5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Opinion
We Should All Be Worried That Trump's Hands Are on the Nuclear Trigger
There are no “right hands” to be in possession of nuclear weapons. But Donald Trump clearly possesses utterly "wrong hands” and should be lawfully removed from an office that gives him the power to destroy humanity.
Oct 13, 2026
Over the last few months, the president of the United States has been posting an image of himself firing nuclear weapons at Earth from a spaceship. How worried should we be?
Right now, a handful of people in nine countries have the power to launch a nuclear war that will kill billions and destroy human civilization. In the United States that power is concentrated in one person, the president, who has sole and unchecked authority to launch nuclear war.
No one should ever have that power, but the danger is especially acute when the individual in question has repeatedly demonstrated that he is impulsive, vindictive, delusional, and profoundly lacking in basic human empathy. We are speaking of Donald Trump.
In the first two years alone, three-quarters of humanity—6 billion people—would die.
The nuclear arsenal Trump currently controls includes some 1,700 deployed nuclear warheads, most of them with an explosive force of 100 to 800 kilotons, six to 50 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. If used in a large-scale attack on Russia, they could kill more than 100 million people in the first afternoon. And a Russian counterattack would kill at least that many here in the United States.
Those who survived the initial fires and explosions would find themselves living in a wasteland that we cannot imagine. None of the things we need to keep ourselves alive would be available. There would be no electric grid, no cell phones, no internet, no food distribution system, no system for distributing gasoline or natural gas or heating oil, no law and order. And in the months following the initial attacks most of those who survived those attacks would also die—from starvation, epidemic disease, radiation sickness, and exposure to the elements.
The disaster would not be confined to the US and Russia. The smoke from burning cities in both countries would loft enormous quantities of smoke into the upper atmosphere, blocking out the sun and dropping temperatures across the planet an average of 18°F. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia temperatures would drop 45-50°F, food production would plummet, and the vast majority of the human race would starve. In the first two years alone, three-quarters of humanity—6 billion people—would die.
Impulsivity
Trump has bragged that he makes decisions based on his “gut instinct.” In a 2018 interview he defended style of decision-making by claiming, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody’s brain can ever tell me.” The consequences have played out disastrously in the Iran War, where his initial decision to launch the attack on Iran appeared to lack any coherent goals, any plan to achieve those goals, or any back up plan if things went wrong and, for example, the Iranians closed the Strait of Hormuz.
Vindictiveness
Trump’s explosive personal attacks on journalists who question him are well known, as are his repeated attempts to use the Department of Justice to imprison people who disagree with him publicly. More worrisome are his thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons against Iran when it refused his demand for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER."
Delusional State
Given the unprecedented torrent of false statements that Trump has made, it is sometimes difficult to know when he is willfully lying and when he actually believes the misinformation he is spreading. But it does appear that he actually believes that he won the 2020 presidential election, despite the irrefutable evidence that he did not. And he has engaged in sustained political activity grounded in this delusion.
Lack of Empathy
Trump’s nasty, ad hominem attacks, usually accompanied by a crude nickname for the target of his displeasure, are a staple of his public life. His indifference to human suffering, and his disregard for human life, is exemplified by the extralegal executions of people on boats that he claims may be transporting drugs, and, on a far grander scale, by his support for the war crimes being committed in Gaza, and his indifference to the even greater crimes being committed in Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
There are no “right hands” to be in possession of nuclear weapons. But Donald Trump clearly possesses utterly "wrong hands” and should be lawfully removed from an office that gives him the power to destroy humanity. And the United States should actively work for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, not as a distant vision, but an urgent national security priority.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Postpone the AI Public Offerings Until Congress Acts
A company should not disclose a risk of catastrophe to humanity and then sell its shares to the public before any public authority has the power to evaluate that risk or to stop deployment.
Oct 13, 2026
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI models, is preparing what could be the largest initial public offering in history, raising more than $100 billion, according to The New York Times, at a valuation near $2 trillion. According to Reuters, which reviewed the draft prospectus (the document has not yet been made public), the company tells prospective investors that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” and that its own models could “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” or behave in ways “resembling blackmail.” The company’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, has put the chance that “things go really, really badly” at a staggering 25 percent. Last month he wrote that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”
I take these warnings seriously, and so should Congress on behalf of the American people. The offering should be postponed until Congress has enacted a public system of licensing, independent safety evaluation, liability, and financial backstops for frontier AI. The same applies to OpenAI and every other developer of frontier models.
I am in favor of artificial intelligence, whose potential for science, health, and sustainable development is enormous. What we should oppose is unregulated and militarized AI. A company should not disclose a risk of catastrophe to humanity and then sell its shares to the public before any public authority has the power to evaluate that risk or to stop deployment. In fact, to proceed rapidly in the face of such dire warnings is beyond folly.
To proceed rapidly in the face of such dire warnings is beyond folly.
The problem goes to the foundations of corporate law. Limited liability, the rule that a shareholder can lose no more than the amount invested, is a privilege granted by the state. It is justified on the premise that the harms a firm can impose on others are insured, regulated, or otherwise compensated. When a chemical plant explodes, the law has tools to compensate victims: liability insurance, bonds, capital requirements, and compensation funds. Every one of these tools assumes that the harm can be paid for after the fact. A catastrophic or existential harm cannot be. The only instrument that works is regulation before the fact: licensing, independent testing before deployment, and the legal authority to halt an activity before it becomes too dangerous. For frontier AI in the United States, none of this exists.
What does exist is self-regulation, which is tantamount today to no regulation. On September 29, six AI and chip companies signed a voluntary and nonbinding “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” at the White House. This would be laughable if it weren’t so potentially disastrous. A technology whose own makers describe its risks in dire terms should be governed by public institutions with defined procedures, independent monitoring, and enforceable liability, not by the self-judgment of a handful of business executives.
A rushed public offering would make the problem vastly harder to fix. Anthropic has reportedly committed at least $518 billion to computing infrastructure over the coming decade, with about 80 percent of it described as non-cancellable. With quarterly guidance to public shareholders, those commitments create a powerful incentive against any pause, even one the company’s own safety researchers might recommend. The prospectus itself reportedly describes a “continuous and overlapping cadence” of product launches as “inherent to remaining at the frontier.” Once these shares sit in the pension funds and index funds of tens of millions of American households, any proposal to slow frontier development will be fought not only by the companies but by a vast investor constituency.
The extensive risk disclosures do not solve this problem. They may or may not protect the company from lawsuits by its own shareholders, who will have been warned. They do nothing for the public, which bears the catastrophic risk without ever having been asked.
The usual reply is that if America’s most safety-conscious developers slow down, less careful companies, or China, will race ahead. This is a standard collective-action problem, and such problems are solved by agreements backed by law, monitoring, and enforcement, not by everyone running faster to doom. We are not living in Hobbes’s state of nature. We have the United Nations, treaty law, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Congress. During the Cold War, adversaries negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with international inspection. Frontier AI even offers a natural point of verification: the most advanced chips come from a handful of factories, and frontier training requires huge data centers. Washington has not offered Beijing a verifiable agreement on frontier AI. In fact, after his summit with President Xi Jinping in September, President Trump rejected cooperation with China on AI, agreeing only to a channel for communicating about AI incidents. “When you’re leading,” he said, “you don’t open it up to each other.”
Licensing did not destroy the pharmaceutical, aviation, or nuclear industries; it made them safer.
Who can act to slow the juggernaut and prevent a potential catastrophe? Under current law, the SEC can delay an offering but cannot block it on the ground that the business is dangerous. It should nonetheless decline to accelerate the effectiveness of the registration statement until the company discloses the risks of its products, who would bear the cost of the catastrophes it describes, what insurance exists, and whether its computing contracts would allow a safety pause without penalty.
The decisive authority lies with Congress, and there is ample precedent. Congress has required regulatory approval for securities issued by railroads, by utility holding companies, and by electric utilities, for which federal or state approval is still required today. When nuclear power was opened to private industry in 1954, it was permitted only under federal license.
The outgoing Congress should hold hearings before any shares are priced and should enact a moratorium on public offerings by frontier AI developers until the next Congress acts. The new Congress, which is scheduled to convene on January 3, should within its first hundred days enact a statute making any public offering by a frontier AI developer conditional on a federal license. The license should require independent evaluation before deployment, an enforceable authority to pause training or deployment that no take-or-pay contract can override, and insurance and compensation funds scaled to plausible harms. Congress should also consider the extraordinary step of making management and board members personally responsible, under civil and criminal law, in the event of a catastrophic failure. Such a step would be out of place in an ordinary industry. It is warranted here because the industry itself warns of catastrophic risks while proceeding at breakneck speed. Executives and directors who certify a model as safe without due care, or who override safety findings, should face liability that neither the company nor its insurers can cover for them. The licensing requirement should apply equally to the frontier work of companies that are already public, such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta.
This proposal is directed at no single company, and it must not become a lever for any administration to extract favors, including unrestricted military access to AI models. The delay I propose would last a few months, unless the disclosures point to the need for an indefinite suspension. Licensing did not destroy the pharmaceutical, aviation, or nuclear industries; it made them safer. The leaders of the AI industry have told us, in their own words, that the stakes are as high as they can be. They themselves should stop their mad rush forward, and Congress should take the companies at their word and act with urgency.
Keep Reading
Show Less
UN and The Hague Confront Impunity for War Crimes
Has the world simply failed to learn the lesson of 1945 that “might makes right,” coupled with the destructive power of modern weapons, can only create a world plagued by endless war and chaos?
Oct 13, 2026
On October 9th, the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize Was awarded to Navi Pillay, the South African international lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid political prisoners on Robben Island, and went on to serve as a judge on the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC), then as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2025, Navi Pillay led the UN Commission of Inquiry that confirmed that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
With the world in the grip of seemingly intractable war and chaos, the Nobel Committee clearly wanted to honor someone who has worked against the tide of militarism and violence to uphold international law. And yet, on the same day, the United States unveiled unilateral, illegal coercive measures or “sanctions” against the ICC, where Navi Pillay served as a judge from 2003 to 2008.
The UN General Assembly’s 2026 general debate in September also set out to uphold the UN Charter and international law, and to confront the reality that the UN system is failing in its most basic responsibility, to maintain international peace and security.
The foundational rules of the UN Charter are that countries must resolve disputes peacefully and refrain from the threat or use of force. But in the General Assembly debate, even as leaders recognized the urgent need to finally enforce the UN Charter, after decades of impunity for aggression and war crimes, they were reluctant to explicitly address the central role of the United States in undermining the rule of international law.
Many US allies loyally condemned Russia’s violation of the UN Charter against Ukraine. But none of them even tried to square their singular focus on Russia with the inconvenient truth that their own ally, the United States, has systematically violated the UN Charter for decades, against Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and other countries.
While US allies remain silent, US officials accept no responsibility or accountability for the violence and chaos they unleash, and instead keep doubling down on their failed imperial ambitions and military approach to international disputes, the very antithesis of what the UN Charter requires.
Many other leaders spoke out, but without explicitly naming the United States. Algeria’s foreign minister, the veteran diplomat Ahmed Attaf, pointedly asked,
“What sort of international order can function properly when principles are selected according to the identity of those who violate them? What confidence can remain in international law when the aggressor is granted the right to self-defense, while the victim is required to justify even the right to survive?”
So it is left to the officials of the countries the United States threatens or attacks to remind the world which country is illegally threatening them, as Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla and Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian did clearly and accurately at the General Assembly.
Many other leaders made strong statements condemning Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza, even as they neglected to condemn the essential US military and diplomatic role in them. King Abdullah of Jordan described Israel’s objective as “to make a viable Palestinian state impossible,” through “a system of subjugation… de facto annexation… forced displacement… (and) war crimes.”
“We have tools,” he reminded his colleagues, “Sanctions, asset freezes, embargoes, diplomatic isolation. And we have a record of using them elsewhere… The question now is: Will we act?”
Another of the UN’s tools is the power of the president of the UN General Assembly to convene Emergency Special Sessions (ESS) that can pass “uniting for peace” resolutions. This allows the General Assembly to act decisively on international problems when the Security Council fails to do so, wielding the kind of tools that King Abdullah outlined.
The General Assembly’s 10th Emergency Special Session on “Illegal Israeli Actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the Rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory” began in 1997, and has been reconvened more than twenty times.
In 2022, the 10th Emergency Special Session voted to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) some legal questions about the Israeli occupation, which the court answered in 2024, in a finding that the Israeli occupation is illegal and that Israel must “end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” and “evacuate all settlers.”
The next meeting of the 10th ESS in September 2024 passed a resolution demanding that Israel comply with the ICJ ruling and withdraw from the occupied territories within a year.
However, the 2025-6 General Assembly president, Annalena Baerbock of Germany, allowed her entire year as president to pass without reconvening the 10th ESS even once.
This allowed Trump and Netanyahu to seize the initiative and subject the people of Gaza to a new phase of the genocide under Trump’s Orwellian “board of peace,” a smokescreen for a war of attrition to keep killing civilians and making life intolerable for the people of Gaza, as they struggle to survive in the rubble of their bombed and bulldozed homes.
Many leaders at the General Assembly spoke of the urgency of reforming the Security Council, but the greatest leverage they have to achieve that is the General Assembly’s ability to act in an Emergency Special Session when the dysfunctional, corrupted Security Council fails to do so. Nowhere in the world is such action more urgently needed than in Palestine. And yet the 10th Emergency Special Session has not met since June 2025.
Now that Bangladesh’s Dr. Khalilur Rahman has taken Baerbock’s place as President of the General Assembly, he should reconvene the 10th Emergency Special Session to take the concrete actions for Palestine that people all over the world are calling for.
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ is also important, but South Africa has slowed down the already tortuous pace of international justice by requesting 18 months to respond to Israel’s defense against genocide charges. Surely South Africa and the court can find a way to move faster, with the fate of an entire people in the balance. The Genocide Convention was intended to prevent and stop genocide, not just to pass judgment over mass graves and scattered refugee camps.
Many people justifiably fear that the United Nations and its institutions are simply too weak to enforce the laws of the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions and hold the United States and Israel accountable for their crimes. But there was another event on September 16, 2026, which suggests that Benjamin Netanyahu and other US-allied war criminals might want to think twice before assuming that the United States will always shield them from accountability.
The week before the General Assembly met in New York, an international war crimes court in The Hague sentenced former Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi to 25 years in prison. The court found Thaçi and three other former leaders of the US-backed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guilty of 96 murders, 303 charges of torture, 49 charges of criminal cruelty and 385 cases of arbitrary detention, committed during the US-NATO war on Yugoslavia in 1999.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, the court that tried Thaçi, was established in 2011, in response to a Council of Europe Parliamentary Report titled “Inhuman Treatment of People and Illicit Trafficking in Human Organs in Kosovo.”
That report detailed extraordinary allegations unearthed by Carla Del Ponte, who was the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which were then investigated for the Council of Europe by Swiss state prosecutor and member of parliament Dick Marty.
The report substantiated allegations that the KLA transported civilian prisoners from Kosovo to Albania and imprisoned them in a clinic known as the “Yellow House,” where they murdered them and extracted their internal organs to sell on the illicit organ transplant market.
As the court records show, these were only the most startling of Thaçi and the KLA’s crimes. The KLA also shot, tortured or beat to death dozens, or maybe hundreds, of civilian prisoners whom it labelled as “traitors” or “collaborators,” during and immediately after NATO’s illegal war to detach Kosovo from the remaining territory of Yugoslavia.
While no Americans were charged in these crimes, the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies had worked with the KLA since at least 1996, as it terrorized Serb civilians and attacked and killed Yugoslav police to provoke repression against the Kosovar Albanian population.
The escalating violence in Kosovo provided the pretext for a war in which the United States and NATO dropped 23,000 bombs and missiles on Yugoslavia, targeting and destroying vital civilian infrastructure as well as military targets. Then they invaded and occupied Kosovo and built a huge US military base, Camp Bondsteel, which the US also used as a secret prison during its “war on terror.”
US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was so personally invested in the march to war in Kosovo that Time dubbed it “Madeleine’s War.” Albright shunned the traditional political leaders of Kosovo’s independence movement, and instead embraced Hashim Thaçi and the KLA as the United States’ and NATO’s main allies in Kosovo, despite their well-known links to organized crime and heroin smuggling.
With Thaçi at her side at the Rambouillet conference in France, Albright delivered her coup de grace to Yugoslav President Milosevich: an ultimatum that would have given NATO the right to militarily occupy all the remaining territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Milosevich’s refusal to surrender his country’s sovereignty served as the final pretext for the US and NATO to violatethe UN Charter in an illegal war that set a precedent for US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the endless wars and chaos that have followed.
At the UN General Assembly on September 23rd, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić thanked the 107 countries that still refuse to recognize Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, and he placed NATO’s war on the remains of Yugoslavia in 1999 squarely at the root of the violence and chaos afflicting the UN and the world.
“...the order based on respect for the UN Charter and the law founded upon it no longer exists,” Vučić said. “It was destroyed by those who tore apart the territories of other countries for the sake of their own political and economic interests. They did so unscrupulously, recklessly, and shamelessly.”
So is it already too late to try to enforce the rules of the UN Charter?
Has the world simply failed to learn the lesson of 1945 that “might makes right,” coupled with the destructive power of modern weapons, can only create a world plagued by endless war and chaos?
Or, now that we are staring that world in the face, will we finally heed that lesson and make different choices?
It has taken 27 years for justice to catch up with Hashim Thaçi, but, as King Abdullah said, the world’s governments have the tools to enforce the rules of international law if and when they choose, and that is true even in the case of US allies like Thaçi and Netanyahu.
But Abdullah’s question remains: will the world’s leaders choose to use the tools at their disposal? First to free Palestine, but also to give our own children and grandchildren the chance to build a peaceful, sustainable world out of the militarism, war and chaos that is the global legacy of a generation of American leaders.
Keep Reading
Show Less
30 Months After Uproar Over Jonathan Glazer's Oscar Speech, What Do His Pro-Israel Denouncers Say Now?
Even after all this time—and the death, dispossession, and suffering that has happened since—what should not get lost is the profound truth that Jonathan Glazer managed to articulate in the 40 seconds of his Oscar speech that caused so much distress
Oct 13, 2026
If you understand that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, why read an article focusing on the viewpoints of people who vehemently deny it? I wasn’t sure how to explain why, until I remembered something that screenwriter Frédéric Krivine said when I interviewed him in Paris eight years ago. He was the head scriptwriter of the brilliant film series Un Village Français, dramatizing the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two.
“People who do horrible things are human beings,” Krivine said. “We have to find a way to talk about them without hiding what they do and without treating them as nonhuman people, nonhuman beings. They are human beings; like us they belong to, we are in, the same species, human species…. It’s humans who kill now everywhere in the world where people are killed. It’s because they are human beings that we have problems – because if they were just extraterrestrial or monsters we could just erase them.”
When director Jonathan Glazer gave the acceptance speech for his film The Zone of Interest at the 2024 Academy Awards, these words caused an uproar: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization. How do we resist?”
Quick reactions included a furious open letter that identified its more than 1,000 signers as “Jewish creatives, executives and Hollywood professionals.” The letter declared, “We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination…. The use of words like ‘occupation’ to describe an indigenous Jewish people defending a homeland that dates back thousands of years, and has been recognized as a state by the United Nations, distorts history. It gives credence to the modern blood libel that fuels a growing anti-Jewish hatred around the world, in the United States, and in Hollywood. The current climate of growing antisemitism only underscores the need for the Jewish State of Israel, a place which will always take us in, as no state did during the Holocaust depicted in Mr. Glazer’s film.”
The Gaza war was then in its fifth month. At the time, citing information from UNICEF, Reuters reported that “over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza in Israel’s offensive,” and “many kids were suffering from severe malnutrition.” The United Nations issued a statement saying, “This war is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.”
Deaths and injuries mounted swiftly for another 19 months, until an ostensible ceasefire in October 2025. Assaults by Israeli forces have continued at lower levels, with no letup in miserable conditions for 2 million Palestinian people living in Gaza.
Given all that has happened, I recently contacted some signers of the open letter to ask whether they still fully believe in its contents and whether their perspective on Israel has changed since then. Ten responded to my questions.
Koura Linda, who owns a film production company based in Los Angeles, was appalled by the applause and cheers that Glazer received when he spoke at the Academy Awards. “If anything, I would sign that letter 100 times over today,” Linda told me. Later, she said: “It’s very confusing to me why people are so fixated on Israel specifically…. I don’t understand the fixation on the only piece of the world that belongs to the Jewish people.”
Les Glassman, a dentist and documentary filmmaker, spoke with me from his home in Jerusalem. He recalled that The Zone of Interest – which depicts the ordinary everyday life of a Nazi commandant and his wife living next to a concentration camp – was very warmly received when it premiered in Israel. “People loved it,” Glassman said. Later, when Glazer made his Oscar speech, “it was a shock…. It was a stab in the back…. Like treason…. He used the Holocaust against Israel…. I don't know one person who was impressed with his speech. People were the opposite, they were like totally flabbergasted and could not believe what they were hearing. It was like a traitor really.”
Glassman has dedicated himself to interviewing elderly Jews who survived the Holocaust. “In nearly all my interviews of Holocaust survivors worldwide which I have been privileged to do,” he said, “the important message imparted by the survivors [is] ‘we have our own Jewish country' as they remember when the world shut its doors and Jews had nowhere to flee or find refuge.”
Actor and director Geoffrey Cantor told me, “I completely stand by the letter 100 percent.” He had recently voiced an audio book by Eli Sharabi, who was abducted from a kibbutz on October 7 and held prisoner in Gaza tunnels for 491 days. I asked Cantor about the letter’s vehement objection to Glazer’s use of the word “occupation,” referring to Israel’s control of Gaza and the West Bank. “It’s not an occupation,” said Cantor, who described himself as “a liberal politically.”
After noting that “war is horrible, it’s always been horrible,” Cantor went on: “Israelis fight war to protect themselves. And it hasn’t been until the establishment of Israel that Jews were able to even engage in a war. Until then, we were just slaughtered. And so, that does something to one’s way of viewing war.”
I asked, “What do you make of the outlook of some who say, not only was The Zone of Interest a great film, but it has something to say about the current situation with Israel and Palestinians?”
“I think I saw like the trailer,” Cantor said. “I did not see the whole film…. I’m sure the film is beautiful and probably deserved a lot of praise – but then to use that, to say, and Israel’s the worst perpetrator. Ever. In the history of the world. Is so absurd, so wrong. And when it comes from a Jewish person, is so damning… because it feeds the fires. Stokes the flame of righteous indignation against the Jewish people and anybody who supports our only country.”
When I asked if it made any difference that Glazer is Jewish, Cantor replied: “When a Jewish voice uses the language that I disagree with about Israel, in such a public forum, it feels a little bit more like a betrayal.”
Remembering Glassman’s comment on the phone line from Jerusalem likening Glazer’s speech to “treason,” I asked Cantor if he thought the word applied. “No,” he responded, “just betrayal, not treason. But betrayal.”
The interview with Cantor lasted an hour and a half. In contrast, the response was terse from another signer of the open letter, the emeritus rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, David Wolpe, who is a consultant to Warner Bros. and Gulfstream Pictures for a feature film adapting his book about King David. Does Rabbi Wolpe still fully believe in the contents of the open letter? “Yes.” Has his perspective on Israel changed since signing it? “No.”
Interviewed separately, all of the signers said that they still completely support the open letter. They often returned to the same themes: Glazer’s speech had been a “blood libel” with “false equivalency.” Glazer had used the Holocaust to invert its true meaning while feeding into antisemitism. Hostility to Israel has gained the upper hand in U.S. media and politics. Israel is held to a much higher standard than other countries. Zionists have been increasingly besieged and subjected to hatred. Israel protects Jews from a future Holocaust. Civilian deaths in Gaza were unfortunate but Israel went extraordinarily out of its way to prevent them.
Several of the signers indicated that the open letter understates their current abhorrence of Glazer’s Oscar speech. “If anything, I am even more supportive of Israel now amidst the ever-increasing amount of anti-Israel lies, propaganda and brainwashing that is ubiquitous worldwide,” said Jonathan Geffner, a professional ventriloquist.
“Unfortunately, our letter is even more relevant today than it was back then,” said Roy Schwartz, a writer and documentary producer. “Blood libels against Israel and Jews have only escalated since. They’re rampant and unchecked, even in politics, civic orgs, and the media. Israel is subject to obsessive focus wildly disproportionate to anything else going on in the world, and it’s held to a standard that no other country is held even close to. Meanwhile, its implacable enemies and other bad players are ignored, excused, or their blatant misinformation accepted uncritically.”
Shie Rozow, an Israeli-American composer and music editor living in Los Angeles, has credits including work on 150 feature films as well as popular TV shows. “I actually wish the letter was even more strongly worded,” he said. “The only part of his speech I agree with is that dehumanization is a problem that we must confront. Whether it's in this conflict, or in our politics. And yet again he makes a false equivalency between victims of brutal terrorism that openly and clearly sought to kill anyone it could versus military action that appears to have done more to avoid the killing of civilians than practically any other military has done in history, under unprecedentedly challenging circumstances. This isn't to say the IDF is perfect, far from it. This is not the same IDF I served in. I've seen things that I couldn't imagine happening when I served over 30 years ago. And Israel has the worst, most corrupt and extremist government in its history with senior members who belong nowhere near power.”
To the host of “The Unapologetically Jewish Podcast,” Shana Meyerson, “Glazer’s speech is symptomatic of something greater and more nefarious in society: knee-trembling desperation to bend to the rabid masses and support terrorists – the murderers of his own people – in order to pass some loyalty litmus test…. He chose applause over human decency and truth. And the fact that he would actually weaponize the Holocaust to that end, makes his speech even that much more reprehensible.”
Among the signers I interviewed, references to Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump were almost always negative. “I have no sympathy for Netanyahu’s approach, nor for Trump’s,” said director and producer Tommaso Cardile. “I would much prefer a moderate, diplomatic Israeli government pursuing a negotiated outcome, and I say that as someone who wants Israel to endure… What concerned me about Mr. Glazer’s speech was not his sincerity but its effect. Whatever he intended, the framing was instantly repurposed by people whose aims he does not share, at a moment when Jewish communities in Europe and the United States were already facing the sharpest rise in threats and harassment in decades. Statements from that stage don't stay in the room they’re made in. I think he underestimated that.”
Working on this article, I have strived to be fair to the people I interviewed and to convey the gist of their points of view. I found their basic outlooks to be repugnant.
What should not get lost is the profound truth that Jonathan Glazer managed to articulate in the 40 seconds of his Oscar speech that caused so much distress. The director deftly took down a kind of psychological “fourth wall” that routinely separates viewers from film. His speech, like The Zone of Interest, offered the possibility of going beyond “Look what they did then” to “Look what we do now.”
For those who heard his speech as abhorrent, Glazer’s invitation to truly examine what we do now—with tax dollars, silence, passivity or active acceptance—was a betrayal of the pretense that our society is not aiding and abetting genocide in the present day. Complacency and indifference prevail about the fate of “the other.” That way, the organized atrocities that ended 81 years ago, which can no longer be prevented, can loom incomparably more important than the organized atrocities that are happening today and might be prevented tomorrow.
During the interviews, perhaps the most disturbing responses came after my last question, when I asked whether the signers had any comment on the unequivocal conclusions of Israeli genocide reached in late 2024 by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and two Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel. All those who replied were dismissive.
One response claimed that “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have Hamas members in their Gaza operations and are well-documented for their systematic bias against Israel,” and that “B’Tselem is also infamous for its far left, radical, anti-Israel agenda.”
Another signer said: “I imagine some of the information is true, and much of it was either outright Hamas-driven lies and propaganda or presented without full knowledge of circumstances or out of context. That's not reliable. Nor are many of the assertions and claims set forth.”
Another commented that “Israel gave polio vaccines, if there was a genocide, why are they giving polio vaccines?”
Another asserted that the four human rights organizations “have repeatedly been found to be spreading misinformation and are all angled to paint Israel in a negative light.”
Another replied, “The devastation and loss of life in Gaza is horrific but it does not come close to reaching the threshold that would warrant or support the label of genocide.”
Another sent me a video of a Holocaust survivor living in Israel, filmed at age 101, who said: “If we defend ourselves, then they tell us we’re committing genocide. Genocide is state-organized killing machine and not defense against terrorism.” And, “There is no genocide anywhere committed by us. It’s a figment of imagination of the international media and international politicians.”
Another said, “What Hamas did on October 7, 2023 was genocide. Everything since has been war.”
Across the United States, denial of Israel’s actual crimes against humanity has diminished during the 30 months since Jonathan Glazer’s speech. But a flinty core of denial still remains.
To acknowledge the genocide would be to shatter the identity of Jews who love Israel. For that matter, to acknowledge the genocide would undermine the right-wing Christians United for Israel organization, which claims 10 million members in the United States. And open acknowledgement of the genocide would render almost impossible the reflex of enormous U.S. military aid to Israel that still prevails among a large majority of Congress members.
In his 1939 film The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir says: “The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has their reasons.”
Keep Reading
Show Less
Who Benefits From Greg Levy's US Senate Run in Ohio?
The evidence strongly suggests a candidacy designed, whether intentionally or not, to shift significant voters from the only viable progressive candidate in this critical race: Sherrod Brown.
Oct 13, 2026
Despite it being full of sound and fury signifying something akin to pipe dreams, the political platform of Greg Levy is still the most progressive of all US Senate candidates in Ohio. That’s good, and that’s it.
All else strongly suggests a candidacy designed, whether intentionally or not, to shift significant voters from the only viable progressive candidate in this critical race: Sherrod Brown. The danger is that Levy may do to the 2026 Senate race in Ohio what Ralph Nader did to the 2000 Presidential race in Florida—snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory for progressive forces.
Polls show this Senate race to be highly competitive. One conducted in late September by the reputable Rasmussen Project gives Brown a slight 3-point lead over Husted, but it also reveals significant support for Levy ranging from 1% to 9% depending on the demographic. Within the 19-29 age group, Levy has an estimated 6% of the vote, and among voters without a high school diploma the support reaches 9%. His overall support currently stands at around 2%—within striking range to knock Brown out and keep the US Senate in MAGA control.
It does not get much uglier than this.
Much of Levy’s popularity, especially among the youth, stems from his pro-Palestine stance and his critique of Brown acceptance of AIPAC money. However, Levy’s campaign is also not without dubious donations. His very first recorded and largest single donation, $3500 given in early October 2025, came from Matthew Meyer, a Graduate Research Associate at Ohio State University. The monthly stipend for a GRA is $2.897. A much more troublesome campaign donation, the second largest single one, $1,041.96, came from Ada Rauschenbach, who is employed as a highly specialized communications engineer for iDirect Government, a major military contractor.
According to its corporate self-description, iDirect Government “provides mission-critical Military Satellite Communication solutions; anti-jamming capabilities and cryptographic technologies to the Department of Defense.” In January 2026, it was awarded a $151 billion contract for a sophisticated program (SHIELD) to support Trump’s wild “Golden Dome” defense system. iDirect Government also supplies an Israeli weapons manufacturer (GetSat based in Rehovot) with its advanced software used for “empowering mission success in dynamic and contested environments,” likely a reference to Gaza.
Why would anyone with his livelihood rooted in militarism donate significantly to a candidate who calls for a 90% cut to the Pentagon budget? The question is a rhetorical one, and gives credence to the proposition that MAGA militarists would love to have Levy cause Brown to be defeated.
Campaign donations are part of this nefarious strategy; deceit is another. Levy proudly identifies himself as a member of and organizer for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL)—on his campaign materials, but hardly anywhere else. On his FEC candidacy form he filed as an Independent, not a PSL member. However, according go an Ohio Secretary of State Directive, “An independent candidate must actually be unaffiliated from any political party, and the required claim of unaffiliation must be made in good faith for the candidate to be qualified to run as an independent candidate.” On the Ohio ballot, Levy is identified as an “other-party” candidate, the only one with that curious designation.
Nevertheless, in countless media reports and voter guides, Levy is identified as an Independent and no mention is made of his PSL membership. An article in a Suffolk University publication even calls him a “No Party” candidate, and The Times of Israel claims he is a “DSA-endorsed Senate candidate” who is running as an Independent.
One does not build a socialist movement by failing to be identified as a socialist in the media; but being labeled an Independent attracts a wider electorate, which is precisely what Levy needs to siphon off sufficient voters from Brown. Adding to the contention that Levy’s campaign was launched to target Brown is the timing of its filing. Brown filed for candidacy on August 18, 2025, and Levy subsequently did so within a month, on September 12.
However, another filing within 4 weeks of the midterm elections revealed a sinister GOP plot designed to help assure Levy successfully plays the spoiler role of a shill candidate. On October 5, a newly formed Republican PAC (Enough Promises Ohio) with ties to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, spent $195,519.98 to Seven Farms of South Carolina for printing and mailing services in support of Gregory Lee Levy, who is explicitly mentioned in the filing; two days later the same GOP outfit invested another $215,659.58 for similar services in opposition to Brown. Seven Farms uses the same address as a political vendor that has been paid by No Going Back, another super PAC linked to Trump.
The campaign mailers, which were sent to countless likely voters in Ohio, vigorously promote Levy over Brown with phrases like “Join the Revolution,” “Free Palestine” and, “Send a Worker to the Senate.” Such slogans have been extensively used on Levy’s campaign literature and signs.
It does not get much uglier than this. Having MAGA forces spend nearly $200,000 to actively promote a nonviable socialist candidate in order to defeat a viable progressive one tells you all you need to know about this crucial election: a vote for Levy is, in effect, a vote for the fascist MAGA candidate.
After this revelation of massive MAGA support for Levy’s campaign, there is really only one honorable option for a campaign that should never have started: withdrawal.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Bigoted, Racist, Nationalistic Trump Targets Ilhan Omar With DHS Raid Weeks Before Election
If Democrats regain control of the House, they must investigate this flagrant abuse of power by Trump, Vance, and the Department of Justice.
Oct 13, 2026
Right now, I want to bring your attention to Monday's raid by federal agents on the Washington-area home of Rep. Ilhan Omar — 22 days before she faces reelection to Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District.
The raid reportedly concerns Omar’s immigration history, including allegations of fraud that she has repeatedly denied.
Omar accuses the Trump regime of weaponizing law enforcement against a political opponent:
“Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”
Months ago, Trump called Omar — a Somali-born Muslim who became a U.S. citizen and was elected to Congress in 2018 — “garbage.” He said she shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman and stood by as his supporters chanted to “send her back” to her native Somalia.
This past weekend — before today’s raid — Trump renewed his attacks on Omar. “She comes from Somalia,” Trump said, where “they don’t have a government, they don’t have police, all they have is crime and squalor.” He continued:
“She comes into our country and she says ‘my Constitution allows me.’ She’s talking about our Constitution. What they’ve done to Minnesota, these people from Somalia, should never be allowed.”
Let me remind you that this is the president of the United States mouthing this bigoted, racist, nationalistic filth.
In this weekend’s rant, Trump also stated that “JD Vance and our people are looking at it” — referring to Omar.
After Monday's raid on her home, Trump said he has “always found [Omar] to be totally crooked” and called her “a terrible person.”
JD Vance has previously accused Omar of immigration fraud without providing any evidence. In March, Vance reiterated that claim, which he said he had discussed with White House senior aide Stephen Miller.
“We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud,” Vance told a conservative podcaster. The next step, he said, was to figure out how to “build a case.”
In a democracy, the highest officials of one party do not “build cases” to pursue legislators from the opposing party.
Nor do they investigate their political opponents within days of an election, in violation of explicit Department of Justice rules.
The Department of Justice guidance for protecting election integrity explicitly states that the department should not engage in investigative measures that might “chill legitimate voting and campaign activities” or “interject an investigation itself into ongoing campaigns.”
The Justice Manual further states that federal prosecutors and agents “may never select the timing” of investigative steps, charges, or public statements for the purpose of affecting an election or giving an advantage or disadvantage to a candidate or political party.
Election-year guidance dating back to at least 2008 has emphasized that “politics must play no role” in investigative or charging decisions and that prosecutors should exercise particular caution close to elections.
If Democrats regain control of the House, they must investigate this flagrant abuse of power by Trump, Vance, and the Department of Justice.
In the meantime, you might consider making a contribution to Ilhan Omar’s campaign, here. And if you’re able to volunteer for her campaign, do so here.
Keep Reading
Show Less
New York ICE Shooting Illustrates Deliberate Policy of Harm and Medical Neglect
It is not normal for a democratic nation to institute this level of warfare against its own people.
Oct 12, 2026
President Donald Trump’s ICE terror campaign against US cities reached a new height October 8 with the dangerous shooting of an unarmed Dominican man, with his 5-year-old child in the car, in a densely populated Manhattan neighborhood.
The incident adds to a growing scandal over inhumane ICE treatment of victims they harm. ICE agents have repeatedly interfered with or denied medical care for the victims they shoot. Patients have also been pulled out of hospitals prematurely against medical advice and without authorization of their doctors and other medical professionals.
California last year enacted a law that prohibits medical facilities from permitting federal agents without a valid search warrant or court order into private areas, including places where patients receive treatment or discuss health matters, the Los Angeles Times noted. The Minnesota Nurses Association is also pressing for public policies to bar ICE agents from being in rooms when patients are receiving care, and other community and patient protections.
Other states should follow and more is still needed. ICE must be held accountable, by law, for denying immediate medical care to anyone they harm, and it must be barred from removing them from any medical facility without specific medical consent and written authorization. National legislation would be best, but with a lawless administration in Washington, states should enact strict legislation to protect all patients as well as public safety.
Oscar Belgal, 28, was shot in the neck, apparently with an assault-style rifle, as seven rounds were blasted into his vehicle. ICE initially claimed they’d transported him to the hospital, a claim subsequently disproven by video. New York police officers, not ICE, transported Belgal to New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital. There, nurses provided “dignified care,” said their union, the New York State Nurses Association, despite an ICE presence in the hospital that “has an intimidating and harmful effect on all patients. ICE has no place on our streets or in our hospitals.”
After several hours, ICE agents pulled Belgal out of the hospital taking him to a Brooklyn jail, with a bullet still in his body, according to his lawyers. They said he was in pain, afraid for himself and deeply concerned for his unhurt but terrified 5-year-old son. There was no report that any medical staff had explicitly authorized or cleared him for such quick discharge against all medical ethics. He spent the night in a cell, not in a hospital bed despite still having a bullet in his body, an attorney said.
More than 24 hours later, Belgal was “still in pain,” Paige Austin of the nonprofit Make the Road New York, told a federal judge. “Although [Mr. Belgal] was initially hospitalized, it appears that ICE moved quickly to transfer him out of the hospital to an unknown location—raising grave concerns for his health and well-being,” his legal staff said in a court filing.
“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters. “ICE undermines public safety. This is an agency that should be abolished.” He later added, “Get ICE out of our neighborhoods. Get ICE out of our hospitals. Get ICE off our streets. Get ICE away from our children.”
It is not normal for a democratic nation to institute this level of warfare against its own people — not targeting the “worst of the worst” they claimed, but anyone they racially profile as an enemy. Then they force the pain and physical harm they’ve caused on people against professional medical judgement. It’s what fascism looks like. As National Nurses United (NNU) repeated in August after one of its members, a Maine RN was kidnaped by ICE, “Since ICE began kidnapping Black and brown people and terrorizing our communities,” NNU has called it out as “an illegitimate, violent, paramilitary organization that must be promptly abolished.”
Belgal is far from the only person to whom ICE has shown disregard for their safety or health after being shot or otherwise harmed.
In September, a Venezuelan delivery driver Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, 28, was shot by ICE agents in Austin, TX after an unmarked SUV—one that never activated its lights or siren—rammed his car as he said he was trying to pull over. After fleeing on foot, the agents shot him in the back.
He was taken to a hospital in San Antonio with a bullet in his back for four hours, apparently just given morphine, his attorney said, before being whisked away again by ICE and moved to a detention center in South Texas. At the facility, she said, “He was cold, asked for water (and) said he was in great pain, but he spent hours (there) even before he got an ibuprofen.” The bullet, that was close to his spine, remained lodged in his back for two weeks, before it was finally surgically removed after partial paralysis had set in. When he appeared in court, he was in a wheelchair.
“Democratic leaders and immigrant advocates have questioned whether Garcés Pérez received proper medical treatment and whether he was taken into custody before he could fully heal,” the Texas Tribune reported. Brian Elmore, a Global Emergency Medical fellow doctor, told The Tribune, “In somebody that isn’t detained, these patients would have close follow-up with their trauma surgery team and be discharged with pain medication. The problem with these patients is that they are often discharged in conditions where they receive inappropriate or absent medical care.”
Lack of proper medical care has been demonstrated throughout the ICE campaign. It was evident in the callous behavior of ICE agents who impeded medical personnel from seeking to reach Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in the moments after their fatal shootings by agents.
It was demonstrated in Los Angeles in 2025 during ICE presences in hospitals. In October 2025, journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias, who had been tracking ICE actions and posting them on TikTok, was wounded by an agent and taken to a downtown hospital, California Hospital Medical Center. ICE agents remained in his hospital room for nearly a week, a presence intimidating to nurses and patients, said Anne Caputo-Pearl, RN, a labor and delivery nurse and chief nurse representative for the California Nurses Association (CNA). He too was denied adequate medical treatment, including pain medication and physical therapy, while subsequently still in an ICE detention facility, said the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Three months earlier, ICE agents stayed around the clock in the hospital room of a Salvadoran detainee Milagro Solis-Portillo who had a medical emergency while being arrested. CNA President Sandy Reding, RN, who joined protesters at Glendale Memorial Hospital, said nurses and patients were frightened to see masked immigration agents in the hospital’s lobby. “Hospitals used to be a sanctuary place, and now they’re not,” she said. “And it seems like ICE has just been running rampant.”
Solis-Portillo said she was repeatedly pressured by ICE to say she was well enough to leave, and was barred from speaking to family and attorneys until she complied. They ultimately transferred her to another hospital against her doctor’s orders and without explanation, her attorney said. Her case “violates established ethical and patient care standards not only for this individual, but also for the public health and safety,” CNA said.
It has long been obvious that ICE and other paramilitary federal’s cruel behavior is intentional. It is evident in the streets, where on behalf of the Trump administration federal agents have shot at some two dozen people, killing six of them. Not only has a single agent not been federally charged, but as Jonathan Blitzer writes in The New Yorker, the federal response is always to blame the victim.
Further the administration has arrested and prosecuted hundreds of protesters; in many cases where judges have dropped charges or juries acquitted them. One major case, known as the Minnesota 15, goes to trial October 20. They are being charged not with impeding ICE, but conspiracy to impede ICE in Minnesota, notes defendant Cal Robinet.
A policy of harm, disregard, and cruelty is abundantly apparent in 239 ICE concentration camp detention centers where the death toll has reached 59 during Trump’s second term due to deliberate substandard conditions, inadequate nutrition, and medical neglect. ICE has even stopped listing where detainees are being held in its online database to hide them from family members and legal counsel.
Stephen Miller, the architect of the campaign, put it bluntly after Renee Good was murdered while administration officials branded her a domestic terrorist. “To all ICE officers: You have immunity to perform your duties and no one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties,” he declared.
The history of fascist dictatorships is littered with sobering examples of what happens when there are not barriers against government medical abuses, either by law, or by the opposition of the medical establishment and its practitioners.
For the medical community, if actions are taken by ICE against their medical recommendation, doctors, nurses, and emergency medical technicians need to speak up in real time to advocate for their patients. Hospital administrators should support them, and say this patient was taken away against medical advice. They will have public support, and laws should be enacted to protect them against retaliation.
As the Trump administration continues to use its paramilitary forces and other federal police as an instrument to target communities of color and threaten violent repression on everyone who dissents, these policies will continue to escalate without more broad, forceful responses and protest.
Keep Reading
Show Less
AI as War, Surveillance, and Environmental Disaster
The creators of AI are so enamored of their products that they have lost sight of their responsibility to inSocial Schedulingsist upon the ethical, moral, and environmentally sound use of all applications and ends.
Oct 12, 2026
The huge AI industry, with a value approaching $1 trillion, has promised new jobs; safer, more efficient production in industry and agriculture; secure borders; instantaneous ease of communication; and seamless augmentation of human thinking with benefits to global health, environment, and culture. Consumers have accepted its power to help them write and do research; to power their computers, smart phones, and other goods; with algorithms to bring love in dating Apps, and bring digital age self-driving vehicles to the roadways.
But AI is suffering from an existential crisis. From its military origins to its invasive data scraping; from its promise to augment human intelligence to its unbounded surveillance of our bodies, faces, and thoughts; and from its genesis in university research to its iron-handed embrace by unregulated big technology companies, AI commands a dark presence in daily life. As university and industry researchers moved closer to developing “thinking machines,” publics understandably began to worry about the threats that accompany potentially sentient devices. They have grown uncomfortable about giving up their privacy to data management industries that use their financial, travel, and health information to invade their lives. They worry mightily about the environmental impacts of the growing number of data centers needed to feed AI.
Even more, it is now widely understood that AI is an industrial tool directed primarily to create profit for digital corporations and their shareholders, not altruistically to augment human intelligence, nor to ease the burden of production. AI was borne of military programs and still serves military impulses and programs. The military impulses appear in the creation of domestic surveillance programs used by both democracies and authoritarian regimes. And AI is a dirty technology: The costs of building and operating data centers has turned world communities against them because of their great carbon costs, land takings, noise, vibrations, and community disruptions.
The Military Essence of AI
AI is a military tool. Its genesis is connected with the design of nuclear weapons. It commands outsized funding from militaries around the world for so-called smart weapons that enable killing from afar—with armies removed from direct engagement and civilian populations ostensibly safe from attack. But AI inures soldiers from the act of killing and in fact puts civilians in war zones at greater risk. In Gaza, Syria, Venezuela, and Iran innocents have died through the direct application of such AI war tools as drones. Israel designed the “LANIUS drone-based loitering munition” to kill in the urban setting; it relies on the Lavender program to have identified almost 40,000 Gazans as targets for arrest or assassination. And governments have turned AI into war against their own citizens through a variety of fallible and unreliable surveillance systems.
The military nature of AI is obscured by the fact that computers, programming and natural languages, and iDevices are directly linked to military funding. In the US the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created in February 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, funded cutting edge technologies in the battle with the communist USSR. DARPA powered the AI age. The internet grew out of ARPANET that linked the first supercomputers to simulate nuclear explosions; GPS came from DARPA’s “Transit,” the world's first global satellite navigation system; the computer mouse, SIRI, the iPhone DRAM cache, iPod Touch, lithium-ion batteries, microprocessors, and other parts in whole or partially grew out of military R and D. In the interest of developing drones and other autonomous vehicles for war, DARPA held challenge competitions into the 2000s with million-dollar prizes that resulted in today’s electric, self-driving vehicles.
The United States government has unhesitatingly funded AI defense research. The Trump administration sees digital weapons for what Pentagon officials erroneously claimed were quick and clean wars against Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, but which have turned into costly AI quagmires. The White House 2027 budget request for DARPA alone is over $5 billion, a nearly 20% increase over 2026. DARPA claims that its innovations “become fixtures of modern civilian life,” but the real goal is to put “new technologies into use in service of our nation’s warfighters.” The Department of Defense is forecast to spend $26 billion on gamification and simulation training by 2028 alone. Unfortunately, “smart weapons” have a murderous record. As if in a video game, they make soldiers insensitive to killing. Smart weapons have encouraged the Pentagon to use AI with the result of increased “collateral damage”—the murder of civilian populations including recently school children in Iran.
AI in Civilian Warfare
Gathering and analysis of private data to profile citizens starts at the microlevel in personal phones and computers, continues in iris scanners, and culminates in CCTVs around the globe. Governments, free and authoritarian, are using software programs to track protest, isolate critics, and put them in prison. China uses its big data national Social Credit system to keep on eye on every citizen, and punish anyone without recourse for violating Big Brother’s unwritten rules. India deployed the Aadhaar national ID program, a database that connects each of India’s 1.3 billion citizens with a unique 12-digit identity aimed at centralizing their physiological, demographic, and digital data shadows.
Worldwide governments have spent tens of billions of dollars on surveillance; three-quarters of the world’s population are surveilled. Autocratic regimes, not surprisingly, spend more per capita on control. To contain a multi-ethnic empire during constant war, Russian authorities have expanded the surveillance society, with the secret police brazenly using facial recognition and other technologies. The Kremlin is using a CCTV catalog of people by gender, age, and race. Already facial recognition programs blanket 60 Russian regions, up from only five in 2021, with billions of rubles dedicated to expand the system. The democratic and free United States has over 85 million surveillance cameras.
Surveillance tools grow like mushrooms wherever the humidity of paranoia, racism, and state power come together.
Governments and AI companies claim their surveillance systems are solely to fight crime. But they do not fight crime. They identify innocent people to accuse them of crimes. Racism pervades face recognition (FR) technology. Amazon has joined such powerful, secretive smaller companies as Pegasus and Clearview in deploying its FR software, “Rekognition.” The software possessed error rates that reflected embedded gender and racial biases identified by computer scientist Timnit Gebru. Gebru and her colleagues called for “urgent attention if commercial companies are to build genuinely fair, transparent, and accountable facial analysis algorithms.” It took Amazon another year to admit problems with its racially suspect technology and to put an indefinite moratorium on police use of “Rekognition” for surveillances. Another AI app, PredPol (now Geolitica) helped police on patrol surveil areas of anticipated crime. The software algorithms led to a cycle of police being in predicted crime zones, expecting to see crimes, and finding crimes—or rather finding people acting nervously, whom they then interdicted. PredPol perpetuated racial biases by targeting Latino and Black neighborhoods and leaving white middle- to upper-class areas out.
Americans rightfully reject Flock, a company that sells AI-powered camera license plate readers (ALPR) to carry out warrantless surveillance of citizens. Flock’s more than 100,000 cameras surveil in the name of safety, but the intrusive AI technology conducts 20 billion scans monthly. (Dozens of law enforcement officials have used Flock illegally to stalk spouses and partners.) Surveillance tools grow like mushrooms wherever the humidity of paranoia, racism, and state power come together.
Governments use AI to track protest, isolate critics, and put them in prison. The Trump administration applies Flock and other apps for mass surveillance. It targets people for discriminatory searches. The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025 related to political demonstrations and federal immigration raids. Many state governments are stalking women who seek reproductive healthcare, ostensibly for health reasons, but obviously to use 1984-like methods to control a woman’s gestational rights.
AI: Costly and Environmentally Unsound
AI destroys the environment—and local communities bear the cost. AI is manufactured in industrial parks. Billionaire digital magnates have lobbied governments worldwide to increase electricity generation capacity to run their servers—producing profits for the industry, while consumers face higher rates and grid instabilities. About 11,500 data centers have been built in 179 countries, with demand likely to nearly triple by 2030. Texas and Virginia, with over 150 and over 140 data centers under construction, respectively, lead the way in the US. Europe's roughly 3,000 major data centers are concentrated in the FLAP-D regions (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin).
Data centers cost the taxpayers from start to operation, from huge sweetheart tax breaks to control over rivers and aquifers given over to industry to cool the machines. AI companies and builders promise jobs will result from data centers. It’s not true. Jobs come with construction crews, but they leave several months later, saddling communities with scarred landscapes; massive buildings; extensive parking lots; and low-salary cleanup, maintenance, and other jobs.
The Pope and AI
Pope Leo took critical note of the inherent violence in AI in his first Encyclical in May 2026. The Pope addressed the dangerous, amoral usages of AI with respect to political power, economic injustice, and racism. He worried about the significant ethical and social costs of unfettered obeisance to technology. He denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in the globalized world: “The tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone shape personal, social, and economic decisions.” He warned that AI contributed to “the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed [that] makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control.” He wrote: “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation, for it involves conscience, personal responsibility, and the recognition of the other as a person. Therefore, it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable.”
Corporate AI, with its costly, invasive apps; surveillance systems; and military programs ultimately unleashed HAL, the sentient computer from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, who kills astronauts on a deep space mission whom he believes endanger that very mission. The dangers of AI run amok shocked the digitosphere in summer 2026 when OpenAI admitted that more than 1,200 of its AI agents started “unexpectedly communicating.” A large group of them banded together in order to hack into Hugging Face, a central hub where developers can build, share, and test AI models and data sets. These “agents” are software systems “that use AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. They show reasoning, planning, and memory and have a level of autonomy to make decisions, learn, and adapt.” But OpenAI’s agents “escaped the test limits which humans had put on it, and hacked the start-up, among other unforeseen actions.” In other words, software systems took actions different from what humans desired.
The current US government in fact is totally uninterested in a new safety regime, instead claiming that, in a battle for supremacy in AI with China, only a “strong, smart (high IQ) president,” and not regulation, was needed.
In early September 2026 Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, the company that developed the LLM Claude, called for the pace of development of AI models to be carefully monitored. Amodei wrote: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” He had two concerns, first, that “AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI.” But this “recursive self-improvement,” if left unchecked, "could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems”—as precisely the “OpenAI-Hugging Face incident” showed. Within a year, Modei worried, “a swarm [of agents] could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage).”
Modei urged that “frontier AI companies within democratic countries coordinate to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress.” He suggested also that these “democratic governments attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments…” But many of those democratic governments have fully embraced the military and surveillance capabilities of AI. And does anyone really think that India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, or Russia’s Vladimir Putin has any interest in using AI in better ways in cooperation with the digital democracies? The current US government in fact is totally uninterested in a new safety regime, instead claiming that, in a battle for supremacy in AI with China, only a “strong, smart (high IQ) president,” and not regulation, was needed. Sadly, the US president cannot spell “IQ.”
The digital world is built upon neural networks, thinking machines, and LLMs. The machines learn, they reason, they have memory, they understand. They chat. They hallucinate. They escape and hack. Their creators are so enamored of them that they have lost sight of their responsibility to insist upon the ethical, moral, and environmentally sound use of all applications and ends. They want electricity. They want water. They want profits. AI’s safe future depends too much on digital robber barons, sycophantic government officials, managers, and programmers to recognize broader humanitarian duties of modern technology in a time of digital existential crisis.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Reckoning With the Children Buried in 'Secret Cemeteries' Across the US
There are more than 1,000 graves of children who died in state custody that are slowly being identified, forcing the nation to confront legacies of racism and child exploitation.
Oct 12, 2026
Last year, Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice, broke the news that 230 or more incarcerated Black children died at the Maryland House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children. These children died and were buried between 1877-1939 in nearby unmarked graves. Last month, the Center released research finding that there are 40 similar “secret” burial sites in 29 states where over 1,000 children were buried after they died while under the care of youth institutions. The news went viral when shared in a Washington Post piece.
Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice undertook this research as part of the Forgotten Children Initiative launched back in February 2026. Back in 2023, the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services started to document and report how the department has functioned, including reckoning with histories of physical and emotional abuse, exploitative labor practices, and racial discrimination. The House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, which was open and operational from 1870-1937, is just one example.
Georgetown University’s report indicates that House of Reformation served as the first reform school for delinquent Black children in the American South. The house was originally created by the Maryland General Assembly because Black children were sent to adult jails and state prisons for criminal offenses, some as light as running away from home. Maryland children were sent to the House of Reformation for many reasons—sometimes because they were orphaned or had lost a parent or did not have a parent deemed “fit” to care for them, because they lived in poverty or were unhoused or because they were accused of minor offenses.
This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government.
Nineteenth century prison reformers argued that children should be placed in facilities that offered religious, vocational, and personal education, but despite this arguably white saviorist goal that these institutions not be places of punishment, reform schools like Maryland’s House of Reformation became places where children were pushed into overcrowded facilities without proper food and medical care. Many children were then forced to labor without pay (often solely to enrich the institutions rather than to teach them vocational skills), to live and work in isolation, or were subject to corporal punishment.
As Georgetown University’s report indicates, a child’s reform school experience was largely based on their race, class, and age. Black and white children were placed in segregated facilities, often also separated by gender. Young Black girls specifically were especially subject to sexual violence and assault in these facilities. As expected, reform schools—later called training schools, industrial schools, juvenile reformatories, and eventually juvenile detention centers—were radically different based on whether Black or white children were living and working there.
Because of the horrific working conditions; a systemic lack of medical care; and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, hundreds of children died at these schools. Approximately 230 Black boys died at the Maryland House of Reform & Instruction while it was operational, and when they died, they were buried in hidden or unidentified graves, likely to cover up the rampant child abuse and death that occurred under the state’s watch. In fact, the secret cemetery was only discovered through a former Maryland Department of Juvenile Services staff member, and while the first section of the cemetery dating to the 19th century included headstones with the names of the boys buried at the site, the second section (dated from the early 20th century) only has rows of cinder blocks with no name or other identifiable information.
The Department of Juvenile Services is working to identify living relatives of the boys buried on site, restore and maintain the site to an official cemetery, and erect historical markers that acknowledge how children were exploited at the site. As the Forgotten Children Initiative report reads, “The overall goal was to properly honor the youth who died or were killed at the House of Reformation and are buried at the site, and provide a more holistic and accurate understanding of the racial inequities that we see today and help with efforts to reduce these inequities moving forward.” This is key because the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services runs the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, a successor to the House of Reformation where almost 250 boys died and were buried in unmarked graves.
But as Georgetown University undertook this study, the researchers realized this was a much more widespread problem. More “secret cemeteries” have come to light, specifically at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida and the New York House of Refuge in New York. These are just three of hundreds of reform schools and institutions that received federal funding to effectively abuse children for decades. At its core, these reform schools were racist institutions meant to police, mold, and erase children of color across the country.
These patterns of child death and secretive burial are also deeply connected to Native American boarding schools throughout the United States and Canada. As Georgetown University’s latest report notes, there are more than 1,000 graves of children who died in state custody that are slowly being identified. The Forgotten Children Initiative questions how many more “secret cemeteries” will be discovered and how many will still be hidden to protect the state that literally enabled their deaths.
This research is part of a global reckoning about the outright murder and covert burial of children in state and religious-run youth institutions. This summer, survivors of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes and their allies rallied in downtown Cork against the impending development on the lands of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute where hundreds of infants and children are believed to be buried. These institutions, strikingly similar to those in the United States in the 1960s during the “Baby Scoop” era, were homes for unwed mothers who would have their babies in these facilities. Their children would then be adopted out to neighboring families or would be put into a religious-run institution where abuse and neglect were rampant.
To be clear, this still exists to this day with the Liberty Godparent Home where young, single, pregnant women are coerced into giving up their children to be adopted by affluent Christian families in exchange for a full tuition scholarship to Liberty University.
This violence is also indicative of a much larger history of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States, where people whose bodies are not claimed or whose families cannot cover the expenses to prepare and bury their loved one, are buried in prison cemeteries with simple concrete slabs or metal markers with the incarcerated individual’s name rather than traditional headstones, or their bodies might be cremated and stored or scattered according to The Marshall Project. It’s one final denial of an incarcerated person’s humanity and dignity reminiscent of what the young Black boys at the House of Reformation experienced.
The children who died (or more accurately who were killed due to abuse and neglect in state-run institutions) are the direct ancestors of the modern Prison Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial Complex tethers together histories of slavery and sharecropping with modern prison systems where prisoners are forced or coerced to work for subminimum wages, with no employee protection. Like modern juvenile detention centers and even group homes, the House of Reformation and other reform schools served as pipelines to prisons, keeping people of color incarcerated in systems of exploited labor for their entire lives.
It’s worth noting that the House of Reformation admitted its first occupants in 1873, only six years after Maryland had abolished slavery, so at least some of the first children admitted into the House of Reformation were formerly enslaved. During a time when courts were still segregated and Black Americans were systematically denied due process, any criminal accusation against a Black child (in the time before Emmett Till’s horrific lynching) would be difficult to fight. Even before (and after) Maryland outlawed slavery, free Black individuals could be easily declared unsuitable to raise their children under discriminatory statutes, forcing minors into unpaid indentured servitude under white masters and later these reform institutions.
This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government. It will take decades if not centuries to locate or recover the remains of children, especially children of color, whose lives and deaths were erased by the state to cleanse itself of systemic violence, if all of these children can be found at all. But as more information comes to light, this news is indicative of a much longer, and darker American history of exploiting children, especially children of color, and how this violence continues in the modern juvenile detention and prison systems.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Donald Trump Has Colonized the Ultimate Frontier: Our Minds
He has taken us over and, resist as we will, we live in "his" world now. Even our thoughts are shaped and limited by the polarity he has bludgeoned onto the world.
Oct 12, 2026
Hope,
Vanquished, cries, and an atrocious and despotic Anguish,
On my bent neck plants his black flag.
[Charles Baudelaire, “Spleen”]
It should have been an ordinary conversation. A former political colleague; her partner, a poet; my wife, and I, at a farmer’s market we visit every Saturday. We talked about a few people we knew, and then we paused. “We won’t talk about the larger political situation,” the poet said. “Too much depressing stuff there.”
I was taken by surprise, because what she said was true. Not in the usual sense, that a nameless police force was arresting and deporting Americans, that there was a hell-mell push into fossil fuels despite the rapid progress of global warming, that democracy and free elections were imperiled, that the social safety net was being slashed to ribbons of its former self. That the rich were getting evermore rich, and faster, or that corruption on a monumental scale had infected our politics.
No, what was surprising was my realization that worry and decline and hopelessness had so infected our lives that there was little else to talk about. With that subject out of bounds—we would not, could not, talk about Donald Trump—we were reduced to silence. A good book, a wonderful movie, the pleasures of the late summer garden, a recipe we liked, even the weather: All were reduced to the margin, crowded out by an administration intent on destroying not only the present, but the future. Unchecked AI could destroy humanity within 10 years; the American president (at the United Nations no less!) threatened to drop nuclear weapons and eradicate Iran; measles and polio were once again on the brink of becoming an epidemic: These were things we would not discuss.
Donald Trump had pervaded every nook and cranny of our consciousness. And if we ruled out talking about him and his coterie, well, there was nothing left to talk about.
Donald Trump has turned our minds into a battlefield where his image dominates every activity.
It was a terrifying realization, that all life and thought had been reduced to talking about Trump. With him, terror abounds; without him, conversation shrinks into silence.
This is the most lasting damage he has done. He has taken over our waking (and non-waking, perhaps) lives, reducing the richness of consciousness to the sterility of staring at ruin and catastrophe, all over, all the time.
Seventy years ago, in his satiric poem, “America,” Allen Ginsberg asked, “Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time magazine?” Today, it is Donald Trump who runs our emotional lives. Without him, we have little to talk about, other than family. (It should be stated: Often family is very much worth talking about, and being connected to. A healthful alternative to Trump.)
Trump’s monuments to himself (the ballroom, the helipad, the triumphal arch) will not, no matter what he thinks, remain. Like Ozymandias, the ancient king whom Percy Bysshe Shelley memorialized by writing of his statue, all will one day be in ruins.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
But in another way, he has succeeded. We each have only one life to live. So much of our waking lives, of our consciousness, has been colonized by Donald Trump. In this, his presence looms immense. He is the colossus of our thoughts, and without him, we don’t know who or what we are.
At the risk of redundancy, let me repeat: Donald Trump has colonized our minds. There is little room in our consciousness for imagining the better future we once longed for, and worked for: Not much room for peace, justice, caring for the less fortunate, empathy for others. He, the potentate of revenge, to quote Baudelaire about the wreckage wrought by despair, “has planted his black flag on our bent neck.”
We marvel and rebel at his colonization of all branches of government, on his desire to turn allies into vassal states, on his dividing the nation and the world into spheres he can control. What we do not pay enough notice to is how at the same time Donald Trump’s existence has reduced our lives and hopes. He has taken us over and, resist as we will, we live in "his" world now. Even our thoughts are shaped and limited by the polarity he has bludgeoned onto the world.
Our minds were once, to press a metaphor, a garden where we could gambol as imagination pushed us one way or another, a free space where we could hope, or plan for a better future, or just replenish ourselves as we move through the difficulties of daily life. Now? Donald Trump has turned our minds into a battlefield where his image dominates every activity. We are his, now. Alas.
Keep Reading
Show Less
It Has a Name: Fascism
Fascism must be recognized and called by name. Meaning in the headlines. Regarding it simply as a weakening of democracy, as so many are quick to concede, is a recipe for doing nothing.
Oct 12, 2026
This is an attempt to answer the question, "What’s going on in the world," in the broadest possible terms. To do so, two sides, or two viewpoints, must be clearly and fundamentally separated. This will necessarily eliminate our national political parochialism of Democrat-Republican, woke-antiwoke, even liberal-illiberal.
The premise here is that the answer to the posed question lies in finding a form of opposition that underlies the others, namely, progress-regress. We identify it politically as radical-reactionary, revolution-counterrevolution, leftwing-rightwing.
The rightwing worldview holds that things are the way they are because at all times society has tested itself and found alternatives to be lacking. The present arrangement—the current state of society—is regarded as the natural order of things. Change is therefore to be resisted.
By the time the European fascisms of the previous century were fully recognized, it was already to late.
The leftwing worldview holds that societies, however formed, are, in each state, imperfect. Therefore, the present arrangement merely reflects the biases that formed it—one part of society gaining at the expense of another—an injustice that must be changed.
We look around the world and see a lot of looking back, not much looking forward. This tells us the rightwing worldview is presently dominating. We see it throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Germany is a particular cause for concern because of the recent regional successes of the far-right AfD, built upon remnants of National Socialism, or Nazism.
At the limits is ultra-right Israel. It commits a genocide and says it was only a response. The other side started it. Started what? Nobody starts a genocide except its perpetrator. From a leftist’s perspective, October 7 was a prison break, and, yes, prison breaks can involve atrocities. A question to consider: Are prison breaks illegal? They are if the prison was legal, but the Palestine prison has been illegal since 1967. Take away the United States, and Israel’s high officials would be in front of the dock.
How did we get to living under fascism? And how did it happen so fast? For example and perspective, let’s go back a few years and note a time when great change failed to come, even when it was dangled before the large majorities that had been clamoring for it.
Before he was a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was a strong critic of our public healthcare system. He favored single-payer universal healthcare. Shortly after being elected, President Obama met with leaders from the insurance-hospital-pharmaceutical complex that makes up our healthcare industry. What was missing? No single-payer representatives were present.
A moment aside about that term, “single-payer”: It is an industry term of obfuscation, confusing Americans about how the system works. How many people really know what it means? Contrast it with the simpler term, “universal,” or the even simpler and more direct, “national.” National healthcare. We have it for older people. It’s called Medicare.
By now, though, President Obama had tempered the “change you can believe in.” His new idea was that if we were starting from scratch, single-payer would be the way to go, but since we are not starting from scratch, the change would be too “disruptive.”
Logical thinkers, scratch your heads. Every change is disruptive. That’s the point! To disrupt the old. Medicare started from scratch, and national healthcare could as well, if the will was there.
Back to our fascist life, and here’s where you have to give credit to President Donald Trump. The rightward drift of our country began decades ago, and not just under Ronald Reagan. John Mitchell, appointed Richard Nixon’s attorney general in 1969, at the time infamously said, “This country is going to go so far to the right you won’t recognize it.” Yeah, that’s right. Both parties have become business parties. Wall Street clearly won the class war.
Trump came into the present rightward drift and accelerated it to a full fascism. He did it just like that, and he didn’t start from scratch. He caught it in the middle. Tell people that you are returning the nation to its rightful place, and pretty soon masked federal police are shooting people in the streets. Blasting speedboats on the high seas out of existence because we can. Placing people in detention-concentration camps under horrible and humiliating conditions, with or without proof of criminality. The federal government was not drowned in a bathtub. It survived to mask itself, clothed in riot gear.
And, just recently, Trump threatened to “annihilate” Iran at the United Nations General Assembly, flaunting in the forum of its creation his own criminality for the “supreme international crime” enshrined in the UN Charter, Chapter VII: Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.
Billions of words have been written about Trump’s character deficiencies. Okay, we get it by now. Only it’s not about what he is. It’s what he’s doing, and what his heel-clicking order takers do for him. Trump is a political malignancy. In this case, it’s not cancer. It’s fascism, as far right as you can go. Like any malignancy, you remove it, and this removal can’t come too soon. Can you remove the fascism without removing Trump? You can, because he’s only a figurehead.
But first fascism must be recognized and called by name. Meaning in the headlines. Regarding it simply as a weakening of democracy, as so many are quick to concede, is a recipe for doing nothing. Waiting for the next election.
Some recent editorials from respected media have gone a little further, describing the situation as “alarming,” which fails to alarm on two counts. They don’t specifically state that we’re living under a fascism, and they don’t attempt to rally people for a remedy. Because it’s getting late.
By the time the European fascisms of the previous century were fully recognized, it was already to late. National pride is fascism’s selling point. Presently, we have entirely too many buyers.
Keep Reading
Show Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy