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Opinion
Fighting the Oligarchy's Stranglehold on the Media
When it comes to media, journalism, and the broader information landscape, there’s a strong practical need to be utopian right now—to give us hope but to also provide clarity as to what we should be fighting for.
Sep 12, 2026
The Trump 2.0 era has intensified a deeply entrenched pathology in the American media system: concentrated corporate ownership. During less perilous times, legitimate concerns about a few corporations capturing so much of our news and information have often been dismissed as conspiracy theories and paranoia. But Donald Trump and his coterie of plutocrats have made our media oligarchy problem acutely evident and impossible to ignore.
Constant controversies—from government and corporate censorship of television comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert to the algorithmic and editorial abuses of Elon Musk’s X and Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post—remind us why media ownership holds such high stakes for any semblance of democracy. Meanwhile, rightwing nepotistic dynasties like the Murdochs and the Ellisons hold inordinate influence over what millions of people can see, hear, and read in their daily media.
Our current media system is simply incompatible with democracy, making structural media reform an urgent priority. This includes unwinding previously approved and pending mergers—exhibit A being Paramount Skydance’s potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (which owns CNN and HBO, among other key holdings)—as well as trust-busting corporate media behemoths by forcing them to divest major components of their sprawling conglomerates.
Undoing the wreckage will take time, but we must lay the groundwork now to launch necessary structural reforms the moment we dethrone Trump and his ilk. This project requires a clear analytical framework for understanding exactly why such run-amok media concentration is bad for democracy, and why breaking up media conglomerates is both necessary and insufficient for reconstructing the media we need from the ground up.
Big corporate media mergers are bad for everyone other than those few who stand to profit. They’re harmful for media workers, consumers, local communities, First Amendment freedoms, and democracy writ large. Over the years, the dangers for democracy posed by media concentration have been borne out by empirical evidence. Research shows that media conglomeration can lead to less local news, more advertising, and shifts toward conservative political commentary, especially under the ownership of rightwing companies such as Sinclair.
According to basic democratic theory, ensuring diverse voices, viewpoints, and stories in our media requires a pluralistic range of media owners. However, the hypercommercialized, corporate-dominated US media system wasn’t devised to privilege democracy. In fact, given its weak public media system, oligopolistic media markets, and light public interest regulations—many of which eroded over time or simply were ignored (or weaponized under Trump)—the US media system is almost perfectly designed to not serve democracy.
Within this hypercommercialized media structure, despite many individual journalists’ courageous work to the contrary, profit imperatives too often trump democracy (bad pun intended). Capitalist logics undercut and skew democratic discourse by encouraging clickbait, excluding low-income communities, and degrading the quality of journalism. Capitalist incentive structures also lead to pronounced deficits through sheer cost cutting, and by treating news and information as commodities, not public services, and audiences as passive consumers, not engaged citizens.
Even during the best of times, media corporations often maximize profits by ruthlessly cutting corners and forcing their media workers to do more for less. Too often, costly services like high-quality journalism are dismantled while content that’s cheaply produced and easily replicated—like shouting heads across ubiquitous screens, endlessly capturing our attention for advertisers—gets amplified.
Media conglomeration only intensifies these commercial logics. For example, cost cutting typically accelerates immediately following big mergers when companies take on tremendous debt. New corporate ownership has subjected CBS to such restructuring and would likely do the same to CNN if the pending merger goes through, for which Paramount Skydance is reportedly incurring $79 billion in debt. To compensate, media corporations often combine newsrooms and lay off reporters—or eliminate journalism altogether in favor of opinion and commentary.
In addition to decimating jobs, managing such debt tends to result in outsourcing costs to audiences by raising prices, offering lower-quality programming, and providing less creative cultural fare. This outcome is especially detrimental given a media landscape already riddled with news deserts, in which scarce original journalism and local media content are being produced.
The debasement of our news and entertainment media is bad enough. But media conglomeration also creates private tyrannies wherein oligarchs command broad swaths of our media. Driven by perverse incentives, these media barons wield dangerous control over public discourse, warping how important issues get framed and what stories get told.
Conferring such political economic power onto a small elite is itself a severe democratic threat. Whether through lobbying, campaign contributions, or preferential press coverage of politicians in exchange for regulatory favors, these media oligarchs almost always develop corrupt relationships with those in government, undercutting the press’s much-vaunted “watchdog function” of holding the powerful to account.
Moreover, media consolidation is a structural precondition for authoritarianism. We saw such patterns play out under Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who demonstrated how authoritarians needn’t control newsrooms by gunpoint. Rather, they can rely on chummy oligarchs to discipline the media for them, resulting in news feeds and media channels saturated with government-approved talking points and propagandistic narratives that brook little dissent toward those in power.
It shouldn’t surprise us that billionaires are likely to deploy their media assets to advance their class interests. This is especially prevalent in the United States, given devalued media properties and extreme concentrations of wealth. To provide one stark example: Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 for less than half of what he would later pay for his super yacht.
In the final analysis, such concentrated corporate ownership—whereby a tiny elite commands so much power over our media—is antithetical to democratic society. Even if today’s villainous oligarchs had the hearts of angels, it’s far too much power for any individual to wield over our news media. Just as every billionaire is a policy failure, every billionaire-owned media outlet is a profound threat to our democracy.
How did the United States fall under this media oligarchy? Many of our contemporary media failures trace back to specific policies and political decisions. One such inflection point occurred during the 1930s and 1940s, when policymakers established a privatized and highly commercialized broadcast media system tempered by relatively weak public interest protections. The latter included what became known as the Fairness Doctrine, which President Ronald Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) jettisoned in 1987.
The United States belatedly established a chronically underfunded public broadcasting system in the late 1960s. But after a period of modest progressive policymaking, we began rolling back media ownership restrictions and “deregulating” our media in the 1980s, leading up to the infamous Telecommunications Act of 1996, when media consolidation began to escalate. In many ways, our oligopolistic media landscape has only worsened since the merger mania of the Clinton-Bush neoliberal heyday.
Particularly alarming is the utter collapse of local journalism, in which more than 40 percent of our newspapers and three-quarters of our local journalists have vanished since the early 2000s. Meanwhile, FCC Chair Brendan Carr is a loyal apparatchik for bullying what’s left of our independent media into capitulation to Trump.
Combined with the federal defunding of our public media, few structural alternatives and countervailing forces can withstand a blasted media landscape dominated by profit imperatives and a handful of media moguls. What’s to be done?
Today we face a dangerous new terrain upon which an authoritarian government weaponizes a hypercommercialized corporate media system against democracy. Yet, the market libertarianism and policy failures over the decades that enabled media oligarchy weren’t inevitable or natural, nor must they be permanent. These were political choices, and politics are subject to human agency and change. But first we must denaturalize this hypercapitalistic system that turns our media against democracy.
To begin, we must recognize that our media pathologies run even deeper than bad billionaire media owners doing bad things. Ownership structures are only part of the problem—a key part, to be sure—downstream from the core root of our media polycrisis: capitalism. Confronting media monopolies requires us to reckon with the underlying conditions that made such concentration possible, specifically the hypercapitalist logics capturing our information and communication infrastructures from root to branch.
Indeed, our media’s systemic problems predate the recent spate of mergers under Trump. While today we must stop mega media mergers, tomorrow we must create an entirely new public media ecosystem in service to local communities. To combat the capitalist capture of the entire American media apparatus that produces various kinds of “market censorship” that would-be autocrats like Trump can exploit, we must create a non-capitalistic system—a truly public and independent media system—that’s owned and controlled by us all.
Fortunately, recent positive signs have already emerged at the state and local levels, ranging from contesting media mergers by state attorneys general to making public investments toward local journalism. Yet we must broaden our political imagination and plan for bold national policy interventions for the post-Trump moment. There’s a strong practical need to be utopian right now—to give us hope but to also provide clarity as to what we should be fighting for. We need a long-term vision firmly planted on our political horizons—we can dare to imagine a media system that privileges democracy over power and profit.
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Iran Is Just the Latest in a Long Line of US Mideast Failures
Washington’s present predicament cannot be explained solely through depleted arsenals, poor military planning, Trump’s impulsiveness, or Netanyahu’s manipulation. Nor can it be understood simply as the result of underestimating Iran.
Sep 12, 2026
The US government continues to double down, even as its stubbornness costs it dearly—not only in material terms, but also in geopolitical influence. Washington is rapidly losing power and status in the Middle East, a decline that could produce a wider domino effect, reverberating around the world.
The latest expression of this hubris came from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Speaking at a G20 gathering of finance ministers in Asheville, North Carolina on September 1, Bessent declared that within two years, the Strait of Hormuz would become “a worthless piece of water,” as oil would instead be transported through overland pipelines.
Bessent is now promoting a new narrative that shifts the emphasis from the military war to an economic one. In an August 23 article for the Financial Times, he announced that “an economic D-Day is coming for Iran,” threatening countries that continue to trade with Tehran with severe economic consequences.
This sounds less like a serious foreign-policy strategy than an admission of Washington’s inability to alter the course of the ongoing war.
The deeper failure lies in Washington’s attempt to impose an outdated model of regional domination on a Middle East—and a world—that has fundamentally changed.
Two dominant schools of thought have emerged to explain how Washington found itself in this position.
The first, promoted largely by sections of the US media, former officials, and retired military commanders, argues that the war on Iran was a mistake from the outset and that Washington lacked the military and logistical preparedness necessary to wage it.
The second explanation places Iran at the center. It argues that Washington fundamentally underestimated Iran’s military capabilities, political resilience, and regional reach, treating the country as though it were another Venezuela that could be subdued through sanctions, threats, and limited military pressure.
Both explanations contain elements of truth. Neither, however, provides the deeper, less defensive, and more historically grounded understanding required to explain the scale of the present American failure.
John J. Mearsheimer, the prominent American political scientist and international relations scholar, has been among the boldest critics of the US war.
“Trump is trapped and has no way out,” Mearsheimer said on July 15, reiterating an argument he had advanced repeatedly since the beginning of the war. “All of this is to say that the decision to attack Iran on 28 February 2026 is one of the greatest blunders in the history of US foreign policy,” he added.
Mearsheimer, like Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Ritter, and other critical American voices, often—and understandably—analyzes these “great blunders” from a US-centered perspective. For millions of people in the Middle East, however, this collective analysis is not an intellectual or strategic exercise. It describes their everyday reality. They have lived through these catastrophic miscalculations and paid the human cost of US intransigence, militarism, and political failure.
The history of US foreign policy in the Middle East offers countless examples of this destructive pattern. Washington’s support for Israel—the region’s greatest destabilizing force—remains the most enduring example.
Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and other peoples of the region require no new strategic framework to reach a conclusion similar to Mearsheimer’s. They have experienced the consequences of US power directly: wars, invasions, occupations, sanctions, political interference, and unconditional support for Israel.
The United States also established a disastrous record through its invasion and occupation of Iraq. It succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003, but failed catastrophically to govern the country, stabilize it, or restructure the Middle East according to the "vision" it had proclaimed.
The outcome was not a new American order, but the devastation of Iraq, prolonged instability, and the rise of political forces Washington had neither anticipated nor controlled.
Washington’s Western allies were also drawn into what became known as the Iraq quagmire, paying considerable political, military and financial costs for a war whose premises proved false and whose consequences remain unresolved.
Naturally, those former partners have little appetite for participating in a much larger and potentially more destructive war against Iran for an indefinite period—particularly when the crisis is being managed by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, two deeply unpopular, impulsive, and widely distrusted leaders.
But the Middle East has changed. Regional states now possess greater political agency, more diversified alliances, and far more at stake than they did in 2003. They are no longer operating within a regional order in which Washington represents the only meaningful center of global power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Egypt provides one of numerous examples. “We must uphold the principle that the people of the Middle East are the masters of their own affairs,” Xi said during his September 2 meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. He also urged countries to oppose “external interference” and strengthen regional dialogue on peace and security.
Like Egypt, other regional powers are similarly diversifying their partnerships rather than relying exclusively on Washington.
Key Middle Eastern leaders understand that a prolonged war against Iran would not remain confined to Iran. It could destabilize the entire region, devastate economies and infrastructure, threaten vital energy routes and generate interconnected wars whose consequences could endure for decades.
This brings us to Israel. Historically the cornerstone of US strategy in the region, Israel is itself considerably weaker. It is militarily overstretched, politically fragmented, socially divided, and unable to decisively conclude any of the wars it has opened, despite Netanyahu’s repeated declarations of victory.
Washington’s present predicament, therefore, cannot be explained solely through depleted arsenals, poor military planning, Trump’s impulsiveness, or Netanyahu’s manipulation. Nor can it be understood simply as the result of underestimating Iran.
The deeper failure lies in Washington’s attempt to impose an outdated model of regional domination on a Middle East—and a world—that has fundamentally changed.
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Never Forget Is Bad Spiritual Advice
There is wisdom in honoring one’s pain and setting it aside, to live. I still believe that. I no longer know if it’s possible when the country doing the wounding has stopped bothering to hide it.
Sep 12, 2026
"The well-prepared heart has hope during adversity and fear during prosperity.”—Erica McAlpine
Twenty-five years, and the day keeps getting bigger instead of smaller. Three thousand dead in a single morning, then some multiple of that across the wars launched in its wake, then a shifting count out of Gaza that outpaces anyone’s will to keep totaling it. I did not expect grief to go on collecting interest this long. I did not expect to still be bitter, on a date this rehearsed, in a country this practiced at looking away.
I have written some version of this before. On some earlier September, I posted this: “#NeverForget is bad spiritual advice. Especially, when one has exacted revenge that far exceeds initial loss. To spell it out, honor your dead but remember, too, the 100,000+ Iraqi civilian noncombatants murdered in a vengeful, unjust ‘war.’ It is unseemly to keep one’s wounds open, while downplaying those of others that we’ve inflicted. There is wisdom, humility, and self preservation in honoring one’s pain & setting it aside, to Live.” Under it, I’d put a line from Friedrich Nietzsche, “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all"; another, unattributed, “If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury, but if you injure him you will always remember"; and closed with Kahlil Gibran: “Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?”
This is not the only year I have said some version of it. Social media keeps a ledger I never asked for: one friend calling it the voice of reason, another admitting he’d learned the hard way that making this case got him nowhere with people he knew, a third telling me the 9/11 Memorial & Museum has a final section on the wars that followed, built into the same ground as the names of the dead. “We can always do better,” I wrote back to that last one, which was as much comfort as I had that day.
Then there is the exchange that still says more than anything I could add to it. A commenter, spoiling for a fight, wrote that we were lucky the whole Middle East hadn’t been leveled. “You’re a funny guy,” I wrote back, “and I’m too fond of you to take seriously your outrageous comment,” and sent him “a great big, virtual hug, until I can give you one in person.” Another commenter played along just long enough to ask what exactly had been won. Afghans and Iraqis, he answered himself: more Americans dead in the war on terror than in the towers, “them” and “us” collapsing into the same casualty list. “Yes,” I wrote back, “it’s always civilian casualties,” which is the whole essay in four words, if I am honest, and everything since has only been me finding 400 more ways to say it.
I could republish that old post today, and only the arithmetic would need updating. Ammiel Alcalay, writing this same week, names the habit outright: Keep what happens abroad in one room and what happens at home in another, so neither has to answer to the other. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the toll of these 25 years, direct and indirect combined, at 4.5 to 4.7 million and still counting. Alcalay draws the line forward, to what he calls, correctly, “the genocide in Gaza and seizure of land in Palestine.” The number I gave my friends, a decade or more ago, was 100,000. It never got revised. It got buried under the next one, and the next. There is no exchange rate for human suffering. The afterlife of September 11 was not measured abroad alone. At home, Muslims remained available for suspicion: The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,683 complaints in 2025, its highest annual total. This week, Rudy Giuliani went on television to say the city’s current mayor, its first Muslim one, shouldn’t attend Friday’s ceremony, then said Muslims are taught from childhood that they want to “dominate us.” Twenty-five years on, and grief still comes with a loyalty test.
What has changed since is the camouflage. Richard Nixon needed Henry Kissinger to bomb Cambodia in the dark. Barack Obama needed kill lists and a “disposition matrix,” a targeting database mapping how terrorism suspects would be captured or killed, dressed up in the calm language of due process. Donald Trump needs none of it. He says the part that used to need a translator, calls it winning, and the bombs land anyway, in the same places they always did. He is the pattern finally caught without its coat on, a confession the country has been rehearsing since before I wrote that old post, only now said out loud.
It was a friend, in that same 2018 thread, who was already flagging the collusion with Saudi Arabia over Yemen: American weapons, sold for profit, into a war just as unjust as the ones carrying our own name. I hadn’t known. I said so. Eight years on, Britain has announced plans, not yet law, to ban imports from illegal settlements and create powers to sanction companies that support, facilitate, or profit from them. It is a small thing. It is also an acknowledgment, however belated, that complicity can carry a price.
I wrote, once, that there is wisdom in honoring one’s pain and setting it aside, to live, that what is spiritually true for us as individuals is also true for us as nations. I still believe that. I no longer know if it’s possible when the country doing the wounding has stopped bothering to hide it, or if honoring the dead, now, requires that we stop setting anything aside at all.
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A Model of Labor Organizing With the Potential for Broad Social Change
In his book Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy, Kim Scipes describes an example of social justice unionism that should change the way that we think about organizing not only in the workplace, but in any response to important issues around the world.
Sep 12, 2026
"The book isn't just a celebration of the past, but an encouragement to see what we can learn to help us today" (Scipes, p. ix, 2026).
Dr. Kim Scipes’ Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building A Progressive Labor Movement is a commemoration of one union’s distinctive approach to social justice unionism that should change the way that we think about organizing not only in the workplace, but in any response to important issues around the world.
Though centered in labor activism from a sociological lens, the findings and framing of Scipes’ work produce an analysis critical for Northwest Indiana and Chicago historians, labor unions, activists, and all individuals pondering the steps to achieving a better world. These findings reach far beyond one workplace, one academic discipline, or one social cause.
To reinforce the diverse application of this work, I approach this review from a communication studies background.
What happens if we all looked outside of ourselves to care, regardless of political party, race, age, gender, or occupation, about intentionally seeking positive change that benefits the well-being of all?
In the book, Scipes reveals two opposing conceptualizations of trade unionism by comparing the organization of two Chicago unions in the steel and meatpacking industries during critical decades of the 20th century.
From the beginning of the book, it is clear that this study was built on a solid foundation. The selection of 1933-55 for this study was important, as this period frames a time of "insurgent trade unionism that emerged from below," with 1933 marking the "beginning of modern American trade unionism" (Scipes, p. 4, 2026).
Further, considering the 1886 struggle for the eight-hour day, the establishment of International Workers Day, the headquarters of the Eugene Debs' led American Railway Union, the site of the Industrial Workers of the World, and more, Chicago was an extremely relevant site for this study (Scipes, p.5, 2026).
From this foundation, three significant claims emerge.
The first is a claim that marks the heart of this book. Upon expansive archival research; the design of a measurement scale; and the synthesis of labor organization records, theory, union case studies, and more, Scipes uncovers that despite being two worker’s unions in the same period of time, comprised of individuals with comparable educational and cultural backgrounds in the same city, faced with comparable issues, both the steelworkers’ (Steel Workers Organizing Committee: SWOC and United Steelworkers of American: USWA) and packinghouse workers’ (Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee: PWOC and United Packinghouse Workers of America: UPWA) unions had two different approaches to addressing racism, white supremacy, and in turn, unionization. Understanding the unions’ navigation of racism is crucial when it is considered how much worker control prevented union organization, as workplace leadership often divided workers by racial group and sparked competition that kept them from realizing efforts that could benefit their collective well-being (Scipes, p. 14-15, 2026).
The steelworkers enacted a form of “business unionism,” while the packinghouse workers took a “social justice unionism” approach.
In the context of this study, the steelworkers' business unionism characteristically refused to address divisions of race among workforces and “took a limited approach to trade unionism, keeping the union divided and weak” (Scipes, p. 190, 2026).
This form of unionism separated members' working lives from their lives outside the plant, leading “to terrible consequence when the regional steel industry collapsed in the 70s and 80s and thousands lost jobs and pensions” (Scipes, p.190, 2026).
Conversely, the meatpackers’ use of social justice unionism brought forth a form of economic trade unionism that “understands the necessity of addressing the needs and concerns of all of its members, in the union, workplace, and the community with mutual efforts to improve the well-being of all” (Scipes, p.197, 2026).
Scipes’ second key claim builds on the first in important ways. Scipes demonstrates the increased power of social justice unionism over business unionism for the well-being of the workers and world positive social change.
To illustrate this, he shared powerful accounts of the way that both unions responded to racial housing discrimination in the community.
The USWA approached racism and discrimination in completely different ways compared with the packinghouse workers. Local steelworker organizations "were not generally interested in becoming involved in community affairs to any great extent" (Scipes, p.179, 2026).
They did not involve themselves in efforts to address racial oppression in the community or housing discrimination. In fact, there is even evidence to suggest the steelworkers ignored the housing riots that took place from 1953-54 at the Trumbull Park Homes in Chicago.
But, the packinghouse workers' fight to "abolish racial terror and discrimination" in the wake of a housing crisis for Black workers was monumental.
Related to their efforts, Scipes cited a powerful quote from United Packinghouse Workers of America President Ralph Helstein: "it is not enough to eliminate discriminatory practices in the plant, but we also have to do it in the community, because you can't work with a man all day long... and then pick up where you left off the next day... it's essential to carry on this kind of activity in the communities in which you lived" (Scipes, p.177, 2026).
The PWOC made it possible for Black workers to walk freely and safely in the community: “Any public space which refused them service would be quickly put out of business by a boycott of the white union members” (Scipes p. 178, 2026). The UPWA efforts continued to accelerate through this period, even leading to the sponsorship of a 1949 conference on housing to address the public housing crisis. Though not a perfect union free of the marginalization of women (p.158), power emanated from the bottom up in the packinghouse workers’ union, enabling popular democracy (p. 192). At every turn, they directly confronted issues of racism and discrimination as conscious union and policy projects.
And importantly, these external efforts did not harm the internal professional well-being of these workers. When measured, Scipes found that “wages for meatpacking workers grew either at the same rate or at a faster rate than it did for steelworkers during the 1939-1958 period… the packinghouse workers did not suffer financially from the social justice unionism of the UPWA…" (Scipes, p. 200, 2026).
Expanding on the relevance of these findings for today’s society, Scipes’ third major claim of this work asserts that we have not had a labor movement since 1949 (p. x). Despite recent efforts to revive the trade union movement through the Chicago Teacher's Union, Starbucks, Amazon, and more (p. ix), Scipes argues that we have only had a trade union movement since 1949, as a trade union movement only looks out for the well-being of union members and a labor movement champions the well-being of all working people (p.x).
Scipes believes that we can revive the labor movement and unify workers. I believe that this book provides us with a road map to unifying all people.
Beyond from the systematic approach by which this study was conducted, my hope is inspired by two additional factors. The first is Scipes’ foundational credibility that informed the body of this work.
Scipes has been active for over 40 years in the labor movement and published more than 300 writings while traveling around the world throughout his life, working in fields in blue-, white-, and pink-collar jobs, working in the print trades, earning his PhD at 51, and teaching for more than 18 years with Purdue University Northwest.
He is still active in Northwest Indiana, Chicago, and the Calumet region today, reinforcing the relevance of the perspective of his research.
“He has seen a range of socioeconomic backgrounds and living conditions across the globe while studying labor practices and movements, from the streets of The Hague to villages in the Philippines,” (Purdue University Northwest, 2021), and cares about finding true understanding through his research process. Of this process, he has been quoted: [When I’m researching,] “I’m out with workers, at union offices, traveling by bus, boat, van. I’m out there integrating with the ordinary people” (Purdue University Northwest, 2021).
He furthered this sentiment with a nod to Alice Walker: “Activism is my rent for living on the planet” (Vasilko, 2022).
So, when Scipes affirms in his book that "with strong, resolute leadership... [workers] can be won to opposing white supremacy and racism... this is not theory, this is not ideology. It is shown to the practices of these labor organizations" (p. 181) I believe that the strength of his credibility is such that we can apply these findings beyond labor organizations.
Which leads me to the second factor of my hope: the currently unrealized positive persuasive power of these findings when applied to society as a whole. It is this part of my review where I can most strongly apply my own scholarly background.
From a communication lens, when I read this book, I was especially interested in the application of Lloyd Bitzer's rhetorical situation (1968), social movement theory (Melucci 1989 and 1995), and the concept of the enthymeme (Brock, 2014).
To preface my application, the enthymeme is a persuasive rhetorical process employed to lead an audience to a desired meaning with intentional word choice by convincing an audience they are co-creators in the process. The phenomenon is imperative for successful collaboration for social change.
And the enthymeme is critical for the creation of meaning, as a proposed meaning has no power without mass consent (Brock, 2014). The enthymeme guides an audience toward the desired mass consent for new meaning, or change. It is important to note that guiding an audience toward mass consent is not inherently evil, it just depends on the speaker's intention. The enthymeme can be used for positive social change by guiding an audience to accept that climate change needs to be addressed, civil rights matter, violence is bad, etc. Most crucial to this study, the enthymeme is most powerful when the audience has common understandings of identity and meaning.
In 1974, French feminist theory argued that the stakes of feminist struggle against patriarchal-driven oppression and discrimination required an overthrow not to the patriarchal system, but to the system of power and the division itself (Vasilko, p. 16, 2023). Meaning that activists must look beyond individual differences and division and fight for the common good of all, leading to a positive, life-enhancing society to benefit all, much as the meatpackers realized in this study.
Lastly, Bitzer (1968) and Melucci (1989 and 1995) have shown us that a shared identity is imperative to keep the momentum of social change protected from co-optation if any exigence is to truly be addressed, which means that social change, overall, requires a shared identity (Vasilko, 2023).
When all of this is synthesized, this leads us back to Scipes for one of the most important theories of his career: polyconflictualism.
Scipes’ polyconflictualism explains the basis for why groups of people who share many comparable characteristics, exist in the same period, and face similar conditions respond to a situation in entirely different ways, just as the steelworkers and packinghouse workers responded completely different to white supremacy and racism. With this theory, he argues that belonging to comparable groups does not automatically guarantee that group members will respond the same way. Instead, group members must be aware of their individual agency and intentionally seek common ground to form collective identities strong enough to address social issues to enhance the well-being of all (Scipes 2025; Scipes 2026).
Recognizing a collective exigence and collective identity is key to positive social change.
Laying out his hopes for the future after his book, Scipes challenged: "What I'm talking about here is building a union pathway to support all who are willing to work to advance the standard of living and improve the social well-being of all... building grassroots power from the ground up in social justice unions controlled by their members... for the purpose of working together and improve conditions for all involved" (Scipes, p. 210-211, 2026).
To readers of this review, I ask an important question as AI impact, environmental destruction, and war accelerate: What happens if we all apply these findings more broadly, beyond labor organization? What happens if we all looked outside of ourselves to care, regardless of political party, race, age, gender, or occupation, about intentionally seeking positive change that benefits the well-being of all?
With strong organization and shared experiences, common threads could be recognized, allowing collective identity and impact to be maximized and a better world to be possible, even as our differences co-exist.
We all have more in common than we realize. It is time to celebrate this book and find ways to apply it to labor unions, organization for positive change, and our world today.
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25 Years After 9/11, Islamophobia Thrives
Islamophobia is at an all-time high 25 years after 9/11, largely due to intentional disinformation and government officials spreading hate in order to get elected.
Sep 12, 2026
A new study by Pew Research finds that more than 4 in 10—more than 40%!—of Americans believe that Muslims are having a “negative impact on the US” and are “less patriotic” than other Americans. These numbers show more negative feelings toward Muslims than immediately after 9/11. Islamophobia is also higher than immediately after 9/11.
And yet, no massive terrorist attack like 9/11 or other similar negative impact by Muslims has occurred in the last 25 years. 9/11 is an unremembered event in the lives of over 100 million young Americans. So what is happening to increase negative views of Muslims in America?
First, those with negative views about Muslims are less likely to have ever met a Muslim. Their views, then, stem from social media, the news, and the many Islamophobic statements by governmental officials.
Second, American attitudes about Islam are being intentionally manipulated by a loose network of individuals and organizations, called “The Islamophobia Industry,” which seeks to disseminate disinformation about Muslims and Islam. The anti-“Ground Zero Mosque” appellation and campaign was engineered by this network. The introduction of the word “shariah” (which essentially just means “Islam”) as a scare word and specter was deliberately introduced by David Yerushalmi, who made a lot of money peddling his xenophobic views to state legislatures, telling them to implement “anti-shariah laws,” which promote the falsehood that Muslim Americans are incapable of complying with American laws.
These attitudes affect Americans. Islam is an American religion. And yet, Muslims experience the most discrimination of any religious group in the United States.
Third, this characterization of shariah, as well as other canards about Muslims, are parroted by governmental officials aiming to scare Americans into voting for them, Vice President JD Vance going so far as to say—on no evidence whatsoever—that Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is “very, very evil,” implying that Muslims are out to destroy other religious groups in America. Yet, the vast majority of Muslim Americans (the largest majority of any American group except for Jewish Americans) want to live in a country where no one is targeted for their religious beliefs.
These negative stereotypes and bogeyman threats belie reality. Polls have shown that Muslim Americans are more likely than other faith groups to reject attacks on civilians. Muslim American women are the second-most educated faith group in the US, ranking just below Jewish American women; Muslim American women have the most parity of income with Muslim American men, as well. Most Muslim Americans believe that homosexuality should be accepted by society (52% accepting to 33% opposed), more than Evangelical Christians (who number between 25% and 40% of all Americans) and Jehovah’s witnesses.
Professor Steven Fish at University of California Berkeley wondered whether the endlessly circulating stereotype that Muslims are more violent than others were true. If so, he thought, homicide rates in Muslim-majority countries should be higher. Right? So he conducted a massive empirical study and found that not only are homicide rates in Muslim-majority countries lower than in other countries, but the larger a Muslim community, the less homicide.
These attitudes affect Americans. Islam is an American religion. And yet, Muslims experience the most discrimination of any religious group in the United States.
Ironically, given all these scare tactics about Muslims taking over the United States, shariah itself requires Muslims to obey the law of the land in which they reside. This has been established in Islam for over 1,000 years. Muslims would violate shariah if they tried to impose shariah on Americans or in American governments. In fact, the Qur’an repeatedly prohibits conversion by force. How ridiculous, then, are our lawmakers for indulging in bigotry to say the opposite.
I grew up in California, answering questions on Islam and Muslims as far back as I can remember (the question of why I didn’t eat pepperoni pizza being the prevalent one when I was a child). I see absolutely no conflict between living as a practicing Muslim and being a patriotic American. After all, the basic tenets of Islam are belief in God, donation to charity, prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage. Broadly speaking, pretty much the same as other American religions. Muslim Americans are pretty much the same as other Americans, as well.
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25 Years After 9/11, It’s Clear Osama bin Laden Won—But He Didn't Do It Alone
In the end, the Saudi-born terrorist's role in the victory he sought turned out to be vanishingly small.
Sep 11, 2026
I can still remember the smell. But I’m at a loss to accurately describe it to you. It wasn’t the unmistakable odor of death, although that must have been some tiny part of it. It wasn’t like burning tires or plastic or even metal. It was all that, but it was more.
In the quarter century since, I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never experienced anything like the smell near the rubble pile at Ground Zero in September 2001. The air was acrid and thick, a swirl of toxins and carcinogens made possible by turning two large, jet-fuel laden planes into cruise missiles and aiming them at gigantic office towers. As it burned, we all inhaled a haze of pulverized cement, glass fibers, asbestos, lead, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs), and whatever else. It remains a part of us still.
The 9/11 attacks — which killed almost 3,000 Americans, toppled New York City’s Twin Towers, wrecked the Pentagon, and took down a plane near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — marked the most devastating intelligence failure in U.S. history and sent the United States into a paroxysm of self-induced catastrophes from which it has never emerged. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s spectacular coordinated assault supercharged what had been a slow-motion imperial decline, trapping the U.S. in a death spiral of ruinous intertwined economic debacles, foreign policy failures, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism, and debilitating wars and military interventions.
Bin Laden’s plan was to trap the U.S. in expensive, foreign quagmire wars that would trigger a domestic economic collapse. It was patterned on the strategy that the local mujahideen, he and other foreign fighters, and the U.S. and its allies had used to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Not only does bin Laden’s strategy continue apace long after his 2011 death, but it also spawned an even more effective means of destroying America from within. Bin Laden’s attacks turned the U.S. government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people. That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
This swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the U.S. in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump.
The so-called Pearl Harbor of the 21st century was no surprise. Long before President George W. Bush, while vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, received a classified intelligence memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S,” the Al Qaeda leader had been honest about his plans. “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spear-headed the crusade against the Islamic nation,” he announced in a 1998 TV interview, castigating the U.S. for stationing troops in the Middle East and its support of Israel. “The Western regimes and the government of the United States of America bear the blame for what might happen. If their people do not wish to be harmed inside their very own countries, they should seek to elect governments that are truly representative of them and that can protect their interests.”
When bin Laden made good on his threats, slaughtering thousands on 9/11, he knew it was bound to trigger a response. One possibility was a measured law-enforcement action that would end with arrests and legitimate legal proceedings. The other was a president standing on a rubble pile, vowing revenge, a never-ending fruitless war against a tactic (terror), a secret torture gulag, a forever prison, and a kangaroo court. One would be ruinous for bin Laden. The other, an answer to his prayers.
Bin Laden’s masterstroke was to attack the U.S. after it had elected a lightweight nepo-baby president and a power-mad vice president who had cut his teeth in Richard Nixon’s criminal-packed White House. While he came to be an enemy of Donald Trump, it was Dick Cheney who paved the way for America’s current would-be tyrant, with the vice president’s relentless campaign to concentrate power in the White House, creating an imperial presidency predicated on the “unitary executive theory,” a misbegotten notion that the Constitution grants the president unrestrained authority over domestic and foreign policy, such as unilaterally removing government officials and waging wars.
In both style and substance, Cheney prefigured Trump. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Cheney went on TV to announce the government would now operate on the “dark side,” as he put it, claiming “a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.”
America has never emerged from those sinister shadows. Cheney was arguably the leading cheerleader for the ruinous war on terror, which began in Afghanistan, spread across the globe, and grinds on a year after his death; a prime architect of the disastrous Iraq War and the faulty, unverified, and cherry-picked intelligence that underpinned it; an enthusiastic supporter of torture, calling the waterboarding of detainees “a no-brainer”; a vocal supporter of domestic surveillance; a promoter of undemocratic, unprecedented, and unparalleled secrecy; and a belligerent bully.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a 2022 ad for his daughter, Liz, one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump at the end of his first term. He might have been right — and he was certainly responsible. Trump has built on Cheney’s accomplishments and pushed America toward autocracy at an unprecedented rate.
After weakening American democracy during his first term, Trump launched a full-scale assault — literally — on it. Despite knowing he lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to concede, worked to subvert vote counts and undermine the certification process, pressured state officials to “find” votes, and orchestrated what special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on it called an “unprecedented criminal effort” to remain in power.
Bin Laden was never able to raise an army in America, lead an insurrection, and launch an attack on the U.S. Capitol. (The plane meant to carry out that attack on 9/11 crashed in rural Pennsylvania.) But on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s encouragement, his supporters stormed the Capitol. The House Select Committee that investigated the “domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex and issues relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power” concluded that Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 Presidential election.” It found that Trump, for hours, deliberately failed to act to stop his followers from attacking the Capitol. Smith said that the evidence gathered by his team “was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” had the American people not reelected Trump.
Bin Laden would have no doubt cheered the attack on the Capitol and endorsed Trump’s reelection run, had he been alive. And he would not have been disappointed by the results. Upon returning to office, Trump unleashed a coordinated assault on American democracy, undermining the rule of law and fundamental freedoms by pardoning and rewarding insurrectionists; weaponizing the Justice Department, regulatory agencies, and the military against American citizens; firing government watchdogs; attacking the free press; engaging in naked and unrestrained corruption, such as violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause; engaging in due process violations, immigration lawlessness, and unconstitutional executive power-grabs; and launching a disastrous war with Iran and a murder-spree on the high seas amid a host of other foreign and domestic policy fiascos.
Since January 2025, there have been nearly 4,000 separate authoritarian acts by the Trump administration including around 1,050 undermining democracy, more than 940 suppressing dissent, over 650 aggressive or destabilizing foreign policy efforts, about 600 acts weakening civil rights, around 500 centered around controlling information or spreading misinformation, and more than 320 acts of corruption, according to the Trump Action Tracker, which documents acts and statements of Trump and his administration that echo those of other authoritarian regimes.
A startling global analysis also discovered “autocratization” in America rose at a speed “unprecedented in modern history” last year. Under Trump, the researchers found, the U.S. has ceased to be a functioning liberal democracy after the largest one-year drop in democratic principles in American history. This took the country back to 1965 levels, when Jim Crow racial discrimination in voting — including violence and intimidation, poll taxes, and literacy tests — were still commonplace. These results are bolstered by research by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, which finds that the corrupting of elections, quashing of dissent, spreading of disinformation, and aggrandizing of executive power are all “escalating” in Trump’s second term, while both authoritarian actions and the politicizing of independent institutions in the U.S. are “rapidly escalating.”
In 2001, the U.S. government recorded a budget surplus of about $128 billion and was projected to pay off the national debt by 2009. But after miring the U.S. in forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere, bin Laden looked upon the fruits of 9/11 and took a victory lap in 2004, bragging that his strategy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” had helped to push the U.S. deficit to “more than a trillion dollars.”
“All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note,” bin Laden announced.
He could not have imagined just how closely and how long America’s leaders would hue to his plan, conducting commando raids, drone strikes, armed interventions, and outright wars in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere. Nor could Al Qaeda’s leader have foreseen how deep into financial ruin the U.S. would sink as a result.
Bin Laden’s 2004 trillion-dollar boast wasn’t actually accurate. The U.S. federal deficit was just $413 billion in 2004. But it wouldn’t remain that low for long. America’s post-9/11 wars have now cost or caused long-term obligations to taxpayers of an astonishing $8 trillion, according to a 2021 analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And Trump has continued to expand America’s ruinous foreign interventions from Ecuador to Iran. An Intercept analysis found that Trump has presided over more than 20 armed conflicts and wars during his two terms in office. And the costs continue adding up. Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told The Intercept that the excessive expenses of the Iran war, alone, would likely reach into the trillions of dollars. And Trump is also currently pushing for a post-World War II record $1.6 trillion Pentagon budget for next year.
In case you hadn’t guessed, the pre-9/11 projection that the national debt would be paid off in 2009 never came to pass. Instead, the Bush and Trump presidencies were marked by massive tax cuts that mostly benefited corporations and the wealthiest Americans, depriving the Treasury of almost $10 trillion in expected revenue.
So after bin Laden’s attack; the forever wars of Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden; and Trump’s contributions in disastrous conflicts and gross fiscal mismanagement, the $5.8 trillion national debt of 2001 has now ballooned by 590 percent to a staggering $40 trillion. That’s $1 million, 40 million times over.
About 50 percent of the debt has been accrued since Donald Trump was first elected. This week, Trump pledged to pay every American adult $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress in November, which would cost more than $1 trillion. And that $128 billion budget surplus from 2001? It’s been replaced by a projected federal budget deficit for this fiscal year of $2.1 trillion. This debt and deficit spiral is also occurring during a time of near-full employment when the government’s finances should actually be improving.
If bin Laden made it to paradise, as was his hope, he is no doubt smiling as the Trump administration dismisses the ballooning debt and the president peddles nonsensical claims that “growth will take care of that very easily.” The U.S. will actually spend more than $1 trillion this year just paying interest on the debt. The Peterson Foundation projects that total interest payments will more than double over the next decade — and that may be an undercount. And even if the debt remained steady at $40 trillion and the United States were to pay down $1 million per day, it would take almost 110,000 years to pay it off.
All this debt is also likely to keep interest rates high, raising the cost of mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, and small business credit, hurting ordinary Americans. High deficits and debt — particularly if coupled with high inflation or interest rates — make it harder for the government to respond to crises like a recession, depression, pandemic, or other emergency.
Then there is the weakened safety net that comes from deficits and debt. Bin Laden doesn’t need to worry about his golden years, and Trump is living them right now at taxpayer expense. But in 2032 — just six years from now — the Social Security trust fund is on track to go bust, to take one example of shortfalls on the horizon. By law, when the trust fund hits zero, all retirees’ benefits are mandated to drop by more than 20 percent.
Looking back, I’ve come to think of the acrid odor of the collapsed Twin Towers as more than a mélange of burning paper, glass, concrete, and around 70 carcinogens. It was, instead, a harbinger of something even darker than the nearly 3,000 Americans who died on 9/11 — a long road of death and destruction stretching out into the future, beyond the vanishing point.
Even Bin Laden couldn’t have imagined long-term lethality of his attacks. Close to 9,700 first responders, survivors, and those who helped to clear nearly 1.8 million tons of debris at the World Trade Center have died of illnesses tied to 9/11, according to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. And more than 57,000 first responders and others have been diagnosed with 9/11-linked cancers. Around 155,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides care and health monitoring to people who were exposed to toxic air after 9/11. And an estimated 400,000 people were exposed to toxic contaminants, the risk of physical injury, and physically and emotionally stressful conditions in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The vengeful war on the world that bin Laden managed to provoke has proved even more devastating than the effects of the toxic stew we inhaled near Ground Zero. An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere between 2001 and 2023, alone. Another 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the toll to at least 4.5 million dead and counting. This quarter century of carnage and all that it unleashed has left the U.S. hollowed out and rotting from within; a deterioration in every conceivable measure from economics to democratic ideals to the spiritual health of the nation.
Bin Laden’s bleed-until-bankruptcy plan was designed to sink America’s economy — and it continues to work to great effect. And by ushering in the presidencies of Donald Trump, bin Laden left the United States morally bankrupt, too. Twenty-five years after 9/11, the country is a pale shadow of the superpower that emerged from World War II having been laid low not by the Soviet Union — the nuclear-armed power it long considered an existential threat — but by two trust-fund terrorists: the scions of a Saudi construction empire, and an outer borough New York City real estate developer, respectively.
“The wise man doesn’t squander his security, wealth, and children for the sake of the liar in the White House,” bin Laden said in 2004, referring to Bush. He likely couldn’t have imagined America choosing an even more inveterate liar, an even greater intellectual lightweight, and an even more ruinous president. A quarter century after 9/11, it’s clear that bin Laden won. But the victory was not his alone. And, in the end, his role in it turned out to be vanishingly small. Bush, Cheney, Obama, and Biden, as well as a raft of politicians, government functionaries, and all who went along with the madness unleashed by the attacks, played key roles in helping hobble the U.S. in the 25 years since the September 11. But it’s been Trump, more than anyone else, who has made bin Laden’s lofty 9/11 dreams America’s never-ending nightmare.
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How 41 Senators Could End the Iran War and Rein In Defense Spending
Forty-one is the number of senators needed to stop the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act—a massive bill that sets defense policies and authorities—and push for key modifications.
Sep 11, 2026
In the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, I joined Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, the Institute for Policy Studies, YES! Magazine, and hundreds of other signatories in calling for “Justice, Not Vengeance.” We argued that the United States should find and prosecute those responsible for 9-11 rather than launch wars against countries that had not attacked us.
We were right to worry: The wars that followed cost trillions of dollars and countless lives, and left the country less secure, not more.
Twenty-five years later, Congress faces a similar test—and a similar warning sign. The United States and Israel are at war with Iran, a war of choice that could prove even more disastrous than the decision to go to war with Afghanistan and Iraq.
While responsibility for the war lies with the Trump administration, Congress has a say in what happens next—if it chooses to act.
When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.
Likewise, Congress can rein in historic levels of military spending and reject proposals to spend billions of dollars on a new generation of nuclear weapons, funded by taxpayers and historic levels of debt. And it can say no to the rapid development and deployment of AI weapons, an especially important step at a time when AI agents are already going rogue.
All it would take is 41 US senators. That is the number needed to stop the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—a massive bill that sets defense policies and authorities, with a proposed price tag of $1.5 trillion.
The NDAA passed the US House of Representatives on July 22, but it has stalled in the US Senate.
Under Senate rules, 41 senators can filibuster to stop a bill from moving to the Senate floor for a vote, and the Democratic caucus has 47 senators. So, even in the minority, the Democratic senators—along with any Republicans who oppose “forever wars”—could prevent the NDAA from advancing without modifications.
When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.
What specifically could 41 Senators do?
- Rein in the spending: Proposed defense spending is at the highest level in real dollars since World War II—a 38% increase over last year’s spending, funded by taxpayers and a national debt that has reached 124% the size of the entire US economy. This spending is unsustainable and unaccountable; the Pentagon just failed its eighth consecutive audit. Congress should restore the inspector general positions the Trump administration eliminated.
- End the war in Iran: Require a War Powers Act resolution, with appropriate guardrails to set the terms for an end to the war. Set limits on the use of taxpayer funds for the conflict.
- Reset our relationship with Israel. Cut military aid to Israel until it withdraws from Gaza, ends the spreading of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and stops threatening its neighbors with unilateral military action. Strip Section 1217 from the Senate version of the NDAA, which would create a US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative merging research, development, and deployment of military technologies with the Israeli military.
- Work for nuclear safeguards, not new weapons systems: End authorization for a new generation of nuclear weapons that includes the development of intermediate-range systems designed for use in regional conflicts. This risks turning nuclear weapons from a deterrent into a first-strike weapon of aggression. Require robust new arms-control talks aimed at reducing nuclear arsenals; none currently exist since the New START treaty expired on February 5, 2026, leaving the US and Russia with no binding limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals for the first time in decades.
- Stop illegal and ill-advised uses of the US military: Enforce the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibition on using US troops on American soil. End the extrajudicial killings of unidentified people on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, now numbering 227. Prohibit using the military to threaten Canada, Greenland, and other allies as part of efforts to seize their territory.
- Put guardrails on AI-controlled weapons: This field is moving faster than Congress can track, and the NDAA is already the battleground. The House and Senate versions each include provisions on autonomous weapons and human oversight. But the same bill also directs the Pentagon to build a department-wide system for deploying agentic AI at speed and scale, pushing adoption forward even as the human-oversight rules meant to contain it remain unsettled. Congress should preserve and strengthen the human-oversight provisions, not let them get traded away in conference, and should require that no lethal-force decision—including nuclear launch decisions—is ever delegated to an algorithm. Three in four Americans agree: Decisions to kill should be made by people, not machines.
In January of this year, President Donald Trump called for raising the US spending on defense to $1.5 trillion, but has been uncharacteristically quiet about this eye-watering level of defense spending ever since.
Perhaps his silence is because he can see how deeply unpopular the US-Israel war against Iran has turned out to be. Sixty eight percent of Americans say it is not worth the costs, according to a July survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a level of unpopularity that parallels Americans’ views of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And there is no end in sight. In spite of President Trump’s bragging about an imminent US victory in Iran, The Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has extended Middle East deployments into 2027.
The US already spends more on the military than any other country—more than twice as much as China and five times as much as Russia. The enormous sums devoted to military spending, and the taxes and debt used to finance them, make the priorities of the American people more difficult to achieve.
Instead of ramping up dangerous conflicts and new weapons systems, we should fund an economy that meets the needs of our families, deploys solutions to the climate crisis, and makes healthcare and housing accessible to everyone. Instead of mounting debt, we should invest in prosperity for future generations.
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After 25 Years, 9/11 Continues to Shape How America Polices Immigration
For a quarter century, America has treated immigration enforcement as a form of counterterrorism. Yet, instead of making us safer, it has given rise to an increasingly militarized agency that, in the name of protecting ‘the homeland,’ uses its vast surveillance network and policing powers to target and kill innocent people.
Sep 11, 2026
Since the start of its second term, the Trump administration has repeatedly defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings and killings, smeared their victims as “domestic terrorists,” racially profiled people with the Supreme Court’s consent, expanded their biometric and social media surveillance capabilities while also maintaining over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists. It is effectively dismantling the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, tried—and is trying again—to repeal birthright citizenship, paused all immigrant visa applications, and is aggressively pursuing politically motivated visa revocations and denaturalizations, among other extreme measures.
All of this is reflective of the rampant and unfettered xenophobia, Islamophobia, and white nationalism that define the Trump administration. Yet, at same time, we must also acknowledge that Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) violence and Trump’s assault on the immigration system is an extension of the national security framework built following the 9/11 attacks.
ICE was established in March 2003 as part of “the single-largest government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense.” A key rationale for including ICE within the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was that the 9/11 hijackers entered the US legally via temporary visas. To keep “the homeland” safe, a more aggressive approach to immigration was thus deemed necessary. As Attorney General John Ashcroft remarked in 2002:
In this new war, our enemy's platoons infiltrate our borders, quietly blending in with visiting tourists, students, and workers. They move unnoticed through our cities, neighborhoods, and public spaces. They wear no uniforms. Their camouflage is not forest green, but rather it is the color of common street clothing. Their tactics rely on evading recognition at the border and escaping detection within the United States. Their terrorist mission is to defeat America, destroy our values, and kill innocent people.
Going forward, immigration enforcement and control agencies would police and surveil every immigrant as if they were potential terrorists. As the Department of Justice (DOJ) emphasized in 2004, “The primary mission of ICE is to prevent acts of terrorism by targeting the people, money, and materials that support terrorists and criminal activities.”
In the name of counterterrorism, the DOJ launched the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) in 2002. Under this program, male foreign nationals aged 16 or older from 25 countries—24 of which were majority-Arab and Muslim (the other was North Korea)—were fingerprinted, interviewed, photographed, and required to check in with immigration officials at regular intervals. These regulations applied to both new arrivals and individuals who were already in the US on temporary visas. NSEERS was suspended in 2011 and finally terminated in 2016 by President Barack Obama—it led to no terrorism prosecutions.
Despite its failure, NSEERS, alongside other measures and decades of Republican fearmongering, functioned to normalize the link between immigration enforcement, border control, and counterterrorism. In doing so, it amplified the alleged danger posed by “radical Islamic terrorism,” thus setting the stage for the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on Muslims. This, in turn, served to distract from the far greater and actual domestic terrorism threat posed by white supremacist groups. As a report by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs noted, “In 2019, DHS publicly acknowledged white supremacist violence as a major threat to national security for the first time, despite being aware internally of the severity of the threat for 10 years.”
In our desperation to prevent another 9/11, we have spent billions building our own homegrown domestic terrorism threat.
The goal of combating terrorism also promoted a demand for more biometric technologies. As Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) noted in 2001, the reason why “a large group of coordinated terrorists [could] operate for more than a year in the United States without being detected” is because “we could not identify them. We did not know they were here. Only if we can identify terrorists planning attacks on the United States do we have a chance of stopping them. And the biometrics technology, the state-of-the-art technology of today, really offers us a very new way to identify potential terrorists.”
To that end, DHS established the US Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) program in 2003 to collect biometric identifiers from foreign nationals and build an electronic check in-check out system. As Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security at DHS Asa Hutchinson remarked in 2003, “initially, fingerprints and photographs” will be used; however, “as the technology is perfected, additional forms such as facial recognition or iris scans may be used as well.”
Fast forward two decades and now, ICE agents are currently deploying facial recognition software such as Mobile Fortify. In May 2026, ICE awarded a $25.1 million contract to BI2 Technologies to acquire over 1,500 wireless, handheld iris-scanning devices. In its fiscal year 2027 budget request, DHS allocated $7.5 million to develop face-scanning “smart glasses” that would grant agents real-time access to biometric databases.
Now, importantly, none of this should be taken to mean that the pre-9/11 landscape was entirely welcoming to immigrants. The “browning of America” discourse depicted—and continues to depict—immigrants as an existential threat to the nation. Meanwhile immigration policies like the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 expanded the number of deportable offenses while also introducing expedited removal processes that allowed immigration officers to deport people without a formal hearing.
And yet, there were a few rays of hope. There was broad support for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, with a Senate hearing scheduled for September 12, 2001. On September 6, 2001, the US and Mexico announced they had reached an agreement on a framework for border and immigration reform that included “respecting the human dignity of all migrants, regardless of their status; recognizing the contribution migrants make to enriching both societies.” At the time, both President George W. Bush and President Vincente Fox “agreed that US-Mexican relations have entered their most promising moment in history.” Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed.
For 25 years, America has treated immigration enforcement as a form of counterterrorism. Yet, instead of making us safer, it has given rise to an increasingly militarized agency that, in the name of protecting “the homeland,” uses its vast surveillance network and policing powers to target and kill innocent people. In our desperation to prevent another 9/11, we have spent billions building our own homegrown domestic terrorism threat.
After 25 years, we must finally recognize that DHS and ICE were never the solution. If we truly wish to make America safer and greater, we must choose to forge a new path—to work toward a world without war, resentment, and violence.
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Victims of Our Post-9/11 Wars Deserve Remembrance, Too
Similarities between Reflecting Absence and an earlier German Holocaust “Counter-Monument” prompt reflections on accepting responsibility.
Sep 11, 2026
Few who pay their respects today in the hallowed plaza where the Twin Towers once stood will be aware that the September 11 memorial echoes a 1987 Holocaust “counter-memorial” in Kassel, Germany. Like our memorial, the German monument consists of a hollow in the shape of what had once been there, into which water flows.
But the scope of the remembrances evoked by the two memorials are revealingly different.
We Americans want only to recall our innocent dead and to honor them. Unlike the Germans, we spurn acknowledging the evils done in their name that came to be intertwined with our losses, the catastrophe we inflicted on an innocent nation, Iraq.
What We Can Learn From Kassel’s Holocaust Counter-Memorial
In 1939, the Nazis destroyed a 40-foot pyramidal fountain in Kassel, Germany because it had been built by a Jew, the entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott. The elimination of “the Jews’ Fountain” was soon followed by the elimination of Kassel’s 3,000 Jews themselves.
The Aschrott Fountain (1908–1939) is shown.
Forty-five years later it was proposed to rebuild the fountain. But simply rebuilding the original fountain would have erased the memory of its destruction. So artist Horst Hoheisel designed a new fountain: “a mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of this place as a wound and an open question.”
The Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Eistreter, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The September 11 memorial, which is called Reflecting Absence, evokes the missing Twin Towers by revealing their empty foundations. Hoheisel’s earlier Kassel counter-monument is, similarly, an emptiness in the shape of the missing original. “The pyramid will be turned into a funnel into whose darkness water runs down,” Hoheisel says.
“The sunken fountain is an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.”
The underground portion of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
Kassel’s Holocaust memorial is one of many throughout Germany, part of the way the Germans have accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. This small, local memorial compels us to think of those who were murdered, but also of those who murdered and those who stood by.
The installation of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
We reflect on the small viciousness of destroying “the Jew’s fountain,” and the monstrous barbarity to which this was prelude. The small monument conjures the sadness of loss, and the responsibility of a people for acts that can never be made right.
Can America Accept Responsibility for the Mass Deaths Inflicted in the Name of Our “War on Terrorism”
The murder of thousands of Americans, the crime of September 11, 2001, spawned a larger tragedy for another people. Using the false suggestion of Iraq complicity as one of its pretexts, and treating the 9/11 “war on terrorism” as license for war on Baghdad as well as on Kabul, our government invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, and occupied the country.
In reality, as Bush White House anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke confirmed, Iraq was not responsible for 9/11 and our government knew it. “In the weeks immediately after 9/11,” Clarke explained, “the president… instruct[ed] the Pentagon to prepare for the invasion of Iraq... Even though they knew at the time from me, from the FBI, from the CIA, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”
Knowing that Iraq had nothing to do with the al Qaeda attack did not matter because President George W. Bush’s government had begun targeting Iraq for invasion long before September 11. The very first meeting of Bush’s national security team on January 20, 2001 included a discussion of “military options” for Iraq and overthrowing its government.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
As a delegation from our British allies secretly reported to their government before the invasion, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush] policy” of going to war. “The case [for war] was thin.”
The American invasion, and the resistance and chaotic civil war triggered by the US occupation, likely took between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqi lives. It made refugees of millions more, and inflicted malnutrition, birth defects, and other health disasters on a generation of Iraqi children.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
To America’s 9/11 memorial we should add a wall on which we engrave, in a necessarily small font, the names of however many can be identified of the million Iraqi men, women, and children slain in the wars and sectarian strife our invasion precipitated. And since President Donald Trump has ensnared our nation in another pointless war, another war of aggression based on the excuse of “terrorism,” a Middle East war he has no plan to end, we should inscribe as well the names of the Iranian civilians killed in Trump’s war. The 100 children slain at the beginning of the bombing campaign. The wedding guests bombed in a small Iran town last week. They deserve remembrance, too.
Of course, this is unthinkable and will never happen.
It would be “too political” to acknowledge any connection between the horrors we suffered and the horrors we inflicted. In fact, even the suggestion will be said to “disrespect” our honored dead—as though their memories could be further sullied than they already have been by the evil perpetrated in their names.
Nonetheless, the proposal may be useful. As Hoheisel says: “That’s how a counter-monument works. People get angry, they write letters, but you have a discussion. Out of this void, the history begins to come out.” In America, such a provocation may be the only kind of counter-monument that is permitted.
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Opening the Book of Life on the Day the Towers Fell
The convergence of September 11 and Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to look back at what we did and did not do in the aftermath.
Sep 11, 2026
I am such a caricature of a native New Yorker that my first date, at age of 12, was at the observation deck of the World Trade Center. I thought there was nothing more romantic than showing someone a full view of the place that was simultaneously my shtetl and the greatest city in the world. I said a shechechiyanu when we walked up to the glass, because the beauty of the moment called for a blessing.
Years later I was a freshman in college in September of 2001, and when I came home for a long weekend that October, the air across Manhattan still smelled unholy, like burning wires, melted concrete, and mass organic decay. There were an unspeakable number of lives, whole universes unto themselves, lost that day, and their memories being a blessing remains a cold comfort. For many of us in the aftermath of that terrible day, we watched the national conversation shift to be entirely about who we should be afraid of—and too often, the answer was some of our fellow Americans.
This year, Rosh Hashanah begins on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The convergence is an opportunity and a gift. Together, Jews in New York and around the country will experience several hours of extraordinary potency: one part of our hearts focused on the opening of the book of life, and the other on the day the towers fell, and everything that came after.
This is an opportunity to understand what Jewish tradition offers us, as well as what it demands.
The legal frameworks this regime is currently using to terrorize immigrant communities were born in the fall of 2001 in New York City. And just like 25 years ago, these attempts to terrorize and target immigrant communities rely on fear.
Judaism teaches us that there is no pathway to atonement with God until you have first atoned with the people you harmed; the gateway to divine repair is closed until interpersonal repair is complete. Crucially, Jewish theology holds it as an impossibility rather than a preference: You cannot approach God while your neighbor still bears the wound you gave them.
There is no such thing as atonement without honest accounting. There is no repair without looking the harm in the eye.
This is the fundamental spiritual nature of the High Holidays. The convergence of September 11 and Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to look back at what we did in the aftermath. But we must also simultaneously account for the acute political crisis unfolding around us. The multiracial democracy that has kept Jews safer in this country than anywhere else in the history of the world is under attack.
A legal fact that must be part of our accounting: It was in the increased pressure to target American Muslim and American Arab communities that Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) was formed post-9/11. There is a direct line from that targeting in the early 2000s to ICE’s attacks these past years in places like Portland, Washington, DC and Minneapolis. Immigrants have been terrorized—surveilled and made to fear their own government when leaving their homes. Immigrants and innocent bystanders alike have been shot and killed, and families have yet again lost loved ones to both violence and detention. The legal frameworks this regime is currently using to terrorize immigrant communities were born in the fall of 2001 in New York City. And just like 25 years ago, these attempts to terrorize and target immigrant communities rely on fear.
Twenty-five years ago we decided it was an acceptable trade-off for our safety to treat Muslim- and Arab-American men as suspects first and neighbors second. Indefinite detention, the erosion of due process, and the normalization of disappearing people were tested on them. Now, twenty-five years later, we are watching those same frameworks on steroids
If Jews, of all people, cannot recognize the peril here, then we are truly lost.
To be clear, some Jews spoke up in the fall of 2001. They joined the Jewish prophetic tradition of decrying injustice and protested the attack on civil liberties for Muslim- and Arab Americans. But most of us did not.
As Jews, we understand what it means to feel afraid. Antisemitism is a real threat to our safety, bigotry that manifests as real violence—in our places of worship, our neighborhoods, and in halls of power. Our immigrant neighbors, our American Muslim and American Arab neighbors, are not our enemy and we must not be silent when they are targeted in the name of our safety as Jews or Americans.
Those in power right now who are using their power to target so-called outsiders need our support to enact their agenda—to create a country only of people who look and think exactly like them. An agenda where white Christian nationalism is the norm, and where it’s become acceptable to use violence and force to keep the rest of us in line.
This is where our tradition meets us with exquisite moral clarity. Where we must account for what we did—or in this case did not—do. The Talmud teaches that someone who can protest the wrongs of their household, their city, their country, their world and does not is held responsible for those wrongs. English unhelpfully softens the words that matter here. What we translate as "protest"—limchot—really means rebuke or forceful confrontation; the Talmud is not asking for polite dissent. And what we translate as "held responsible"—nitpas—comes from a root meaning to physically grab, to catch, to seize. The sin snags you. It wraps itself around you until the injustice is indisputably as much yours as anyone else's.
This is the warning, and this is the theology of the season. We cannot atone for what we refuse to name. You cannot get right with God while you are still refusing to get right with your neighbor. And you cannot get right with your neighbor while you are still pretending you did not participate in the harm.
We must not treat the 25th anniversary of September 11 and the beginning of Rosh Hashanah as separate events. Instead, we should welcome this invitation to stand in our fear, and our pain, and our integrity, and face what we did. Only then can we truly move into a different world. Our spiritual health and the health of our democracy are both depending on it.
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9/11 Began a US Reign of Terror in the Middle East—Now It's Come Home
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States.
Sep 11, 2026
On September 11, 2001, the world watched as the World Trade Center, the twin towers that represented US global dominance, were struck by hijacked US commercial jetliners and came crashing to the ground. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, from high-powered executive to clerical workers and immigrant kitchen workers. The hijackers were Middle Eastern men, primarily from Saudi Arabia.
Twenty-five years later, many questions remain about how the US military and security establishment could have allowed this to happen. Hardly anybody believes the official 9/11 story, which raises more questions than it answers, and there are many competing theories about who was behind this tragedy. Was this an incredible US security lapse or a highly coordinated false flag? Whatever the case, the neocons in George W. Bush’s administration immediately declared a “war on terrorism,” and put into motion their longstanding designs to conquer seven Muslim countries in the Middle East (as revealed by General Wesley Clark)—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Over the last 25 years, the US has initiated wars against all of these countries, as well as Afghanistan.
US administrations under Presidents George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump (again) are responsible for creating a hell on Earth throughout the Middle East, resulting in millions of deaths and millions more homeless refugees. Thousands of US soldiers also died in Iraq and Afghanistan, any thousands more carry the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds to this day.
These nations may never fully recover, but Iran still stands. It may be the only Middle Eastern country still strong enough to resist domination by Israel, the US, and the former European colonial powers. That is why it is being frantically targeted by militarists in Israel and the US And that is why the US peace movement must do all we can to end the escalating US on Iran.
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Under the slogan of “the war on terror,” the US government has carried out an increasing campaign of terror worldwide and against its own people. Torture has been normalized as represented by the extralegal Guantánamo torture prison on occupied Cuban land. The US and NATO provoked Russia into a catastrophic war in Ukraine which they continue to fuel with billions of dollars, arms, and military advisers. Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses have enabled an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. In January of this year, the US made a brazen attack on Venezuela, kidnapped its president and first lady, and are holding the Venezuelan government hostage while they steal Venezuelan oil. The US has blocked all oil shipments to Cuba, greatly exacerbating the damage done by the 64-year-old US blockade of Cuba, even as they threaten to invade. President Trump and “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth post “snuff videos” of their blatantly illegal bombing of boats in South American waters, where they have murdered hundreds of fisherman and alleged “narco-terrorists” without any evidence or judicial proceeding.
Trump’s War of Terror Comes Home
The stepped-up US aggression abroad is now being mirrored by state-sponsored terror in these United States. Armed gangs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents routinely carry out racist attacks on immigrant communities and people of color, no matter their immigration or citizenship status. The mass incarceration of Black men is now matched by mass incarceration of brown men, women, and children in for-profit prisons, where abusive conditions have led to many deaths. White supremacism is out in the open as cruel fascist practices are being normalized. US peace activists and immigrant rights activists are being labeled as terrorists and prosecuted as terrorists for nonviolent resistance to the terror of the state.
Even as the US war on Iran continues and escalates, the Trump administration and Republican Party are openly seeking to undermine the midterm US elections by blatant last-minute gerrymandering of congressional districts, by trying to prevent mail-in voting, by reducing the number of polling places, by threatening to deploy intimidating ICE agents at polling places and even “joking” about canceling the elections altogether. Veterans For Peace has joined with other veterans’ groups and military families in the Veteran Against Fascism coalition to do all we can to defend the elections, for example by providing safe accompaniment to the polls.
The Terror of Nuclear War
Adding to the atmosphere of global terror is the ever-growing threat of nuclear war. Multiple sources have confirmed that the Trump administration has been discussing the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in its war on Iran. Pentagon war-gaming of the US use of tactical nuclear weapons has consistently resulted in global nuclear war that leads to a nuclear winter in which billions of people would starve to death—those that survived the initial nuclear blasts and radiation illnesses. Seventy-five countries have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which outlaws possessing sharing, transporting, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has ditched the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with Russia, while it carries out a series of wars that—if not checked—will inevitably lead to nuclear war. In fact, the US is actively planning to wage a war against China that would start with a US nuclear first strike on China. These policies only lead more countries to seek nuclear weapons, directly the opposite of the stated US policy and treaty obligations to seek nuclear non-proliferation and good-faith negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we must rededicate ourselves to resisting US wars at home and abroad.
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