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Opinion
Words Are the First Weapon of War
The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized.
Oct 18, 2025
I sit here at my desk, looking out the window—and see someone walking through the parking lot. This is the most ordinary of moments. I shrug quietly. Life goes on.
My impulse is to stop writing the column here. That’s it. Nothing more to say. Life is totally fine and civilized and I’m here in the middle of it, growing old but giving no thought whatsoever to the darkness that lurks at humanity’s margins. Sure, the news covers that stuff, but what do I care? Things are fine where I live.
But the darkness tugs. I read the news. I know that hell consumes parts of the planet and certain lives have no safety—no value—whatsoever. Here’s a recent New York Times headline, as ordinary as the fact that someone was walking through the parking lot outside my window:
“U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says.”
Well, so what? They were transporting drugs. “The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects...”
To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them.
Minor news, right? But consider the complexity of the context that emerges from these words. The story is critical of President Donald Trump for bombing boats and claiming without evidence that they were transporting drugs meant to be sold to Americans. But there’s a quiet assumption here. By making the point that this was not a war zone, the story quietly leaves the assumption hanging that if it were a war zone—and the boat had been carrying officially declared American enemies—well, that would be a different matter.
War itself is unchallenged and accepted—certainly by the mainstream media (whatever is left of it). And also by the collective American, and perhaps global, norm. And here’s the problem. War is a 50-50 deal: There’s a good side and a bad side. And if you’re on the good side, the war you wage is just. That means you have the moral leeway to kill whomever you want... excuse me, “must.” This includes children.
But “permission to kill” is psychologically—indeed, spiritually—complex. It requires a further step, one that lets us off the hook from our own inner moral sensibility: We’re all humans. We are deeply alike. We are one.
The way around this emotional difficulty is simple: Dehumanize the enemy! It happens virtually automatically, as soon as a particular group is declared the enemy, i.e., “them.” But it requires linguistic assistance: The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Now it’s a weapon. Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized. Language is the initial weapon of war, and is an indispensable tool of those who wage it.
Indeed, dehumanization exists almost as though it’s part of who we are. I believe with all my heart that it is not part of the human DNA, but it sure seems to act like it is. To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them. We can just dismiss them.
Welcome to racism. Welcome to ethnicity. Welcome to borders, both political and religious. Welcome to us vs. them—the hole in the human heart.
In my lifetime, here in the USA—in the wake of World War II—the primary way to dehumanize someone, at home as well as abroad, was to declare them a communist. The term had instant power. Every leftist was a commie. They were taking over Hollywood, not to mention Washington. They were under our beds! Because of the existence of nuclear weapons, America’s powers-that-be wisely avoided going to war with the Soviet Union or China, but we nonetheless had the wherewithal to create the military-industrial complex here at home and engage in proxy wars, killing a few million people and, oh yeah, intensifying our long-term, unacknowledged war on Planet Earth itself.
Another dehumanization term that emerged from those wars was “collateral damage”—a unique form of dehumanization. Those who were collateral damage were not necessarily our enemies, just people in the vicinity of the just war we were waging. They were merely in the way. But the term did its job. It took the humanity away from anyone our bombs unintentionally eliminated and turned them into scrap metal at a junkyard.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, however... uh oh, now what? The communists were done with, but we still needed an enemy! Governing is so much harder without one. Enter the terrorists, our primo enemy of the last couple decades and a word with enormous potency. For instance, anyone who criticizes Israel for killing 70,000 Palestinians (or far, far more than that) is both pro-terrorist and antisemitic. The flotilla trying to bring food to Gaza is a terrorist operation.
And then, closer to home, we have the “illegals”—aliens, wetbacks—who are not just fleeing poverty and crossing the border into the USA, but invading it. Looks like we’ve got another war on our hands, folks.
I’m not worried about the guy I saw walking through the parking lot a little while ago, but what if he looked like an invader? Hey, ICE...
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Democrats Have Let Republicans Become the 'Peace' Party
Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Oct 18, 2025
When President Donald Trump announced that he had helped broker an end to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, it marked the achievement of a goal many anti-war activists had been struggling toward for two years. Few were bothered by the fact that it was Trump who ultimately presided over the cessation of violence; the goal was always to end the bombing, by any means possible. Whether this deal amounts to a lasting end to violence in the region is all but certain; already, Israel has attacked and killed Palestinians in an apparent breach of the agreement’s terms. But, with a hostage swap underway, there is some reason to believe that this merciless, apocalyptic phase of the genocide in Gaza is coming to an end. As this fragile “ceasefire” takes hold, it is worth considering what this apparent diplomatic success means for Trump, his foreign policy going forward, and for his opposition.
For his part, Trump has long telegraphed his yearning to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As with any policy he pursues, the ends are always self-serving, and this latest round of peacemaking is no different. After his apparent success in Palestine, Trump has already announced his intent to broker a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine, ending another conflict that dogged his predecessor, Joe Biden. It is unlikely that Trump is earnestly committed to an anti-war legacy (see, for example, his illegal and outrageous attempts to draw Venezuela into open conflict). Rather, Trump is eager to shore up his image as a president who can end seemingly intractable conflicts. That Biden fumbled his handling of both Gaza and Ukraine so badly is just more inspiration for Trump to succeed where his nemesis failed.
Whether Trump can bring an end to the fighting in Ukraine before his term ends is an open question. His newfound enthusiasm for peacemaking, though, leaves his opposition, the Democrats, in a quandary. Biden’s term as president coincided with the onset of the two military conflicts that have come to dominate the 2020s, in Ukraine and Gaza. In both cases, Democrats, and much of the Republican establishment too, quickly lined up behind the US’ nominal allies: Israel and Ukraine. As the conflicts dragged on, though, a strain of isolationist skepticism provided an off-ramp for many Republicans, exemplified by members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). By the time Trump’s 2024 campaign was off the ground, he was running on ending the war in Ukraine, even promising, with typical Trump bombast, to do so within his first 24 hours in office.
Meanwhile, Biden and other Democratic leaders were doubling down on their support for prolonging both conflicts. In Ukraine, Democrats repeatedly advocated for and voted to approve the shipment of weapons, even as the US’ own internal assessments were dubious about Ukraine’s chances for success. By 2024, unfaltering support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s army had become largely identified with the Democrats, while Republicans dithered.
The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties.
And then there was Gaza. As Democratic Party leaders pledged undying fealty to Israel, the party’s base began to sour on US complicity in the wanton slaughter playing out in Gaza. While more international bodies confirmed that Israel’s onslaught there met the criteria for genocide, the Biden administration was unstinting in its support. Heading into 2024, signs mounted that Biden’s reelection bid (and, subsequently, Kamala Harris’ campaign) were threatened by constituents’ discontent over the administration’s Israel policy. Despite the gathering storm clouds, the party could not bring itself to depart from its initial hard-line support, even going as far as to bar a Palestinian-American speaker from its 2024 convention floor.
The massive disconnect between the Democratic Party’s leadership and its base is sure to have ramifications far beyond last year’s election. Recent polling has revealed that just 8% of Democratic voters are supportive of Israel’s “military action” in Gaza; meanwhile, just 55 of the 214 Democratic representatives in Congress (only 26%) support a bill to halt weapons shipments to Israel. The dealignment between Democrats’ base and elected leadership on this issue could hardly be more stark.
Now, Trump has succeeded where Biden failed in bringing some measure of peace to the region. The risk to Democrats is not so much that Trump will woo more Democratic constituents to the Republican Party—Trump’s authoritarian tendencies at home and his vile persecution of all perceived political enemies largely foreclose that possibility. The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties. Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Some Democrats seem to understand what a dire bind the party has put itself in. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), for example, recently sounded the alarm about Democrats ceding the “anti-war” mantle to Republicans and Trump. Others, like Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), have put this opposition to war-making into legislation, authoring the aforementioned Block the Bombs Act.
But, for the Democrats to truly turn the ship around, many more elected representatives will have to follow in the footsteps of Khanna and Ramirez. If the party cannot quickly change its tune on war and peace, it may risk ceding this policy terrain to the Republican Party well into the future.
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On Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Militarism
As the forces of fascism and neoliberalism threaten our freedom and our most basic human rights, the imperative is to insist on respect for our dignity, for constitutional democracy, and for the rule of legitimate law.
Oct 18, 2025
As an anti-Zionist Jew born in 1946 my understandings of authoritarianism are rooted in lessons from the Nazi Holocaust and World War II. Two books were especially important to me, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and her fellow philosopher Karl Jaspers On the Question of German Guilt. But there was more, from Arthur Koestler to Milovan Djilas. Essential to Arendt’s analysis of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union were her understandings of the central roles played by fear, terror, and ideology, all designed to destroy individuality. This led to interpersonal atomization and isolation and totalitarian control of society. Essential to these processes is the assault on and manipulation of truth.
These dynamics are all at play today in the United States, as they are in China, and Russia. A friend of mine put it this way. We are dealing with very powerful and aggressive fascist forces, but the US is not yet fascist.
Fortunately, there is broad popular, legal, academic, and media resistance to President Donald Trump and MAGA fascism. But it is also true that I could be arrested and tried as a “terrorist” if what I have to say here is misinterpreted as anti-Americanism, rather than as the affirmations of constitutional democracy, the Enlightenment, and human rights.
In 1787 Benjamin Franklin, one of the authors of the US experiment in democracy, was asked, "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Two and a half centuries later billionaire kleptocratic autocrats are on the offensive, among them Trump, whose father was in the Ku Klux Klan, as well as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, whose worldviews were forged by African apartheid.
Reading and listening to our daily news has become painful, even when it doesn’t include deepfake propaganda from the White House press room.
The Trump-MAGA rise and seizure of power is the consequence of at least four powerful forces: 1) unresolved racism whose origins lie in the country’s original sin of slavery; 2) the loss of Roosevelt-Johnson New Deal values combined with neoliberal greed and the technological and structural changes that allowed the creation of the billionaire class and growing economic inequality; 3) corruptions of the Democratic Party that date from President Bill Clinton and earlier; and 4) the debilitating and lost endless post-Cold War imperial wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere that along with the rise of China and the Global South accelerated the decline of the United States and the West.
If you want a historical analogy, think in terms of German disillusion and dislocations that followed their World War I defeat, the Versailles Treaty which inflicted staggering inflation and poverty in Germany, and the power of historic antisemitic and Nazi ideologies.
In the US we speak of the Trump-MAGA regime “flooding the zone”: Illegal and unconstitutional assaults come at us faster than we can track or respond to them. Over the past 40 years our Supreme Court has been stacked with extreme right-wing ideologues, and Republicans in Congress have given up on holding the executive branch accountable, fearing that they will lose their status and privileges as they opportunistically click their heels in response to each nationally destructive Trump demand. There is a reason that our massive and smaller rallies across the country have been mobilized under the slogan “No Kings!
As I said, I could be prosecuted for what I say here. Many of us are now working to understand the implications of and to respond as necessary to a “little-noticed national security directive that identifies 'anti-Christian’ and ‘anti-American' views as indicators of radical left violence.” NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political violence,” directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to take action against "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;… extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality."
Reading and listening to our daily news has become painful, even when it doesn’t include deepfake propaganda from the White House press room. On a daily basis we read or hear about the government’s illegal and unconscionable actions. Innocent immigrants, and sometimes even citizens, kidnapped from our streets, from their homes and workplaces by masked Gestapo-like police in Trump-MAGA, white-nationalist ethnic cleansing. The Supreme Court has authorized racial profiling by the police, and as a result my Latino grandson, who is a citizen, lives with fear of being arrested, incarcerated, maybe even being sent to a concentration camp or far-off country. And the former FBI director and New Your attorney general have been indicted for lack of loyalty and for attempting to hold Trump accountable for a few of his many crimes.
The writers George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut, and the historian Howard Zinn, wrote that if we don’t know our history, we cannot be free. Now, in the tradition of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Viktor Orban, our press faces constant threats and restrictions and is subject to deepfake videos. Not unlike German universities, museums, and industry in the 1930s and 40s, Trump is now requiring our institutions of higher learning to align with MAGA ideology. Priority funding will go to universities, like the University of Texas, which revise their curricula, including any criticism of conservative ideas, and hire faculty to align with MAGA commitments. References to diversity, equity, and inclusion are being banned from universities, workplaces, and even the military. Thus, the history of slavery and the struggles for justice are being literally whitewashed, with curricula rewritten, books vanishing from libraries. And even photographs of brutally abused slaves removed from some museums.
Beyond history, the president, who once recommended injecting cleaning agents including bleach to overcome Covid-19, has unleashed a war on science, blocking billions of dollars needed for research and unleashing his anti-vaxxer Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. against our health systems and against our very lives.
Stupids In Charge
They say that history does not repeat itself but it can rhyme. Recently reading about Charles De Gaulle, I found that during his first term as French head of state he humiliated a member of his cabinet, saying, “I chose the most stupid man because I thought he would be the most loyal.” Bingo! The Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman put it succinctly. We are being ruled by an “autocracy of dunces.”
Three weeks ago, and at enormous expense, Trump and his secretary of defense, a former TV personality who has installed a makeup room in the Pentagon and sports a Christian Crusader tattoo to advertise his commitments, ordered 800 generals and admirals from around the world to assemble at a Marine base in Virginia. The gathering’s purpose was a deeply held secret, arousing fears that like other banana republics, our military would be required to pledge loyalty to Trump not the Constitution.
Instead, with obvious displeasure they endured embarrassing, racist, and rambling bloviation from the Commander in Chief. Trump’s incoherence was so unhinged that it raised questions about possible invocation of the 25th Amendment that provides for the removal of an incapacitated president. The generals and admirals had to sit through a soliloquy about how presidents should walk to avoid falling, condemnations of fat, and disregard for racial and gender equality. Still more disturbing, the president urged the military to use Trump’s accelerating troop deployments to US cities as training grounds “to fight the enemy within”—understood to mean urban communities of color. This was followed with brutal and dehumanizing effect in Chicago and a warning from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker that the deployments are being made in part to seize ballot boxes during our 2026 midterm elections.
The day after the assembly of generals and admirals, in an example of the Trump-MAGA primacy of fascism over morale, the Pentagon moved to instill fear among 5,000 of its most senior officers and employees. They are now required to sign nondisclosure agreements and will be subject to random polygraph tests, to confirm their loyalty to Trump and prevent embarrassing leaks.
Militarism
Our headlines have been full of what we can read between the lines will prove to be the failures of Trump’s Middle East grand bargain and his smash and grab threats to seize Panama, Greenland, Venezuela, and Gaza’s beaches. But allow me two frameworks to illuminate the most dangerous tensions and rising militarism.
With the post-Cold War era now history, we have faced an increasingly dangerous time reminiscent of the years leading to World War I. We have a Thucydides trap of rising and declining powers, a dynamic that has often led to catastrophic wars. We have arms races with new technologies, complex and uncertain alliance structures, intense economic competition and integration, growing nationalism, territorial disputes, and wild card actors from Trump and Putin to Taiwan’s Lai Ching-te and Britain’s Nigel Farage.
Compounding these dynamics is the Ukraine War which is in fact a war between Putin and the West over Europe’s future, and which still carries the danger of escalation to nuclear war. No longer contained to the Ukrainian borderlands, drones that threaten airports and infrastructure compound fear that is driving increasing military preparations, spending, and operations across almost all of Western Europe.
My second frame of reference comes from a Chilean Methodist minister who was imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship and was later exiled to the United States. At a meeting of US peace movement organizers in the 1980s, he was asked, “When do you know if you have a military government?” His answer: “Look at your national budget.”
While it is difficult to mobilize people and actions for abstractions, it is past time to revive the call for Common Security. It can serve as a model for mutual aid, justice, and equality within our societies.
In the US, more than half of national government discretionary spending is devoted to the military and to military-related institutions like the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and so on. With that budget now exceeding a trillion dollars and totaling 40% of world military spending—not counting its leading role in arms sales—US military spending is greater than Russia and China’s combined. This while despite ostensible Trump-MAGA “America First” commitments, our educational, health, and social welfare services are being slashed and all lag behind those of the most advanced nations.
China, which has been modernizing its military spending for the past 30 years and now rivals US power in the western Pacific, is responsible for just 12% of world military spending while it produces four times more engineers every year than the US does. Despite its imperial intrusions in the South China Sea, with some success Beijing advertises itself as a stabilizing force in the era of Trumpian turmoil and dangers.
Long ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower wisely warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, whose tentacles subvert democracy. Members of Congress are not only lobbied by the Pentagon and by major military contractors, they are also expected to bring military profits and jobs to their districts and states. Failing to bring home military pork can spell the end of a political career. And this militarism permeates our schools, sports, and even the arts. Thus, military Keynesianism has long been a driving force of the US political economy, and it appears that Germany and others in Europe are about to adopt this dangerous and corrupting model.
Of course, the US is not the only power or nation with a military-industrial complex. With the rise of China, we are now three scorpions in the nuclear bottle. In addition to Ukraine, the most dangerous potential nuclear flashpoint is Taiwan, where the Chinese government remains committed to finish the nation’s civil war via reunification with what it perceives to be a rebel province. Meanwhile the US Congress, the Taiwan Relations Act, and the US Seventh Fleet are resolved—possibly with nuclear weapons—to reinforce US Asia-Pacific hegemony by defending the island’s democracy and de facto, if not de jure, independence.
And as we learned from this year’s India-Pakistan War, the danger of nuclear war which could lead to global cooling and deaths by starvation of up to 2 billion people is not limited to the greatest nuclear powers. And in an era of cyber warfare, AI technologies, and preparations for total war, military and imperial power depends on more than bullets, bombs, missiles, and numbers of armed soldiers.
Europe, we must acknowledge, finds itself between a rock and a hard place, between NATO and the increasingly autocratic and greedy United States on one side, and on the other, a Russia whose response to NATO expansion was the invasion of Ukraine and its call for the roll back of NATO from former Soviet republics.
Neither subservient kowtowing to Trump’s 5% demand for NATO spending increases nor ambitions to create a parallel or independent European superpower are the answers. Like the US trading the welfare state for the warfare state will result in growing economic insecurities that further open the way for the fascist and neo-Nazi right, as we see in Germany, Britain, and elsewhere in Europe. Spain, with its refusal to increase military spending, provides a far better model.
At the most basic level, as the forces of fascism and neoliberalism threaten our freedom and our most basic human rights, the imperative is to insist on respect for our dignity, for constitutional democracy, and for the rule of legitimate law. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valleys of authoritarianism, deceit, and militarism, to the sunlit path of justice and peace. Now is the time to lift our nations from the quicksands of brutality and injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
And, while it is difficult to mobilize people and actions for abstractions, it is past time to revive the call for Common Security. It can serve as a model for mutual aid, justice, and equality within our societies. It was the paradigm with which the Cold War ended even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and which served as the basis for the first years of the post-Cold War order. Common Security achieves peace through strategic empathy, recognition of the fears and insecurities our actions engender in other nations and respect for the truism that we cannot win security against our rivals. Security is only through the sometimes demanding diplomacy that addresses and resolves fears on all sides. This applies to Israelis and Palestinians as much as it does to Americans, Russians, and Chinese.
Friends, we make our road by walking. I look forward to our journey which must include revitalization of the United Nations Charter order and renewed respect for international law and the full implementation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In Europe, it requires negotiation of a new regional security architecture. It means reinforcing the welfare, not the neoliberal warfare, state. Of necessity that would include a European nuclear weapons-free zone and a new Conventional Forces in Europe agreement. We have the outlines of an Indo-Pacific common security order with last year’s Indo-Pacific Common Security Report. And it means building on the International Peace Bureau’s appeal for Disarmament for Development.
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Trump’s National Security Agenda Puts 'We the People' in Its Crosshairs
From Venezuela to Chicago, Trump’s seizure of military powers puts us all at risk.
Oct 18, 2025
As the Trump administration edges closer to a full-scale, unauthorized war on Venezuela, and amidst reports that President Donald Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act to wield the military against the American people, we must assert limits to Trump’s war powers.
On October 8, 2025, the Senate nearly passed a resolution to block the US from blowing up more boats in the Caribbean. The War Powers resolution, led by Sens. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), failed by just three votes and follows revelations that the Trump administration secretly authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela. The administration still has not provided its legal justification or evidence supporting its repeated unlawful strikes on boats, which have killed at least 27 people so far. These startling developments are just the tip of the iceberg of Trump’s illegal abuses of wartime powers to enact his draconian agenda—in the process putting we, the people, in its crosshairs.
It’s almost impossible to list all of the ways in which the Trump administration has invoked “national security” as a means to achieve unilateral power and crush dissent. But there are a few standouts. In March this year, the Trump administration invoked an 18th-century wartime act in peacetime, targeting Venezuelan community members and disappearing them to a torture prison in El Salvador. It then defied court orders attempting to curb its unlawful actions. Simultaneously, the administration asserted that the wartime act allows it to search homes without a warrant and that it can deploy the military against certain civilians–we now know it’s delivered on the latter promise.
Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said he wants to suspend habeas corpus—the right to challenge unlawful imprisonment—for all immigrants. Guantánamo Bay is warehousing immigrants as Trump attempts to expand a “global gulag” for mass deportations. The federal government has also exploited laws rooted in anti-Palestinian racism to designate Latin American and Haitian cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and wants to lock up anyone opposed to the Trump agenda as “domestic terrorists”—all of this so the administration can silence, strip rights from, and wield its massive police powers against whatever community it sees fit.
Most people view the Japanese internment and racist post-9/11 policing of Muslim communities as stains on our country’s history. The Trump administration’s latest racist power grabs are no different, and are already harming communities across the country.
This isn’t as unprecedented as it may feel, though the sheer magnitude is alarming. Racist laws and policies in the US have long drawn lines to dictate who has rights and who does not. Eighty years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt invoked the 1798 wartime act during World War II to enable the government to detain and expel people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. Over 31,000 people were rounded up based on nationality and imprisoned in concentration camps, separating thousands of families. Raids, kidnapping, and incarceration of Japanese Americans soon followed–all justified in the name of national security.
Six decades later, the Bush administration used national security as cover for racist executive power grabs which defined the post-9/11 era. Congress passed laws and allocated billions to expand a national security apparatus that criminalized Muslim identity and political and religious expression. The Bush administration even attempted to suspend habeas corpus until the Supreme Court intervened.
Most people view the Japanese internment and racist post-9/11 policing of Muslim communities as stains on our country’s history. The Trump administration’s latest racist power grabs are no different, and are already harming communities across the country.
The administration has claimed power to deny fundamental rights to any community it decides is a threat—whether abroad, or at home. Already, residents of multiple cities are dealing with active military on their street corners. Adults and children are being snatched off the street in broad daylight, from the kidnappings of Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to the disappearances of a dozen people to South Sudan, to the attempted abduction of hundreds of Guatemalan children. Last month, the Supreme Court caved to the administration and green-lit racial profiling against Latinos by masked, violent, and sometimes deadly federal officers. People in towns and neighborhoods across the country are terrified to take their kids to school, travel to work, or sleep in their own apartments, all because the administration is misusing war powers to surveil, detain, and disappear anyone it wants, foreign or domestic.
Congress must exercise its power to rein in this unchecked executive. The Senate is poised to bring a new, bipartisan War Powers resolution, offering senators another, critical chance to block the administration's unlawful military strikes on civilians. The House should likewise move Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) or Rep. Jason Crow's (D-Colo.) similar War Powers resolution. Congress must also demand answers from the administration on its deadly, illegal attacks; stop funding its raids, deportation, and disappearance machines; and restore fundamental rights by passing laws like the Neighbors Not Enemies Act, which diminishes the executive’s power to mass deport or surveil.
Increased military force, whether in the Caribbean or in Chicago, are interlocking pieces in a horrifying puzzle of presidential overreach. A runaway executive, emboldened by the courts, is subjecting communities of color—and anyone it labels a threat—to a different set of rules. We’ve seen this play out before, and we know what’s at stake for ourselves and our neighbors. We must speak out, resist, and demand our elected officials refuse to fund or sanction the Trump administration’s naked power grabs before it’s too late.
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