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Hoo boy. The stupid and evil, somehow accelerating, burn. America's so-called leader, the "Worst That Has Ever Drawn Breath," manifests ever more cognitive dissonance on steroids. Absurd, addled, vindictive, looming above "a circus of death and chaos," he commits war crimes, guts voting rights, plots devastation, abases decency, murders mercy, yet whines about mean jokes. But as America reels, Banksy, Bruce, Platner and others increasingly declare, "We are not fucking doing this anymore."
Amidst what the head of Amnesty International calls "the year of the predators," humanity itself is under attack, most notably by our ludicrous narcissist and his "casual, bewildering cruelty." Despite his foolishness, Nesrine Malik writes, "This is what evil looks like": See history's portrayals of Hitler - "the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog" - and Mussolini, "that funny man, that consummate buffoon." Trump's "farcical puniness," Malik notes, is "a projection onto the world, not of large intent, but of smallness and fear...The consequences of his violence are secondary to the validation that comes from inflicting it (to) erase his terror of humiliation (and) feed his sociopathic appetite for escalation." Thus can deeply silly still equal dangerous.
Daily, the large and small atrocities are both, albeit without the resonance of the label "fascist" only because he lacks the wit, intent and coherence it requires. The war in Iran veers on: "Another day, another pivot. Trump flails." It's won, not, won but not by enough, it's not a war, we made a deal, we don't want a deal, talks are going well, we don't wanna talk, Iran struck a school full of young girls, or if we did it's Obama's fault. Give me ballroom or give me death: The solution to gun violence that kills 12 children a day, wounds 32 more and has affected over 390,000 kids since Columbine - is to build one rich white guy who's never expressed any grief over any of them a gilded bunker of his own. The way to keep more people safe is to kill as many as possible, including by firing squad.
Also, Bill Maher, Hakeem Jeffries, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel are low IQ losers, James Comey tried to kill and "inflict bodily harm on" him with "aggravated beachy seashell pictures," he's so "young, vital, vibrant" he could've joined the Artemis II astronauts easy like he aced his three screening tests for dementia - "A lion, a giraffe, a bear, and a shark. Which one is the bear?" - which the Villages audience def couldn't do, ditto sketchy Harvard Law graduate Hussein Obama. America's response to his musing what we'd do if a con man moron turned up - "How do you get to be president and you're stupid?": "That would suck - we'd probably have unprovoked wars, high gas prices and all our allies would hate us," "He's so close to getting it," "The Irony Meter is dead after spontaneously combusting," and "You're a fucking moron." Also, so grotesquely weird.

Meanwhile, the Orwellian rules for what you can/can’t see/say keep spooling out, lies sold as half-truths to justify a brazen, racist, whitewashing of both present and past under the shameless moniker of content “inappropriately disparaging Americans past or living,” but always white. Among dozens of changes at our National Parks, gone are signs about the contributions of Native Americans and women, warnings about climate change "not grounded in real science," evidence of Founding Fathers owning slaves and explorers' atrocities against Native tribes. But you do get Trump's loathsome mug plastered on park passes, like on our money, buildings, passports ad nauseum. Happily, fighting back for years have been patriots like the Resistance Rangers, the Alt National Park Service and whatever genius slapped these "Sex Offender" flyers across D.C.'s parks.
Hence incrementally, far too slowly but feeding vital hope and our frayed spirits, the flip side of our grim absurdist timeline begins to emerge as Trump and his monstrous clowns flail, fail, dig their own dank holes. So many horrors should have sparked it -Gaza, ICE, USAID, the boundless greed, cruelty, stupidity. Instead, prices did it, a non-stop, staggering incompetence that saw people being screwed once too often and lied to about one too many senseless wars. Last week, Banksy registered his own anti-imperialist protest in a middle-of-the-night dropping into the heart of ceremonial London a large statue mocking such Blind Patriotism. Mirroring the classical style of surrounding monuments celebrating the British Empire's inglorious colonial past, he presents a suited man, his flag flying into his face, one foot poised to step off into his own demise. Much like, you know.

Kicking off his Land of Hope and Dreams American tour several weeks ago, Bruce Springsteen offered his own fiery rebuttal to "a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and treasonous administration," which drew roars from a huge first night crowd in Minneapolis. Equal parts celebration and call to action, The Boss insisted, "This is still America, and - shades of the Big Lebowski, "this will not stand." Summoning "the righteous power of art, music and rock and roll in dangerous times," he asked the crowd to "join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division, and peace over....(lights come up to segue into) "WAR! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!" complete with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello shredding a solo. A righteous, dynamic pair.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
In contrast, standing grotesque and slumped-shouldered in a dingy, empty corner, is the small, mad man-child who spent Monday bellowing to a weary world that Iran will be "blown off the face of the Earth" if it targets U.S. ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which his inane recklessness closed in the first place. Online, in "the most desperate shit" to ever make its demonic way from the White House, a juvenile lackey posted him saying, "Winning it" on a loop for over 60 minutes, which still didn't make it so. The text read, "Can't stop, won't stop." Please fucking do. A horrified America: "This is a real tweet from a real account about a real man who leads a real country." Kyle Kulinski, on "the war criminal of all war criminals" who makes genocidal threats and bleats about insults: “We are not fucking doing this anymore. You don't get to say shit."
Still, one Tom Wellborn says it best in, “A Eulogy for the Worst That Has Ever Drawn Breath,” subtitled “Being a Complete and Unflinching Account of the Most Loathsome Specimen Ever to Consume Resources, Occupy Space, and Insult the Patience of a Universe That Deserved So Much Better." "There are villains, and then there are monsters, and then there are creatures so cosmically, transcendently... terrible that language itself recoils," he begins. "Grammar buckles. Syntax weeps...He is this thing. He is the thing past the thing past the thing. He is the sub-basement of the human condition, the moldy crawlspace beneath that sub-basement, and the writhing centipede beneath that."
"He has no morals. Not a single one. Not even the bad morals that at least imply a moral framework: the corrupt cop who loves his dog, the mob boss who goes to church. No. He exists in a morality vacuum so total that ethicists have proposed naming it after him...A being entirely without moral content. Not evil, because evil requires intention. Simply absent of the entire apparatus...A moral negative space shaped vaguely like a man...He has no empathy....like a raisin...He is incapable of the most basic social theater that even sociopaths manage....He takes without asking. He takes everything without asking. He takes things that aren’t takeable...The principle being: I can....He is stupid in a way that is almost majestic...His stupidity (is) total. Unified....He has been wrong about everything, always, without exception..."
"He is callous the way concrete is callous: not through malice, not through choice, but through an utter material inability to register (another) person’s pain...You could show him the face of grief, and he would wonder aloud if there was parking nearby...He is vicious the way a blunt instrument is vicious: through sheer, undirected force, through the momentum of his own awfulness...He is smelted fury with no purpose, unforged, unbent, uselessly molten....(He is) a statistical outlier so extreme that evolution seems to be embarrassed by him, a glitch in the long project of civilization...And the most horrifying part...He will never know any of this. He will never know what he is." Name it, damn it, take it down. Maine's Graham Platner hopes to help do that. We wish him well.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Environmental activists are hopeful after a six-day climate summit in Colombia resulted in a coalition of more than 50 countries agreeing to start developing plans to move away from planet-heating fossil fuels. But they say action must now follow talk.
In marked contrast to the annual United Nations climate summits, which have been routinely overrun by oil and gas industry lobbyists and concluded with agreements that largely ignore the imperative to divest from fossil fuels, Shiva Gounden, the head of Greenpeace's delegation this week in Santa Marta, said the conference that concluded Wednesday "was a breath of fresh air, a real sign that the wind is finally shifting."
The 59 nations that attended the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels did not ultimately end with a binding agreement to transition away from fossil fuels within a specific timeframe, which activists say is urgently necessary as global heating rapidly approaches 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
Many of the world's biggest polluters—including the United States, China, and India, as well as petrostates like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—were also absent.
However, the summit did end with attendees, nearly half of whom are fossil fuel producers and who represent more than half of global gross domestic product, agreeing to form tangible "frameworks" for how they plan to transition away from a fossil-fueled model of capitalism that Colombian President Gustavo Petro decried as "suicidal."
Perhaps the single biggest breakthrough at the conference was France's unveiling of a national roadmap to phase out fossil fuels in the coming decades. It became the first developed nation to lay out such a plan, with the goals of removing coal from its national grid by 2027, phasing out oil by 2045, and fossil gas by 2050.
The French climate envoy, Benoit Faraco, described it not only as an obligation but an opportunity: “This process has made us realise we want to be an electro-superpower,” he said, according to The Guardian. “We want to be the electricity Saudi Arabia of Europe, selling green electrons to the UK, Ireland, Germany, and other countries.”
Many attendees also agreed that any collective movement away from fossil fuels would require addressing the debt crisis in the Global South, which many countries—especially those in Africa, where national debts have doubled in the past five years—have found themselves cranking up fossil fuel production to cope with.
While the conference concluded without any binding plan for debt forgiveness, which many delegates from developing countries had proposed, the participants agreed that poorer countries would need support to move out of debt and finance a green transition.
"Fossil fuel dependency deepens economic instability, fuels conflict, and traps countries in cycles of debt," said Bronwen Tucker, public finance lead for Oil Change International. "As long as Global South countries remain locked in this system, while Global North governments write the financial rules, public resources will continue to flow away from people and toward the systems driving crisis."
Laura Caicedo, the campaigns coordinator at Greenpeace Colombia, described the conference as "an important space to put the just energy transition on the agenda ahead of the Climate COP," which will take place in Turkey this coming November.
"There is willingness and a sense of fresh momentum that is worth celebrating," she said. "But this is only the beginning: more time is needed for this process to mature into a true platform for dialogue that can inform decision-making in this and other cooperation spaces on key energy issues."
The next conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels is set to occur early next year in Tuvalu, a low-lying Pacific island nation that is at risk of becoming uninhabitable within decades due to sea-level rise.
While climate activists were heartened by the progress made in Santa Marta, Gounden said countries need to come to Tuvalu with concrete plans.
“When we get to Tuvalu, the conversation has to change," she said. "We can’t just bring more ambition; we have to bring proof of implementation."
This week's conference took place against the backdrop of the US and Israel's war in Iran, where US President Donald Trump has suggested a key goal is to "take the oil" controlled by Iran. The obstruction of oil shipments has become a critical piece of strategic and economic leverage and simultaneously inflicted chaos upon the global economy, disrupting humanitarian aid for some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people.
"Amid a tense geopolitical context and worsening climate extremes," said Rodrigo Estrada, Greenpeace International's senior climate adviser, "Santa Marta helped spark a feeling of renewed energy, but delegates must now follow through to deliver action, not just words."
While the war has sent energy companies' profits soaring, the climate advocacy group 350.org estimated this week that the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz could cost households and businesses an additional $600 billion to $1 trillion.
"It’s never been clearer that fossil fuel phase-out is imperative for stability and peace," Tucker said. "Every step away from fossil fuels weakens the outsized power and wealth that allows the US to wage illegal wars in the name of energy dominance."
At the next conference, she added, "The richest polluting countries must show they are serious. Canada, Norway, the UK, and the EU must make real plans to accelerate their fossil fuel phaseout at home and come to the table with real economic collaboration."
Mariana Paoli, the climate policy lead for Oxfam, said the lack of action by rich countries was "disappointing" and needed to change.
"Wealthy governments have still not stepped up to provide sufficient climate financing for poorer countries, which face the brunt of the impacts of the climate crisis," she said. "Rich countries hold the historical responsibility for the climate crisis, therefore they must not only move first and faster but also provide finance at scale for others to follow them."
"A just transition," she said, "must make rich polluters pay for the crisis they have caused."
As celebrities prepared to attend the 2026 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Monday, a coalition of nearly three dozen civil society groups warned that with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—currently the fourth-richest person on Earth—chairing the annual fundraiser, the gala risks "artwashing the harms of extreme wealth."
Groups including Greenpeace International, Patriotic Millionaires, and War on Want signed a letter organized by the Tax the Superrich Alliance, calling on the museum and Vogue magazine, which hosts the event, not to honor Bezos and warning that the billionaire is using the two cultural institutions as tools "to launder his public image."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a celebrated collection of art spanning centuries, many of it made "in defiance of power—work that exposed injustice, gave voice to the silenced, and held the powerful to account," reads the letter.
But the tech mogul chosen to chair the gala "has made his loyalties clear" since President Donald Trump first took office in 2017 and during the Republican's second term, said the groups, pointing to Bezos' purchase of The Washington Post, the mass firing of hundreds of the newspaper's reporters this year, and his remaking of the publication's opinion section into one focusing on "free markets."
He "gutted" the Post "while reportedly pouring $75 million into a film promoting Melania Trump," reads the letter, referring to the Amazon-produced documentary film Melania.
"A 2% wealth tax on just three necklaces previously worn by celebrities to the Met Gala’s red carpet could fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance program, helping 1 million households heat and cool their homes."
"He is not just a bystander to Trump’s administration," wrote the organizations. "He is one of its enablers. This is not philanthropy. This effectively is influence bought and paid for by Bezos’ pocket change—and the Met Gala is his latest purchase."
The groups added that in addition to aligning himself with the White House through his ownership of the Post, Bezos and Amazon—a government contractor where he is still the largest individual shareholder—is working with Trump to "make possible a concentration of power that not only threatens lives in the US but across the world as well."
"While so many of these policies aren’t new, they have been exacerbated under Trump and with the help of people like Bezos—from families torn apart by ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids reportedly enabled by Amazon's own technology, to a White House emboldened to threaten and carry out military action against sovereign nations without consequence—including to ‘destroy a whole civilization’ in Iran—with no accountability," reads the letter.
The Tax Justice Network, one of the signatories, emphasized that just a fraction of the money that goes to the $100,000-per ticket Met Gala could alleviate the economic inequality that's grown worse under the Trump administration.
"A 2% wealth tax on just three necklaces previously worn by celebrities to the Met Gala’s red carpet could fully fund New York City’s home energy assistance program, helping 1 million households heat and cool their homes," said the Tax Justice Network, citing its analysis released Monday.
Bezos is among the billionaires who have contributed donations to Trump's pet projects—a luxury ballroom and a 250-foot-tall arch in Washington, DC—while the president has tried to cut the home energy assistance program, said the group.
“There’s a thin line between celebrating glamorous fashion and artwashing extreme wealth, and that line gets bulldozed when your poster boy is an ICE-profiteering billionaire bankrolling Trump’s vanity projects and a top spender on anti-worker lobbying,” said Alex Cobham, chief executive at the Tax Justice Network.
In the first two hours of the Met Gala, Cobham added, "Bezos’s wealth will grow by the equivalent of 130,000 hours of a teacher’s labor... This extreme distortion throws economies out of whack. Our economies are supposed to let people earn the wealth they need to lead secure and comfortable lives, but most countries’ tax rules make it easier for the superrich to collect wealth than for the rest of us to earn it."
It's a thin line between celebrating glamor & artwashing extreme wealth. That line gets bulldozed when your patron is an ICE-profiteering billionaire bankrolling Trump’s vanity projects & a top spender on antiworker lobbying. Don't let Bezos artwash his at the Met Gala taxjustice.net/press/2-tax-...
[image or embed]
— Tax Justice Network (@taxjustice.net) May 4, 2026 at 3:25 AM
"In Bezos’ case, it’s easy to see how that undertaxed collected wealth goes towards lobbying further against workers’ rights and pay, while his company Amazon remains one of the biggest recipients of US subsidies," said Cobham.
According to the Tax Justice Network's analysis, Bezos accumulated $3.8 million every house from 2023-25, when his total wealth grew by more than $100 billion.
"If Bezos were to continue to accumulate wealth at this rate," said the group, "he would accumulate $7.6 million in the first two hours of the Met Gala event, which is the equivalent of 110 NYC Public Schools teachers’ starting salaries"—$68,902.
Those organizing the gala can and must "stop celebrating those destroying our countries and humanity itself," reads the letter sent by the Tax the Superrich Alliance, by not honoring Bezos and backing the fair taxation of the wealthiest households and corporations.
"End the oligarchy," reads the letter. "Tax the super rich. Now."
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a proponent of taxing the rich to pay for crucial public programs and services, planned to skip the Met Gala in a break with tradition. Last month Mamdani announced plans for a tax on second homes valued at $5 million or more in New York City.
Celebrities who are reportedly planning to skip the event include Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid, who has spoken out against ICE and in favor of Palestinian rights, and actress Zendaya.
Organizers in Missouri on Sunday said they reached an important milestone in a campaign to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot this year that would stop Republican officials in the state from trying to sabotage ballot initiatives.
Respect Missouri Voters, a coalition aimed at protecting and strengthening the state's ballot initiative process, announced that it has delivered more than 367,000 signatures to the Missouri Secretary of State's office in favor of a constitutional amendment that enact two key policies to protect voter-passed laws.
First, as the Fairness Project summarized on Monday, it would "require that all future ballot measures in the state be summarized for voters in fair, clear, and easily understandable terms"; and second, it would demand "that any attempt by the Legislature to refer a voter-approved measure back to the ballot clear an 80% threshold in each chamber, a high bar designed to prevent politicians from undoing what voters have already decided."
The first part of the amendment is aimed at addressing problems created by Republican Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who has repeatedly been taken to court for writing ballot initiative summaries that advocates say are misleading or provide incomplete information about what the initiatives would do.
As the Missouri Independent reported in February, a total of five summaries written by Hoskins have been thrown out by courts since October, as "judges at every level of Missouri’s court system have stepped in to block or rewrite ballot language" drafted by the secretary of state.
The second part of the amendment, meanwhile, was written in response to Republican legislators' efforts to overturn ballot initiatives passed in 2024 that legalized abortion in Missouri and established mandatory paid sick leave.
Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a key backer of Respect Missouri Voters, said the gathering of more than 367,000 signatures is "a promising milestone for Missouri voters and for direct democracy."
"Perhaps more than in any other state, voters in Missouri understand what is at stake,” Hall added. "It’s in Missouri that extremist politicians have worked overtime to undermine the will of their voters, whether it’s been fighting to reinstate a wildly unpopular ban on access to abortion care, gerrymandering congressional districts, or undermining the ballot measure process. What voters are saying now is that democracy is sacred."
However, it's not just Missouri where direct democracy is under attack. The Fairness Project reported last September that “extremist” legislators across the United States “escalated their efforts to dismantle the ballot measure process in 2025 by 95%.”
The University of Michigan is facing criticism after it apologized and said it was launching a review into a professor's commencement speech in which he praised the school's pro-Palestine student movement for highlighting the “injustice and inhumanity” of Israel's genocidal war in Gaza.
Since the early weeks of the war, which has so far resulted in the deaths of more than 72,000 Palestinians according to official estimates, Michigan's campus has been the site of continued acts of civil disobedience from student activists that have been met with harsh disciplinary action by the school and aggressive crackdowns by state police.
During a commencement address on Saturday, Professor Derek R. Peterson—a University of Michigan historian and the outgoing chair of the Faculty Senate—acknowledged these students as part of a speech that commemorated the school's long history of social activism, including the struggle led by suffragette Sarah Burger for the school to open its doors to women in the mid-1800s.
"The freedoms that we all enjoy were hard won. They weren't handed to us by a generous and far-seeing administration," Peterson said. "So the next time you sing 'Hail to the Victors,' our fight song, sing for Sarah Burger."
"Sing for the thousands of other students who have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of social justice over the course of centuries," he said.
He encouraged students to “sing for Moritz Levy, the first Jewish professor at the University of Michigan,” who helped turn it into “a safe haven from the antisemitism of East Coast universities” and for “the students of the Black Action Movement, whose members demanded a curriculum that would reflect the experience and identity of black people in this country.”
Then he said to "sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists, who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel's war in Gaza."
A cheer erupted from the crowd. But Peterson said the comments caused “a furor on social media” from supporters of Israel, who called it a “political rant,” a shoutout to “terrorist sympathizers,” and “grounds for termination.”
Sarah Hubbard, a Republican who is currently serving as a regent at the university, wrote on social media that while she was not in attendance, she found Peterson's remark "troubling and disappointing." She added that there should be "meaningful consequences" for his statements that should "set the tone" for the conduct of other faculty.
Leo Terrell, the chair of the Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, which was created by President Donald Trump as part of an effort to crack down on pro-Palestinian speech on college campuses, said, “Shame on the University of Michigan,” and issued what appeared to be a threat for retaliation over social media: “We’ll see you soon. You can bet the house on it.”
Domenico Grasso, president of the University of Michigan, responded to the uproar on Saturday by issuing an apology for Peterson's remark.
He called the comments "hurtful and insensitive to many members of our community" and said, "We regret the pain this has caused on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment."
Grasso accused Peterson of having "deviated" from the remarks he'd shared before the ceremony, and said his statements "were inappropriate and do not represent our institutional position" or "the diversity of views across our entire faculty."
He added that Peterson's remarks "were expected to be congratulatory, not a platform for personal or political expression" and said the school would "review and refine" future commencement programming to prevent speech that does not "align with the purpose of the occasion." The university has removed Peterson's commencement video from its public channels.
The University of Michigan has had sitting members of Congress and other political leaders serve as commencement speakers for decades.
President Lyndon B. Johnson famously used the ceremony in 1964 to introduce Americans to his "Great Society" agenda, which he said would demand an "end to poverty and racial injustice." President George HW Bush used the forum to tout his foreign policy accomplishments and rail against "political correctness" on university campuses.
Just last year, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) served as commencement speaker and warned that public discourse was being “defined by fear” under the second Trump administration in part because of activists being punished for their political beliefs and speech.
In a statement to CBS News Detroit, Peterson responded to the backlash and the university's response.
"It should not be controversial to have one's 'heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel's war in Gaza', which is what I credited activists with doing," he said. "Having an open heart to other people's suffering is a fundamental human virtue. It is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be."
Peterson said he was "mystified" by the response to his speech. "I have—like many of us here in Michigan—been convicted by the evidence of human suffering in Gaza; and I credit my awareness of that to pro-Palestinian activists... On a day meant to honor students for their accomplishments, I thought it important that we would honor the student activists who have, over the course of time, pushed the institution toward justice."
"The idea that graduations should be apolitical is ridiculous," Peterson added. "Michigan is not a finishing school for polite young men and women. Our students are not wilting flowers. They have just finished their degrees at the foremost public university in the country. They can handle controversy."
Just as Peterson's comments sparked a backlash, the university's reaction to his speech has been met with familiar criticism that it is silencing political speech at the behest of Israel's supporters.
"The entire 'speak-no-criticism-of-Israel' industry is erupting in outrage and demanding retribution for a history professor’s speech at the UMich graduation," said Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, who added that those seeking to discipline Peterson were effectively making a "demand for a complete Israel-exception to free speech."
Israel has been condemned for human rights violations in Gaza by United Nations experts and numerous nations around the world, while several human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli organization B'Tselem, among many others, have used the term "genocide" to describe its campaign of destruction and displacement in Gaza.
Dean Baker, a senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research, noted Grasso's claim that Peterson's statements ran counter to the school's "institutional position."
He said sardonically that it was “pretty neat to see a University of Michigan president say the school is opposed to human rights.”
As the one-man protest of activist Guido Reichstadter reached its fifth day, 168 feet above the Anacostia River on the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, DC, the anti-war activist is receiving praise both at home and worldwide as he said Tuesday he would go another day even though he has run out of both food and water.
"We are profoundly touched," said CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin during a visit Monday, standing below Reichstadter's perch at the top of one of the bridge's arches, which he has been occupying since last Friday in protest of President Donald Trump's war on Iran and the rapid proliferation of unregulated artificial intelligence.
"It's such a beautiful act of profound civil disobedience that is making waves all over the world," said Benjamin in a video clip posted on social media by documentary filmmaker Ford Fischer.
2) Guido Reichstadter spoke by phone with Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, saying he's "touched" by their support.
"We are just amazed that you did this!" Benjamin told him. "Just something beyond our belief."
Police over a loudspeaker continued to implore Reichstadter to accept… pic.twitter.com/cnBXv0mNTy
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) May 4, 2026
Reichstadter climbed up to the arch on Friday and unfurled a long black banner that he says represents the "shame and grief" of those who have been forced to be complicit in the US-Israeli war on Iran.
He released a statement saying he was demanding "an immediate end to the Trump regime’s illegal war on Iran and the removal of the regime’s power through mass nonviolent direct action and non-cooperation.”
The 45-year-old activist and father of two has staged other high-profile acts of civil disobedience in the past, but this one garnered the attention of Explosive Media, an independent media group that has released several viral videos skewering the Trump administration's deeply unpopular war. Reichstadter appeared in a video released by the group over the weekend, portrayed as a heroic LEGO figure.
As Benjamin spoke to Reichstadter, police continued trying to convince him to climb down from the arch, which he said he planned to leave Tuesday afternoon.
Now: Police get some exercise as they monitor Guido Reichstadter, now on his fifth day of occupying the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in a one-man protest against the Iran War and AI proliferation. https://t.co/DFkhA6zABG pic.twitter.com/0dumNmXk20
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) May 5, 2026
He survived on Chex Mix and dried cranberries for the first day of his occupation, before running out on Saturday. He ran out of water Monday afternoon and was almost out of phone battery, but Fischer reported that he "managed to get something working."
Reichstadter said that he would stay for "possibly another day or two."
With reporters assembled nearby, Benjamin asked him if he wanted to share any message about the war in Iran, in which hostilities were continuing this week in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's insistence that a ceasefire that was reached last month is holding.
"We have to end it," said Reichstadter.
"We're so worried that the bombing is going to start once again," said Benjamin, "and that's why you being up there is so important at this moment, because you represent the majority of people not only in the United States who overwhelmingly in the public opinion polls, say they're against the war, but of course the majority of people in the world... So what you're doing is on behalf of people all over the world, who are saying, 'This war was unprovoked, it's illegal, it's reckless, and it has to end."
More than 60% of Americans view Trump's war on Iran as a "mistake," according to a Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll released the day Reichstadter climbed on top of the bridge.
One press freedom advocate said the reported FBI investigation "would be outrageous even if The Atlantic reported classified information, which it didn’t."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday denied that it launched a reported probe into The Atlantic, which recently published a damning account of FBI Director Kash Patel’s alleged drunkenness, though magazine leadership and press freedom advocates remain alarmed.
As reported by MS NOW on Wednesday, the FBI is conducting a criminal leak investigation into The Atlantic's Sarah Fitzpatrick, whose reporting on Patel cited two dozen anonymous sources to document concerns about the FBI director's behavior.
MS NOW noted that the investigation into Fitzpatrick's reporting is "highly unusual because it did not stem from a disclosure of classified information" on the part of government insiders.
One source told MS NOW that the FBI agents assigned to the case have expressed serious reservations about its scope and purpose.
"They know they are not supposed to do this," the source said. "But if they don’t go forward, they could lose their jobs. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don't."
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson denied to MS NOW that the agency had launched an investigation into Fitzpatrick, saying that "every time there’s a publication of false claims by anonymous sources that gets called out, the media plays the victim via investigations that do not exist."
Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, said the magazine was working to learn more about the alleged investigation, but "if true, this would be an outrageous, illegal, and dangerous attack on the free press and the First Amendment."
"We will defend Sarah and all of our reporters who are subjected to government harassment simply for pursuing the truth," Goldberg added.
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, also condemned the reported investigation, which he said "would be outrageous even if The Atlantic reported classified information, which it didn’t."
"The FBI is reportedly conducting an invasive leak investigation merely to settle a personal vendetta," added Stern. "Separately, it doesn’t make much sense for Patel’s FBI to investigate leaks from what Patel’s lawsuit over the same reporting called ‘sham sources.’ Fake sources can’t leak."
Patel last month filed a $250 million defamation suit against The Atlantic for its report on his behavior, which the magazine said included "episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences."
The Atlantic vowed to fight the lawsuit, saying it stood by its reporting while describing Patel's complaint as "meritless."
One Brazilian lawmaker said Teresa Regina de Ávila e Silva's death occurred "against a backdrop of extreme distress for the family, with the unjustifiable detention of Thiago in Israel."
The mother of detained Brazilian Gaza flotilla activist Thiago Ávila died Tuesday while her son is allegedly being abused in Israeli custody after being seized off the coast of Greece last week.
Brazilian media reported that Teresa Regina de Ávila e Silva, 63, died after a decadeslong affliction with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, a progressive neurodegenerative disorder.
The Civil Police Union of the Federal District in Brasília—where Luana de Ávila, Ávila e Silva's daughter, is vice president—said in a statement that "Teresa Regina is remembered as a woman of admirable joy and strength, whose life was marked by her ability to face life with lightness, dignity, and love."
"Throughout her journey, she built strong bonds with everyone around her, leaving behind a legacy of affection, presence, and care for her family," the statement continued. "Later in her life, she faced a delicate condition, which she confronted with courage and serenity, always supported by the unconditional dedication of her children, grandchildren, nephews, and all her family and friends."
Erika Kokay, a member of Brazil's ruling Workers' Party representing Brasília in the Federal Chamber of Deputies, said on X that "Teresa will be remembered as a woman of strength and joy, who faced life's challenges with dignity and left a legacy of love for her family."
"My solidarity is even deeper when considering that this grief is unfolding against a backdrop of extreme distress for the family, with the unjustifiable detention of Thiago in Israel," Kokay added. "He was arrested while on a humanitarian mission headed to the Gaza Strip, enduring violations of his rights."
Thiago Ávila and at least 175 other Global Sumud Flotilla members were intercepted and abducted by Israeli forces on April 30 approximately 45 nautical miles from the Greek coast and more than 600 nautical miles from Gaza while trying to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinian territory in dozens of boats.
After allegedly enduring abuse and brutal attacks that left over 30 flotilla activists with injuries including concussions and broken ribs and noses, all but two of the convoy's members were released.
Ávila and another member of the Global Sumud Flotilla steering committee, Spanish-Swedish national Saif Abu Keshek, were taken to Israel, which claims without evidence that the pair have links to Hamas, the militant Palestinian resistance group that led the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Israeli authorities have twice extended the pair's detention. According to the Global Sumud Flotilla, Ávila and Abu Keshek “are being subjected to systemic psychological torture and explicit threats to the lives of their families.”
Adalah Legal Center, which represents the pair, said Ávila is being "subjected to repeated interrogations lasting up to eight hours," and “interrogators have explicitly threatened him, stating he would either be ‘killed’ or ‘spend 100 years in jail.’”
“Both activists remain in total isolation, subjected to 24/7 high-intensity lighting in their cells, and kept blindfolded whenever they are moved, including during medical examinations,” the group added.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and their respective governments have condemned the activists' detention and demanded their release.
On Wednesday, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights joined calls for the pair's release, asserting that "it is not a crime to show solidarity and attempt to bring humanitarian aid to the Palestinian population in Gaza, who are in dire need of it."
Gazans are suffering from 31 months of what UN experts say is a genocidal war and siege perpetrated by Israel, whose leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court. The Hague-based tribunal accuses Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation.
Since October 2023, more than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded—including thousands of bodies still buried beneath rubble—and most of the Gaza Strip's more than 2 million people have suffered forced displacement, starvation, or illness caused by Israel's onslaught.
Ávila isn't the first high-profile person to lose his mother while jailed by Israel. Samiha Abu Safiya died of a heart attack attributed to “severe sadness” after her son, Kamal Adwan Hospital director Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, was imprisoned by Israeli forces, including in the notorious Sde Teiman prison. Abu Safiya—who has allegedly been subjected to torture including electric shock and has suffered broken ribs—is still being held by Israel.
"Only a select few in the top tax bracket are benefiting from this, and the majority of you ain’t in it," said former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Observers are once again raising concerns about insider trading on Wednesday after a trader took a colossal crude oil short position just over an hour before a US-Iran peace deal was reported to be on the horizon, causing prices to fall.
The Kobeissi Letter, a financial newsletter, reported on X that at 3:40 am on Wednesday, "nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news."
This was equivalent to $920 million in notional value, which the letter described as "an unusually large trade" so early in the morning. But it would soon pay off.
At 4:50 am, just 70 minutes later, Axios published an exclusive scoop by Middle East reporter Barak Ravid that the White House believed the US and Iran were on the verge of agreeing to a one-page "memorandum of understanding" to end the war, which included more nuclear negotiations, one of the key sticking points for US President Donald Trump.
By 7:00 am, just over two hours after Axios dropped its report, oil prices had fallen by 12%, allowing the savvy investor to make $125 million in a matter of hours, which led to accusations that it was yet another example of "epic insider trading" by those in the know about Trump's plans.
Prices have since rebounded by about 8% after Iran announced the creation of the new "Persian Gulf Strait Authority," to mediate the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz on its terms.
The Trump administration has already been deluged with accusations that its members are using insider information to take advantage of financial markets and prediction market apps.
Last month, an active-duty US special forces soldier was indicted by the Department of Justice after he made about $400,000 betting on Polymarket that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power, a bet he allegedly placed using classified information about an operation he himself was involved with.
More bettors collected around $1 million in profits from bets on the specific timing of Trump's war with Iran in late February. The Financial Times also reported a surge of more than $580 million in oil futures trading right before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iran's energy facilities in March.
Of course, Wednesday's bet theoretically could have been made without the aid of insider information.
The new peace framework is the latest in what has seemed to be an endless pattern over the past several weeks in which US officials tell media outlets that a peace agreement is on the horizon, causing oil prices to dip, only for it to collapse later in the week, often with Trump issuing hostile threats or making new demands.
It has become such a familiar story that some have speculated that the announcement of productive ceasefire talks is deliberately choreographed to calm oil markets and bring down prices, which have become a growing problem for Trump among voters.
But as The Economic Times explained, the bet placed Wednesday morning likely "is not a routine hedge" or "a portfolio rebalancing move."
"At that hour, in that size," it said, "a crude oil short of that magnitude is a deliberate, high-conviction directional bet."
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a one-time Trump cheerleader who's become one of his leading critics, suggested Trump's erratic approach to negotiating an end to the war was just a tool used by him and his allies to profit.
"When is everyone going to start realizing that the on-again, off-again war/peace rhetoric is really just insider trading? And sprinkle in some murder," Greene wrote on social media. "Only a select few in the top tax bracket are benefiting from this, and the majority of you ain’t in it."
Democrats in Congress have urged the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate what Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) suggested could be "mind-blowing corruption" by the White House, not only related to Trump's wars, but also to his tariff regime, which has caused similar market chaos that bettors have been able to capitalize on with fortuitously timed wagers.
But critics have described profiting from the machinations of a war that has killed more than 1,700 civilians as particularly grotesque.
"This has to stop," said Fox News commentator Jessica Tarlov. "Lives on the line so they can insider trade!"