in a phrase adapted from the Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos: “They buried us thinking we were corpses. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

So even after loss, persistence matters as much as ever. As Rebecca Solnit posted the evening of Trump’s 2024 election, “The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”

Sometimes we don’t know our impact until long after we take action. In 1969, Richard Nixon threatened to escalate the Vietnam War with nuclear strikes unless North Vietnam forced the National Liberation Front in the South to surrender. He had military advisers prepare detailed plans. But two weeks before his deadline, millions of Americans joined the nationwide “Moratorium” protests—the largest coordinated day of protest in the United States up to that point. When half a million people marched past the White House the following month, Nixon’s spokesperson announced that the president had watched the Washington Redskins football game instead, claiming the demonstrators hadn’t affected his policies in the slightest.

Nixon’s seeming indifference fed the frustration of far too many in the peace movement and accelerated the descent of a small number of people into violence that tainted the movement for decades to come. Yet, as Nixon’s memoirs revealed much later, he privately decided that the protests had so polarized public opinion that he would have to abandon his threat. Until the memoirs were published, Moratorium participants didn’t know that their demonstrations may have actually helped prevent a nuclear attack.

Similarly, “No Kings” protestors who challenged Trump could never know the precise effects of their protests. Donald Trump dismissed them to the point of posting an AI video of himself defecating from a plane on their marches. Yet their efforts built resistant community, gave courage to others, and impacted the culture in ways we may never precisely know.

Since we can’t predict the future or even always read the impact of our actions in the present, perhaps, as Margaret Wheatley suggests in “From Hope to Hopelessness,” we should let go of expectations altogether. “Anytime we hope for a certain outcome,” she writes, “and work hard to make it happen, then we also introduce fear—fear of failing, fear of loss.” Instead, Wheatley suggests concentrating less on the measurable impact of what we do, and more on the value and appropriateness of our work and on the communities we build in the process. It’s no accident that so many of those who’ve devoted their lives to creating a more humane world share this outlook, and continue doing the necessary work whatever their immediate successes or failures.

Excerpted from the wholly updated new edition of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, by Paul Rogat Loeb (Basic Books, Oct 13, 2026), theimpossible.org. © Paul Loeb 2026.

Political scientists have a fairly dry checklist for what makes a regime oppressive: It silences dissent, it turns state power against its own people, it treats international law as optional, and it punishes anyone—institution or individual—who tries to hold it accountable. Read as a list, it sounds abstract or like something that happens elsewhere, in a dictatorship in a Third World country maybe.

For Americans, such a definition no longer feels abstract anymore.

Let’s start with the silencing. Since the war on Gaza escalated, human rights groups and journalists have documented, for years now, a pattern of pro-Palestinian content—protest footage, on-the-ground reporting, even the straightforward accounting of civilian deaths—being throttled, flagged, or removed from major platforms. Meanwhile, incitement and dehumanizing rhetoric spreads with far less friction. Independent researchers have called it out repeatedly. Platforms deny doing it on purpose.

Regimes like this have ended before, usually because enough ordinary people refused to stop saying what they saw.

The silencing isn’t limited to algorithms, either. Last month, the White House revoked press credentials for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, physically barring their reporters from the building over what the president called unfavorable coverage. A federal judge has since ordered access temporarily restored, calling the move a likely violation of due process, but the message had already landed: Cover this administration the wrong way and you can be locked out of the room where the decisions get made. A press freedom advocate called it part of a broader pattern meant to intimidate journalists and deter critical reporting. When the people paid to tell the public the truth are the ones getting the door closed in their faces, “free press” starts to feel like a technicality rather than a guarantee.

Then there’s the gap between what the government does and what the country actually wants. This summer, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) forced a vote to strip billions in US military funding to Israel. This was no fringe gesture but a real floor fight that split both parties and forced members to go on the record. It lost. But the fact that it happened at all, that a sitting Republican congressman felt he had to make Washington answer for the money it kept sending regardless of what constituents were saying, is itself the story. Institutions are moving in one direction while public sentiment visibly pulls in another, and the institutions are winning anyway.

And there’s the reach outward. When the International Criminal Court issued warrants tied to the Gaza war, Washington didn’t argue the law. It sanctioned the court itself, freezing officials’ bank accounts, cutting off their email, warning American staff they’d be arrested for traveling home. A body created specifically to stand outside any one government’s control got treated like an adversary for doing its job. If that’s what happens to an international court, it’s not hard to imagine what happens to an ordinary citizen who speaks too loudly.

Actually, it’s not hard to imagine because it is happening on a daily basis, especially for those who protest the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Last month, Donna Ganger—the mother of Renee Good, a US citizen shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis in January—testified on Capitol Hill that she’s a registered Republican who voted for Donald Trump because she believed that these agents were there to protect citizens, not to treat her own family like the threat. She didn’t get an apology. “This is madness,” she concluded.

Every day, millions of people in America live the reality of a police state. They are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being detained by ICE, thrown into horrific holding centers, and sent back home to civil war or family abuse or even deportation to a third country they know nothing about. ICE has become something closer to a domestic enforcement arm than an immigration agency, and “wrong place, wrong time” is a real category of harm now, not a hypothetical one.

What does it mean to raise a child in a country where simply existing in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong moment carries risk? Where even a global court gets its accounts frozen for trying to hold power accountable?

It’s a strange kind of irony that at the United Nations last month, Trump denounced “the fanatical Iranian regime” for spreading “carnage and chaos” and called for its “complete economic isolation” over how it treats its own people. He’s not wrong that repression deserves condemnation. He’s just describing, almost point for point, the pattern playing out here at home—press outlets barred from covering their own government, citizens shot by agents meant to protect them, and dissent treated as the threat rather than the right.

The distinction between “oppressive regime” as a concept in a textbook and “oppressive regime” as the texture of ordinary life—for millions of people living in this country right now, citizens and noncitizens alike—has ceased to exist. Describing the disappearance of that distinction—calmly, specifically, without exaggeration—feels like the first form of resistance available to someone who isn’t a lawyer, a lawmaker, or a judge.

Regimes like this have ended before, usually because enough ordinary people refused to stop saying what they saw. That’s the piece I want to hold onto, even on the days when fear wins out.

On October 9, only hours after the announcement of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, a former judge on the International Criminal Court, the Trump administration imposed its latest sanctions on the global judicial body. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “we will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate.”

When the ICC became operational in 2002, it represented a major breakthrough for the human rights groups that had campaigned for it. The new organization had the mandate to prosecute individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and, after 2018, the crime of aggression. Once nations ratified the ICC’s authorizing document, the Rome Statute, they took responsibility for arresting these individuals and submitting them to the court for trial. Designed to complement, rather than to replace, national criminal justice systems, the ICC could prosecute cases only when countries were unwilling or unable to do so. A total of 125 countries―nearly two-thirds of the world’s nations―have ratified the Rome Statute.

Since its founding, the ICC (headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands) has acted to hold individual perpetrators accountable for the world’s gravest atrocities. Its actions included opening 34 cases (some with more than one suspect), holding 17 different investigations across four continents, issuing 61 arrest warrants, and, thus far, issuing 13 convictions and four acquittals.

Nevertheless, the campaign against the ICC is having a serious impact. In late July, thanks to US government pressure, Venezuela and Chad announced their withdrawal from the court’s Rome Statute.From its inception, however, US officials were wary of the ICC.

In the United States, President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute, but refused to present it to the US Senate for ratification, warning that it had “significant flaws,” including the inability to “protect US officials.” His successor, George W. Bush, “unsigned” the treaty in 2002 and signed US legislation authorizing military force to liberate any American nationals it held for crimes. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, he denounced the ICC before the United Nations General Assembly and imposed economic sanctions and visa restrictions on top ICC officials for any effort to investigate the behavior of US personnel in Afghanistan.

Russian officials, too, soon realized that enforcement of international law threatened them. Although, initially, the Russian government signed the Rome Statute and participated constructively in the ICC, it withdrew its signature after Ukraine appealed to the ICC in 2014 and 2015 to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The ICC did initiate a preliminary inquiry that, after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 and Russia’s murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war in Bucha, expanded into a formal investigation. In 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children.

Denying any wrongdoing in Bucha, the Russian government also dismissed the charge of kidnapping as “outrageous.” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of the Russian Security Council, threatened a Russian hypersonic missile attack upon the ICC headquarters.

Meanwhile, the assault on the ICC escalated. Although US President Joseph Biden scrapped Trump’s sanctions on the court and authorized sharing information with it during investigations of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, he and numerous officials of other nations denounced the ICC’s November 2024 war crimes arrest warrant for top Israeli officials. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assailed what he called “the antisemitic decision” of the ICC and said that Israel refused to comply with it.

With Trump’s reelection, the campaign to destroy the ICC went into high gear. In February 2025, he imposed sanctions on the ICC prosecutor. That August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, labeling the court “a national security threat,” added ICC judges to the sanctions list. In late 2025, a top Trump administration official told Reuters that there was “growing concern” that “the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them.” That was “unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.” The ICC, he said, had been informed that, unless it amended its founding document to ensure that it would not investigate the Republican president and his top officials, new, very punishing US sanctions would be imposed on the court.

The Russian government also ramped up its attack. In December 2025, a Russian court, retaliating for the ICC’s arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova, convicted the ICC prosecutor and eight ICC judges, in absentia, of “unlawful prosecution,” sentencing them to terms of imprisonment ranging from three and a half to 15 years.

In July 2026, Rubio announced what the US State Department called “a sweeping campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the International Criminal Court to US sovereignty.” It would “feature a whole-of-government response to systematically disable the ICC’s ability to operate” and destroy the court “brick by brick.” That August, imposing additional sanctions on court officials, Rubio proclaimed “our unwavering mission to protect Americans from this sham of a court.” Meanwhile, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called on Latin American and Caribbean governments to sever their ties with the ICC.

Many observers, of course, were appalled by the Trump administration’s behavior. The European Union immediately expressed its backing for the ICC, while Germany’s foreign minister declared that the court made the world “safer and more just.” In a biting article, Kenneth Roth, a former executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that “the administration’s real goal is to secure impunity for war crimes.”

Nevertheless, the campaign against the ICC is having a serious impact. In late July, thanks to US government pressure, Venezuela and Chad announced their withdrawal from the court’s Rome Statute. The number of withdrawals now stands at five, including Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The latter three are ruled by military juntas allied with Russia.

As the Nobel committee warned when announcing the Peace Prize, the “judges and institutions of international law are under political attack.”

If the attack succeeds, it will produce a disaster not only for the rule of law, but for the cause of human rights.

As a first-generation Mexican American, the first time I ever connected with a book and felt genuinely excited to write a book report was when we were assigned to read Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan by Pam Muñoz Ryan in sixth grade. The story, which follows a girl learning to navigate her new life inside a labor camp in California after being forced to move there following the tragic death of her father in Mexico, included themes that really resonated with me.

Up until then, I had never read a book like that. It spoke to me in a way I never imagined a book would, and it made me want to read more. Sixth grade became the year I started considering myself an avid reader because I was pursuing that “special feeling” Esperanza Rising gave me in other books. I was chasing the feeling of being seen.

Today, Esperanza Rising is being challenged in states like Texas and North Carolina because parents feel uncomfortable with its themes of racism and immigration, and I can’t help but think back to my 11-year-old self. If this book had been banned before I got the opportunity to read it, I’m not sure that I would have discovered that “special feeling,” at least not in sixth grade. It would have taken me longer to discover it, if I discovered it at all.

There must be a collective understanding among the gatekeepers of children’s literature that these stories matter, and a commitment to protecting them from being removed from shelves.

This is what makes book bans incredibly dangerous, especially at a time of declining literacy rates, and parents struggling to get their kids to pick up a book instead of their tablets or devices. In October 2026, PEN America reported nearly 12,000 book bans involving more than 7,300 individual titles in US schools during the 2025-2026 school year, which the organization says is the largest censorship case numbers it had ever recorded.

There have been multiple studies reporting on the negative impact book bans are having on teacher morale and student learning, with marginalized young readers especially bearing the brunt of these decisions. The American Library Association reports that a significant proportion of contested books center on LGBTQ+ experiences, racial identity, or themes of systemic inequality, essentially sending the message that those themes should be censored.

When I wrote the first book in my middle-grade magic school series featuring the daughter of undocumented immigrants as the protagonist, Chloe Vega and the Agents of Magic, my goal was to educate young readers about immigration in a way that is digestible and age appropriate. It follows Chloe, who is terrified that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will take her undocumented parents from her. She’s unaware magic exists until a sorcerer disguised as an immigration officer takes her parents, forcing her to embark on a journey to harness her abilities at a magical academy so she can reunite her family.

Despite its fantasy elements, the book is essentially about a little girl fighting to reunite with her family. It’s a heavy message for many young readers, but the magical elements make it easier for them to process. The book has been out for a year, and many parents have reported that it served as an excellent gateway to serious conversations with their children about immigration and the times we’re living in.

The sequel to Chloe’s story, Chloe Vega and the Missing Unseen, was published on October 6, 2026, and both books could be challenged or banned in many states because they address immigration, despite their age appropriateness.

When we ban books for young readers that tackle topics surrounding marginalized people, we lose a critical avenue for parents, educators, and librarians to educate children on these serious topics and help them develop understanding and empathy. We also strip marginalized young readers of the opportunity to feel seen when they are already painfully underrepresented. In the times that we’re living in, this can be extremely harmful.

It also puts these authors at a significant disadvantage, making it harder to get their books into the hands of the readers who need them most. Many have had school visits canceled because educators and administrators fear repercussions from lawmakers and increasingly restrictive book-banning policies. These challenges create greater financial risk for both authors and publishers, which can make publishers more hesitant to invest in books by marginalized authors and further limit the diversity of stories available to young readers.

So far, many efforts have been made to combat book bans. In 2024, a group of authors banded together to launch Authors Against Book Bans, whose mission is to stand united against the unconstitutional movement to limit the freedom to read and to unequivocally support the availability of diverse voices in schools, libraries, and culture. Organizations such as PEN America are actively filing lawsuits against school boards, arguing that these bans violate the First Amendment.

But more needs to be done. There must be a collective understanding among the gatekeepers of children’s literature that these stories matter, and a commitment to protecting them from being removed from shelves. Books have long been celebrated for their ability to build empathy and compassion by inviting readers into lives and experiences different from their own. But when the books being challenged and removed are disproportionately about marginalized people, it does more than limit what children can read. It erases the experiences and identities of the very people whose voices deserve to be heard.

Let’s start with the good news. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has added 61 companies to its database of businesses involved in activities linked to illegal Israeli settlements, expanding the list from 158 to 214 companies.

Why is this good news? Because it further illustrates a degree of seriousness within the international community to move its position on Israel from the realm of language to that of action.

Yet more good news: Five previously listed companies were removed after the office determined that their involvement in the relevant activities had ended.

For the Israeli mindset to change, the consequences of occupation, annexation, and genocide must become unmistakable.

This matters because it suggests that the mechanism can work: Sustained scrutiny can influence corporate behavior, and supporting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine can carry a price.

Expectedly, the updated list has been welcomed by Palestinian and international human rights organizations, though, rightly so, they insist that such lists are not enough unless followed by direct government action and expanded to other facets of the Israeli military and economy.

But before focusing on what else needs to be done, we must acknowledge the significance of such reports, especially when placed within the larger context of global initiatives aimed at isolating Israel and its extremist leadership.

First, the 2026 update demonstrates continuing institutional commitment by the UN Human Rights Office. The database was not a one-off initiative issued under temporary political pressure. Its continued expansion and revision show that corporate involvement in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise remains subject to international scrutiny.

Second, the addition of 61 companies reflects extensive research and follow-up by the UN, supported by information from Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations. The database is therefore not simply symbolic: It documents the international corporate networks that sustain and profit from Israel’s settlement project.

Third, the removal of five companies suggests that the mechanism can produce results. Its impact remains far below what Palestinians need, but the removals indicate that companies can end relevant activities and subsequently be removed from the database.

The list also provides civil society with credible material for accountability and boycott campaigns. More importantly, it can help move such efforts beyond individual consumer choices toward action by governments, financial institutions, and regulatory bodies.

This is particularly relevant as Western governments begin taking measures of their own.

On September 8, 12 countries—Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom—announced their intention either to introduce national restrictions or support European restrictions on trade with illegal Israeli settlements. Britain went further, banning settlement goods and moving against companies involved in settlement construction.

The significance was difficult to miss. Heavyweights such as Britain, France, and Canada were no longer merely condemning settlement expansion; they were beginning to attach economic consequences to it.

But here lies the challenge: Reports, databases, and sanctions remain insufficient—and risk becoming meaningless—unless they are followed by sustained monitoring and practical action.

What is the worth of sanctions if they are not enforced, expanded, and accompanied by political pressure capable of changing Israeli behavior?

Decisions, lists, and threats are double-edged swords. They can become launchpads for sustained and meaningful political action. Or they can be used to mollify civil society, allowing politicians to buy time and votes while avoiding any fundamental policy change.

However, there is a way to help distinguish between the two.

An independent international monitoring group, composed of and supported by civil society figures with recognized moral authority, could systematically track governments that have committed to sanctions, boycotts, or trade restrictions: What was promised, what was implemented, what loopholes remain, and whether measures are producing tangible consequences.

Monitoring these governments is becoming almost as important as monitoring Israel itself.

The same principle applies to UN reports. Palestinian and international civil society organizations must incorporate their findings into the growing global boycott and accountability movement, while governments must ensure that companies under their jurisdiction are not contributing to illegal settlement activities.

Considering that Israel continues its genocidal assault on Gaza while accelerating settlement expansion and annexation measures in the West Bank, none of these steps can ever be sufficient on their own. They are, however, meaningful steps in the right direction.

Palestinians expect—and deserve—far more than the bare minimum. The situation in the occupied territories is simply too urgent for symbolic politics. Every passing day should bring another measure of accountability: another restriction, another divestment, another sanction, another political or economic consequence.

Israel has operated for decades on the assumption that it is effectively untouchable—that condemnation will remain rhetorical, reports will gather dust, and Western governments will ultimately retreat when meaningful pressure becomes politically costly.

That assumption must end.

For the Israeli mindset to change, the consequences of occupation, annexation, and genocide must become unmistakable. Sanctions cannot merely be announced; they must be enforced. Boycotts cannot remain symbolic; they must carry an economic cost. International law cannot simply be invoked; it must have consequences.

The real measure of these initiatives, therefore, is not how many companies appear on a list or how many governments announce sanctions. The real measure is whether these actions can finally impose a political and economic price on Israel high enough to make occupation, annexation, and genocide unsustainable.

Here’s today’s trivia question (which may turn out to be not at trivial at all when all the facts emerge): Who solicited money from a presidential donor in return for access to the head of the IRS over the donor’s taxes, was a Fox News host, was engaged to the son of the US president, was the former wife of someone who wants to be the next US president, who raised money for and spoke at a rally that led to an attack on the US Capitol, and now is a US ambassador?

If you guessed Kimberly Guilfoyle, you’d be correct on all counts.

Rarely has a person been so enmeshed in the workings (or one might say, dysfunctions) of our current political-economic-media-influence system as Guilfoyle.

From 2001 to 2005, Guilfoyle was married to Gavin Newsom, now governor of California. In 2018, she began dating Donald Trump Jr., became engaged to him in 2020, and emerged as one of his father’s most outspoken defenders and a MAGA icon.

After Trump’s 2020 defeat, Guilfoyle sought to turn her status into a profitable business ventures including lines of hair care and fragrance products and a medspa. She also launched a political consulting firm and sought work in public relations.

In 2022, she launched what she termed an upscale vodka and champagne brand, American Dream, organizing a dinner for Mar-a-Lago guests that participants realized halfway through was an investment pitch.

According to a report in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal by Dana Mattioli, Drew Hinshaw, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Joe Parkinson, Trump grew frustrated with Guilfoyle for soliciting investments from Mar-a-Lago members for her companies, and complained that Guilfoyle was supposed to be raising money for him but instead was at his club raising money for herself.

The Journal reports that after Trump won the 2024 election, Eric Deters—a Trump donor and former co-owner of Snappy Tomato Pizza, a regional restaurant chain, who had mounted unsuccessful runs for Congress and governor—began soliciting Guilfoyle’s help on several matters, including gaining access to incoming Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Billy Long, to discuss an IRS probe into Deters’s tax deductions.

Guilfoyle offered to use her sway as Donald Jr.’s former fiancée. Deters promised to pay her as much as $1 million if she were successful.

Her engagement to Trump Jr. ended in December 2024. On December 10, 2024, Trump nominated Guilfoyle to be the US ambassador to Greece.

After Billy Long was confirmed IRS commissioner, Guilfoyle sent him a congratulatory note, attaching a letter Deters had written outlining his tax dispute: “Don Jr. and I are very close with Eric Deters and his wife and I know he sent you a letter,” she wrote. “I am hoping I know how busy you are that you could give some time and attention to it.”

She assured Deters that “I wrote him a very nice message. Told him how important it was that you’re close to me and to don.”

The Journal reports that as her confirmation hearing approached, Guilfoyle complained to friends that she was broke.

She reached out to Deters with an urgent request: She needed $100,000 that she said she owed American Express—and needed Deters to give it to her in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on Signal, according to messages reviewed by the Journal.

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she texted Deters, adding a prayer hands emoji and a PDF with bill payment instructions from American Express. “You could just send it here,” she wrote on July 3, 2025, just days before her July 9 confirmation hearing.

Deters ultimately did not make the payment, but the set of transactions illuminates the casual pay-to-play world in which Trump, his family, appointees, and donors all operate.

The Senate confirmed Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece on September 18, 2025.

Billy Long is now the US ambassador to Iceland.

The top two Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees have now called for an investigation into Guilfoyle.

Congressional Democrats are already looking into claims reported last month by the Journal that Guilfoyle told guests at a reception that the US could undermine the Greek government if it chose to, that she promoted the business interests of one particular Greek construction and energy company, and allowed its lobbyist into private diplomatic meetings.

In Trump world, being close to power creates a special economy of getting and giving. The arenas include Fox News, Mar-a-Lago, the White House, Capitol Hill, and extend even to our foreign embassies. All relationships within these arenas—personal, romantic, political, diplomatic—are transactional.

In a nationwide poll conducted a few weeks ago and reported on by Axios, the majority of all registered voters surveyed said the number one word to describe Donald Trump is “corrupt.” This represents a massive opportunity for Democrats both now and for the next two years.

And the experience of candidates in today’s Democrats’ position around the world validates the argument that this is the best way to both campaign and win elections and political power.

Péter Magyar defeated Viktor Orbán in the Hungarian elections because he ran a Navalny-style playbook, calling Orbán’s and his billionaire buddies’ capture of the media and most other aspects of Hungarian life a “state capture system” grounded in good old-fashioned “corruption.”

From Orban’s son-in-law pulling a Jared and using his government position to become one of the richest men in the country, to his billionaire cronies buying up the media like the billionaire Ellisons are doing here now, corruption was Magyar’s singular through-line message. And it worked, producing an overwhelming turnout and undeniable victory.

It will work here, too!

Democrats are (continuously, it seems) debating what should be their campaign strategy, their main through-line message, for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Every faction and special interest group in the country is pushing their own idea, but there’s one overarching concept — one word — that can encompass most all of them and do so with a proven political punch: “Corruption.”

At every level, ever since the Reagan Revolution, the heart of Republican policies has been the naked corruption of our American political and economic systems. Since the 1980s, Republicans have sold their corruption with slogans like, “Government is the problem, not the solution,” and “Let the market decide,” but their real message is, “Turn it all over to the billionaires and their corporations.” The result has been:

— Tax cuts and loopholes for billionaires and big corporations that, in aggregate since 1981, add up to more than our total national debt of $40 trillion (in other words, Republicans borrowed $40 trillion in our names that our kids will repay and gave all of it to the morbidly rich).
— Reagan’s 1983 suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws that has caused every industry in America to become a form of monopoly dominated by five or fewer massive corporations, gutting competition and raising prices.
— Five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are persons and money is the same thing as “free speech,” handing our elections over to the highest bidders.
— Virtually every legacy federal regulatory agency being run by industry insiders working on a revolving-door basis.
— Members of Congress and the corrupt Trump regime engaging in insider trading with impunity.
— A GOP-aligned military-industrial complex that’s essentially taken over Pentagon procurement.
— An anti-labor Labor Department; an anti-education Education department; an anti-civil rights Civil Rights enforcement agency; an anti-environment Environmental Protection Agency; etc…
— Trump’s mysterious pardons that always seem to go to people who’ve given him millions of dollars (after Giuliani claimed he and Trump were selling pardons for two million each and splitting the money).
— The wholesale gutting of the Internal Revenue Service enforcement budget and staffing that’s largely ended audits of morbidly rich people and increased audits of working-class people instead.
— The systematic sabotage and privatization of public institutions — from the US Postal Service to public schools to prisons — with virtually every one of the for-profit replacements becoming big GOP donors.
— The explosion of dark money after Citizens United so we don’t even know who’s buying our elections.
— The weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to loosen media ownership rules while threatening outlets that dare criticize Trump or the GOP.
— Red-state-level voter suppression laws including strict ID requirements, purges of voter rolls, and reduced polling access all to discourage voting by people in demographic groups associated with Democrats.
— The Republican refusal to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for years and they’re still blocking most efforts.
— The systematic dismantling of campaign finance enforcement, turning the Federal Election Commission into a deadlocked, do-nothing body.
— The use of tax havens and trade policy to encourage offshoring American jobs.
— The Republican normalization of lobbyists literally writing legislation via groups like the Koch-funded ALEC.
— The rewriting of environmental and labor rules to favor polluting industries by GOP appointees who often came from those very industries.
— The strategic packing of the federal judiciary with hardcore rightwing/neofascist judges.
— And now Trump’s pathetic attempts to bribe voters with his $5000 offer backed up by $80 and $500 checks going out this week to people on Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.

Even Republicans understand the power of mobilizing the public’s outrage against the corruption that they themselves have participated in for over 40 years. Astonishingly, cynically, that’s the meta-message to Trump’s main campaign slogan each of the three times he’s run for president:

“Drain the swamp.”

It worked, even though it was an outrageous lie. Democrats, who have actually been trying to do something about corruption for years, need to appropriate the anti-corruption theme as their main message. Because, universally, it works.

— When working in Russia, I witnessed the way Alexi Navalny came so close to taking down Putin that the Russian dictator ordered him murdered; it was done via Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. It systematically and relentlessly exposed the ways Putin and his cronies were looting their nation’s government while passing out favors to oligarchs willing to align themselves with them.

— In the 1980s, I was working for a German international relief organization in The Philippines when Cory Aquino mobilized an anti-corruption message against the Marcos dynasty; the week Marcos and his wife fled the country I was bumped off Philippine Airlines flights five days in a row because so many of their cronies were appropriating all the seats (the airline was run by a crony).

— When Jair Bolsonaro first successfully ran for president of Brazil it was on a campaign against the corruption “Operation Car Wash” had exposed in the Lula administration. When elected, Bolsonaro, instead of ending the corruption, slid right into the system and expanded it, leading to his own ultimate downfall and current imprisonment.

— In Delhi, activist Anna Hazare’s 2011 anti-corruption hunger strike ignited a nationwide movement that helped spur passage of India’s Lokpal anti-corruption law and led his former allies to found the “clean government” Aam Aadmi Party.

— And, of course, it was the anti-corruption message of the EuroMaidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that lifted then-comedian and TV star Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the presidency of Ukraine.

From Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Era of the early 20th century to the present, anti-corruption messages have repeatedly proven to be one of the most potent forces in American politics, too.

— In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt built a foundation of mass support by casting monopolies as a “corrupt alliance” between the morbidly rich and our government, while the exposure of William M. “Boss” Tweed’s graft by Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons helped bring down New York’s Tammany Hall by converting complex examples of corruption into the simple story of “stolen public money.”

— The Watergate scandal turned corrupt abuse of power into a national reckoning that forced Richard Nixon from office and fueled sweeping electoral gains for reformers like Jimmy Carter, while more recent scandals like George Santos’ reinforced “clean government” as a winning local message.

— At the national level, Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign and the “rigged system” critiques advanced by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren show that, across the ideological spectrum, framing political battles as struggle against entrenched, self-dealing elites remains one of the most consistently reliable ways to get energized voters to the polls and win power.

It makes perfect sense that this should be the Democrats’ main strategy: the core philosophy of the GOP that was first made explicit by the Reagan administration — “greed is good” — openly invites corruption. As we’ve seen in virtually every congressional vote over the past decade, Republican politicians are entirely in the pockets of the fossil fuel, health insurance, tax preparation, and weapons industries, among others.

Whether it’s the corrupt collusion between the Kushner and Netanyahu families that helped lead us into an illegal war against Iran, the billions Trump’s family has made in crypto and other schemes, the insider trading on the war, putting industry insiders in charge of regulatory agencies, the DeSantis and Paxton/Abbott corruption scandals, there are vivid examples of Republican corruption laying on the public ground all over the country in plain sight.

There’s a whole panoply of issues Democrats can and should seize on, from privatization to deregulation to climate change to affordability to healthcare and education, but the core — the foundation — of every one of them is corruption.

Every Democrat in America should scan their local horizon for examples of corruption they can use against Republicans. The words “Republican corruption” should be continuously on their lips, whether campaigning, speaking to constituents, or making media appearances.

Hammer these corrupt SOBs with their own crimes against democracy and the middle class, and Democrats will see results like Magyar, Zelenskyy, Aquino, and so many others have achieved.

It’s simple, easy, and powerful: “It’s the corruption, stupid!”

US President Donald Trump’s Latin America policy has seemed, at times, detached from genuine US national interests in the region and increasingly driven by his personal preferences. He now appears determined to transform Brazil into a “political laboratory” where a right-wing triumph would serve as definitive proof of the superiority of his authoritarian worldview.

Ambition Rules

If anyone doubted the scope of Donald Trump’s ambitions, they need only look at his attempts to dictate terms to the largest economy in Latin America. To Trump, Brazil isn’t a sovereign nation with a rich culture and complex history. It’s merely a convenient staging ground for expanding his ideological influence.

In his worldview, the Brazilian political landscape largely mirrors that of the United States. This makes it a suitable "testing ground" for the geopolitical and domestic policies Trump and his supporters will try to adapt and apply to the United States.

It’s not hard to see how Trump is trying to install his own personally loyal "king" in Brazil. With surgical precision, he's attempting to remove anything progressive from Brazilian politics. He's striving to reshape Brazilian politics so that the voice of the people is drowned out by the noise of right-wing populism, and democratic institutions merely serve as window dressing for one man’s will.

Mirror in the Tropics

At the core of this strategy lies Trump's profound fixation on the Bolsonaro family: former President Jair Bolsonaro, presently incarcerated for his role in a coup attempt, and his son Flavio, a prominent right-wing candidate who emerged victorious in the first round of elections on October 4th and is set to compete against current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

To the occupant of the Oval Office, Bolsonaro isn’t just an ally; he's Trump’s political reflection, his "tropical doppelgänger." Through this troubling narcissism, Trump sees confirmation that his tactics of intimidation, aggressive rhetoric, and disregard for the truth are a universal recipe for power.

Trump and MAGA Republicans' drive to promote conservative supremacy is turning US foreign policy into an instrument of ideological dominance. They are intent on proving to the world once again that conservative ideology is the only correct path. To this end, Brazil must become the main trophy—a living testament to the idea that authoritarianism equals efficiency and everything else is a mistake.

Attacking Lula: A Contest of Hope

In this context, Trump's criticism of Lula does not appear as political debate, but as blatant aggression. Trump rejects the Brazilian leader precisely because he champions everything his American counterpart disdains: empathy, social justice, and faith in the greater good.

This ignores the fact that Lula has become a beacon of hope for millions of Brazilians while Trump sows discord. For this reason, Lula’s return to power in 2022 was not just a political victory, but a triumph of humanity over cynicism.

It’s difficult to remain indifferent when witnessing Lula's consistent defense of the Amazon rainforest—the “lungs of the planet”—which was brutally exploited under right-wing governments at the behest of corporate interests. While Brazilian right-wing politicians and their supporter Trump see nature merely as a resource for enrichment, Lula fights for humanity's ecological survival.

The Brazilian president's unwavering support for the LGBTQ+ community and minorities in the face of aggressive conservatism is an act of true democratic leadership, in contrast to the narrow vision of "right-wing supremacy."

The Destructive Influence of the Right

Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise that issues such as confronting extremism in politics, combating electoral violence, and bolstering communities against disinformation have come to the forefront of US-Brazil relations.However, as events surrounding Brazil's election campaign show, Trump and his allies, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are hardly concerned with regional stability. By promoting right-wing popolism supremacy, Trump is attempting to blur the lines between governance and his personal ambitions through his reflection in Bolsonaro.

This has already prompted a response from Democratic members of Congress, who sent Rubio a letter criticizing the White House’s blatant attempts at interfering with and potentially undermining Brazil's elections. The administration must stop using economic and political pressure to weaken Brazil’s democratic institutions. Such activity is seriously damaging the bilateral partnership.

Cautious Optimism

Brazil's election campaign clearly demonstrates a clash between two worlds. One world is embodied by Trump, Bolsonaro, and right-wing conservatives. It is a world of cold calculation, hierarchy, and dominance. The other world is championed by Lula. It is a world of equality, ecology, and democracy. Republicans who want to see democracy thrive must recognize that turning Brazil into a "political laboratory" for the Trump era is a dead end.

On October 8, Oscar Belgal was shot in his car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent. According to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYC Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, agents surrounded the man’s car, which had a 5-year-old child in the backseat, before firing seven rounds. A photograph taken a few hours after the shooting showed the car crashed into a concrete barrier, with a bullet hole in the windshield, two holes in the rear side window, and one in the rear panel.

Belgal was reportedly struck in the neck and taken to the hospital. While the child miraculously sustained no physical injuries, as Mamdani notes, this experience will leave him “traumatized and terrified.” Mamdani further remarked, “Tonight, millions of our neighbors are wondering whether they will be safe on our streets, in our schools, at their work sites.”

Those words are far from hyperbole. Additional photos obtained The Intercept show a federal agent in a high visibility safety vest wielding an assault rifle. An eyewitness said that the man was posing as a construction worker before the incident. This would not be the first time Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents disguised themselves to surveil targets. In 2025, ICE admitted that their agents were posing as construction workers in New York as part of an ongoing operation. Earlier this year in Minneapolis, ICE agents were caught disguising themselves as utility workers using fake license plates in clear violation of state law.

The sad reality is that Trump does not need to taunt Iran into attacking American cities—ICE is already doing that.

Not only do these secret police tactics undermine public trust and accountability, they also create additional risks. Since the start of President Donald Trump’s mass immigration agenda, people have impersonated masked ICE agents to commit robberies, kidnappings, scams, sexual assaults, and to terrorize immigrant communities across the country.

All of which raises several questions: Did ICE agents properly identify themselves to Belgal? Or did he just see a construction worker with an assault rifle pointed at his car and child? Did the officers try to deescalate the situation? Or did they take advantage of the confusion their own disguises created to justify unwarranted violence?

Importantly, Wired reports that one of the ICE agents present at the scene has been identified as Brenden Cuni, an ICE supervisor who has been involved in several illegal street arrests:

Court filings accuse him of using a Taser on a handcuffed man, while activists have alleged he is one of the agents seen forcing a pregnant woman to the ground during a Minneapolis operation. In recent months, federal judges have repeatedly found arrests involving Cuni unlawful. One judge called an arrest warrant he signed ‘fraudulent,’ while another said that video evidence contradicts his sworn account of an arrest; in a third case, the government withdrew his sworn statements as inaccurate.

Given the circumstances, as well as ICE’s track record of unprovoked violence and the string of ICE impersonations, Belgal would have had every right to fear for the safety of himself and the child. While ICE blames sanctuary policies and undocumented immigrants for endangering the public, it is their fascist tactics and the incompetence of their officers that are actively making the country less safe.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immediately responded to this latest violent incident by blaming the victim. They claimed that federal agents were conducting “a targeted enforcement operation […] to arrest a criminal illegal alien” who had been arrested in 2023, “but was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies that put American lives at risk.”

Notably, their statement offers no justification whatsoever for the use of deadly force. Even if we accept DHS’ framing of Belgal as a dangerous criminal, that is not a legitimate reason for a federal agent to shoot a civilian—let alone to fire indiscriminately at a car with a child onboard. Within a rule-based democracy, prior arrests are not a license for extrajudicial violence.

This, however, is part of the problem. ICE operates as if simply being undocumented or having a criminal record nullifies any legal protections that immigrants are constitutionally afforded. In doing so, they openly violate and betray the very principles they purportedly wish to defend, while simultaneously breaking the very laws they supposedly want to uphold.

The sad reality is that Trump does not need to taunt Iran into attacking American cities—ICE is already doing that.

Importantly, this latest incident comes less than two weeks after DHS announced that ICE had “initiated a nationwide public safety surge in sanctuary cities.” On October 8, the same day Belgal was shot, the Trump administration reportedly launched “Operation Safe California”—a 45-day immigration enforcement surge across the state beginning in San Diego.

While the Trump administration has repeatedly targeted sanctuary cities and policies, these specific efforts are about the midterms. By targeting blue states like New York and California, Trump is hoping to sow enough fear and chaos to suppress Democrat turnout, while rallying Republicans who continue to overwhelmingly support his administration’s immigration policies. This, alongside his attempts to undermine mail-in voting and use a controversial database to check the citizenship status of voters, are part of his administration’s multipronged strategy to remain in power. As Trump himself has noted, if Republicans lose the midterms, he’ll “get impeached.” It is that fear—not public safety or concern for the American people—that is driving this latest round of ICE violence. In the end, Trump only cares about one thing: himself.

Ultimately, ICE must be abolished, but in the short term we must do everything we can to defend our communities against Trump’s armed gestapo and his attempt to steal the midterms. This includes pushing our elected officials to pass and enforce meaningful checks on ICE activities, supporting journalists and media outlets documenting ICE abuses, as well as creating community support networks to help victims of ICE’s brutality.

Yesterday it was Belgal. Three weeks ago, it was Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. Tomorrow, it could be any one of us. For everyone’s sake, we must put an end to ICE’s violence once and for all.

For the third week in a row, high school students across France are taking to the streets demanding more investment in their education. They want more teachers, smaller classes, decent school buildings, and a public education system that works for poor and working-class students.

But their struggle comes at a moment when France faces mounting pressure to cut public spending while dramatically increasing its military budget. The question at the heart of this uprising goes far beyond education: Will France invest in its young people—or in missiles, weapons, and war? Books or bombs?

What began in the Paris suburbs has spread to more than a thousand schools. On October 6, more than 250,000 people reportedly took to the streets in demonstrations supporting the students.

An entire generation is being asked to accept austerity while Europe embarks on one of its largest military buildups since the Cold War.

The government's response has only deepened the anger. Instead of addressing students' demands, authorities have unleashed riot police, tear gas, grenades, and mass arrests. More than 6,500 people have reportedly been arrested since the protests began, most of them minors. Some young protesters have suffered horrific injuries, including a 15-year-old who lost his hand after a police grenade exploded. Amnesty International has condemned what it calls the "disproportionate" use of force against young people peacefully demanding their right to education.

The contrast is striking: Students are asking for teachers and decent schools, while the government deploys riot police against them—and finds billions more for its military.

The student movement is unfolding just as NATO is pressuring European governments to massively increase military spending. Under intense pressure from Washington, NATO leaders agreed in 2025 to a staggering new target: 5% of each member country's GDP by 2035. At least 3.5% is supposed to go directly to military expenditures, with another 1.5% devoted to military-related infrastructure, cybersecurity, and "resilience."

This represents an enormous shift from NATO's previous 2% target, which many members already struggled to meet. For countries facing growing deficits, heavy debt, and deteriorating public services, such an increase comes at a steep price.

France provides a glaring example. The country has nearly $4 trillion in public debt—roughly 119% of GDP, one of the highest levels in Europe. To tackle its deficit, the government has proposed approximately $48 billion in spending cuts and tax increases, putting already strained public services under even greater pressure.

Yet even as the government demands belt-tightening, its proposed 2027 budget increases military spending by approximately $7.2 billion in a single year, compared with just $1.2 billion more for education. The education budget would also eliminate 1,588 permanent teaching positions.

Imagine being a 16-year-old sitting in an overcrowded classroom, with a leaking ceiling and no regular teacher, hearing that your government cannot afford better schools—but can somehow find billions more for weapons.

France's own fiscal watchdog has pointed out that increases in central government spending are being driven largely by rising interest payments, contributions to the European Union, and increased military expenditures.

NATO officials insist that this massive military buildup is necessary to protect Europe from Russia and other threats. But the notion that Russia is poised to invade France is absurd, and the push for ever-greater military spending raises a fundamental question: What kind of security is the French government actually providing if their schools, hospitals, and other public services are left to deteriorate?

France is not alone. Students and teachers in Belgium, Spain, and Portugal have also taken to the streets over education funding and working conditions, reflecting growing frustration across Europe with governments that claim there is not enough money for basic public services.

An entire generation is being asked to accept austerity while Europe embarks on one of its largest military buildups since the Cold War. Political leaders may insist that education and military spending are separate issues. But they compete for the same limited public resources.

And some French students are already making that connection themselves. Protest signs have declared, "Money for schools, not war" and "Fund high schools, not genocide," linking their immediate demands to the broader question of what—and whom—the government chooses to fund.

These young people are challenging the very definition of security. NATO measures security in tanks, missiles, drones, and ammunition. The students are demanding another kind of security: decent schools, equal opportunity, and a society that invests in their future instead of sacrificing it to an endless arms buildup.

Their demands should resonate throughout the NATO alliance, including in the United States, where public services are under attack while President Donald Trump seeks a staggering 54% increase in the military budget.

That's why CODEPINK and allied groups are organizing a Taxpayer Uprising in Washington, DC, November 10-12, bringing people into the halls of Congress to demand a fundamental reorientation of our national priorities. Instead of funneling ever more tax dollars into war and weapons manufacturers, our government should invest in healthcare, education, affordable housing, green energy, and a sustainable future.

From the classrooms of France to the halls of Congress, the question is the same: Will our governments invest in life—or in war? Books or bombs?

House Democrats can stand with college athletes, or they can help Donald Trump score a win at those athletes' expense. There isn't much middle ground here.

The Senate has passed the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that would make it harder for college athletes to set the terms of their own endorsement deals. Now the president wants Congress to put it on his desk.

Democrats should say no. Passing it hands him a win and gives powerful schools even more control over the young people whose labor keeps college sports running in the first place.

There's still time for Democrats to hold out for a better bill. They should keep the scholarship and health protections, protect women's and Olympic sports, and give athletes real bargaining rights and a way to fight unfair restrictions.

In its September 28 statement, the White House cast Trump as a champion of college athletes and pushed lawmakers to bring stability to the system. It's a tidy story. Democrats ought to ask the obvious follow-up, though. Stability for whom?

For decades, college sports ran on the idea of amateurism. The rivalries got the headlines, and players were told they were out there for the love of the game. Funny how that love never kept the schools from cashing in. By 1952, college football was already a TV property. That year, NBC paid the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) $1.14 million for the rights to broadcast one game a week.

Then came 1984, when individual schools and conferences won the right to cut their own TV deals, and the value went through the roof. That's a big part of how college sports grew into the multibillion-dollar business it is today. Schools and conferences fought each other for TV money, all while capping what the athletes bringing in that money could make. Nobody turned on the TV to watch an athletic director. They tuned in for the players.

A lot of the athletes shut out of that money came from families without much wealth to pass down. Black athletes, in particular, filled the rosters of the football and basketball programs that drew the biggest TV checks. Colleges and networks made money off every game, yet the players couldn't earn a dime from their own names or faces. Their work built wealth for just about everyone but them.

That began to change in 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled in NCAA v. Alston that the NCAA couldn't cap certain education-related benefits for athletes. Days later, state name, image, and likeness (NIL) laws took effect, and the NCAA set aside the rules that had kept athletes from profiting off their names, images, and likenesses. For the first time, a player could get paid for an endorsement or a video game appearance and still keep their eligibility.

To Democrats, this ought to read as a labor fight, plain and simple. Athletes finally got some room to negotiate what their names and talents are worth. Coaches, networks, and universities have been doing that forever. Yes, a scholarship is worth something. So is the work of the person who earns it. We can't champion workers' bargaining power in every other industry and then act like it's a problem once it shows up on a football field.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who has spent years preaching about free markets, is now one of the people leading the charge to limit what athletes can earn. So I guess competition only becomes a crisis when the young people doing the work finally have some leverage over the schools paying them. Nick Saban insisted last month that player pay and coach pay are "totally different markets," but when the Senate had a chance to cap coaches' salaries, that amendment failed, so apparently the only market that needs a ceiling is the one where the players get paid.

Congress has no business giving schools more power over the terms of players' endorsement deals. Athletes deserve protections, and they shouldn't have to give up their leverage to get them.

Collective bargaining belongs at the center of this fight. Athletes need to be able to negotiate as a group over pay, working conditions, and medical care for injuries that can stick with them for years after their eligibility runs out. Giving them a seat on some committee doesn't come close. Democrats should insist on a bargaining framework with real teeth, not punt the question to some future commission.

For Black athletes, the stakes are even higher. An NIL deal might cover a family's bills, chip away at debt, or start a savings account. Cap what players can earn or where they can go, and you shrink those chances during a career that's short to begin with. The NAACP has opposed this legislation, warning that it puts institutional interests ahead of athletes' economic rights. Democrats would be smart to listen.

And now Trump wants his name on it. Why would Democrats help him market limits on athletes' bargaining power as a win for the same people those limits hold back? We tell voters we'll fight for workers and help Black families build wealth. We should remember that when rich universities and conferences show up asking for protection.

There's still time for Democrats to hold out for a better bill. They should keep the scholarship and health protections, protect women's and Olympic sports, and give athletes real bargaining rights and a way to fight unfair restrictions. What they shouldn't do is give Trump a win paid for with Black athletes' economic freedom. The people doing the work have earned a win of their own.

Looking across the devastated landscape of the Gaza Strip, where surviving generations now carry the permanent physical and psychological scars of war, the ultimate indictment of our era is damning: The world watched the horror unfold in real time, possessed all the legal, political, and institutional mechanisms to stop it, and did nothing.

For months, then years, the catastrophe in Gaza tested the fabric of international law, the integrity of global governance, and the moral conscience of humanity. From the halls of the United Nations to the high courts of The Hague, what followed was not information failure, but a shameful surrender of political and moral will.

Rarely does history deliver such swift and scathing hindsight. Three years after October 7, 2023, the real horror of Gaza is that this barbarity was never hidden; it was broadcast live in high definition to a global audience that watched, debated, proceduralized, and allowed it to continue.

There was never any doubt about the genocide, nor a dearth of international laws to end it. Instead, the failure lies entirely with Western institutional gatekeepers who have lacked the courage to act.

Israel’s war on Palestinians continues uninterrupted. Despite having the influence to halt the crisis, major international powers have not intervened, allowing the regime and its colonizers to increase their violence across both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

As time lifts the fog of war, the systemic breakdown of global institutions and governments becomes unmistakably apparent. The world failed to stop the genocide in Gaza not because it lacked awareness or warning. It faltered because the “rules-based” international order (aka Western order) is structurally and morally bankrupt, paralyzed by complicity, cowardice, and double standards.

The war exposed international humanitarian law as a selective tool of the West—applied swiftly to some, but suspended when it inconveniences the powerful. Governments that traditionally postured as champions of human rights have prioritized strategic alignments over universal legal and humanitarian obligations.

During the initial months of the onslaught, as the number killed rose into the tens of thousands and entire neighborhoods were flattened with their residents inside, global diplomats did what they do best: Use bureaucratic delays to stall for time.

While hospitals were besieged and children underwent amputations without anesthesia, on blood-soaked floors, the UN Security Council degenerated into a theater of deadlock. The world’s premier body for collective security rendered global consensus impotent and buckled under superpower threats.

Repeated resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire were either vetoed or watered down into toothless rhetoric. Meanwhile, international courts meticulously deliberated over the legal nuances of genocide while graves multiplied and atrocities continued uninterrupted.

Today, as the International Court of Justice unhurriedly considers its final ruling on South Africa’s 2023 genocide case against Israel, tangible memories of Palestine are being erased; centuries of history, culture, and ancestral lineages are being obliterated. For Palestine, justice delayed is not justice denied; it is genocide completed.

Three years of impunity, of unprosecuted genocide, reveal that the value of human life is being measured on a sliding scale; that it is weighed based on race, geography, and political utility.

In retrospect, these procedural and administrative delays look less like structural gridlock and more like an active cover-up. Every month spent debating the semantics of humanitarian corridors or compliance with international law gave carte blanche to Israel’s military onslaught.

The harshest criticism of the last three years falls on Western powers. Governments that never tire of lecturing the world on human rights, rules-based order, and international jurisprudence performed moral gymnastics to justify the unjustifiable.

We watched as world leaders converged on Israel with blank checks of allegiance, supplying an uninterrupted stream of munitions that reduced universities, schools, hospitals, markets, bookstores, bakeries, places of worship, and apartment blocks to rubble.

While publicly wringing their hands, in private, these same leaders approved the weapon shipments. And, in a cruel theatrical act of humanitarian absolution, they authorized the aerial dropping of meager sacks of flour into the very zones in Gaza they helped leave in ruins.

Failure was not restricted to the halls of power; the entire mainstream media landscape failed alongside it. For months, reporters on the ground in Gaza—those who were not among the hundreds systematically targeted and killed—fought to pierce a wall of severe censorship and dehumanization.

In the West, corporate media tied itself in knots trying to sanitize language in order to obscure Israel’s direct responsibility for the ongoing violence. Outlets downplayed Palestinian deaths by using passive language like "died" to treat mass casualties as collateral damage, all while elevating voices that defended the legitimacy of the war.

The public response, however, revealed a deeper fracture. Millions marched in cities worldwide, launching one of the largest sustained anti-war mobilizations in a generation. Yet, the disconnect between the governed and the governing remained absolute. Western democracies proved entirely immune to the moral demands of their own citizens.

The silence of the last three years has been deafening. There was never any doubt about the genocide, nor a dearth of international laws to end it. Instead, the failure lies entirely with Western institutional gatekeepers who have lacked the courage to act.

Allowing genocide to go unpunished creates a dangerous precedent for global security. If international law and justice are buried in the rubble of Gaza, the global community will ultimately be digging its own grave.

In Guaíba, in southern Brazil, the effects of CMPC’s pulp mill enter people’s homes. Residents living nearby describe a rotten-egg smell from reduced sulfur compounds that irritates the eyes and nose and causes headaches and nausea. They live with noise and powerful vibrations, in some areas around the clock. Residents report cracks in their homes and disrupted sleep while sawdust and even foam from the mill’s effluent treatment plant fall on their houses. Soot and dust cover laundry hanging on clotheslines and cars parked in driveways, making it standard practice for the company to pay for the washing of neighborhood vehicles.

And then there are the accidents.

Workers have suffered poisoning and injuries, including fatal incidents. Chlorine leaks have affected residents living nearby, while communities still do not have an adequate emergency plan for a major accident.

Now CMPC Wants to Build Another Pulp Mill

Chilean pulp and paper company and monoculture tree plantation CMPC plans to build the so-called Natureza Project in Barra do Ribeiro, Rio Grande do Sul. The project isn’t simply a factory. It encompasses the expansion of massive eucalyptus monoculture plantations, roads, port infrastructure, dredging, transmission lines, and increased transportation, with production projected at millions of metric ton of pulp annually.

Indigenous and environmental organisations therefore question why the territorial, social, water-related, and ecological impacts of this tree monoculture expansion are not fully incorporated into the project’s assessment process.

And this is all happening as the industry continues to utilize an intense corporate lobby, leading to serious legal setbacks in corporate environmental regulation at the state and national levels. In 2023, environmental zoning regulations for forestry in Rio Grande do Sul were relaxed, allowing for the expansion of plantations from 1.2 million hectares to 4 million. And in 2024, forestry was excluded from the list of potentially polluting activities that consume environmental resources in Brazil, exempting tree monocultures from any type of environmental permit.

CMPC also actively greenwashes their activities, going as far as to fund local football tournaments. We see this as a broader scheme by corporations to mitigate pushback against their operations.

The Impact Assessment Can’t Stop at the Pulp Mill

The proposed mill would discharge industrial effluent into Lake Guaíba, a crucial water body near Porto Alegre and other municipalities with a population of around 1.3 million people. Among the issues raised publicly are water quality; cumulative effects on a watershed already under pressure; and impacts related to dredging and navigation, mining, and the discharge of wastewater and industrial effluents (including those from the company’s existing factory). The volume of water consumed by the company and the pollutants discharged into Lake Guaíba would be equivalent to the water consumption and wastewater production of the entire population of the region. Possible contaminants include dioxins, extremely toxic chemical compounds that can enter the food chain and reach humans through the consumption of fish.

Lake Guaíba also supports fishing communities, contributes to drinking-water supplies, and is already under enormous ecological pressure. Asking whether a new factory complies with the technical conditions of a permit is therefore a narrower question than asking whether the entire corporate project is compatible with the rights of the people and ecosystems that are forced to absorb its consequences.

The Natureza Project presents a practical test for a global principle: Corporate human rights regulation must reflect the reality of corporate power.

The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office says at least eight Mbyá Guarani villages fall within the project’s direct area of influence and 18 within its indirect area. As a result, its recommendations stress that consultation under International Labor Organization Convention 169 cannot be replaced by informal meetings or an Indigenous component study. Consultation must be free, prior, and informed and must respect the communities’ own protocols and decision-making processes. But the struggle goes beyond the consultation; it is about ensuring that communities have the right to say NO to the project.

That distinction is fundamental. Consultation is not a box to tick after the project has effectively been decided.

The proposed mill is also inseparable from a longer history. CMPC has been linked to the Laja-San Rosendo massacre, in which 19 people were murdered following Augusto Pinochet’s military coup. In 2021, the Concepción Court of Appeals convicted a former CMPC employee as an accomplice in the killings, finding coordination between state agents and company personnel. That history underscores why corporate accountability cannot be reduced to whether a company publishes sustainability reports or complies with a narrow administrative procedure.

The UN Binding Treaty

The proposed legally binding instrument is intended to address precisely the gaps that arise when corporate impacts cross borders, jurisdictions, and stages of production. A meaningful treaty should require companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, and address human rights risks associated with the entire chain of activities under its control or linked to its project.

For a project like Natureza, that would mean assessing the mill alongside plantations, roads, ports, dredging, water use, emissions, and affected communities. It would mean treating Indigenous consultation as a substantive right rather than a procedural obstacle. It would mean ensuring access to information, participation, justice, and effective remedy.

Most importantly, it would clarify that responsibility cannot disappear simply because an impact occurs several steps away from the factory itself. That is the accountability gap the UN negotiations must confront.

The Natureza Project presents a practical test for a global principle: Corporate human rights regulation must reflect the reality of corporate power.

If a company’s business model transforms land, water, livelihoods, and Indigenous territories across an entire region, then the law must be capable of seeing that whole picture.

Anything less leaves the people bearing the consequences to carry the burden of a business model they never designed.

As we approach the midterm elections, our country's most prominent voting concerns are back on the frontline. The US is experiencing historically high voter turnouts, yet voters are expressing record levels of dissatisfaction. Perhaps it is because one of the most salient topics across party lines is missing from the conversation: campaign finance reform.

The upcoming midterm election cycle is projected to be the most expensive in American history. Analysis by The New York Times found that 20 donors have already spent $1.2 billion on this year's campaigns to push candidates in battleground states and integrate corporate agendas into public policy. Special interest groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Musk’s America PAC are spending big to elect allies friendly to their political and economic interests. Not only do AI groups fund candidates, but increasingly dishonest and weird deepfake AI videos circulate online. Further analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) Action Fund found that 172 billionaire families spent $1.7 billion. Over $1 billion in untraceable dark money is corrupting American democracy.

Americans are unhappy with the state of campaign finance in the US. But how did we end up here? In 1976, the Supreme Court’s Buckley v. Valeo paved the way for campaign finance laws by equating campaign donations to “free speech,” protected as a First Amendment right. In, 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling enabled the creation of “super PACs,” allowing unlimited corporate donations beyond the previous $5,000 limit. As a result, US elections are dominated by corporate interests and lobbyists, increasing the cost and accessibility of running for office.

The For Our Freedom Amendment is here, and campaign spending limits are not far behind.

Several polls confirm Americans’ discontent. Many in both parties and in all regions of the country have lost faith in our system, feeling elected officials cater to lobbyists rather than constituents. Nearly 80% of voters believe big donations are linked to corruption, while merely 4% of American voters believe the United States’ current political system works well. This pattern is similarly present in congressional elections;8 out of every 10 adults in the US believe that people who donate money to political campaigns have too much of an influence over congressional decisions.

However, while many remain dissatisfied with the state of campaign finance, large majorities are optimistic about reform. Approximately 60% of Americans believe in the possibility of adopting laws that limit spending on political campaigns. An even greater majority desire doing so, with 72% of Americans believing in imposing spending limits on campaigns. All around the country, Americans support enforcing limits by margins of 3-to-1 or even greater.

Although many may be skeptical, wondering how campaign finance reform can take place when unlimited spending is protected under the First Amendment, change is already underway. The pathway lies in the very foundation of the American democratic system: the United States’ Constitution. Supermajorities up to 80% across the country support an amendment to limit campaign spending. Already, the cross-partisan nonprofit American Promise has drafted and is proposing the amendment.

The For Our Freedom Amendment was developed meticulously through the collaboration of citizens, lawmakers, and scholars from all parties. Its text gets straight to the point: It empowers the government by granting it constitutional authority to enforce campaign spending limits. The full text of the amendment is as follows:

Section 1. We the People have compelling sovereign interests in the freedom of speech, representative self-government, federalism, the integrity of the electoral process, and the political equality of natural persons.

Section 2. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to forbid Congress or the States, within their respective jurisdictions, from reasonably regulating and limiting contributions and spending in campaigns, elections, or ballot measures.

Section 3. Congress and the States shall have the power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation and may distinguish between natural persons and artificial entities, including by prohibiting artificial entities from raising and spending money in campaigns, elections, or ballot measures.

Its concise and clear language makes it accessible to the average American. It conveys a refreshing honesty and constituent-first sentiment recently missing from political debate, placing it at the heart of political and individual dignity.

Not only is it drafted, but support for the amendment is significant. Twenty-three states have passed official resolutions calling on Congress, meaning it has garnered nearly half of the three-quarters majority required for Congress to propose the amendment.

While a constitutional amendment may feel beyond reach, we must keep constitutional change at the forefront of our political imagination. The seeds of reform have already been planted by the electorate. Electing proactive candidates enables conversations and reform in Congress. Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.) proposed the House Joint Resolution 191, Constitutional Campaign Finance Reform Amendment, in collaboration with American Promise. With this, Rep. Barrett expressed unwavering American democratic spirit, and this is just the beginning.

It is now our job as citizens in this election cycle to keep the pressure on, which means greater voter participation. Congressional leaders are in charge of the Committee on Appropriations, which oversees and enforces campaign finance laws. Participating in the election of competent leaders can lead to higher standards of regulation; but beyond that, it may very well be a key stepping stone on the road to ratification.

Unequivocally, the facts do not lie: Americans want change. So, call your friends and family, or chat with your neighbors, and let them know: The For Our Freedom Amendment is here, and campaign spending limits are not far behind. We can make this happen

Washington’s political discourse on the war with Iran took a revealing turn during President Donald Trump’s recent campaign remarks. Having originally sold the confrontation as a rapid, low-cost campaign destined to conclude within weeks, the administration abruptly reset its threshold of acceptable sacrifice. Trump declared that even if Iranian retaliatory strikes were to “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego, such catastrophic damage would remain “a small price” for American security. While the remarks drew immediate backlash across California leadership, the strategic implication runs far deeper. It marks the collapse of the Pentagon’s short-war doctrine, signaling that the conflict’s costs have migrated from West Asia directly to the American homeland.

At the onset of hostilities, the White House’s logic rested on absolute military preeminence. Superior firepower was supposed to impose a swift resolution, sparing Washington an attritional quagmire. But as weeks turned into months, the gap between promise and operational reality became unbridgeable. Rather than compelling capitulation, Washington met Iran’s resilient deterrence and asymmetric depth. Instead of seeing military burdens recede, the administration must now explain to voters why they must shoulder costs never accounted for in initial war plans.

Hawks defend this shift by claiming that conditioning the public for pain signals resolve and escalation dominance. Yet this justification collapses under scrutiny. Effective deterrence requires achievable political aims, not normalizing homeland destruction to obscure planning failures. Far from projecting strength, accepting strikes on major domestic metropolises reveals an inability to dictate terms militarily. It is the posture of an overextended power that has lost escalation control and is retroactively negotiating the price of strategic deadlock with its own electorate.

Dismissing devastation to these hubs as a “small price” reveals the transactional ethos of the ruling elite: Ordinary citizens and domestic infrastructure are treated as war livestock—herded to absorb the fallout of elite adventurism while their safety is traded away for unattainable geopolitical goals.

The dismissal of potential damage to California brings this cynicism into sharp relief. Los Angeles and San Diego are not incidental collateral; they anchor America’s defense architecture. San Diego serves as the premier home port of the Pacific Fleet Surface Navy, housing dozens of combatants and major Marine Corps installations, while Los Angeles anchors the nation’s primary aerospace and defense manufacturing cluster. Dismissing devastation to these hubs as a “small price” reveals the transactional ethos of the ruling elite: Ordinary citizens and domestic infrastructure are treated as war livestock—herded to absorb the fallout of elite adventurism while their safety is traded away for unattainable geopolitical goals.

This domestic vulnerability mirrors Washington’s strategic miscalculation in the Strait of Hormuz. Planners envisioned the waterway as a pressure point where naval coercion would rapidly force compliance. Instead, it became an economic trap. Protracted uncertainty across maritime routes, compounded by crisis-level war-risk insurance surcharges—premiums have surged from 0.10-0.25% of hull and machinery value pre-conflict to 3.5-7.5% per transit—and severe disruptions documented in the US Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) assessments of vital transit chokepoints, turned a tactical blitz into structural inflation. The EIA assumes the strait will remain effectively closed through late May before traffic gradually resumes. The very levers intended to force a rapid settlement have prolonged the conflict, imposing compounding penalties on American consumers.

The crisis extends beyond an elongated timeline; the political logic of the war has been inverted. Initially, military force was justified as a way to avert protracted costs. Today, that framework has become an exercise in retroactive justification. When the White House argues that metropolitan destruction is acceptable against abstract security objectives, the debate ceases to be about preventing the burdens of conflict. It becomes about forcing citizens to accept homeland vulnerability as the price of foreign policy failure.

The central question is no longer simply when Trump can announce that the war is over. The more important question is whether he can explain to the American public the gap between the promise of a “two-week war” and the reality of a protracted crisis. A war that was supposed to end with a rapid victory has instead become a conflict whose continuation requires explanations about fuel prices, the Strait of Hormuz, and even the security of American cities.

This shift exposes an irreconcilable contradiction in official messaging. Trump insists the conflict will end “very soon,” yet simultaneously prepares the public for catastrophic domestic losses. If the war were genuinely nearing a favorable conclusion, preparing the homeland for devastation would be irrational. If the destruction of major cities is a realistic possibility, the promise of a swift, contained campaign was fundamentally illusory. Washington cannot maintain both assertions: one is a fiction, the other an admission of failure.

Where did the two-week war go? The answer lies in Washington’s altered vocabulary: from promising minimal costs to declaring destruction at the heart of America tolerable. When leadership stops preventing the burdens of conflict and instead demands that citizens absorb them at home, the illusion of hegemonic control shatters. The two-week war collapsed against strategic overreach, leaving an administration trying to sell the sacrifice of its own cities as an acceptable price of power.

In much of the country, there is an enormous vacuum for working people seeking political representation. In 2024, 132 Republican House victories were by 25 percentage points or more.

In nine Great Plains and central states—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho—Democrats did not even field candidates in approximately 40 percent of the roughly 1,400 state legislative races, according to my own rough count.

Here’s what one 2026 projection looks like:

The above map shows all too clearly that in vast areas of the country working-class voters have no realistic alternative-party representation—the Republican is the only viable major-party choice, while the Democratic Party has largely abandoned many of these races.

But nature, as well as politics, abhors a vacuum, which is why we’re starting to see the emergence of progressive populist independents trying to take hold in this desert.

Here are a few worth noting:

Dan Osborn, a mechanic, Navy veteran, and former labor union president, is running for US Senate in Nebraska against incumbent Republican Pete Ricketts, the former governor and son of billionaire Joe Ricketts. Osborn came within seven points of defeating Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in 2024, running 16 points ahead of Kamala Harris, and the 2026 race has again attracted national attention.

The current polling picture is close. The average of three recent Nebraska polls has Ricketts at 46.3 percent and Osborn at 44.7 percent, within the margin of error, with a substantial share of voters undecided or supporting other candidates. The latest polls that meet the New York Times criteria for worthiness show Osborn slightly ahead, a virtual toss-up pitting an incumbent Republican with deep pockets against an independent.

We can expect an inordinate amount of money to flood into the race to attack Osborn. A Republican super PAC has already put more than $3 million into advertising targeting him.

Osborn is running on his Nebraska Growth & Fairness Plan, which he says is “not a party’s platform or written by consultants. It’s written for the people who punch a clock and wonder why nobody in Washington is fighting for them.”

He explicitly disavows a connection to the Democratic Party, though the Republicans try to link the two at every turn.

If Osborn can overcome the Republican financial advantage, it would be an enormous boost to working-class candidates who have given up on the Democrats.

Unfortunately, Osborn faces the fallout from a leaked audio recording in which he made disparaging remarks about some of Trump’s voters. The recording was obtained by the Omaha World-Herald, and Osborn subsequently said that the voice “sure sounds like me” and apologized for the remarks.

He was recorded saying:

“Billy Bob in f—— Red Cloud, Nebraska, who lives next to the f—— Trump store as you pull into town and is waving the flag, all he knows is that he’s on the winning team. (Trump has) been so effective at taking Billy Bob and his wife Mary Jane or Mary Jo and telling them … you’re on the winning team. And that’s all they care about, because their lives probably suck so f—— bad.”

November will tell us whether his campaign against the two parties can overcome both the Republican financial advantage and the political damage from his choice of words.

Todd Achilles is running as an independent for US Senate in Idaho. He says:

“The two-party system has failed America. Both parties increase the national debt, keep us in endless wars, and favor big corporations, harming our families in the process…I reject the left-right divide because the challenge ahead of us is those at the top versus those at the bottom — those in power against the people. I will fight for all Idahoans, not billionaires or extremists.”

Achilles, a former Democratic member of the Idaho House of Representatives, is not a traditional working-class candidate. He is an Army veteran and technology executive who is running on a populist, anti-corporate platform.

The polling picture in Idaho is complicated. Recent surveys have produced very different results depending on the sample and whether voters are shown a two-candidate or multi-candidate race. One recent rather optimistic average of polls shows Achilles trailing by about 3 to 5 percent.

Whatever the polling, Idaho remains an overwhelmingly Republican state: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris there by 36.5 percentage points in 2024, winning 66.9 percent to Harris’s 30.4 percent.

Brian Bengs, a US Navy and Air Force veteran, former JAG officer, and lawyer, is running as an independent for the US Senate from South Dakota. In 2022, he ran for Senate as a Democrat and lost by more than 40 points. He’s running as a member of the Independent Veterans of America.

He is attacking the billionaire class:

“who buy politicians to rig the system so they can pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries & condition us to see only through red or blue-colored glasses disguising how they pick our pockets.”

His campaign’s current platform indeed emphasizes getting big money out of politics, eliminating corruption, banning congressional stock trading, unrigging the tax code, and reducing the national debt.

Like Achilles, Bengs faces a formidable Republican political environment. Trump carried South Dakota by 29.2 percentage points in 2024.

Bill Hill, a commercial fisherman, construction worker, teacher, principal, and former superintendent, is running as an independent for Alaska’s sole congressional seat. He spent more than two decades in education and was named Alaska Superintendent of the Year in 2023.

Hill is calling for:

“a total ban on congressional stock trading. Billionaires and corporations need to pay their share like the rest of us. And we need to get big money out of our elections…I’m a lifelong independent running to do what’s right by Alaskans, not what’s right by billionaires, corporations, or party bosses in DC.”

Political analysts repeatedly warn that third-party candidates can serve as spoilers, potentially helping the candidate they least support. But Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system makes the situation more complicated.

The Democrat, Eric Hafner, remains on the November ballot, along with Republican incumbent Nick Begich, Hill, and Libertarian Jim McDermott. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, the first-choice results were Begich 47 percent, Hill 35 percent, Hafner 8 percent, and McDermott 5 percent. After ranked-choice tabulation, Begich led Hill 53 percent to 47 percent.

So, in Alaska, the spoiler question is not simply a matter of who finishes ahead in the first round. The ranked-choice system makes the ultimate effect of Hafner’s candidacy dependent on how his supporters’ second choices are distributed.

Candidates Without a Party?

Currently, there is no unified effort to build a party of independents to run in deep-red America. Instead, the effort is largely driven by the candidates themselves. It’s unclear if this will be the best long-term approach.

The word “independent” does fit nicely with the idea of independent candidates, free from any broader party or political organization. But independence has its downside in terms of accumulating and sharing campaign expertise, funding, and building a unified platform.

To find out more about the viability of independent candidates, we will be conducting a new survey of 5,000 voters in red America. One question we will ask respondents is whether a new organization of independents should be formed and what to call it.

Will a New Political Formation Emerge?

The political logic of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of its working class roots, which led to the very red map of America, and the Republican Party’s failure to support workers and their issues while having control of the government, suggests strongly that something new could emerge. There are just too many working people with no political home. But it remains to be seen how this vacuum will be filled—and by whom.

There is some chance that the Democrats, responding to the independents, will address the void by running many more working-class and progressive populist candidates. But the Democratic brand is extremely tarnished.

As John Tester, the former Democratic Montana US Senator, put it in a leaked text attributed to him:

“Every race I ran as Montana Senator and US Senator it was about distancing myself from the Democratic Party…. During my last two races the Democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected.”

For those of us who want to end MAGA’s grip on national politics this November, let’s hope that an enormous blue (and independent) wave will serve, for now, as the antidote.

For more information, see A Party of Our Own.