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Opinion
The Senate Can and Should Take an Important Step Toward Ending Israeli Impunity
A vote is expected early next week on Senate Resolution 852 to hold Israel accountable for its horrific actions against US citizens killed or detained by Israel.
Sep 26, 2026
Last week, I was pleased to once again participate in a meeting with one of my US Senators, Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a consistent leader for peace, justice, and human rights in Congress, and especially for ending US support for Israel’s genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing against the people of Palestine.
The subject of the meeting was his bill, with a vote expected early next week, Senate Resolution 852, to hold Israel accountable for its horrific actions against US citizens killed or detained by Israel. The goal of the resolution is very simple: within 30 days of passage, to require a State Department report on Israel’s alleged killings of nine US citizens, and more broadly, on the commission of “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights by Israel.” The resolution cites US law, section 502(B)(c) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.
The resolution reads, in part “...since January 2022, at least nine United States citizens have been killed by violent Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces in the West Bank, including Omar Assad, Shireen Abu Akleh, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, Mohammad Khdour, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, Amer Rabee, Sayfollah Kamel Musallet, Khamis Ayyad, and Nasrallah Abu Siyam” and “...the killings of these Americans in the West Bank have been met by a lack of accountability from the Netanyahu government and an inability to secure justice by the United States Government.”
This resolution can help bring an end to US support for Israel’s atrocities, something most people in this country, especially nearly three-quarters of Democrats, support.
Asking the Department of State to produce such a report sounds like the absolute minimum we, as taxpayers, deserve from our government, and certainly the families of those killed by Israel, likely with US-provided weapons, deserve that and much more. The resolution is supported by 84% of voters, on a bipartisan basis, in a just-released poll, and has 24 Senate co-sponsors. And as the resolution states, and many supporters note, protecting US citizens abroad is constantly touted as the top priority for US foreign policy, even by the current rogue Trump regime that regularly flouts domestic and international law, with the most egregious example being the illegal US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran.
Peace advocates regularly support much stronger legislation, and will do so repeatedly, until peace, justice, and human rights are the real foundations of US foreign policy, and not just paid cynical lip service. Soon there will likely be a Joint Resolution of Disapproval (JRD) in Congress to stop the proposed shipment of 40,000 one-ton bombs to Israel. The Biden administration, as bad as it was in its support for Israel during the razing of Gaza, had put this sale on hold, but President Donald Trump is now moving it forward. But the relatively modest Van Hollen resolution would be an important step toward ending Israel’s impunity, and if we can’t get justice for American citizens killed by Israel, then Congress is completely derelict in doing its job.
Peace Action and our colleagues have already generated over 57,000 letters to the Senate in favor of Sen. Van Hollen’s resolution, and many groups are pushing to get that figure close to 100,000, if not more.
With the mess in Congress (not to mention the administration and Supreme Court), there is no guarantee this resolution will pass, or even get a vote, though it is considered privileged, so it can’t be bottled up indefinitely under Senate rules. It could get punted to the lame-duck congressional session after the midterm elections. Regardless, along with other proposed legislation such as the JRD in the pipeline, this resolution can help bring an end to US support for Israel’s atrocities, something most people in this country, especially nearly three-quarters of Democrats, support.
While I doubt hardcore supporters of Israel in this country will be swayed by much of anything, there is a growing political inevitability at play here. Regardless of what one thinks of the state of Israel, its actions, or its “right” to certain territory, US taxpayers are not going to continue to put up with endless amounts of US weaponry and military going to support genocide, apartheid, and gross human rights violations. And it’s easy to connect to the “affordability crisis” in the US and elsewhere. Young Americans who can’t afford to buy a car, let alone a house, and lack the free universal healthcare Israelis enjoy, have especially turned against Israel. The pipeline of US military support is going to be shut off eventually, and perhaps sooner than expected. Politicians of any party ignore this reality at their own peril.
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Trump's Diversionary Assault on the First Amendment
As the many disasters of his presidency pile up, President Donald Trump turned to a familiar foil and a proven strategy: Attack the press to distract public attention from his failures.
Sep 26, 2026
President Donald Trump is in trouble and he knows it.
- He promised “no more foreign wars,” but started a war with Iran that he has lost.
- He promised to tame inflation, but tariffs and his war of choice have made it worse.
- He promised to deport only the “worst of the worst” illegal immigrants. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has terrorized American cities as agents sometimes arrested, detained, wounded, or killed US citizens.
- He promised to make the United States the most respected country in the world, but he has destroyed America’s reputation and alienated its allies.
- He calls himself the best president in history, but his approval rating has dropped to the mid-30s—his lowest ever and approaching President Richard Nixon’s final approval rating of 24% shortly before his resignation in 1974.
- He tells his audiences to pretend he’s on the ballot in November, but many Republican congressional candidates are distancing themselves from him.
- Sen. John Curtis (R) from ruby-red Utah is not up for reelection, but he has urged an investigation into the Trump family’s financial dealings and the potential for corruption.
- Trump promised lower interest rates on home mortgages, but 30-year fixed-rate mortgages now exceed 7%—the highest since May 2024.
- He promised gasoline below $2.00 per gallon, but the price has soared to an average of $4.50 per gallon. The price of diesel has increased even more dramatically—to a record-shattering $6.50 per gallon.
The list goes on and on. So Trump turned to a familiar foil and a proven strategy: Attack the press to divert public attention from his failures.
Same Old Playbook
CNN, MSNOW, and Politico won the first round in Trump’s latest attempt to subvert the First Amendment. But Trump’s shiny object consumed the media. His goal now is to extend the controversy.
Act I
While many of his most senior advisers were away at 3:00 pm on Friday, September 18, Trump announced on social media that he was banning CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. At first nothing happened, but by Saturday morning the press passes for reporters at those organizations no longer allowed them past White House security.
On Monday morning, September 21, the news organizations sued the Trump administration for violating their First Amendment right to a free press and their Fifth Amendment right to due process of law.
On Tuesday, September 22, the White House sent the organizations what it purported were notices of the revocations, giving them until Friday to respond.
Act II
At a court hearing on Wednesday, September 23, Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted the laughable argument that the White House letter sent to the news organizations on Tuesday, September 22—days after Trump revoked the press passes—somehow satisfied the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process prior to any revocation.
The DOJ also told the judge that amorphous “national security” concerns justified revoking the passes. But Trump’s own statements of his reasons for the revocation undercut that argument.
Without reaching the First Amendment issues, the court based its constitutional ruling on Trump’s failure to provide due process. Judge Timothy J. Kelly—a Trump appointee—granted a temporary restraining order requiring Trump to restore the revoked press credentials immediately.
Act III
Judge Kelly issued his opinion around 1:00 am on Thursday, September 24. But as the business day began, the affected reporters’ press passes were still disabled, prompting the news organizations to file an emergency motion before Judge Kelly. The Justice Department responded with a declaration stating that press access had been restored at 9:55 am, so the judge cancelled the hearing.
But that evening, reporters for CNN and MSNOW were turned away from the state dinner arrivals at the White House, where Trump was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Act IV
To satisfy Trump, government attorneys are probably working on a new strategy. Here’s one possible scenario:
- The White House imposes less drastic restrictions on its disfavored press outlets. Slow walking the reinstatement of press passes and preventing CNN and MSNOW reporters from covering arrivals at the state dinner for President Xi Thursday night could be previews of coming attractions.
- The White House gives the news organizations new notices and an opportunity to be heard before suspending their press passes again. The notices would concoct arguments, probably with a focus on Trump’s favorite phrase for justifying his consolidation of power—“national security.”
- The White House would then revoke the press passes.
- The news organizations would file another lawsuit challenging the revocation.
- Trump would lose again, but he would press ahead in the hope that eventually the US Supreme Court would bail him out. If Trump loses in the DC Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court probably would refuse to take the case—leaving his loss in place.
- If the Supreme Court accepted the case, I predict it would issue a 7-2 opinion—with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting—confirming that the First Amendment still means what it says.
- All of this will take time. And most importantly, it will remain a big news item that diverts at least some attention away from the broader failures of Trump’s presidency.
“The People’s House”
Trump has been eager to tear down the East Wing, reshape the White House grounds, turn the interior into a gilded spectacle, and otherwise impose his dramatic construction ideas at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Yet shortly after revoking the press credentials of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, he told reporters: "It's sick. I mean, there's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stuff.”
In the next sentence, he revealed himself: “Now, if they want to write them, that's fine. But I don't have to let them into my, into the people's house."
Trump thinks the White House belongs exclusively to him. But his lease ends in two years, and no security deposit is sufficient to cover the profound damage he is inflicting on the nation.
Meanwhile, it is vital to beat back Trump’s repeated assaults in the Constitution. But it’s also important to remember that among the most important underlying goals of his most outrageous actions is diverting Americans from the mess that he has made of the country.
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Just So You Know, Trump’s Erratic Behavior Makes Life More Expensive for Everyone Else
The basic story is that while the president is apparently having a good time, the rest of the country is paying a big price in the form of higher prices for gas, food, electricity, and many other items, as well as higher interest rates.
Sep 26, 2026
The interest rate on 30-year bonds rose to 5.4%, the highest rate since July of 2003. It’s not clear exactly why the rate rose, but expectations of higher inflation do not seem a plausible explanation. The interest rate on inflation-indexed bonds has been rising pretty much in tandem with the rise on 30-year bonds. This means we are looking at higher real interest rates.
There are several plausible reasons why real interest rates would increase. A standard explanation is higher government budget deficits. I have always been skeptical of any direct link between deficits and interest rates, but if investors believed that the Fed would respond to deficits by pushing the federal funds rate higher in future years, that would lead to higher interest rates, whether or not a larger deficit was directly the cause.
And we are certainly looking at larger budget deficits now than at the start of the year, due to the war on Iran. This has led to large expenditures to fund the war and will almost certainly lead to larger expenditures in the future, as President Donald Trump seeks to replenish depleted weapon stockpiles and reconstruct bases destroyed in the war. He is requesting a budget of $1.5 trillion, almost 5% of GDP, which would be $600 billion more than the last Biden budget.
There is also the Trump-crazy premium. There are many ways in which the world was reasonably predictable before Trump but no longer is.
The trillions of dollars that the hyperscalers plan to spend building data centers also creates huge demand for borrowing. This spending can also play a role in pushing up rates.
There is also the Trump-crazy premium. There are many ways in which the world was reasonably predictable before Trump but no longer is.
Under Trump, US trade agreements are no longer meaningful. He openly ignores them at will, saying they were signed by “dumb” presidents, including the agreements that he negotiated. Trump has also threatened wars or military actions all over the world, including against longstanding US allies like Denmark and Canada. And he has shown a lack of respect for domestic law, repeatedly violating orders from judges when he disagrees with them.
This erratic behavior almost certainly adds a substantial cost to borrowing. While under other presidents it would have been virtually inconceivable the United States would default on its debt, that is no longer the case. It is entirely plausible that Trump would at least selectively default, not paying off the interest and principal to bondholders he didn’t like. As Trump is fond of saying, he can do whatever he wants.
While that may be fun for him, Trump’s erratic behavior makes life more expensive for everyone else. He has pushed mortgage rates over 7%, making homeownership ever more unaffordable. Higher rates also mean that people have to pay more on car loans and credit card debt, as well as the interest rates businesses and state and local governments have to pay.
The basic story is that while Donald Trump is apparently having a good time, the rest of the country is paying a big price in the form of higher prices for gas, food, electricity, and many other items, as well as higher interest rates. Trump apparently hasn’t noticed this reality, and any of his aides who have are too scared to tell him. It’s very MAGA!
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Eliminating Nuclear Weapons: an Urgent Existential Threat
At this time of great peril, it is also a time of great opportunity if only we will act. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to take them apart.
Sep 26, 2026
On Saturday the world observes the United Nations International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, known as Nuclear Weapons Elimination Day. It was first observed on September 26, 2014 subsequent to the UN Declaration in December 2013 following high-level United Nations meetings on nuclear disarmament. The day provides an opportunity to educate the public and elected officials about the benefits of eliminating nuclear weapons, as well as the humanitarian, social, and economic costs of their continued existence.
Today, our world faces the greatest threat of nuclear war with the devastating possibility of the extinction of humanity. Current nuclear arsenals have roughly 12,187 nuclear weapons, hundreds of which are on hair-trigger alert with the potential to cause the deaths of billions from the use of only this small percentage of the world’s arsenals.
We have seen a breakdown in relationships between the largest nuclear armed states. The expiration of the New START Treaty occurred on February 5 this year. This has left the world for the first time since 1970 with no agreed-upon nuclear limitation treaty. We have witnessed reckless and immoral threats against adversaries and ultimately to all of humanity by the nuclear “superpowers,“ including US President Donald Trump’s not-so-veiled nuclear threat to annihilate Iran and its people before the world community at the UN's 81st General Assembly on Tuesday of this week. Such vitriol and illegal statements regarding the threatened use of nuclear weapons cannot be tolerated. Imagine our reaction if we heard any other nation espousing similar comments before the international community.
An informed and active citizenry must step forward and lead the way.
We have also recently acknowledged the illegal placement of weapons in space by the United States. In our technologically reliant world, the existence and potential use of such weapons threatens much of our day to day lives with the possibility of rendering technology impotent.
Each of these facts when combined with the potential for disruptive technologies, including discussions and testing of artificial intelligence in nuclear war scenarios, led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to reset their famous Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds to midnight earlier this year, the closest it has been since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 81 years ago.
The challenge to rein in these weapons seems daunting and impossible.
Yet, at this time of great peril, it is also a time of great opportunity if only we will act. We know how to build these weapons, and we know how to take them apart. We have made tremendous progress through the decades reducing global arsenals from roughly 64,000 in 1985 to the current totals. What is needed is the political will and courage.
Internationally, nuclear weapons are illegal to possess, develop, test, acquire, transfer, use, or threaten to use, by virtue of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which was adopted on July 7, 2017 and entered into force on January 22, 2021. This treaty evolved from the inertia of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) with the understanding of the humanitarian consequences of even a limited war, and the refusal of the non-nuclear nations to be held hostage any longer by their nuclear counterparts. Initially adopted by 122 nations, the treaty currently has 101 nations that have signed it and 75 that have ratified it through their legislative bodies representing a majority of the world‘s population. The lion's share of effort on this treaty has been by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. ICAN is a coalition of 733 international partner organizations.
Here in the United States, a similar grassroots coalition exists called “Back From the Brink.“ This coalition includes 505 organizations encompassing every sector of society, 78 municipalities and counties, eight state legislative bodies, 594 local and state officials, 70 members of Congress through Congressional Resolutions H.Res 317 and S.Res 323, and 28 community hubs across the nation. Addressing the urgent danger of nuclear weapons, the campaign works to build awareness and support for the need to abolish these weapons coupled with the immediate actionable precautionary measures necessary to prevent nuclear war until their elimination is achieved.
As such, Back From the Brink calls on the United States to lead a global effort to prevent nuclear war. It urges the US to enact these five policy solutions:
- Pursue global elimination of nuclear weapons through a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals;
- Renounce the option of using nuclear weapons first;
- End the sole, unchecked authority of any president to launch a nuclear attack;
- Take US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and
- Cancel the plan to replace the entire US arsenal with enhanced weapons.
Working with Back From the Brink is Students for Nuclear Disarmament (SND). As a national, nonpartisan, organization dedicated to raising awareness among Gen Z about the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity, its growing presence in high schools, colleges, and universities across the nation educates and empowers young people to take action against the growing threat of nuclear war.
To succeed in this critical effort to save humanity, we must remain informed and work to inform others. Our movement, while still barely noted by corporate media, is unstoppable and must continue to move quickly and strategically. An informed and active citizenry must step forward and lead the way. We must demand wise public officials to act immediately and move away from the brink of nuclear war.
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What Do We Do About Trump? Remove Him!
No Kings is an historical descriptive designed to engage our intellect, but it asks nothing. It demands nothing. It, like media editorials, sounds an alarm but an alarm is endless without a call. What’s missing is a bold call for removal.
Sep 26, 2026
We’re nearly two years into President Donald Trump’s second term in office—his first where his fascist dreams took flight—and I’m not the only one to notice. Millions of people in groups as large as city blocks, and as tiny as a corner in a village without a traffic light, have gathered to protest under the banner, No Kings.
Its success was in bringing together disparate groups of people. At some I had the impression that out of thousands of people, no two had a similar political orientation. That’s the good part. It’s also a weakness.
At the same time, and now with increasing regularity, respected media (from The New York Times down to those that take their lead from it) editorialize in stark terms against the administration. Editorials read like a list of grievances, not unlike the Declaration of Independence. But unlike the Declaration, they lack a political message.
Fascism is not a throwaway word. Trump told people he was returning the nation to its “rightful place,” and pretty soon hastily organized federal police ganged up on people and shot them in the streets.
No Kings is an historical descriptive designed to engage our intellect, but it asks nothing. It demands nothing. It, like media editorials, sounds an alarm but an alarm is endless without a call. What’s missing is a bold call for removal. Remove him!
By what mechanism? Do I mean by impeachment? No, I do not. Do I mean by the 25th Amendment? No, I do not. Do I mean by the Democratic Party? No, I do not.
It is not up to those that call for removal to state or provide a mechanism. The call signifies itself. If the causes are alarming enough—and I suggest we are presently living under a fascist regime—there is nothing left to be done but what was once done.
The Declaration of Independence keenly notes that people “are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Before enumerating the greatness of the causes for separation, the Declaration expresses a sentiment that Washington’s gatekeepers would have us forget: that it is the right and the duty of the people to throw off such government as is reducing them to despotism.
The gulf must be acknowledged between what the leaders of a country in 1776 declared and did, and what, not the leaders, but the followers of a country in 2026 are prepared and able to do. The situations cannot be compared, but they can be instructive.
The Declaration is a radical document. It did not wait for the government of the mother country to have a change of heart, as we wait for the midterm elections. Suffering what we must.
What is our cause for alarm? And should it mark the time for a call for removal? Even if it only articulates what we want?
Fascism is not a throwaway word. Trump told people he was returning the nation to its “rightful place,” and pretty soon hastily organized federal police ganged up on people and shot them in the streets. They’re coming for people. They may not have come yet for you and me.
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Trump Is Wrong: Internationalism Is the Only Path Forward
In the face of health and climate crises and unilateral wars, we can’t afford to ignore internationalism or to quietly retreat from institutions meant to buffer those most at risk.
Sep 25, 2026
This week, I watched New York’s East River swell with armed speedboats as cars, ferries, and planes ground to a halt for President Donald Trump’s motorcade to the United Nations General Assembly’s 81st session. Stranded temporarily, I had plenty of time to consider Trump's winner-takes-all rejection of the United Nations.
And yet, as UNGA81 continues, this dismissive bluster aims to hide the global ripple effects of a crumbling world order. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development oil inventories are at their lowest in decades as the US and Israel continue strikes on Iran, and as Russia continues to wage its war on Ukraine. The real costs continue to fall on those with the least cushion, including the 50 million people the World Food Program says will be pushed into acute hunger. While only 15% of the world’s population lives in what we call the Global North, that 15% continues to drive the greatest of climate and economic catastrophes imposed on the Global Majority.
Last year, the United Nations General Assembly felt like a descent into surrealism. This year, the world order is fully under attack. In the face of health and climate crises and unilateral wars, we can’t afford to ignore internationalism or to quietly retreat from institutions meant to buffer those most at risk.
Trump may have usurped the podium at UNGA to malign multilateralism, but we're doing the work beyond the podium.
This does not mean wholesale protection of multilateralism as we know it. From foundation leaders to UN officials to civil society, we hear calls for "reimagining" the UN and global governance. Indeed, we cannot build a future fit for purpose for us all if we don’t bring the lifelines we need—from the International Criminal Court to the Paris Agreement.
That is what makes this week so critical. UNGA takes place in the shadow of elections in Russia that are anything but free or fair and heading into midterms in the United States that, while free, rest under the pressure cooker of strong and clear cross-border efforts to attack open societies. If internationalism is to survive, we have to make the case for multilateral cooperation and global funding. Internationalism is the only way we can see ourselves through the crises that we’re facing.
Crises from the Covid-19 pandemic to the risks of unregulated AI have shown us that if we go at it alone or try to address just one country or one policy at a time, we will invariably fail all. We cannot withstand the polycrises we face if we don’t consider ourselves intrinsically linked to movements around the world. And philanthropy's purpose is precisely to fund what markets won't.
We—those who seek to protect human dignity and rights—are not alone. Autocratic leaders, who bask in impunity and lambast institutions like the UN, have a secret: They are the ultimate internationalists, under the guise of nationalism.
The irony is that autocratic forces have mobilized with one another, carefully, strategically, and across borders, over the last 20 years. They have trained each other, learned how to keep and barter power, and worked with the very same billionaires to mobilize breathtaking amounts of money to dismantle and destroy progressive policies and strip away our basic civil and political rights. "Make America Great Again" and "Russia United" are playing by the same authoritarian playbook to keep the opposition in check.
They have another secret: They need us, too. Leaders like Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are still showing up to UNGA81 (albeit in a flurry). They still care enough to ridicule allies, to bully others into foreign aid budget cuts their citizens oppose, and to push back wherever they could be held to account, whether by the International Criminal Court or reports by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Indeed, 10 countries—including the US, Russia, Israel, and North Korea—opposed an extended four-year mandate for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk.
These debates are not symbolic. They are signals that descent into isolationism and away from multilateralism is not a foregone conclusion. They point to where the fight is—and the spaces we must not cede. And, lest we lose sight of the larger lesson, the possibilities indeed, in a new world order: 144 countries voted in favor of extending High Commissioner Türk’s mandate.
So, how can we lead internationalism into its next era with conflicts multiplying, the Sustainable Development Goalss off track, and AI reshaping global governance? How can we protect human dignity and human rights for all people? By getting more creative in shaping our shared future—without wholesale retreat from the institutions that bring us together. Just this week, Canada invited the United Kingdom to join the economic alliance it is negotiating with the European Union, days after the commission floated a first-ever associate status. This year, countries committed to moving us away from fossil fuels came together despite China, Russia, and the US to implement just transitions. The Global Alliance for Human Rights is a perfect example of adaptation—convened by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the alliance is a multi-stakeholder, cross-regional mobilization that connects people across sectors and generations, without any single person, organization, or country that is responsible for the lion’s share.
As many of us gather this week—itself a signal—from UNGA to Climate Week, the Clinton Global Initiative to the Devex Impact House, it is time to reimagine what kind of leadership can carry internationalism through its most consequential transition in decades. At Human Rights Funders Network, we believe that better preparedness means building infrastructure for coordination, improving funding flows, and connecting diverse sectors, so movements can survive today’s crises and thrive tomorrow. And we plan to make the case for development and multilateralism to a new United States and policymakers worldwide. We are two years away from the 80th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. What we do, say, and create in the next two years will determine whether we are celebrating a new era of our shared humanity or if we have ceded to the divisions some would have us believe are inevitable.
The US war on Iran has shown how quickly one region's crisis becomes everyone's. Leaders who treat their constituencies as separate are ignoring what the past seven months have made plain. Trump may have usurped the podium at UNGA to malign multilateralism, but we're doing the work beyond the podium—at coffeetables, halls, and on the streets—to ensure the very best of the internationalism system is protected.
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Minnesota Proves Trans Inclusion Works; the Government Needs You to Believe It Doesn't
When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.
Sep 25, 2026
In 1993, Minnesota became the first state in the country to protect people from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in its Human Rights Act, with explicit trans-inclusive language built into the law from the start. In 2014, the Minnesota State High School League clarified that student athletes can participate on teams that align with their gender identity. And just last year, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Cooper v. USA Powerlifting that it’s illegal discrimination for sports organizations to ban trans women from participating.
Throughout these 30-plus years of trans inclusion, girls' and women's sports in Minnesota have thrived—the state ranks No. 1 in the nation on Action Network's Girls' Sports Opportunity Index, which measures participation, access, and gender parity across all 50 states. Minnesota is also home to the winningest coach in Women's National Basketball Association history.
As a cisgender woman, I believe it's past time for more women like me to stand in loud, public solidarity with trans people, rather than let this manufactured fight be waged in our name. The people most invested in “protecting” women's sports have rarely shown up for women's sports at all. And as the executive director of Gender Justice, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in the Upper Midwest, I’d love to know where all the urgency around fairness in women’s sports has been.
This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there.
I've spent years talking with women athletes across Minnesota. They talk about the sexual harassment. The state of their locker rooms. Subpar training facilities. Uneven access to fields and courts. Unequal pay and unequal media coverage. They talk about the coaches and administrators who still don't take their teams seriously. What they don’t talk about is the urgent need for the government to ban trans women from participating in sports.
So why does the noise persist? Republicans and their allies spent nearly $215 million on network television ads vilifying transgender people during the last presidential election cycle alone—more money than has ever been spent championing the women and girls they claim to want to protect.
Because sports was never the destination—they were the entry point. This is a familiar political playbook: Choose a wedge issue that polls well, use it to normalize the once-radical idea that civil rights law is negotiable, then expand from there. Across the country, courts are being asked whether Title IX protections extend to transgender students. The very law, passed in 1972, that guarantees equal access to education and athletics, protection from harassment, and freedom from discrimination based on sex, is being weaponized as a tool for exclusion. Executive orders now redefining "sex" across federal law and agencies don't stop at locker rooms either; they reach into schools, healthcare, and workplaces—into the fabric of American life. Title IX has never required schools to exclude trans students. It has long protected them.
What we are witnessing is not about fairness in athletics. It's political theater, and transgender youth are the ones paying the price—subjected to fear, harassment, and public scrutiny that lawmakers should be ashamed to have invited. What's happening now isn't a return to what the law always meant—it's a rewrite, carving an exception into a civil rights statute so that protections can be revoked for whichever group is politically convenient to sacrifice.
Attacks on trans rights, attacks on abortion rights, and persistent pay inequity are not separate fights; they are one fight against gender inequality, taking on different forms depending on the news cycle. Minnesota already answered the question of whether trans girls and women should have the right to play, with 30 years of evidence and a unanimous state supreme court ruling showcasing that trans inclusion works. The question still on the table is much more dangerous: Do we accept a government empowered to decide who gets rights, and who doesn't? When we allow our government to dismantle the fundamental rights of transgender people, we validate a legal precedent that threatens the liberties of every single citizen tomorrow.
If trans inclusion were the threat opponents claim, then three decades of it in Minnesota would have proven it. Instead, it's proven the opposite.
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MAGA ❤️ Motherhood (If You’re White)
The Trump-Vance family policy reeks of white supremacy and misogyny.
Sep 25, 2026
Creepy. That’s the word for the rising right-wing interest in family policy, exemplified by a recent administration proposal to pay $9,000 each year per child for women to stay at home with their children. The money would come from, and deplete, an existing federal program that helps working parents pay for childcare.
Of course, that program, the Child Care and Development Fund, is already woefully underfunded—only 1 in 7 eligible parents is able to use it. Most of those are single working mothers, the kind of hardworking people who do tough work for low wages and are derided by conservatives as “Welfare Queens.” They would not be eligible for the stay-at-home moms benefit.
MAGA leaders like Vice President JD Vance have a model of family life that is a caricature of a 1950s TV family: Dad works and Mom stays home with the kids, shops, cooks, cleans house, and puts on a clean apron and a big smile for Dad when he comes home from the office. A woman’s appropriate concerns in that model life are “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” Children, cooking, church, as 19th-century Germans described the feminine role.
MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.
Or put more simply, “barefoot and pregnant.”
In Vance’s view, women who seek a professional career have chosen a “value system that leads to misery.” Consistent with the MAGA conception of women’s roles in society, Vance opposes abortion in all circumstances, wants to make divorce more difficult, and sees traditional family life as “the path to happiness and to fulfillment.”
But Vance and the right are motivated by bigger concerns than female happiness. They believe more pregnancies are critical to preserving civilization. It’s a “crisis,” says Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West,” says Elon Musk.
Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Mehmet Oz warns that “1 in 3 Americans are under-babied.” Declining teen pregnancy is part of the problem: Fox medical analyst Marc Siegel laments that teen pregnancies (15-to-19-year-old girls) are “down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people who are young not to have babies.” To remedy that problem, President Donald Trump is actually defunding federal programs designed to reduce teen pregnancies.
This despite the well-documented medical and developmental risks of teen pregnancies for both mother and child: high blood pressure, preeclampsia, post-partum hemorrhage, systemic infections, mental health difficulties, life-long health issues, premature births, neonatal fatalities and stillbirths, low birth weight. And the teen mom’s interruption in schooling commonly means a life of poverty and instability.
MAGA family policy bears striking similarities to that of Nazi Germany, which linked national greatness to more babies—of the correct race. In the interest of higher birth rates, German mothers could not terminate pregnancies if the child would be “of good blood.” The Nazi state also offered “marriage loans” and child financial incentives, and—in a society that treated single mothers as pariahs—they even tried to destigmatize unmarried motherhood.
Medals for motherhood were a Nazi honor Trump might consider offering. Hitler awarded the Mother Cross for large families. (In bronze for mothers of four children, silver for six, gold for eight or more babies.)
The American fertility rate is indeed substantially below the 2.1 required to maintain the American population level. But if a declining population is a problem, the answer is obvious: Welcome immigrants.
America is already suffering from Trump’s mass deportation efforts, as the agricultural workforce is decimated, and workers in home healthcare, food packing, restaurants, home construction, and building services are in desperately short supply, exacerbating inflation. We plainly need more immigrants, not fewer, to sustain our nation.
Immigration is not an acceptable solution for MAGA because they demand a whiter America, and more immigrants come from what the president has called “shithole countries” than from “Aryan” nations like Norway. But non-whites are not “replacing” supposed “real” Americans because America is and always has been a multiracial, multinational society.
MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing (white) women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.
A 2025 survey of Americans showed that two children was the most desired family size, and only 20% wanted to three or more. Similarly, an international survey conducted by the United Nations showed most respondents wanted just two children.
In the US survey, cost and the state of the world were high among the reasons Americans gave for not wanting more children.
Here is what the Trump regime is doing to address those concerns: defunding healthcare; slashing food assistance for families and children; weakening education and child welfare systems; imposing eligibility requirements for government rental assistance; denying climate change; ignoring the challenge of AI; deregulating polluting industries; and fueling inflation through deportation, tariffs, and an unending war.
Why are women in the workforce and not staying home with the children? The determination to lead full lives is a driving force. But, in all likelihood, the number of stay-at-home moms has plummeted since the 1970s because rising income inequality has made it impossible for a working class or middle class family to survive on one income. Before right-wing “traditionalists” utter any more demands that women give up their jobs, ambitions, independence, and self-respect, perhaps they can start by confronting the unbearable greed of the billionaire class that has rendered the supposed MAGA aim beyond reach.
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An IPCC for Inequality Is Good, But It Can't Replace the Movement That Made It Possible
The gap between rich and poor will not be closed in a seminar room, it will be closed the way every advance against entrenched power has been won, by people organizing, demanding, and refusing to be told that the way things are is the way they have to stay.
Sep 25, 2026
For years, the people organizing against extreme inequality have made a simple argument that the world’s institutions preferred not to hear: The gap between the very rich and everyone else is not an accident, not a law of nature, and not something we have to accept. It is a choice, made by people with the power to choose differently.
For a long time that was a fringe position. It isn’t any more.
You can see the shift in the news that South Africa is pushing to create an International Panel on Inequality, like an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the wealth gap, to pull the evidence together in one authoritative place and put it in front of governments. Joseph Stiglitz backs it. More than 500 economists have signed on.
Nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.
This is a good thing, and we welcome it. When the establishment builds an institution to take your issue seriously, it means the argument is being won. The people who got this far deserve credit.
But I want to be honest about where the real momentum is coming from, because it matters for what happens next. The panel is a sign of progress. It is not the engine of it. The engine is the movement that dragged inequality up the agenda in the first place, and that movement is where the story of actual change has been written.
Look at what the IPCC has actually done so far. For 30 years it has produced the best climate science anyone had ever assembled. It won a Nobel Prize. It leaves no room for honest denial. And for a long time, governments read it and carried on much as before. The science mattered enormously.
However, it moved politics fastest when people forced it to: kids walking out of school on Fridays for the Future, communities blocking fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline. The movement was decisive. Change came when the two worked together, and not a moment before.
Inequality is in the same place as the climate crisis now—the evidence is not the thing we are short of. We already know the shape of it. The richest 1% took 41% of all the new wealth created between 2000 and 2024. Around 2.3 billion people, nearly 1 in 4 of us, now skip meals because they can’t afford to eat. South Africa, which is carrying this panel forward, is the most unequal country the World Bank has ever recorded.
A panel will sharpen that picture, and sharper is better. But nobody skipping meals is waiting for a footnote. What they are waiting for is action, and action comes from pressure.
Here is the encouraging part: That pressure is already working.
When Brazil used its G20 presidency to put a global tax on billionaires on the table, it did not come from nowhere. Movements, campaigners, and economists had pushed the idea for years, and the Fight Inequality Alliance was part of that.
The economist Gabriel Zucman drew up a plan: a 2% minimum tax on the world’s roughly 3,000 billionaires, enough to raise around $250 billion a year. In November 2024, for the first time, G20 leaders agreed to cooperate on taxing the ultra rich. An idea dismissed as impossible a few years earlier was suddenly the position of the world’s largest economies.
That is what movements do. They move the line of what is politically possible, and they do it faster than any institution.
This is why the movement matters, and why its role in this next chapter should be front and center. We are the ones knocking on the doors, running the campaigns, and keeping the pressure on long after the summit is over and the experts have gone home.
We have been doing it without a panel, and we have already moved things many said could not be moved. Give that movement the authoritative evidence a body like this can provide, and you do not only get a better report. You get a sharper weapon in the hands of the people already fighting.
The tax has not been won yet. The United States and Germany refused to back a binding version, and it was watered down to a promise to cooperate. But notice why.
It did not stall for lack of evidence. Zucman had done the numbers, and nobody serious disputed them. It stalled because the people who would pay still had the power to slow it down. That is the real contest, and it is not a contest of data. It is a contest of power, and power is shifted by organized people, not by publications.
I say all this as someone who spends more time with campaigners than with economists, and I will be honest about our own side too.
Movements do not win every time. We are sometimes better at naming a problem than at holding the ground we take. But the lesson of the last decade is not that we need fewer people in the fight and more in the seminar room. It is the opposite. The evidence has been overwhelming for years. What has changed the weather is people refusing to accept it.
So build this panel well, and build it close to the movement that made it necessary. Let it answer the questions people are actually fighting over. Get its evidence into the hands of the people doing the pushing. Check whether it does speak to the inequalities and the solutions people are talking about and demanding change for. Treat the organizers and the communities living this every day as partners in the work, not an audience for the findings. Do that, and this panel becomes part of something genuinely powerful.
Because the gap will not be closed in a seminar room. It never has been. It will be closed the way every advance against entrenched power has been won, by people organizing, demanding, and refusing to be told that the way things are is the way they have to stay.
The evidence is on our side. It has been for a long time. Now comes the part that actually changes lives.
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Why We Need a Carbon War Tax
What if every war came with a bill for the carbon it releases into the atmosphere?
Sep 25, 2026
When a bomb destroys a home, we see the rubble. When a factory burns, we see the smoke. When forests are set on fire, we see the devastation. But one consequence of war is almost impossible to see: the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.
And that carbon does not stay where the bombs fall. Once released, greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming far beyond the borders of the country at war. A war may begin in one place, but part of its climate cost is carried by the entire planet.
The smoke may clear. The carbon does not simply stay behind.
The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax. It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.
Yet when we talk about the cost of war, that climate cost is rarely part of the bill.
That gap in accountability led Saravana Kumar Nagarajan and his colleague Sean Xavier to develop the idea of a Carbon War Tax, documented in their 2021 master's thesis at Klaipėda University and the University of Bergen. The question behind it was simple: if industries are increasingly expected to measure and account for their carbon emissions, why should warfare be treated differently?
The Carbon War Tax proposes a new principle: Measure the greenhouse-gas emissions caused by war, assign responsibility, and attach a financial obligation to those emissions.
Military fuel use, weapons production and transportation, fires, destroyed factories and power plants, damaged infrastructure, and burning forests can all create emissions. Scientific models, satellite imagery, and other data could help estimate them. The goal would not be perfect accounting overnight. It would be to make an invisible cost visible.
And then make someone responsible for it.
The money generated through such a system could support carbon capture and storage, environmental restoration, ecosystem recovery, pollution cleanup, and climate-resilient rebuilding in communities affected by war.
That creates a striking possibility: The environmental cost of destruction could help pay for restoration.
The Carbon War Tax is not a proposal to put a price on human suffering. No amount of money can compensate a family for a life lost or a community destroyed. It addresses one specific consequence of war—the carbon and environmental damage that reaches far beyond the battlefield.
Today, we count the cost of weapons. We count military spending. We count destroyed buildings and economic losses. We count refugees and reconstruction.
The Carbon War Tax asks us to add another question: How much carbon did this war release—and who is responsible for paying for it?
That question could also change the economics of war.
No tax will magically end conflict. Wars are driven by power, territory, security, ideology, and politics. But economic consequences influence decisions. If military escalation carried a measurable climate liability, governments would have one more cost to consider before choosing destruction over negotiation.
And there is a deeper question of justice.
Why should a community devastated by war inherit the environmental damage? Why should people who had no role in starting a conflict bear the climate consequences of the emissions it creates? And why should future generations inherit an atmospheric debt they never chose?
The Carbon War Tax is not presented as a finished international policy. It is a starting framework that needs to be tested, challenged, and developed.
Climate-policy researchers could determine how wartime emissions should be measured. Scientists could improve methods for calculating emissions from military operations and conflict-related destruction. Economists could study how a financial mechanism could work without creating unintended consequences. International-law experts could examine questions of responsibility and enforcement. Policymakers, diplomats, and peace organizations could explore how such a system might fit within existing international climate and legal frameworks.
In other words, the idea needs a global research effort to turn a powerful concept into a credible mechanism that could one day be implemented.
That work has not yet been done. And that is precisely why the conversation should begin.
The idea began as an academic question in 2021. It now deserves to move beyond the pages of a thesis and into the hands of the researchers, policymakers, and institutions capable of testing its possibilities.
Because if the world can develop systems to make industries accountable for their carbon, perhaps it can eventually develop a system to make war accountable for its carbon.
Imagine a future in which governments considering military escalation must confront not only the human and financial costs of war, but also the environmental debt it could create.
Imagine that debt helping restore forests, ecosystems, and communities damaged by conflict.
Imagine peace having not only a moral argument, but another economic one.
The Carbon War Tax is not simply about creating another tax.
It is about changing the way we understand the price of war.
War destroys lives. War destroys communities. And war can leave behind a carbon debt carried by the entire planet.
Perhaps it is time that debt became visible.
Perhaps it is time that the world studied how to make it accountable.
And perhaps, if developed into a workable international mechanism, the Carbon War Tax could give peace one more powerful reason to prevail.
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Elections Won't Save a Movement People Don't Trust
Democracy has always depended on more than elections. It depends on institutions that people believe are worthy of their participation and capable of improving their lives.
Sep 25, 2026
As millions head to the polls in the 2026 elections, voters are showing up disappointed, forgotten, and worn down from years of failed policies.
After nearly two decades working inside campaigns, Democratic leaders, national advocacy organizations, and movement institutions have made it clear: We’ve got a problem on our hands.
The challenge before us is not simply that Democrats have a messaging problem, nor is it that Republicans have become better communicators. The deeper problem is that we have spent years trying to win elections while underinvesting in the communities, relationships, and culture that make political victories durable.
People don’t organize their lives around resistance alone. They organize around belonging, purpose, hope, and the possibility that tomorrow can be better than today.
Narratives don’t emerge from communications plans, but rather from institutions that people trust. This distinction matters.
We keep hearing the same question: Why aren’t more young people and people of color engaged in the civic process? This is the wrong question.
The question we need to be asking is whether or not our current institutions are willing to or even positioned to share power with us. More often than not, participation is shared only after decisions are made, and usually with an ask attached.
We are not waiting for institutions to tell us how to participate. We have lived the reality of what happens when institutions fail, time and time again. We have seen how powerful it is when we build our own.
Young Black folks in particular are organizing, creating, building community, and culture. Especially for those who are young, queer, and Black, so much of the language and swagger that shapes our lives has been created by us. We know that when institutional belonging is unavailable, community creates belonging. We got us.
As Black queer Americans, we inherit a tradition shaped by people who understood that institutions rarely surrender power simply because the moral argument is clear. Generations before us organized, marched, litigated, and forced America to confront the distance between its ideals and its reality. Progress has never been inevitable. It has always been demanded.
A collective 20 years inside politics has made it clear to us: Institutions rarely fail overnight. Long before they lose public trust, they lose relevance. They become more concerned with protecting existing power than with creating new possibilities, optimizing for stability rather than adaptation.
Eventually, they find themselves speaking fluently to one another while struggling to connect with the people they were created to serve. That is where much of the progressive movement finds itself today.
Americans are losing faith in politics and in the idea that our institutions can solve the problems shaping their everyday lives.
People do not experience institutional failure in constitutional language or policy briefs. They experience it through rising costs, unstable jobs, inaccessible housing, underfunded schools, broken infrastructure, and the growing sense that the rules apply differently depending on who you are and how much power you hold. They talk about fairness, opportunity, dignity, and whether working hard still leads to a better life.
These conversations are not separate from politics. They are politics. We can’t continue mistaking communications for culture.
Too often, the response has been to refine the message rather than rebuild the institution that delivers it. We have mistaken communication for culture, which has led to the consequences we are all currently living with.
The progressive movement has become extraordinarily sophisticated at producing content. We can generate messaging guidance overnight, build rapid-response campaigns within hours, and create endless streams of digital content. Yet none of those capabilities automatically produce trust.
Trust is earned when people see themselves reflected not only in the message but in the leadership, values, and relationships behind it. You can’t message your way out of a deficit of trust. No amount of message testing can compensate for institutions that people no longer believe understand their lives.
This is where imagination becomes essential.
Since 2016, countless postmortems have focused on messaging, media strategy, and digital infrastructure. Those conversations matter, but they begin from an incomplete premise. They assume we already have a compelling story to tell.
We are not convinced we do.
Sentiments such as “fight” or “protect democracy” are important calls to action, but they are not visions of the future. They put us on the defensive and describe what we oppose more clearly than what we are building. People don’t organize their lives around resistance alone. They organize around belonging, purpose, hope, and the possibility that tomorrow can be better than today.
That kind of vision cannot be manufactured through advertising.
It grows from culture. It expands from artists, educators, organizers, faith leaders, entrepreneurs, local institutions, and civic spaces where people build relationships long before anyone asks for their vote.
We can look back at the Obama era, as one example of how politics can bend the arc of history. If you were near a college campus on November 4, 2008, you remember the celebrations. Music poured from dorm rooms and car speakers, topped off with dancing in the street. For a brief moment, hope felt less like a slogan and more like a possibility finally personified. The belief in our collective power and the possibilities it could create ignited a generation.
Research supports what many organizers have understood intuitively for decades. Economist Raj Chetty’s work on economic mobility found that social capital (the relationships that connect people across communities and opportunities) is among the strongest predictors of upward mobility. That insight extends beyond economics.
Relationships shape what people believe is possible. They influence trust, aspiration, and whether institutions feel relevant to everyday life. Politics is no different.
Queer communities have long understood something about the power of relationships that institutions are only beginning to relearn. We call it chosen family: the idea that belonging can be deliberately built through relationships of trust, care, responsibility, and mutual recognition. There is a civic lesson in that tradition. Durable movements are built the same way. Not through an email list or a message tested to perfection, but through relationships strong enough to survive disagreement, disappointment, and the space between elections.
The same is true for Black communities, particularly Black women, whose creativity, organizing, and cultural leadership have repeatedly expanded the boundaries of American democracy while too often receiving recognition only after the fact.
Innovation doesn’t come from preserving the status quo. History has shown us that it comes from creating space for voices that institutions have historically overlooked.
That means the work ahead demands more than better campaigns. It requires rebuilding civic infrastructure and cultivating leaders rather than personalities. A focus on relationships instead of audiences and investing in organizations that remain present between election cycles.
Institutional renewal is no longer optional as artificial intelligence, economic uncertainty, climate disruption, and political polarization reshape public life simultaneously. The pace of change is accelerating, while confidence in the institutions meant to guide us continues to decline.
That should concern all of us. Democracy has always depended on more than elections. It depends on institutions that people believe are worthy of their participation and capable of improving their lives.
The encouraging news is that Americans have not completely lost faith in one another. Mutual aid networks, local organizers, community leaders, and everyday people continue to demonstrate the generosity and resilience our institutions often struggle to match.
We must build institutions strong enough, imaginative enough, and trustworthy enough for the story to tell itself. There’s no other choice.
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