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Opinion
Standing Witness to University Complicity in Criminal Wars of Aggression
Military-related research at universities like NC State helps the imperialist state find ways to more effectively kill people around the world who resist US domination.
Apr 05, 2026
On February 28, 2026, the Trump administration ordered US military forces to launch a criminal war of aggression against Iran. In the first wave of bombing, a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls elementary school in Minab, collapsing the roof and killing over 100 children. Since the attacks began, over 1,900 people have been killed and 24,800 wounded, according to media reports. The casualty numbers are preliminary, but otherwise these are uncontroversial facts.
Here are a few more observations that should be uncontroversial.
Many, perhaps most, US research universities, public and private, function in part to abet the imperialist state. Military-related research at these universities helps the imperialist state find ways to more effectively kill people around the world who resist US domination. Today, plain talk about these activities is rare, as is protest against them. For the most part, university aid to the capitalist class' projects of imperial domination either goes unmentioned, is normalized as morally unproblematic, or is celebrated under the aspect of nationalism.
Finally, here's a report from the non-Ivy province of academia: On March 12, 2026, the vice chancellor of research and innovation at North Carolina State University (where I am professor emeritus), Krista Walton, sent a campus-wide email titled "Investing in Our Research Infrastructure's Future." NC State, the email said, ranked "steady at 6th place among our peers (public universities without a medical school) in research expenditures." This sounds innocuous enough. The usual sort of institutional cheerleading.
I am thus appalled when universities are suborned into service of an imperial state. To use universities in this way is a betrayal of the enlightenment values that make universities humane institutions.
But where did the money come from? And what will building the university's research infrastructure entail? Walton goes on to explain.
Among the major funding sources noted in the email are the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy, and NASA. In DOD funding, Walton boasts, "NC State ranked second only to Duke University." As for building infrastructure, the email calls for "positioning the university to align with national priorities," and "build[in] on the great work our investigators are already doing in the defense and security sector." More specifically, building on this work will involve creation of a new "defense and security institute," for which faculty are invited to "help develop an aligned vision, mission, and goals."
Again, this email and the invitation to get on board—to help make the university more responsive to the needs of the imperial state—was sent less than two weeks after the criminal attack on Iran began, less than two weeks after the killing of more than 100 school children in Minab and the deaths of many more civilians in subsequent weeks. Though the email of course makes no mention of killing, it implicitly invites faculty, students, and staff to support the kind of reach-across-the-globe military violence that inevitably destroys innocent lives. To put it any other way amounts to moral self-deception.
Analysis is needed to explain how we've gotten to this point. I've done that sort of thing before. I've written about NC State's addiction to tobacco money, its multi-million-dollar deal with the National Security Administration, and its ties with criminal corporations. Administrators and their political backers putting the university's snout into the trough of military funding could be analyzed in the same ways: as the result of cuts in funding from general state revenues, of the nationalist ideologies in which Americans are steeped, of amoral careerism, of bureaucratic structures that let people separate intentions from consequences and thus join in causing great harms—holocausts, genocides, wars. A thorough analysis would consider all of these causes, and more.
But do we need more analysis right now, or are the results in? The facts are as I have stated them. No one should begrudge further good-faith interpretation of these facts and what they imply. Analysis, in this sense, has no end; it is the perpetual motion machine of academia. For now, however, I have reached a point where all I can do is stand as an appalled witness. I speak simply to profess—not to untangle any sociological mysteries but to make a public statement of conscience.
I believe universities should exist to freely create and transmit knowledge useful to all peoples; to promote peace based on rational discourse; and to develop understandings of our common humanity across the divisions created to foster elite domination. I am thus appalled when universities are suborned into service of an imperial state. To use universities in this way is a betrayal of the enlightenment values that make universities humane institutions. It is a revolting reduction of universities to instruments of nationalism and resource control, for the benefit of those who have captured the reins of the state.
I am further appalled at the violence this entails, and at how this violence is obscured or normalized. The NC State email from which I quoted earlier cheerfully asks us to align the university with "national priorities"—set by whom?—by building our research infrastructure in the areas of defense and security. And for what? To make the venal and powerful—the capitalist class or, as some have taken to calling it, the Epstein class—more powerful, if necessary by destroying the lives and infrastructure of others. To this, I object.
I object, too, to the hypocrisy of conducting this violence-abetting work behind the veil of liberal values, while the violence is perpetrated at a distance, so far away that it is hard to see the links between research done for the Department of Defense or military contractors, illegal wars of aggression, and dead schoolchildren. To refuse to see these links is not merely head-in-the-sand hypocrisy; it is rank dishonesty hidden inside an institutional shell that claims the pursuit of truth to be its distinctly virtuous mission.
North Carolina State University is just an example, and no special villain. The big leaguers at the military trough are MIT, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Maryland. To the extent that these institutions claim greater prestige—based on touting humane values and scientific achievements—their hypocrisy is all the more rank. To the extent that these institutions help to legitimate war-making research at less prestigious institutions like NC State—pretending it is compatible with freedom, equality, and democracy—the damage they do is all the worse.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich argues that the psychic force driving fascism is repressed sexuality. As a social psychologist trained in sociology, I never put much stock in this argument. Most of what conduces to participation in collective acts of destruction can be traced to culture and social organization. Yet I think Reich was right when he said, looking back at the 1930s, "While we presented the masses with superb historical analyses and economic treatises on the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler stirred the deepest roots of their emotional being." Critical intellectuals offer similar analyses today. But if at the end of analysis we can't connect to our own emotional being—the part of us that stands appalled and says, No, enough!—those analyses will wither without effect, as they too often have in the past.
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Can Prospects for Nuclear War Get Any Worse? Sure, We Can Put AI in Charge
How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows.
Apr 05, 2026
Can we possibly get away from AI’s ubiquitous presence in our lives? But as long as AI is now in our faces 24/7, it’s time to seriously start pushing back about its outsized and overwhelming influence. Troubling stories tumble out of the media daily. Employees in a major fast-food chain must now wear AI headsets that tell them how friendly they’re being to customers and coaching them on their work. (AI is now posing as our servant, but in the years ahead will the dynamic be reversed?)
And then there is the looming data center controversy, with Big Tech companies rapidly taking over huge swaths of land across the US to build massive and environmentally unfriendly data centers. Fortunately, this trend is now emerging as a campaign issue given early and cascading effects on electricity prices. In general, AI is having a tough year in the court of public opinion. Witness this cover story in a recent issue of Time magazine: “The People vs AI.” The article noted that “a growing cross section of the public—from MAGA loyalists to Democratic socialists, pastors to policymakers, nurses to filmmakers—agree on at least one thing: AI is moving too fast…. A 2025 Pew poll found… the public thinks AI will worsen our ability to think creatively, form meaningful relationships, and make difficult decisions.” Along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement-related pushback, a spontaneous wellspring of grassroots activism appears to be bubbling up against the AI juggernaut and the patently undemocratic backdoor power grab by technocrats and the companies behind them.
One of the greatest concerns in the public sphere is AI’s rapid incorporation into present and future military campaigns. This is actively being encouraged by the Trump administration’s decision to give AI companies free reign to develop their products with minimal regulation and oversight. This is an existential train wreck waiting to happen, and it came into striking focus in the monthslong dispute between AI company Anthropic and the Pentagon. Although it was already using the Claude platform, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was unhappy with the company’s refusal to use it to remove human decision-making from military operations and support accelerated mass surveillance of US citizens.
Anthropic’s move was that rarity in Big Tech circles, a strong and principled ethical stand against an administration that doesn’t seem to know what that is. Happy warrior Hegseth then branded the company as a “supply chain risk,” effectively banning further use by the Pentagon and punishing the company’s overall viability in the non-defense marketplace as well. Ever the opportunist, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, then jumped in to offer his AI platform to do what Anthropic wouldn’t. The matter is now in the courts.
Handing AI the “Nuclear Football”
Using AI to create what are called autonomous systems represents a quantum leap in the rapidly advancing business of modern weaponry. Paradoxically, weapons technology is being simultaneously downsized through the use of drones and smaller and sophisticated high-tech devices (such as mine sniffers) and upsized with the use of the AI systems designed to manage and control them.
This raises the very troubling picture of wars being conducted without much human oversight. It’s probably one reason even high- profile AI influencers and Big Tech CEOs have admitted (sometimes a little too casually) that the technology could destroy humanity given the right set of circumstances. While autonomous systems can apply to stand-alone weapons such as killer robots, the most worrying concern relates to the Pentagon’s desire to build and deploy command-and-control systems that remove military officers from the split-second decisions that need to be made in warfare. And yes, that includes nuclear weapons.
If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet.
How quickly is the Pentagon moving toward handing the nuclear keys over to AI systems and Big Tech? No one really knows. When questioned by a reporter on the matter, one senior official in the Trump administration weakly demurred, “The administration supports the need to maintain human control over nuclear weapons.”
AI experts and strategic thinkers say that a big driver of this process is that America’s top nuclear adversaries—Russia and China—are already using AI in their command-and-control systems. These developments are happening at lightning speed and are being further propelled by Epic Fury, the first AI-fueled war in US history. And let’s not be too laudatory about Anthropic. Its Claude system has been integrated with Palantir’s Maven to identify military targets. The Pentagon is still investigating whether Maven played any part in the horrific event when a US Tomahawk missile struck a girls’ elementary school killing more than 165.
Sleepwalking Into Armageddon?
What madness is this? By what shallow calculus can a handful of powerful individuals or shadowy organizations decide or even risk the fate of humanity? How do we put all of this dangerous thinking at the highest levels of our government into some kind of perspective that correlates with common sense and basic human decency? In our trajectory toward what some have called techno-feudalism, we have this apparent plunge into barbarity coupled with a powerful array of tools to accelerate it. When nuclear activist Helen Caldicott warned that Western civilization is “sleepwalking into Armageddon,” it was perhaps this particular kind of blindness that she had in mind. And the brilliant socio-biologist E.O. Wilson’s profound observation also springs to mind: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous.”
The rush to deploy AI as large-scale weaponry with every bit as much destructive potential as our existing nuclear arsenal is a tip off to the deeper motivations behind its development. In the meantime, some obvious questions need to be asked. Why aren’t government and academic institutions eager to apply these advanced AI tools to the many intractable problems that characterize world polycrisis such as global climate change or better distribution of scarce resources including food and water? Where are the urgent calls from those who serve in Congress to do so? Or why don’t we see headlines like “Harvard Inaugurates $100 Million AI Project to Address Climate Change”?
It seems pretty clear that AI justifications coming from the both the administration and Congress (not to mention that the establishment commentariat that serves them) invariably gravitate to enhancing corporate productivity or military use. And it’s equally clear that AI will also serve as yet another powerful mechanism of wealth transfer to the 1% and either knowingly or unknowingly act as a chaos agent in an increasingly unstable multipolar geopolitical world. If AI is truly as superintelligent (and sentient) as its Big Tech proponents claim it is, then these systems should also be smart enough to refuse to participate in any projects that could degrade or destroy life on the planet. I don’t see any evidence of this. Sadly, it looks like we may have to once again learn the hard way that information, knowledge, and wisdom all are very different things. And that while knowledge can be appropriated by powerful computers, wisdom will never be.
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Trump's Abandonment of Climate Regulation Proves His Is Not a Legitimate Government
The US government is refusing to fulfill its fundamental obligation to protect public health and safety at home, and showing open disdain for the lives and well-being of people worldwide.
Apr 05, 2026
The White House recently announced what might be its most brazen attack on climate science yet. Roughlyo months ago, the administration rolled out plans to repeal the federal government’s “Endangerment Finding”—essentially, its authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants.
This 2009 finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined that the increase in public health and safety risks caused by climate change—such as extreme heat, wildfire smoke, ozone pollution, and catastrophic weather events such as hurricanes and flooding—justified regulating greenhouse gases as pollutants.
That’s the legal underpinning for everything from vehicle fuel economy standards to the requirement for power plants and factories to measure and report their emissions. Since 2009, the scientific basis for these rules has only grown stronger. This is borne out by successive studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative global climate science institution.
The most recent report by the IPCC working group assessing the state of knowledge on climate science, a collaboration of 234 prominent scientists from across the world, found overwhelming evidence that the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land have warmed rapidly since the start of the industrial era—and that the warming is attributable to emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases.
The regime’s decision wasn’t driven solely by ignorance or stupidity. Fossil fuel oligarchs have essentially bribed the president (in response to his open solicitation, no less), and penetrated the highest ranks of government.
Another IPCC working group, consisting of 330 of the world’s leading scientists, found that more frequent and severe weather and climate extremes attributable to climate change, such as heatwaves on land and on oceans, droughts, and wildfires, have already resulted in “widespread adverse impacts” on “ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure.”
In recent years, other studies have found that climate change made many severe weather events in the US and across the world likelier and more destructive, including Hurricanes Helene and Milton in the US in 2024, deadly flooding in Pakistan and a record-breaking heatwave in Iceland and Greenland in 2025, and devastating flooding in Southern Africa earlier this year.
The Trump regime has attempted to counter this overwhelming body of rigorous, peer-reviewed science with government-sponsored misinformation. It has published a report written by five handpicked scientists, purporting to show that there is too much uncertainty about human-caused climate change. Large numbers of scientists from a wide variety of disciplines have condemned this report as methodologically flawed and relying on cherry-picked evidence, and have provided a detailed rebuttal.
In typical fashion, however, the Trump regime has ignored mountains of incontrovertible evidence to race ahead with repealing the Endangerment Finding, giving themselves a legal fig leaf for their actions to enable expansion of polluting industries and dismantle environmental protections.
This is a direct attack on communities throughout the country who have lost their loved ones, their homes, and their livelihoods because of fossil-fueled wildfires, storms, and floods, and communities who will inevitably suffer similar disasters as a consequence of the regime’s refusal to address the threat of climate change.
It’s also an attack on communities experiencing, or increasingly likely to experience, similar disasters worldwide. It is nothing short of a declaration of war against humanity.
The regime’s decision wasn’t driven solely by ignorance or stupidity. Fossil fuel oligarchs have essentially bribed the president (in response to his open solicitation, no less), and penetrated the highest ranks of government. They’re getting the policy outcomes they want, enriching themselves at the expense of people and the planet.
The US government is refusing to fulfill its fundamental obligation to protect public health and safety at home, and showing open disdain for the lives and well-being of people worldwide. This is occurring in the broader context of a government that is practically at war with its own population, flagrantly violating basic human rights in pursuit of an extremist ideological agenda.
A government that refuses to fulfill its most basic responsibilities even as it assaults citizens and knowingly exposes people worldwide to serious harm is not a legitimate government. Governments worldwide need to recognize this reality, and do everything in their power to protect their own people, and stand up for human rights in the US.
This op-ed may be republished with attribution to InsideSources.com.
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Tax the Rich Across the Land!
And there's not just one way to make sure the wealthy are paying their fair share. Two bold proposals have been introduced in the last few weeks that should be celebrated and supported.
Apr 05, 2026
How can the U.S. reverse democracy-distorting concentrations of wealth and power? A federal annual wealth tax must be part of the equation.
The richest 0.1 percent — the top one-thousandth of households, who are all worth over $50 million — have seen their wealth surge since the beginning of the 2020 Covid Pandemic. U.S. billionaires have seen their wealth double since 2019, with the top 19 U.S. billionaires adding $1 trillion to their wealth in 2024 alone.
Politicians and the public are waking up to the disruptive impact of billionaires, as chronicled in my recent book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. But most policy prescriptions fall short of truly addressing the accumulated wealth and power of the richest 0.1 percent.
While Congress was busy passing an enormous tax cut for the ultra-wealthy, campaigners from Massachusetts to Washington State have put forward several state-level “millionaire taxes” that are essential ways for states to build fairer tax systems with or without federal participation.
Hiking top income tax rates collects more revenue from the “working rich” — those with high incomes like doctors, lawyers, and CEOs. Those with substantial asset wealth have found countless ways to play shell games and reduce their income taxes, including their capital gains tax burden. (Ray Madoff’s new book, The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made An American Aristocracy, covers their crafty avoidance mechanisms).
California’s proposed emergency one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires is the boldest of the state initiatives. It has the vulnerability of any progressive state level policy: The global billionaire class moves their money around the planet into tax havens that compete for business. Even mere threats billionaires make that they’ll move have rattled state voters. (It’s important to note that post-millionaire’s-tax Massachusetts has seen notably low attrition — there was some bluffing going on.)
There is no taxation silver bullet because America’s wealthy hire phalanxes of “wealth defense industry” attorneys and money managers with ample tax avoidance tools at their disposal. (See my book The Wealth Hoarders for more.)
The U.S. needs an “ecosystem” of tax reforms including patches to the income tax, a robust inheritance tax (to replace the porous estate tax), and meaningful oversight enforcement — so billionaires can’t wriggle their way past borders to avoid paying their fair share.
An essential cornerstone of reducing extreme wealth inequality is a federal annual wealth tax with severe penalties for billionaires that renounce their citizenship to avoid taxation. Two bold proposals have been introduced in the last few weeks that should be celebrated and supported.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have introduced the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act” that would levy a 5 percent wealth tax on households with over $1 billion, mirroring the California billionaire tax initiative at the federal level. The tax would raise an estimated $4.4 trillion over ten years, though the conservative Tax Foundation estimates avoidance will reduce the revenue to closer to $3.3 trillion. The tax proposal invests 1 percent of revenue in strengthening enforcement and levies a 60 percent “exit tax” on billionaires renouncing their U.S. citizenship.
The bill includes a number of popular provisions including a $3,000 direct payment to every person earning less than $150,000 a year, in the first year (or $12,000 for a family of four). Other provisions include a reversal of Trump budget cuts to Medicaid, expanded health coverage, investments in affordable housing, and a minimum salary of $60,000 for all public school teachers.
Senator Elizabeth Warren has reintroduced an updated version of her 2021 “Ultra-Millionaire Tax”, with lead House sponsors Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA). This proposal would levy a 2 percent annual wealth tax on households and trusts valued at over $50 million. It would add an additional 1 percent annual surtax on wealth and trusts over $1 billion.
While Sanders-Khanna wealth tax would focus entirely on the estimated 950 U.S. billionaires, the Warren tax proposal would levy taxes on the wealthiest 260,000 households, excluding 99.85 percent of taxpayers. The Warren wealth tax would raise an estimated $6.2 trillion over ten years. As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, “Inequality has boomed so much in the 2020s that a 2 percent wealth tax on multimillionaires initially introduced in 2021 would yield more than twice as much revenue today.”
The revamped Warren-Jayapal-Boyle proposal responds to the aggressive tax avoidance by the wealthy and their “wealth defense industry” enablers, which our disinvested oversight systems struggle to respond to. The legislators suggest levying taxes on wealth in trusts and assets held offshore, and modernizing the IRS to better catch evasion and track complex asset valuations of the ultra-rich. The proposal also includes a 40 percent “exit tax” on multi-millionaires and billionaires that renounce their U.S. citizenship.
While the revenue is not earmarked, the cosponsors of the legislation envision massive investments in affordable housing, universal childcare, expanded Medicare eligibility, and tuition-free community college.
| Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) | Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) | |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Tax | Ultra-Millionaire Tax |
| Who they tax | 5% annual wealth tax on assets over $1 billion | 2% tax on every dollar over $50m and additional 1% tax (total 3%) on every dollar over a net worth over $1 billion |
| What is being taxed | Entire stock of wealth over the $1 billion | “All household assets held anywhere in the world will be included in the net worth measurement, including residences, closely held business, assets held in trust, retirement assets, assets held by minor children, and personal property with a value of $50,000 or more.” |
| Number of Households Taxed | 938 billionaire households | 260,000 households |
| Revenue Estimate | $4.4 trillion over 10 years | $6.2 trillion over 10 years |
| Benefits & Investments | -$3,000 direct payment to every person making less than $150,000 annually ($12,000 family of 4) in the first year, in subsequent years allocation can be adjusted -Reverse “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts to Medicaid and ACC -Expand Medicare to include dental, vision, and hearing for seniors -Build and rehab 7 million affordable homes -7% of income cap on childcare expenses for families -$60,000 minimum salary for all public school teachers -Increase accessibility for seniors and people with disabilities to home health under Medicaid | -Universal, affordable childcare -Build millions of new homes -Slash child poverty by expanding the Child Tax Credit -Lower the Medicare eligibility age to 55 -Universal paid family leave -Tuition-free community college |
| Guardrails & Exit Taxes | -1% of revenue to the IRS for enforcement -Adjusts rules for governing grantor trusts and fights -Imposes a 60% tax on taxable net wealth for taxpayers who expatriate | -“Valuing assets for the purposes of the Ultra-Millionaire Tax will provide an opportunity to tighten and expand upon existing valuation rules for the estate tax… close loopholes and develop new valuation rules as needed” -Increased IRS enforcement budget -Minimum audit rate for Ultra-Millionaire taxpayers -Set a 40% “exit tax” of net wealth over $50m to US citizens that renounce citizenship. Plus a third-party reporting system that adds to tax information exchange agreements already in existence |
Both these wealth tax proposals expand the national conversation and vision about what is possible if we tax oligarchic concentrations of wealth and power. They don’t seek to break up big fortunes as an end in and of itself — they directly outline the abundant opportunities and benefits Americans could reap from more revenue.
It’s almost certain that taxing wealth will be at the heart of 2028 presidential election discourse. The policy is incredibly popular across political parties and feels like common sense to hundreds of millions of people across the nation. Those who oppose new taxes should consider why they’re so out of step — and get on board fast.
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