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Opinion
Seeing Jesus in the Machinery of Violence
Jesus moved through a world shaped by imperial rule and internal fragmentation. Fear and political instability were not background conditions. And when he was executed by the state, it was not an accident—it was policy.
Apr 23, 2026
In 2001, forensic artist Richard Neave and his team reconstructed a face the world thought it knew. What emerged was not the pale, European Christ of Western art, but a Middle Eastern man with dark hair, brown skin, and features shaped by the climate and culture of his time.
Historian Joan Taylor reached a similar conclusion. Jesus likely had olive skin, dark eyes, and stood at an average height for a first-century Jewish man living under Roman occupation. He was not outside history but fully inside it, shaped by the religious and economic pressures of his world.
He was born in Bethlehem and raised in Nazareth. In his own language, he would have been called Yeshua.
This is not a minor correction. It changes the story.
It changes not only who Jesus was, but how systems treated him and how they still treat the vulnerable now.
Jesus moved through a world shaped by imperial rule and internal fragmentation. Fear and political instability were not background conditions. They structured daily life.
When he was arrested, the pattern was familiar. He was identified, taken at night, questioned, and beaten. The Gospels preserve competing accounts of responsibility and meaning, reflecting early struggle over what his death signified. What they agree on is simple. He was handed over to the state.
His execution was not an accident. It was policy.
Crucifixion was a Roman instrument of control, designed not only to kill but to make suffering visible and instructive. The body became a warning. Power was communicated through exposure, through the public display of consequence.
That is what makes the story so difficult. It was legal. It was orderly. It was widely understood as justified by those who authorized it. And it was still wrong.
That is what makes crucifixion more than a method of killing. It functioned as a public technology of state control, designed to bind suffering to authority itself. The body became a message. Power was asserted not only through death, but through visibility, through the instruction embedded in pain made public.
Modern systems of violence rarely depend on that kind of visibility. They tend instead toward distance and procedural insulation. Harm is distributed across chains of authorization. It is classified and carried out through mechanisms that separate decision from direct encounter. What changes is not only the method of force, but the organization of moral perception itself, how responsibility is dispersed and how suffering is rendered remote even when it is extensive.
Today, in the Gaza Strip, images continue to emerge of destroyed neighborhoods, displaced families, and children pulled from rubble. These realities are interpreted through competing frameworks of meaning, including security, survival, trauma, and political necessity, each carrying real historical and emotional weight.
But the scope of this violence does not remain contained in one place.
Across the wider region, children have been killed and injured in multiple arenas of conflict. In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, and in Iran, families have buried children whose lives ended in strikes and attacks justified through competing claims of defense and deterrence. No side is untouched by the loss of childhood life, even if the scale, cause, and context differ sharply across each setting.
This is not equivalence. It is recognition. Distinct political realities can still produce a shared human outcome: children reduced to collateral within systems that speak the language of necessity.
And yet even recognition can drift toward abstraction when it remains at a distance.
That distance collapses when the scale shifts.
A family member of mine is a special education teacher in a district marked by poverty, where food insecurity is a recurring presence in daily life.
Jesus’ teaching becomes sharper here. He does not offer “feed the hungry” and “clothe the naked” as metaphor or aspiration, but as commandment. These are not symbolic ideals. They are the ethical floor of his vision of human life.
The other day, they shared something a student created in class: a graphic novel about home life.
Inside it, a third grader drew a refrigerator marked with X’s and wrote simply, “no food.” He drew his mother in bed with X’s over her eyes. His siblings stood nearby saying the same thing: no food.
There is a silence that follows stories like that. Not because they are rare, but because they are real.
In that moment, the commandment to feed the hungry is no longer distant or theological. It becomes immediate and unresolved. It presses against every broader claim about necessity and allocation of resources.
In a society capable of directing vast resources toward military power, the persistence of child hunger is not a failure of capacity. It is a reflection of priorities.
The same world that produces advanced systems of defense and deterrence also produces a third grader who draws a refrigerator marked “no food.”
In the same moral field where children abroad are killed in war, children here experience deprivation that is quieter but no less real.
The distance between those facts is not only political. It is ethical.
What matters, then, is how violence becomes normalized within systems of authority. Responsibility disperses. Each actor follows procedure. Each decision appears limited in scope. Yet together, they produce outcomes no single participant fully controls or can easily disown.
This is how injustice becomes durable. Not only through hatred, but through structure. Not only through intent, but through obedience.
As Henry David Thoreau argued, when law turns individuals into instruments of injustice, moral responsibility does not dissolve into the system. It returns to the individual. Refusal, in such moments, becomes a form of ethical clarity.
That claim is not simple. It raises questions of risk and competing obligations. It also raises a harder question: what happens when moral clarity demands attention to suffering both far away and right in front of us?
The world does not lack information about Gaza. The images are constant, and the interpretations are global. What remains uncertain is not awareness, but response. Whether recognition becomes action, or whether it is absorbed into the ordinary language of necessity.
To return to the crucifixion is not to collapse history into the present. It is to recognize a recurring structure in how power operates: a Jewish man from the Middle East, judged as dangerous, processed through systems of authority, and killed in the name of order.
That structure does not belong to one century.
It appears wherever human life is subordinated to the maintenance of political, institutional, or economic control.
The question is not only what we see.
It is whether what we see—far away and close to home—will change what we can no longer ethically afford to ignore.
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A Delusional Trump, Backed by Israel, Drives the Iran War
Trump continues to issue maximalist demands for conditions he helped create. The American president's lack of strategic and emotional maturity only promises more war.
Apr 23, 2026
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the temporary ceasefire is the culmination of an American policy defined by strategic incoherence. At the center stands Donald Trump, whose shifting positions, confused war objectives, and conflicting actions have not only failed to ease regional tensions but have actively deepened them.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Trump’s threats to blow up the whole country, including its bridges and power plants. At the same time, he touted a military “big day,” presenting potential war crimes as diplomatic tool, aggression as diplomacy, and destruction as leverage.
Trump inflated, almost delusional, promises ahead of potential talks come across less as statesmanship and more as a calculated sales pitch to the American public. His vows “to end up with a great deal,” coupled with an almost obsessive focus on Barack Obama by insisting his agreement will be “far better” than the one negotiated over a decade ago. An approach that reflects a tendency toward messaging driven less by policy depth and more by projection, comparison, and to frame outcomes in terms of self-aggrandizement and personal glory. Instead of articulating clear strategic objectives, his policy relies on distinguishing himself and image cultivation to project authority and superiority, leaving the underlying substance vague and open to question.
By manufacturing optimism and exaggerating progress while promising an imminent “great deal,” Trump appears to be negotiating with himself—or detached from reality—seeking to construct a narrative of success regardless of the facts on the ground. The performative optimism stands in sharp contrast to his simultaneous threats and pompous rhetoric, suggesting not confidence but a measure of desperation.
This yo-yoing of positions does more than create confusion; it erodes the credibility. Diplomacy depends on a baseline of predictability and mental stability.
Trump’s rationale for extending the ceasefire because of “internal divisions” within Iran is unconvincing. If internal debate within Iran is seen as warranting a pause, what should be said of a policy where direction shifts from one moment to the next? Differing political views are the essence of a normally functioning political system, whereas impulsive, erratic, personalized decision-making is not.
All of this unfolds as Trump continues issuing maximalist demands for conditions he helped create. For instance, he demands the surrender of enriched uranium that would not exist had he not abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Likewise, the Strait of Hormuz was closed as a consequence of his and Netanyahu’s war, not as its cause.
The consequences of these Israel-driven U.S. policies are felt by ordinary Americans at the gas pump and in grocery stores. The Strait of Hormuz has become a battleground, destabilizing global energy supply chains and economies worldwide. Yet despite these cascading effects, the core strategy remains unchanged. Trump continues to operate within an echo chamber of Israel-first sycophants that assume military might alone can deliver results, even as the policy falters and the war spills across the region, threatening roughly one-fifth of the world’s energy infrastructure.
This is not merely a political flaw or a matter of mismanagement. It is rather a strategic vulnerability shaped by Israel-first loyalists pulling U.S. strategy in directions that ultimately undermine U.S. national interests. In the absence of clearly defined national objectives, as in the first Israel’s war in Iraq, each step risks drawing the U.S. deeper into the polluted water of the Gulf, while simultaneously advancing an environment of chaos that serves only Israel’s calculated aims.
In this framework, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent statement that the war with Iran is “not over” an embedded message to Trump ahead of the proposed peace talks in Pakistan?
Negotiation between countries, especially in the context of war is not selling real estate deals, where haggling and the threat of retracting an offer are routine tactics. The craft of negotiation in this case operates on an entirely different level. Culture, national dignity, historical memory, and political positioning shape both the process and the outcome. Leaders are not merely bargaining over financial assets or credit ratings, they are navigating domestic demands, legitimacy, and the perception of strength or weakness on the global stage.
In this regard, threats or the constant withdrawal and reintroduction of proposals are not leverage, they are weakness. Unlike commercial transactions where the “Art of the Deal” is largely concluded at the moment of signing, international agreements mark the beginning of an ongoing, often long-term relationship. What may pass as hard-nosed bargaining in business can, in international diplomacy, be interpreted as bad faith, an approach that tends to invite resentment and resistance instead of compromise. This is why since last Tuesday, Trump was left waiting for Iran to come to the negotiation table.
Effective diplomacy requires serious leadership, consistency, and an understanding of the symbolic as much as the substantive. Agreements endure not because one side is pressured into submission, but because all parties can present the outcome as preserving their dignity and advancing mutual interests.
The lack of strategic maturity is indicative in a proclamation in the morning signaling openness to de-escalation; by midday, the message splinters, issuing threats and ultimatums while simultaneously hinting at imminent breakthrough deals; by the middle of the night, amid his insomnia, it escalates to threats of total destruction. This constant shifting of positions is not a minor stylistic quirk. It is possible that, at least some of this, is associated with his nocturnal communications with Netanyahu, who is apparently wagging him left and right.
This yo-yoing of positions does more than create confusion; it erodes the credibility. Diplomacy depends on a baseline of predictability and mental stability. When signals shift faster than the wind, uncertainty breeds mistrust, and negotiations drift from closed rooms into fiery statements played out for public consumption, creating an opening for Israel to drive the war and breed destruction and more chaos.
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Why the Anti-Data Center Movement Is Succeeding Where Others Have Struggled
By starting at the local and focusing on politics of material impact, the anti-data center movement has generated solidarity and success on a national scale unseen in recent movements for social justice.
Apr 23, 2026
Since November of last year, residents in Monterey Park, a city outside of Los Angeles, have been fighting against a multi-billion dollar investment firm to stop a massive data center from being built in their residential neighborhood. For months, residents have educated themselves, organized, reached out to the community, and showed up at local City Council meetings to urge municipal governors to reject the developer’s permit application.
The group, No Data Center Monterey Park, has been tremendously successful. Just this past week, the City Council passed three ordinances banning data center construction in the city and declaring them a public nuisance. The Council also created a ballot measure to be voted on during a special election on June 2, called Measure NDC (No Data Center), potentially adding a second set of protections in the city. This came after months of persistent and strategic organizing and action that is emblematic of what the strongest local democracy can look like.
This story has been unfolding in similar ways all across the country as data centers are pushed by the Trump administration and Big Tech. Counties across the nation—rural and metropolitan—are fighting back against data centers and having success. Data Center Watch reported in 2025 that from May 2024 to March 2025, $64 billion in data center projects had been blocked or delayed. It is a moment that few expected, but gives hope for the future of community organizing against corporate domination.
What is making these data center fights so successful? There is a lot we can learn from why this national movement is both so widespread as well as so effective—from high-level takeaways about winning fights for justice in this moment, as well as low-level nuts and bolts organizing strategies that communities are using successfully. Seeing it through these lenses, the anti-data center movement may in fact be a signal of a new direction for social justice organizing we have yet to tap into.
Data Centers Are an Unlikely, But Perfect Organizing Target
While data centers may seem an unlikely target for social justice movements, upon examining the features of the fights themselves, they reveal themselves to be a strong target for organized resistance. For one, data centers are an extremely local and tangible piece of infrastructure. Data Center Watch notes in their analysis of fights across the nation that the main concerns of residents are things like utility bills increasing, water usage and pollution, impacts on their property values, and noise and air pollution as well as the sicknesses they can cause.
The fact that local government has the power to stop infrastructure development that is supporting a national agenda is remarkable.
Tangibility and nondiscrimination are some of the strongest aspects of the fight—something that has been a thorn in the side of other movements in recent years. For example, the climate justice movement has frequently found difficulty with the fact that climatic changes are slow, long-term, and subject to local variation. Movements for racial justice are hampered by a consequence of the very problem they’re trying to solve: namely that people of different races and ethnicities have different experiences, creating extra work to move those whose privilege blinds them from oppression. Similarly, the movement for justice in Palestine is driven by empathy for those who are experiencing unimaginable violence, and much more rarely firsthand experiences of that genocidal violence.
In contrast, everyone in a locality breathes the same air, has to use the community’s water, and is subject to the electrical grid and its price fluctuations. This has brought a rare solidarity to the fight that has not been seen in many major social justice issues of the past handful of years. Focusing on the material dimension, in the manner than union organizing does, forces a politics of solidarity that cuts across partisanship, as everyone is suffering at the hands of the same financial oppressor.
Due to these local, tangible impacts, the composition of the anti-data center movement has also been noted as different from typical social justice movements—not falling only within the purview of the left or liberal center, but also including those who identify as Republicans. Data Center Watch reported that 55% of politicians taking stances against data centers are Republican, and 45% are Democrat. Those who lean left are concerned about environmental impacts. Those who lean right are widely opposed to tax abatements for developers. And issues of power consumption, grid strain, and prices increasing are cross cutting.
Add to this that the current push for data centers is intrinsically linked, materially and ideologically, to the Trump administration and Big Tech’s push for AI to pervade every aspect of society. Pew Research reported in September of last year that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI (50% Republican, 51% Democrat), and only 10% are more excited than concerned. Moreover, 61% of polled respondents wanted “more control… over how AI is used in their lives”—61% of Republicans polled and 63% of Democrats. Distaste for AI and how strongly it is being forced on society is also bipartisan, as it is becoming a material reality for people regardless of their politics.
These aspects of the fight help explain why the movement is so widespread and able to block tens of billions of dollars of proposed development. But they do not tell the entire story of the success. One other major factor contributing to widespread victories in the anti-data center movement is the fact that most of these proposed data centers are subject to municipal law.
The tactics that appear to be most widely used to stop data centers are through local legislation that bans development through ordinances and zoning, local moratoria, rejecting permits that need to pass through local legislature, or by voting projects down via referendum or ballot measure. The fact that local government has the power to stop infrastructure development that is supporting a national agenda is remarkable. It speaks to the power of local politics—when there are mechanisms in place for actually wielding that power. When they are able to organize effectively, residents are actually able to use the democratic mechanisms in place in their municipalities to exert a level of control over their lives and futures.
This combination of factors makes the anti-data center movement incredibly powerful and strategically sound from a change-making perspective. The tangibility of the infrastructure and universality of effects make a clear group of people who stand to be harmed and can be organized. The instruments of local governance allowing people to effectively wield power allows for straightforward calls to action that can yield immediate, tangible results. The tractability and clarity of this type of fight puts in perspective what effective campaigns can look like.
Can Social Justice Movements Focus on the Material?
There is much to learn from this movement against data centers in the US. It differs from other nationwide movements in the not-too-distant past and even the present, and those differences are worth examining critically.
The most notable takeaway is that focusing on material, local outcomes has generated decentralized, locally contextualized organizing spaces that have not been as present in some other recent major movements. For example, the youth climate movement in 2018 was legitimately critiqued for being too focused on the national scale, and began organizing without understanding the local politics. In my experience, this movement was constructed as local groups fighting for national issues, rather than local groups fighting for local issues. As a consequence, it was plagued by conflict when local groups expanded and bumped up against other long-time local organizers—who were often minoritized folks fighting environmental injustice.
Part of the power of the anti-data center movement is that it has the power of firsthand evidence because the effects are felt by everyone in the community. This stands in contrast to the movement to end the genocide in Palestine, which is often more about empathizing with the plight of people across the world—an absolutely worthy plight to organize around, as the genocide is unacceptable and should be stopped. But an issue across the world makes organizing difficult because the effect that moves people to action is mainly brought about via media or personal connection, and relies on empathy.
Acknowledging the reality of national and international issues, or systemic issues, but then being able to pinpoint their real manifestations and effects in your own life and the life of your community, should be the organizing paradigm we work within.
The nature of the anti-data center movement’s balance between the national and local scale appears better struck than what I experienced in the youth climate movement. People are fighting tangible infrastructure that poses harms to their immediate lives, but are simultaneously fueled by, and noting disdain for, the national push for AI and Big Tech’s greed. There is real power in this type of organizing, and it goes to show that national issues have local effects and targets that can be focused on.
These tactics could be applied to other national and international arenas, such as the climate crisis or the genocide in Palestine. The climate crisis has no shortage of local effects and targets. Organizers could rally around environmental injustices such as pollution from oil and gas, or around food justice to counter the power of Big Agriculture.
Or in the case of Palestine, focusing on the local effects of municipalities supporting the weapons and surveillance industries to the detriment of the local economy supporting life-giving jobs could be a valuable, material reframing. Inevitably, these militarized economies also come home, as the technologies and tactics used in Palestine are now being weaponized against local communities to fuel the deportation regime.
Acknowledging the reality of national and international issues, or systemic issues, but then being able to pinpoint their real manifestations and effects in your own life and the life of your community, should be the organizing paradigm we work within. Systems cannot function unless their local units act to fuel the system. Oil and gas relies on countless local offices, workplaces, university programs, and even gas stations or pipeline projects. Workers and infrastructure fuel the machine. The same is true for Big Tech, the military-industrial complex, Big Agriculture, and more.
Furthermore, the decisions to support local jobs and infrastructure that supports militarism or fossil fuels take away resources that could otherwise be put into community programs that truly generate prosperity. The anti-data center movement clearly identified that building data centers not only creates massive harms for the community, but also directs resources wastefully, which should otherwise be used to create schools, affordable housing, and community infrastructure. We need to learn to identify and challenge those local units so we dismantle the system in a way that is manageable.
Another benefit to applying this organizing paradigm is that targets and campaigns become much more manageable and concrete. When you fight a data center, you know that your goal is to cancel the contract, or enact a municipal ordinance banning construction of the infrastructure. Contrast this, for example, with the No Kings rallies, which are aiming at a lofty symbolic goal of “reject monarchy and authoritarianism,” without any clear tangible goals. I personally know local organizers who have struggled with this for Palestine solidarity as well, fighting for somewhat vague resolutions condemning genocide rather than dismantling of tangible projects supporting the violence.
Returning the Left to its Roots
If anything, this argument may be easily subject to the critique of, “This is always what the left has been about; this is nothing new.” That is a fair point, but a truth of ideas rather than a truth of reality.
The anti-data center movement is a strong example of anti-corporate, material politics that has been desperately missing from major movements in the US aside from the labor movement. It is a testament to the power of focusing on material circumstances, and evidently can bring together unlikely allies who have been wedged apart by other political fights.
None of this is to say, of course, that material politics should exist separately from focuses on race, gender, sexuality, Indigeneity, internationalism, or any other domain of social justice. We cannot properly understand the anti-data center movement without recognizing environmental justice, and the fact that many centers are being built in minoritized communities on purpose. We cannot understand Big Tech’s illegitimacy without understanding politics of patriarchy, neoliberalism, and colonial drives for extraction.
But it is to say that perhaps some social justice movements of the past decade have been too focused on fighting the world at scale without understanding how it manifests in their own neighborhood, or how it can be fought locally. There is power in fixing our own community. We should learn how to wield it.
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America Reads the Bible: the Horror of Trump Invoking John Winthrop
When the eyes of all people were upon Winthrop's 'city upon a hill,' what they saw was a community established by genocide and based on slavery. Winthrop advocated for, and participated in, both.
Apr 23, 2026
On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump participated in America Reads the Bible, in which hundreds of political, faith, business, and entertainment leaders will each read a passage until the entire bible has been read.
Trump read from II Chronicles 7:11-22, including the passage, “If My people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
According to many media outlets, the passage is “a hallmark of the religious right” that implies a covenant between God and the United States and advances the belief “that America has been and should be a Christian nation.”
In his “Message Commemorating 250 Years of the Bible in America,” Trump praised the marathon event and said, “The Bible has been indelibly woven into our national identity and way of life.” He said that throughout the history of the United States, “The truths of Holy Scripture remained deeply embedded in our culture—not only within the walls of our churches but in our homes, schools, courtrooms, and public square.” Continuing a theme that challenges the spirit of the separation of church and state, Trump added that “the Bible has enduringly illuminated our system of Government.”
And Winthrop participated in that slavery too. In his will, he left his slaves—he called them “my Indians”—to his son.
But the most offensive and appalling part of Trump’s Presidential Message was his invocation of John Winthrop to provide a historical foundation for America Reads the Bible and his participation in it. Trump said: “Nearly 400 years ago, a decade after the arrival of the Mayflower, the legendary John Winthrop powerfully invoked Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew: ‘We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,’ Winthrop said, imploring his fellow Christian settlers to stand as a beacon of faith for all the world to see.”
The horror of invoking John Winthrop as a foundation for America as a city upon a hill and a Christian land, is that when the eyes of all people were upon us what they saw was a community established by genocide and based on slavery. Winthrop advocated for, and participated in, both.
In 1620, the Mayflower landed in America. Most of the Indigenous people had died in an epidemic brought, unintentionally, by the British. The few Indigenous people who survived the epidemic helped the English survive that first harsh winter. But, because of the epidemic, the English found many once thriving villages empty.
The Puritans used the emptying results of the epidemic to justify the stealing of the land. They sanctioned their crime by appealing to divine providence. One of the leading spokesmen for divine justification for stealing Indigenous land was Winthrop: “God hath consumed the natives with a miraculous plague, whereby the greater part of the country is left void of inhabitants.”
Winthrop would go on to become one of the vanguards of a movement that defended the legal right to take any land that was not currently inhabited or developed without purchase or deed, ignoring the rights of Indigenous people if they were not currently or permanently on the land or if they were not developing it (or even if they were).
And he was not at all above helping the land to become empty. As Greg Grandin, history professor at Yale University told me, “Winthrop presided over the 1637 Pequot War, the first New World Anglo-American massacre, of hundreds of Pequot women and children who were burned alive in their village.” Grandin quotes Winthrop saying it was a “fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fier, and the streams of blood quenching the same.” Those who survived were taken as legal slaves having been captured in a just war.
And Winthrop participated in that slavery too. In his will, he left his slaves—he called them “my Indians”—to his son. In America, América: A New History of the New World, Grandin says that Winthrop’s “Indians” were taken in the Pequot War and made his property.
It is to this appalling history that Trump appeals in explaining his participation in America Reads the Bible.
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