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Abelardo de la Espriella’s young administration has enthusiastically embraced Washington’s interventionist security agenda while, like Trump in the US, advancing its own confrontational eradication campaign against progressive institutions and social movements.
The empty spaces inside Colombia’s National Museum in Bogotá offer a dramatic, if not painful introduction to its new, right-wing government. Several dozen objects related to the peace process with the M-19 rebel group; the historic 1991 Constitution; and mementos of social movements, LGBTQ rights, and other artifacts of the country’s complex history have disappeared from public view. Those objects included a Carlos Pizarro campaign poster, an armband from the political movement that emerged from the M-19’s demobilization, and the student ballot associated with the constituent process that produced the 1991 Constitution.
These histories record how Colombians previously excluded from national power fought to enter public life in a country governed for generations by a white, economically powerful, and politically exclusionary elite. Critics say removing them from the public view diminishes the evidence of that decades-long struggle. Museum anthropologist Andrés Góngora described it in El País as a “mutilated museum.”
The unexpected decommissioning of these items sparked a spontaneous citizen’s protest outside the museum in mid-October, where hundreds of angry people gathered with signs that read, “Poetry is necessary, military domination is not!” and “We’re artists, not terrorists.”
In both cases, political leaders claim authority to determine which historical interpretations belong in public institutions, a unilateral, authoritarian approach to erasing history.
Not surprisingly, the protesters were quickly confronted by highly armed riot police using heavy-handed tactics to block off the entrance to the museum, a show of force designed to demonstrate who was now in control. Barely three months into Abelardo de la Espriella’s presidency, the fight over who belongs in the country’s history has become a fight over who has the right to openly challenge its current trajectory.
The parallel with Donald Trump’s campaign against the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions is unmistakable. Trump’s March 2025 executive order seeks “to remove improper ideology” from the institution. In both cases, political leaders claim authority to determine which historical interpretations belong in public institutions, a unilateral, authoritarian approach to erasing history.
This is just one of a list of concrete policy decisions made by De la Espriella that indicate that Colombia’s first-ever Republican president is going full-on MAGA as he settles into his new executive office.
Seriously.
De la Espriella’s connections to the US Republican Party are concrete and extensive. A naturalized US citizen since 2023, he has donated to Republican Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida and publicly endorsed her reelection. He’s met with Colombian American Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) on several occasions, including when Moreno visited Colombia during the runoff election explicitly to endorse his candidacy, what some critics saw as direct US meddling in the electoral process.
The new president’s social media posts during the campaign included images of him and his family proudly waving the “Stars and Stripes” while sporting MAGA caps. It’s no secret that Colombia’s president has become an active and vocal participant in the partisan politics of his adopted country, while moving his actual homeland ever closer to Trump.
De la Espriella’s young administration has enthusiastically embraced Washington’s interventionist security agenda while, like Trump in the US, advancing its own confrontational eradication campaign against progressive institutions and social movements. His unwavering genuflection to Donald Trump goes far beyond the familiar, decades-long accommodations that Colombian dependence on its more powerful ally has required of its elected leaders. He appears intent on making the MAGA approach to government his own, but with a distinct criollo flavor.
Like Trump, his highly mediated performances invite viewers to mistake that victory for a license to dominate everything.
The danger is that in the Colombian context of generational political violence, the consequences could be pretty severe for those sectors at the receiving end.
De la Espriella’s over-the-top, high-volume theatrical delivery makes the bilateral relationship with the US easier to sell to his enthusiastic followers. The roaring “Tiger” persona he has adopted, the inflated rhetorical threats and melodramatic public scoldings directed at his detractors, resembles the stereotyped performance of a B-list actor playing out strongman omnipotence in a low-budget narco-telenovela. As a former defense attorney of accused drug traffickers and paramilitaries, he’s had ample time to rehearse the part, which today he is playing out on a much grander stage.
He’s done photo ops with corpses in body bags and captured prisoners in handcuffs, trophies of his self-declared war on “narco-terrorists.” On October 22, the presidency released a video showing him authorizing an aerial bombardment against the ELN, one of Colombia’s many armed groups he's declared open war against. Military command becomes an opportunity for content creation, with the president—decked out in army greens and walkie-talkie in hand—cast as its indispensable protagonist.
The circus-like spectacle carries a deliberate political message. More than 12 million Colombians supported his opponent, the left-wing Senator Iván Cepeda, in June’s runoff election. It was the closest election in Colombia’s history. This extremely narrow victory gave De la Espriella the presidency, so, like Trump, his highly mediated performances invite viewers to mistake that victory for a license to dominate everything. Trump’s own campaign endorsement of “el Tigre” promised him the “total support and strength of the United States,” something De la Espriella is quick to remind audiences about regularly on live television and social media posts. For the new president, Washington’s stamp of approval helps project power over a country that remains profoundly divided.
In September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Colombian Foreign Minister Omar Bula signed memorandums in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla covering critical minerals and civil nuclear cooperation. News reports of the encounter situated the initiative within Trump’s competition with China and Washington’s effort to secure strategic mineral supplies, especially through its obedient neighbors to the south.
The documents signed in Barranquilla establish a nonbinding framework for technical cooperation, investment, and processing. While they do not necessarily hand ownership of Colombia’s deposits of rare earth minerals to the United States, their significance lies in the extractive development priorities they encourage: Colombia is positioning its resources within Washington’s strategic supply chains, radically reversing the previous government’s efforts at ecological sustainability and economic diversification. Opposition leaders in the Congress, excluded from any consultation in this process, argue that the public deserves to know how communities near these proposed projects will participate, what environmental protections will apply, and who will capture the benefits. Up to now, it’s anybody’s guess, and De la Espriella is in no rush to explain.
As if the extractive collaboration with Washington weren’t enough, the strategic security alignment between the US and Colombia is even more explicit, and alarming. Speaking in Panama on August 12, the bellicose US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia had requested US participation, authorizing “joint military operations to destroy terrorists and terrorist networks.” Colombia also joined the US-led regional counter-cartel coalition, known as the Spear of the Americas. Critics of these announcements—left-wing lawmakers, progressive political analysts, and human rights workers—focused on national sovereignty and the constitutional role of the Senate in authorizing foreign troops.
De la Espriella’s proposals for more coca eradication, aerial bombing, extraditions, and building enormous prisons, a crackdown The New York Times refers to as the “Bukelization” of Colombia, offer the promise of heavy-handed solutions. But they also risk renewing familiar cycles of violence that have shaped Colombian history since the 1950s.
Hegseth’s announcement does not necessarily mean that US soldiers have already carried out attacks inside Colombia, although that is always hard to determine. It does establish the Colombian government’s willingness to invite a deeper military role for Washington in its internal strategic affairs, a trend we’ve already seen in Ecuador, Peru, and El Salvador.
The designation of the declared enemy as “narco-terrorists” makes that invitation sound straightforward and even justifiable, obscuring complex questions about who they are targeting, civilian protection, and accountability. It’s important to point out that the term “narco-terrorist” has been employed by Colombian security forces and government officials repeatedly for almost 40 years to deliberately target opposition and social movement leaders, human rights defenders, and even independent journalists. The probability of this repressive history repeating itself today is very high, considering the current belligerent leadership in both Washington and Bogotá.
Combined with De la Espriella’s public applause for the illegal bombings of alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific by US forces, attacks which have resulted in over 235 deaths since last October, the current rules of engagement on the ground amount to the worst-case scenario that any of us who have fought against direct US military involvement in Colombia could have imagined.
There’s no question that the security crisis De la Espriella inherited is real, and in many ways led to his narrow election victory in the first place. The policy of “total peace” carried out by former President Gustavo Petro failed to halt the expansion of armed organizations throughout the country. Rural communities continue to endure displacement, extortion, and child recruitment despite Petro’s sincere efforts at negotiating with at least 14 different armed and criminal groups during his mandate, according to the International Crisis Group.
But if history has taught us anything, there are no guarantees that military escalation will work to bring the country security. In the past, the crackdown and capture of leaders of armed groups led to the fragmentation of those organizations, resulting in further, more widespread territorial warfare, while bombardments and sweeping arrests resulted in high levels of civilian casualties and other human rights violations. De la Espriella’s proposals for more coca eradication, aerial bombing, extraditions, and building enormous prisons, a crackdown The New York Times refers to as the “Bukelization” of Colombia, offer the promise of heavy-handed solutions. But they also risk renewing familiar cycles of violence that have shaped Colombian history since the 1950s. People living under armed coercion in high conflict areas need a range of protections and guarantees. And that protection must last beyond the next televised military operation or social media post.
There are other examples of policy decisions that demonstrate how radically De la Espriella has pivoted toward a MAGA agenda. One recent rupture relates to international human rights policy that aligns closely with MAGA’s obsessive anti-wokeism. In mid-September, Colombia withdrew from the Equal Rights Coalition, an intergovernmental alliance which promotes LGBTQ+ rights and which Colombia had been co-chairing with Spain. The Foreign Ministry explained that participation in the coalition “was not a priority.”
The positioning of Colombia as an uncompromising and committed ally of Israel is another stark shift from Petro’s open and vocal criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu for the genocide in Gaza. This pro-Israel stance coincides with an almost fanatical fascination with and embrace of Christian Evangelicals within Colombia, with the formerly self-described atheist president regularly performing the rituals of a true believer in front of the cameras during his first several weeks in office, openly declaring, “Long Live Christ the King!”
De la Espriella’s admirers may enjoy watching the Tiger perform. Colombians, particularly the most vulnerable and traditionally marginalized, will have to live with the policies enacted between those mediated appearances.
It’s hard to understand how any of these policy shifts will materially benefit the Colombian people, including those who voted for him. But there’s no question that these decisions put the new government even further into the good graces of the Rubio-Vance-Trump sphere of influence that the US citizen-turned Colombian president so fondly desires.
Resistance has already complicated the Colombian government’s plans. For example, a judge ordered the removed objects from the National Museum protected and barred further removals pending review.
These kind of decisions give the political opposition compelling reasons to continue to organize and mobilize. On October 14, unions, students, and Indigenous organizations took to the streets in large and small cities all over the country, speaking out against De la Espriella’s authoritarian dictates. It is already clear that popular sectors will not easily abandon their demands because the president commands the cameras. A larger call for a general strike in November is already in the works. Repression could deepen the confrontation, especially if security officials treat resistance to economic, cultural, and social policy as a security problem.
De la Espriella’s admirers may enjoy watching the Tiger perform. Colombians, particularly the most vulnerable and traditionally marginalized, will have to live with the policies enacted between those mediated appearances.
It would be naïve to think they will not stop demanding their rights and livelihoods be protected.
A president who treats those demands as obstacles to his authority is giving the country ample reason to resist.
While destruction and great loss has occurred in President Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, it does not mean that it is inevitable that it will continue to occur in perpetuity. The midterms give social movements a chance to fight back.
“Nothing is inevitable but everything is possible.” My friend and comrade once said that in reference to the vibrant movement moment of the Black Lives Matter uprisings after the heinous Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.
These words have been a mantra for me since I read them. Like many of you, I’m terrified of the state of the world and my country's role in its suffering. When I consume the news, take a tally of the rights our people have lost, and hold the memory of those who are no longer here, I am at times resigned to believe that “it’s over” and that “nothing matters.” When the onslaught is constant, giving up becomes alluring.
Hope is a necessary and useful tool for our social movements in the struggle against authoritarianism. My attempt here is to share my perspective on possibility and the role it plays in tumultuous times like these.
Winning this election means stopping authoritarian consolidation within our government, which clears the way for defeating the MAGA movement for a second time in the 2028 presidential election.
Authoritarianism always tries to abolish memory—capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, evangelical Christian, fascist imperialists want us to be trapped in their now. As if their now is inevitable. Authoritarianism wants us to believe that only one thing is happening.
While destruction and great loss has occurred in President Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, it does not mean that it is inevitable that it will continue to occur in perpetuity. Since the colonists first came to this land, horror has followed. And so have miraculous acts of resistance, political gains, and life-altering wins. That’s because human beings chose resistance and strategy in the face of oppression. Abolitionist movements of the past engaged in highly sophisticated, multi-century, strategic political struggle to free enslaved Black people from bondage (movements composed of enslaved people and abolitionists like Fredrick Douglas). In hindsight, people over and over again made the conscious choice to engage in the long arc of protracted struggle.
Nothing; not a moment, administration, movement, law, nor empire lasts forever, nor is any of it inevitable. Or more relevant to the point I’m trying to make, nothing is one thing constantly and always. Change will occur. History is never one note. There are variations over time and in those variations are the inspirations for interventions where dominant ideas are changed. These changes, or fluctuations and fissures, are opportunities of possibility to exploit to use against our enemy.
Capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, evangelical Christian, fascist imperialists want us afraid and isolated. We are facing a multi-pronged attack. MAGA and billionaire oligarchs are launching attacks in a variety of ways. Using electoral intimidation and rigging, tech over-dependence and surveillance, and right-wing takeovers of media through monopolization, to name a few. Billions of dollars are being spent to keep us apart and to internalize a false narrative: “It’s over,” “Nothing matters."
This false narrative of the inevitable has begun to make its way into some contemporary American movies. Movies like Don’t Look Up, A House of Dynamite, and Bugonia. All were released within a few years of one another, the latter two came out the same year (2025). Each of these movies come to similar fatalistic conclusions: Doom is inevitable.
This is not true, but it does serve a strategic purpose. This fatalistic view is both a real felt experience of perceived reality and a constructed reality, created by fascists and tech oligarchs. David Ellison’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery into Skydance Media to form the far-right Skydance Corporation is Trump’s fascist administration controlling the narrative (literally by having the reins to CNN, TikTok, HBO, and movie studios like Warner Bros.) to attempt to further sow disillusionment toward sociopolitical change, hopelessness, and a belief that MAGA is invulnerable.
I am not arguing a promise. “Change” and "possibility” are neutral. Neither is inherently good for our social movements or means sure defeat for the opposition. Change and possibility do not mean that things will get better tomorrow or that things will only get worse forever. Octavia Butler teaches us through her writing that the only lasting truth is change. This onslaught will end, the impact we’re being hit with by this administration will stop. Though the consequences of those blows will linger. As a result of this administration's actions, suffering will continue, people will continue to die. Whether that lasts a few years or many decades, at least in part, is dependent upon what our social movements do when an opportunity presents itself to strike our own blow(s). I see these midterm elections as one of those opportunities. Elections are strategic interventions. Winning this election means stopping authoritarian consolidation within our government, which clears the way for defeating the MAGA movement for a second time in the 2028 presidential election.
A far-right authoritarian political movement (MAGA) is controlling the government. In other words, the United States has a fascist federal government. Democrats and Working Families Party candidates winning a majority in the House and Senate will shorten the reach of this fascist administration. That matters. Like it mattered for Black people not to be considered three-fifths of a human in the Constitution, like it mattered when Roe v. Wade was won, and how having political power matters to ensure a sitting congressperson’s house isn’t raided. The MAGA movement is positioning itself toward one-party, minority rule that can't be challenged through democratic channels (that is fascism). Disenfranchising voters serves authoritarianism. Losing the midterm elections serves the strategy of our enemy.
Our social movements are tasked with quelling the further consolidation of power of this authoritarian regime.
Y’all, our social movements need to win majorities in the US House and Senate to slow the rise of fascist law. Races like Angie Nixon in Florida, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Will Lawrence in Michigan, and Justin Pearson in Tennessee are so important for building a line of defense to save our lives.
Fascism is here. The position we find ourselves in isn’t one that sets us up for immediate liberation. The fight of the rest of this decade is to defang authoritarianism.
There is a difference between forever and experiencing the current reality. History tells us that forever does not exist in the political sphere. We are swimming in the waters of this decade's dialectics, wading in the multiple truths of our given moment in time. Contradictions can be generative if strategy leads the decisions of our social movements when opportunities present themselves.
Some things are inevitable. If my phone slips out of my hand it will fall. Gravity ensures that. Fascism is a powerful force, but it is not gravity.
Once you understand that the immigration lie is the core of MAGA’s support, the answer becomes clear: We need Democrats to adopt a new rhetorical and policy framework on immigration.
MAGA is an insidious political “movement” that is the inevitable conclusion of the project started with the infamous Powell Memorandum in 1972. Formally titled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” the Powell Memo is a call to arms for the oligarchy in the US to push for a set of policies that benefit the wealthy while waging a narrative battle designed to get the working class to support these policies to their own detriment. The Powell Memo is not hypothetical: it is the blueprint that the modern conservative movement has followed, and the result some 50 years later is MAGA.
The central narrative of MAGA is essentially this: Some other group of people is preventing you (typically white, Christian, straight, cisgender men) from having the basic things in life that you deserve. This outside group of oppressors can be whoever the Dear Leader Donald Trump says it is, although it can never be the wealthy elites and Republican lawmakers who are actually leading the oppression of the working class of the country, because the purpose of the narrative is to distract working and poor people away from the true source of their problems by keeping them fixated on a fictional boogeyman.
No group has been more frequently smeared and shoehorned into this narrative role by MAGA than immigrants. Donald Trump has famously said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the US; that Mexico is sending drugs, crime, and rapists into the US; and spread so many vile lies about Haitian immigrants (who were in the US legally through Temporary Protected Status) that Justice Elena Kagan insightfully pointed out that the conservative majority in Mullin v. Doe (the case that paved the way for the administration to end TPS for Haitians and other groups) couldn’t even stomach putting Trump’s racist statements into their opinion when she wrote, “The evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially infected that the majority declines to put them in print.”
If the MAGA immigration narrative is not defeated, the soil will be fertile for a new right-wing fascist to come to power.
Immigration is therefore the core of the MAGA mythology. MAGA primarily exists under the narrative bargain of protecting white Americans from (Black and brown) immigrants, and in exchange, the base gives Trump power and condones his authoritarianism. It’s important to remember that even though some people are happy to support fascism no matter what, fascism does not get broad support unless people think that they have to support it because it is necessary to prevent some worse or existential harm from happening to them. If the choice is voting for a dictator or allowing the country to be destroyed by whatever the outside threat is, more people will choose the former than they would have otherwise, which can be enough to tip the scales and usher in a fascist regime.
Immigration served as one of the main selling points for Trump in 2024. The allure of this “You need me to protect you from marauding immigrants.” narrative was so powerful, that it even managed to sway members of the Latino community, who have subsequently turned away from him. When the rhetoric of good guys stopping bad guys to make the country better turns into your friends, family, and neighbors being menaced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while living under an even worse economic reality where nothing is affordable, the fascism bargain suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing. To be clear, I am not blaming the Latino community for the rise of Trump, as Trump is a creature of the overwhelmingly white male constituency that supports him. I merely point to Trump’s support with Latinos as evidence of the appeal that fascism can have for people and how people will vote against their own interest if they feel like they have to.
Despite the fact that immigration is the rhetorical center of MAGA, the Democrats have consistently failed to come up with a narrative and set of policies to counter it. In her presidential debate with Trump, former Vice President Kamala Harris infamously touted her “tough on border enforcement” credentials, effectively ceding the ground to Trump and adopting his framework that immigrants are dangerous and that immigration is a bad thing. In The Art of War, Sun-Tzu wrote, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” He also wrote, “Sow the seeds of success in fertile ground.” If you are playing by the enemy’s rules and trying to win under their terms, you are destined to lose, which is exactly what happened. If you are telling the public that immigrants are dangerous, then how can you be surprised when the candidate with the most hard-line approach on immigration gets the most support? It is truly political malpractice that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) spent untold millions of dollars on corporate consultants, but they still could not figure out this basic concept.
Even though Trump is now a historically unpopular president, the Democrats continue to largely coast on the issue of immigration. Instead of offering their own narrative framework and policy agenda, they are content to sit back and decry Trump’s immigration policies. This strategy fits perfectly into the DNC’s preferred tactic of having it both ways. They can label Trump’s policies as extreme (which they are), but when they get pressed on immigration issues, they can tack back to the center and try to say that they are actually the real immigration enforcers. It didn’t work for Kamala Harris in 2024, and even though Trump’s time will inevitably come to an end, if the MAGA immigration narrative is not defeated, the soil will be fertile for a new right-wing fascist to come to power.
The Democrats’ strategy of saying no and doing nothing is like trying to chop down a tree by picking off the leaves. As Bruce Lee wrote in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do: “We shall find the truth when we examine the problem. The problem is never apart from the answer. The problem is the answer—understanding the problem dissolves the problem.” The only way to get rid of the poisonous MAGA tree is to chop down its trunk and uproot it. Once you understand that the immigration lie is the core of MAGA’s support, the answer becomes clear: We need Democrats to adopt a new rhetorical and policy framework on immigration. The guiding principles for the pro-immigration rhetorical framework should be:
Supporting progressive immigration policies is important, and I will outline a few progressive immigration reforms below, but I think getting the rhetorical framework right first is important for two reasons. First, the “immigrants are dangerous” lie has been pummeled into the minds of Americans for decades, and it absolutely needs to be countered. If people think immigrants are an existential threat, they will continue to be primed to support right-wing policies, even though those policies will make their lives worse. We have been subconsciously duped for generations into thinking that immigrants are dangerous and that taking them into the US is an act of charity. If we continue to think of immigration as a form of charity that requires sacrifice, we will always have right-wing politicians pushing regressive policies under the justification that Democrats are selling out the American population to foreigners, when the reality is that immigration is good for Americans. Immigration is therefore not an act of charity, but it is in our own best interest, and right-wing immigration policies are therefore harmful to America.
Second, immigration law is complex, and the problems with our immigration system are numerous. There is no easy, single policy fix for our immigration system in the same way that Medicare For All would be a single policy that would have a huge, positive impact on healthcare in America. Even though there is inherent complexity to the immigration system, Democrats need to push for progressive immigration policies such as:
Congress has immense power under the Constitution to set immigration laws into place. We need Democratic candidates for Congress to adopt a pro-immigration, progressive narrative, or else we will continue to have MAGA and right-wing candidates win elections and implement regressive, oppressive, and counterproductive immigration policies, that ultimately harm both the American and foreign-born population.
Mike Rogers was willing to give up any ounce of principles he may once have had to stand up to Trump’s lies just to get cool with the MAGA crowd. If you think he has the best interests of Black Michiganders in mind, I have a bridge to Canada to sell you.
I was in the classroom for enough years to spot a bully from a mile away. At first glance, Mike Rogers doesn’t seem too threatening, but as you get closer, you realize that he’s just another Donald Trump wannabe. Rogers has been actively working to disenfranchise and demean Black Detroiters for decades.
Folks across the city are fed up over the conditions of our schools; closures due to excessive heat are now regular. These conditions can be traced back to the mismanagement that unraveled when Mike Rogers served as the state Senate majority floor leader and PA 10 became law, the legislation that allowed the takeover of Detroit schools. He bears responsibility as an architect of this educational breakdown.
I started my career in 1998 teaching second and fifth grades at John Lynch Elementary School on the east side. It was just before the Detroit public school system changed dramatically; the democratically elected school board had their power taken from them while the state installed unaccountable bureaucrats to make decisions on behalf of Detroit families’ futures. The result? Our votes and voices got ignored, while a $100 million operating surplus turned into a $200 million deficit.
We don’t need another leader representing us in Washington who is trying to trample over our rights as Black folks.
Rogers’ disregard for Black Detroiters didn’t stop there. He’s no moderate; he’s a radical whose campaign has numerous ties to Christian Nationalists while parroting Trump’s racist attitudes about our city.
His record is all there. In just the past few years alone, Rogers fundraised with a former state legislator who made racist remarks about African Americans, had someone on his student outreach team who defended a group chat filled with praise of Hitler and slurs, and defended Trump making the city of Detroit a scapegoat. Not to also mention that one of his largest financial backers is a Texas oil tycoon’s PAC associated with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
They say you are the company you keep. And what does that say about Mike Rogers?
Rogers has long stood in the way of Black Detroiters’ full participation in democracy, and that started when he was first a state legislator in the nineties. Some argue he was just a standard, Bush-era neoconservative back in the day who supported DeVos school voucher schemes, but today he’s transitioned into a full-on MAGA mouthpiece.
Consider how Rogers has changed his tune on the Big Lie. We all remember how in 2020 Trump claimed the election was rigged partly based on conspiracies around ballot counting in Detroit. At the time, Rogers tried to distance himself from the soon-to-be impeached president, so much so that he wrote a Washington Post opinion piece on the eve of the January 6 insurrection urging Republican lawmakers to uphold the will of the people.
Now, Rogers is a full-on election denier. Not only has Rogers claimed that his loss in the 2024 US Senate race was “stolen” despite an audit confirming it was completely fair, he’s now promoting the worst of Trump’s voter intimidation tactics against Black voters.
At an April 17, 2026 Kalamazoo County GOP meeting, Rogers described recruiting off-duty or retired police officers as poll watchers in Detroit, saying, "Try to intimidate them, please," and, "All you got to do is open your jacket and you see the badge on the belt.” Not only is voter intimidation a federal crime, but calling for this in the largest majority-Black city in the country reeks of racism.
Mike Rogers would be a reliable vote for Donald Trump’s agenda if he’s elected. That means Republicans will be closer to passing the SAVE Act, which are plainly Jim Crow-like tactics that disenfranchise voters by requiring people to show documents like a birth certificate or passport to vote that are inaccessible for many.
Mike Rogers was willing to give up any ounce of principles he may once have had to stand up to Trump’s lies just to get cool with the MAGA crowd. If you think he has the best interests of Black Michiganders in mind, I have a bridge to Canada to sell you.
We don’t need another leader representing us in Washington who is trying to trample over our rights as Black folks. Now, it’s on us to show up to the polls on or before November 3 to make our voices heard.
For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled.
Humpty dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again—Nursery Rhyme
Much can be said about President Donald Trump, but it is impossible to say that he has “done nothing.” This boorish, megalomaniacal, unpredictable, and frighteningly ignorant real-estate salesman has transformed his country by unleashing an avalanche of executive orders, edicts, institutional transformations, legislative shifts, and policy changes. Whether the nation can recover its democratic roots should not be taken for granted despite its institutional resilience and civic culture.
Trump-World is about more than Trump the president and demagogic ruler of the Republican Party. MAGA stands on tradition. Its base is rooted in the same backward classes, with a similar authoritarian and fascist ideological outlook as its right-wing extremist forerunners such as the “know-nothings,” the KKK, “America First!,” McCarthyism, and the White Segregationist Councils. Whatever the president’s decline in poll numbers, his mass base isn’t going anywhere and its racist, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and anti-working class beliefs are firmly entrenched. A reactionary sword of Damocles still hangs over a Democratic Party torn between a sclerotic mainstream and an exuberant faction of democratic socialists. Republicans collapse the former into the latter and then attack this essentially “center-left” political organization as “liberal,” “socialist,” communist, “Marxist,” and “anarchist,” even as Trump followers haven’t a clue what these words actually mean.
For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled. It is not a matter of the next election or putting together a grab bag of issues that will leave the public as confused as it was before, but a readiness to change institutions, reorient economic policy, and refashion foreign policy by highlighting three or four crucial points in each domain.
This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy.
Trump has issued over 500 executive orders in 2025-2026 alone. These now touch upon virtually every aspect of everyday life. Every progressive social movement with a marginalized constituency has come under attack through legislative and often coercive means. Public lands have been privatized, coal has been promoted while wind and solar energy projects have been shut down. Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have been “weaponized;” indeed, between the beginning of June and the end of August 2026, more than 150,000 arrests were made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Meanwhile the “leftist” departments of education, environmental protection, and health and human serves have been gutted. Other regulatory agencies have been purged, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Legal gambits have insulated the presidency from criminal indictment, legal harassment of critics and “enemies” has become an everyday occurrence. The press has been intimidated, television shows have been canceled, and academic freedom is on the ropes. The threat to democracy is real and and the nation’s fabric is fraying. Drastic changes to the tax codes favoring elites and the top 0.1% have contributed to the greatest upward shift in wealth in American history. Unions have been banned from 40 federal agencies, collective bargaining agreements are imperiled, and worker health programs have been eviscerated. The new imbalance of class power is fixed, if not set in stone. Everything associaated with the “New Deal” of the 1930s, and the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s is hanging by a thread. With the Trumpist counterrevolution, the whole has become more than the sum of its parts, and everyday people find it difficult to process this avalanche of reactionary measures or the dangers that they pose. A mixture of political frustration and disorientation that provides fertile ground for nostalgia associated with the 1950s, when America was seemingly admired by the whole world.
US foreign policy has changed for the worse as multilateralism has surrendered to “America First!” Indeed, reference to the isolationist and quasi-fascist movement of the 1930s with the same name is not coincidental. Trump has identified the American national interest with his own. His personal enrichment by $2.6 billion in 2025-2026 occurred in concert with constantly fluctuating positions on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Iran War, NATO, the European Union, and Canada. The rule of thumb: Where cash is not to be made, support is not to be given. The United States has reneged on all major climate treaties. Aid to the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the world’s most vulnerable nations has been cut to the bone. Trump has signed a sweeping bill imposing sanctions on Russia while simultaneously negotiating new “business deals” before the conflict ends, thus contradicting his previous warnings. His on-again, off-again imperialist threats to turn Canada into America’s 51st state, “protect” Greenland and Denmark, “run” Venezuela’s oil industry, create a “Gazan Riviera” (presumably based on Trump company investments), exploit Ukrainian minerals, sign a bill with sweeping sanctions and set up hotel deals in Russia, constitute the mix of personal and institutional goals that provide the president’s zigzag approach with a certain logic.
Trump’s foreign policy has no need for a state department, which has essentially been hollowed out along with the experts necessary to create prudent policies. Our president values the personal touch, and he is not above blackmail, threats, intimidation, bluster, and childish tantrums to get his way. None of this has worked. Trump has alienated NATO and the EU to Russia’s delight. Relations with Canada are at their lowest point amid a bitter tariff war. America’s squandering of military rources and diplomatic setbacks have left Taiwan and South Korea feeling increasingly uneasy as Chinese military actions linger in the background.
Trump’s record of failure is astonishing. After all the grandiose claims, mediation efforts to end the Russian-Ukraine War are stalled, policy toward Israel is an embarrassment, Venezuela has the same authoritarian regime, Iran’s geopolitical importance has actually increased, and there are rumblings about charging the United States with war crimes. Trump’s attempts to intimidate China have failed, the tariff offensive is tottering, and the president’s charismatic charm apparently hasn’t prevented North Korea’s “supreme leader” Kim Jong Un from further nuclear testing. Never has the moral and symbolic standing of the United States been lower, and never has it shown itself so incapable of distinguishing between democratic friends and authoritarian enemies.
“America First!” has turned into America last. Reversal of discrete policies is possible, restoring checks and balances is more difficult, and reigning in the charismatic presidency is likely. But this ignores the forest for the trees. Trump-World is more than the sum of its parts, and the avalanche of policies and edicts makes the counterrevolution difficult to process and threatens to overwhelm the ability of critics to prioritize their responses. MAGA will offer ongoing opposition to progressive forces and, in response, they must forward a rational and radical agenda of their own. This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy. That is what it will take for the United States to recover from its decade-long trauma—and even then...
The Trump-Vance family policy reeks of white supremacy and misogyny.
Creepy. That’s the word for the rising right-wing interest in family policy, exemplified by a recent administration proposal to pay $9,000 each year per child for women to stay at home with their children. The money would come from, and deplete, an existing federal program that helps working parents pay for childcare.
Of course, that program, the Child Care and Development Fund, is already woefully underfunded—only 1 in 7 eligible parents is able to use it. Most of those are single working mothers, the kind of hardworking people who do tough work for low wages and are derided by conservatives as “Welfare Queens.” They would not be eligible for the stay-at-home moms benefit.
MAGA leaders like Vice President JD Vance have a model of family life that is a caricature of a 1950s TV family: Dad works and Mom stays home with the kids, shops, cooks, cleans house, and puts on a clean apron and a big smile for Dad when he comes home from the office. A woman’s appropriate concerns in that model life are “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” Children, cooking, church, as 19th-century Germans described the feminine role.
MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.
Or put more simply, “barefoot and pregnant.”
In Vance’s view, women who seek a professional career have chosen a “value system that leads to misery.” Consistent with the MAGA conception of women’s roles in society, Vance opposes abortion in all circumstances, wants to make divorce more difficult, and sees traditional family life as “the path to happiness and to fulfillment.”
But Vance and the right are motivated by bigger concerns than female happiness. They believe more pregnancies are critical to preserving civilization. It’s a “crisis,” says Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Low birth rate is the number one threat to the West,” says Elon Musk.
Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Mehmet Oz warns that “1 in 3 Americans are under-babied.” Declining teen pregnancy is part of the problem: Fox medical analyst Marc Siegel laments that teen pregnancies (15-to-19-year-old girls) are “down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people who are young not to have babies.” To remedy that problem, President Donald Trump is actually defunding federal programs designed to reduce teen pregnancies.
This despite the well-documented medical and developmental risks of teen pregnancies for both mother and child: high blood pressure, preeclampsia, post-partum hemorrhage, systemic infections, mental health difficulties, life-long health issues, premature births, neonatal fatalities and stillbirths, low birth weight. And the teen mom’s interruption in schooling commonly means a life of poverty and instability.
MAGA family policy bears striking similarities to that of Nazi Germany, which linked national greatness to more babies—of the correct race. In the interest of higher birth rates, German mothers could not terminate pregnancies if the child would be “of good blood.” The Nazi state also offered “marriage loans” and child financial incentives, and—in a society that treated single mothers as pariahs—they even tried to destigmatize unmarried motherhood.
Medals for motherhood were a Nazi honor Trump might consider offering. Hitler awarded the Mother Cross for large families. (In bronze for mothers of four children, silver for six, gold for eight or more babies.)
The American fertility rate is indeed substantially below the 2.1 required to maintain the American population level. But if a declining population is a problem, the answer is obvious: Welcome immigrants.
America is already suffering from Trump’s mass deportation efforts, as the agricultural workforce is decimated, and workers in home healthcare, food packing, restaurants, home construction, and building services are in desperately short supply, exacerbating inflation. We plainly need more immigrants, not fewer, to sustain our nation.
Immigration is not an acceptable solution for MAGA because they demand a whiter America, and more immigrants come from what the president has called “shithole countries” than from “Aryan” nations like Norway. But non-whites are not “replacing” supposed “real” Americans because America is and always has been a multiracial, multinational society.
MAGA right-wingers define America as a white nation and seek to shrink our non-white population, so the only solution acceptable to them is persuading or forcing (white) women to have more babies than they want. It won’t work.
A 2025 survey of Americans showed that two children was the most desired family size, and only 20% wanted to three or more. Similarly, an international survey conducted by the United Nations showed most respondents wanted just two children.
In the US survey, cost and the state of the world were high among the reasons Americans gave for not wanting more children.
Here is what the Trump regime is doing to address those concerns: defunding healthcare; slashing food assistance for families and children; weakening education and child welfare systems; imposing eligibility requirements for government rental assistance; denying climate change; ignoring the challenge of AI; deregulating polluting industries; and fueling inflation through deportation, tariffs, and an unending war.
Why are women in the workforce and not staying home with the children? The determination to lead full lives is a driving force. But, in all likelihood, the number of stay-at-home moms has plummeted since the 1970s because rising income inequality has made it impossible for a working class or middle class family to survive on one income. Before right-wing “traditionalists” utter any more demands that women give up their jobs, ambitions, independence, and self-respect, perhaps they can start by confronting the unbearable greed of the billionaire class that has rendered the supposed MAGA aim beyond reach.
"I go after what I want, but maybe that’s what they don’t like," said the congresswoman.
It's been five days since US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a potential 2028 presidential contender, went public with her decision to freeze her eggs.
But the response from right-wing influencers and operatives has already given her an opportunity to turn the discussion of her fertility into one that addresses Republican policies driving the affordability crisis, questions how committed the right really is to "freedom," and points out conservatives' hypocrisy when they urge women to "have babies younger"—while applying little of the same pressure to young men.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced her decision to freeze her eggs last Sunday with the first in a series of Instagram videos in which her nearly 10 million followers have been able to follow along as she injects hormones and attends ultrasound appointments in preparation for the procedure—all while appearing on news programs to discuss foreign and domestic policy and talking to her followers about the side effects as well as the cost of fertility preservation treatment.
"I want you all to see that, because women can do anything,” Ocasio-Cortez, often known as AOC, told her followers. “And I think it’s badass that I’m going to be, you know, giving myself shots in the greenroom, get my glam on, roll out, talk about international events, domestic policy, elections, pop out, live my life, do my thing.”
Right-wing commentators who have bemoaned low birth rates and attacked liberal women for buying "into the feminist lie and spend[ing] their childbearing years climbing the career ladder," as podcaster Katie Miller said, immediately pounced on AOC's decision.
Allie Beth Stuckey, a popular right-wing podcaster and author of the books Toxic Empathy and You're Not Enough (And That's Okay), the latter of which warned against "the toxic culture of self-love," responded to the 36-year-old progressive congresswoman's videos with a list of reasons she should have already had children. She accused AOC of being "selfish and irresponsible" for potentially becoming a mother after 40 and said she was "glamorizing the lie that women can have it all."
Miller, the wife of President Donald Trump's homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, allowed that "we should celebrate" a woman's efforts to have children in the future, but said that “more women should get married and have babies younger," while a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, the right-wing group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, said AOC's fertility decisions were a "cautionary tale" for women.
Meanwhile, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is said to have considerable influence in the White House, announced that AOC had "failed as a woman" and had “wasted her entire 30s living with a man pretending to be engaged when she could have gotten married and had a baby." (It was reported this week that AOC's long-term relationship had ended.)
Some conservatives questioned whether attacking the popular, social media-savvy lawmaker over her desire to have children was a wise move for the MAGA movement, with one former Office of the Director of National Intelligence official, Alexa Henning, telling The Times in the UK that "dunking on AOC for freezing her eggs is not a winning message with women voters."
On Thursday evening, Ocasio-Cortez suggested Henning was right to be concerned, as she posted her latest Instagram video on the topic.
She said she has found "the freak-out" around her egg-freezing process to be "pretty funny," because "my choice is a threat to them."
"Despite the rhetoric they use and the bald eagles that they plaster all over the place, they actually really do not believe in a free country," said AOC. "Very aggressively do not believe in a free country, because they attack everyone who exercises their freedom to choose all sorts of lives... They attack those who choose the life that they don't lead or a life that they don't approve of."
"And people say you’re peddling this 'dangerous lie that women can have it all.' You know, maybe in life you can’t have everything, but here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot. And I am very grateful for my life. I go after what I want, but maybe that’s what they don’t like either," she continued, before shrugging: "Too bad for them."
AOC: I also find the freakout around it pretty funny as well. I’m not gonna lie. A commentator that was like, “What she’s doing is peddling the dangerous lie that women can have it all.” Can you believe that?
What I find funny is that my choice is a threat to them. Despite the… pic.twitter.com/rwpPL8YH0F
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026
She emphasized that the procedure "is not a guarantee" that she'll be able to use the eggs to have children later in life, but said the process had relieved "a certain amount of anxiety or stress that can come with feeling like you are in a race against biology that men simply don't have to engage in."
She then took aim at commentators like Stuckey and Miller for directing their pronatalist pressure campaigns disproportionately at young women.
"In straight relationships, who are you supposed to be having babies with?" said AOC. "They aren't pressuring men to be ready to have a baby young, as the way that they are pressuring women to have a baby when they're young."
AOC: For all of these right-wing people who are harping about women having to and needing to have families at a young age—and again, if that’s your choice, that’s amazing—but they are doing nothing to make sure that men in their culture respect and value women.
In fact, many of… pic.twitter.com/ox70tJzth1
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026
The congresswoman then suggested that while Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk's widow and now the CEO of Turning Point USA, recently told a crowd of young college graduates to "have more kids than you can afford," financial concerns may play a role in falling birthrates and delayed parenthood. Housing unaffordability has soared to record highs in recent years, while Trump's tariff policies and war in Iran have contributed to rising costs for groceries, gas, and other essentials. Republicans have also attacked government healthcare programs including Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies, and about a third of Americans reported cutting back on spending in order to afford healthcare last year.
"The basics are more expensive than they've ever been," said Ocasio-Cortez. "For a lot of people, we would have kids at a much younger age if the conditions were right, if women got paid equally, and if people in general were paid enough and things were affordable enough that you feel like you could comfortably provide for a child."
With her series of videos, said Amanda Litman, executive director of the political action committee Run for Something, AOC had opened up "a larger conversation on women, ambition, family, gender politics, and so much more."
Journalist Zaid Jilani suggested right-wing commentators had fallen into a trap: "Intentionally or unintentionally she got the Republicans to act really weird."
The response from influential commentators on the right "is why her allies think she could run for the White House," wrote Katy Balls, Washington editor for The Times. "Her ability to set the terms of debate and trigger the right just as Trump does the left."
The end result of GOP cuts to the domestic social safety net and to foreign aid will be the cleansing of people defined by the Trump regime as being useless, needy, and inferior.
Throughout history, malicious regimes have risen to power and, thinking they are superior, have targeted groups of people they have decided are a threat to their economy, their society, or their race. These governments then proceed to disenfranchise and eliminate those they decree as inferior, the “out-groups.” This is eugenics, the discredited beliefs and practices that claim to improve the genetic quality of a specific group by eliminating the propagation of the “out-groups.” This has been accomplished in the past by forced sterilization, inhumane institutionalization, or outright euthanasia. In reality, the practice of eugenics is about preserving the power of the dominant group or government, not genetics.
The United States has a dark history of eugenics targeting people of color and those with disabilities. Though it may be less glaringly obvious today, eugenic thought and policies have been empowered by the MAGA movement. In 2024 the Trump administration defined “out-groups” both nationally and internationally, with massive funding cuts to social programs, healthcare, and research directed at reducing health disparities—efforts that they call “woke.” As ever, these actions will have the deadliest effects on their designated “out-groups”: immigrants, the elderly, the poor, those with disabilities, people with mental illness, retirees, and Black and brown people. These are all groups that the administration and MAGA Republicans see as using the social services they want to eliminate, or as not being important to the economic growth of the US. The end result is the eugenic cleansing of US citizens defined by the regime as being useless, needy, and inferior.
How did they do this? In the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Republicans succeeded in undermining social programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This greatly affects the health of those they disfavor, such as those who experience poverty and struggle for adequate healthcare and nutrition. These actions also directly harm people with disabilities, who are more likely to live in poverty and to require food assistance. Additionally, people with mental health conditions, as well as people who are unhoused, are being targeted by administration policies aimed at institutionalizing them. Institutionalization has a dark history in the US and is just one step from state-mediated sterilization and elimination.
To further assure poor health for the “out-groups” the administration, in league with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his HHS cronies, has methodically weakened the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Vital disease monitoring programs have been halted, lifesaving research has been crushed, vaccine uptake has been attacked, and fact-based science and medical practices have been exchanged for conspiracy theories and the promotion of unproven supplements. All of these actions will most severely damage the health of the most vulnerable, the “out-groups.”
The administration, right-wing politicians, and the MAGA movement seem to have taken it upon themselves to eugenically cleanse the Earth of poor, non-white people.
And it doesn’t stop in the United States. Immediately after the inauguration, the Trump administration began with severe cuts to foreign aid through the elimination of US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other destructive policies. It has been predicted that this will ultimately end in the deaths of millions across the globe. It is already happening.
This is eugenics—many of the millions who die, or become permanently disabled, will be children, who will be eliminated before they can reproduce. And the greatest effects of the withdrawal of aid are directed against Black and brown people, the “out-group” who, according to the crude language of the US president, live in “shit-hole” countries—as if these countries and the human beings who live there are worthless and expendable, a burden to the US and the world.
The administration, right-wing politicians, and the MAGA movement seem to have taken it upon themselves to eugenically cleanse the Earth of poor, non-white people. Apparently, they believe they have the power and the right to reduce the world’s population by promoting terrible suffering through fatal diseases and starvation in places far out of their view.
Let’s say it outright—this is state-sponsored eugenics and it is happening in the America which was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The actions of the current administration have disgraced those principles. Even hard-core MAGA followers should be opposed to the behavior of their chosen leaders, who are resorting to eugenics, using the infliction of terrible suffering, pain, diseases, and starvation for political power, economic gain, and supremacy. And MAGA followers should remember you are not immune; a small change in status will bring you into the crosshairs of state-sponsored eugenics. We should all be alarmed.
The flow of smoke down from Ontario has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.
Everything I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.
Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.
To hit the basics: Roughly 1,000 wildfires are currently burning in Canada, many in northern reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the direct fire damage is being borne by members of Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small communities are the main inhabitants of these wild places. People are crowded into Thunder Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled; the stories of escapes like the one pictured above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas, for instance, interviewed members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in the northwest part of the province. Here, for instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:
“It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN.
She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs, and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.
Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away.
“All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.”
“If we had waited any longer, we would have been dead.”
As Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out:
It's NOT just that people and wildlife are losing their homes... it's the history that is being lost for generations to come.
It's tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia, ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed from generation to generation, hidden, protected and preserved, repatriated and restored.
So, just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from these fires is to small bands of people who have done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has been endlessly damaged by the larger Western project of settlement and control.
But flame, of course, is not the only product of fire. There’s also smoke, which contains high concentrations of particulates, the solid and liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that are especially dangerous because they can slip past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on the prevailing winds, which have been blowing south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s fourth-largest city.

But of course the border with the US does not prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of the most densely populated parts of America have been inundated with smoke as well. Last Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the most polluted air in the world, as Charles Ramirez chronicled:
Detroit had an air quality index, or AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1 spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes air quality monitoring and air cleaning products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or particulate matter, and the index reading makes the air “hazardous,” according to the company, which means unhealthy for everyone.
By 5:00 pm, Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341 and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402. Both measures were considered “hazardous.”
Parts of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see across the street, and this was worse.
Jeff Masters has the most comprehensive set of numbers, as per usual:
The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.
Now, in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a compassionate response, as leaders sought to help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse is bad. On Fox, for instance, the channel’s public health expert timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”) recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks to prevent particulates from getting sucked down your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said host Brian Kilmeade.
Meanwhile, a series of Republican “leaders” started producing angry denunciations of Canada, for polluting America’s air with their thoughtless fires:
Michigan congressman John James, whose campaign for state governor has been endorsed by President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”
Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said he planned to introduce “a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”
And of course the ultimate source of all MAGA craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:
We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!
Trump promised tariffs to make up for the costs, and indeed—and remember this—insisted that “maybe they should pay us some damages.”
The GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during one wave of California’s hideous fires that the state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as he expressed it during its first term, “You gotta clean your floors.”
Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke Hausfather has performed his usual public service by actually looking at the data:
Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1°C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. The boreal burns in rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing.
As he points out, even if the Canadians somehow decided to go “thin the forest,” it wouldn’t work:
The boreal is on the order of 3 million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.
So what is driving the huge increase in Canadian wildfires? It appears some mysterious force is raising the temperature of the Earth. As Quinn Gablicki points out, quoting the University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck:
As long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures will increase, droughts will worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events.
The haze hanging over much of the United States today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of worse times to come.”
Or, as Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management put it on Friday:
“Warmer, drier weather is becoming more common, increasing wildfire risk in Canada and around the world,” she wrote. “Northern Ontario and Quebec, for example, received less than 40% of normal precipitation this June, with temperatures above historical averages.”
None of this, of course, is surprising in any way. America’s forests are currently on fire too, and in remarkable fashion. With our no-pack snowpack year, large fires are burning across the interior West—and what do you know, lots of the smoke is drifting north into Canada, causing bad air quality in British Columbia:
“As wildfire activity increases, so has smoke across many areas of the region. Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-US border and will have varying impacts over the coming days,” an update Saturday evening from the provincial wildfire service said.
This is far from the smallest irony in this saga. In fact, “irony” hardly seems an apt word, suggesting that there is something even slightly subtle about the idiocy. For instance, as our leaders complain about Canada, it seems as if it might be nice if they also noted that our neighbors to the north have consistently set firefighters south to help America fight its great blazes. When Los Angeles caught on fire in January of 2025, Ontario deployed 150 firefighters to help:
“Our closest friend and our closest ally needs help, and we’re going to make sure we’re going to be there supporting them,” the province’s premier said.
And what do you know, last week a Canadian pilot died fighting one of the vast conflagrations on the Colorado-Utah border. As Michele Brunoro reports, Nicholas Dale left behind a wife and two sons:
“He was out there doing his best and just so very sad that we lost a great person and an experienced person fighting something, a natural disaster,” said Dale’s long-time friend Adam Gilliver.
While we’re on ironies, let’s note in passing that the smoke pouring out of these great blazes temporarily diminishes the power of the solar panels that are our main weapon in slowing the heating of the Earth. Miriam Wasser reports on the experience of one Massachusetts homeowner:
In the two days before the first big plume arrived, Stephen Gordon’s solar array produced about 53 kilowatt-hours of power per day—an amount he said is typical for a warm summer day, and more than covers his household needs during daylight hours.
Then came Wednesday, when people throughout New England woke up to gray or even orange-tinted skies. Gordon’s total output that day was just under 23 kilowatt hours, less than half of what his panels generated the previous day.
But of course all of those ironies pale next to the main one: Smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday, but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess.
I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”
So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire.
This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies. As the Center for Climate Integrity documented:
Eleven US states and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments collectively representing more than 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking major oil and gas companies to court to hold them accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and make them pay for the resulting damages.
And MAGA politicians are doing everything they can to try and stop those suits from succeeding. As Abraham Lustgarten reported in April:
Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.
A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the US Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.
At the federal level, the very same politicians complaining about Canadian wildfires are trying to moment, this takes the form of the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act. They’ve drawn support from the industry that owns them:
“We thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers,” said American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Mike Sommers in a joint statement.
America, though the all-time champion, is not alone in spewing fossil fuels, of course. One of the other ironies of the moment is that just as Canada catches on fire, its Prime Minister Mark Carney is announcing a new system of pipelines from the tar sands of Alberta. As veteran climate journalist Adam Radwanski wrote in the Toronto Star, under Toronto’s “dystopian haze” Canada’s pivot away from climate action is “impossible to ignore.” In her excellent new newsletter Patterns, Naomi Klein writes, “As the nation burns, Carney celebrates new fossil fuel projects as 'nation building.'”
So irony drifts back and forth. But responsibility can never really be shed. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry, but that’s simply not true.
It’s not godless communists who are walking around, arresting and sometimes killing Americans, it’s the Trump Gestapo, also known as ICE.
“These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists.” And they will “attack all religions, but in particular, Christianity. They always do..."
“It's like crazy. They will close your churches in this country... They will kill your people, and that's what they're about. They want to end religion. They have to end religion because their ideology doesn't work if you have strong religion... This is the greatest threat to our country since its founding, in my opinion, 250 years ago, what's happening right now.”
This is our Dear Leader speaking, of course, ripping our seriously problematic political system to shreds and turning it into a cult, with Donald Trump as the cult leader, of course. Only he can save us, and by “us” I mean real Americans: the true believers in virtually nothing except what they’re told to believe, also known as MAGA,
“Donald Trump is a desperate man,” writes Elliott Negin at the LA Progressive. “With the midterms on the horizon and his approval ratings under water, he doesn’t want to talk about affordability. Nor does he want to talk about his war with Iran. And he certainly doesn’t want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.”
Trump’s fearmongering is just a cover for his administration’s fear creating.
What he wants to—needs to—do is offer his followers, which in good times may amount to about half the country’s voters, an enemy so terrifying it takes their minds off Epstein, Iran, et al. Even the “white replacement” invasion by immigrants isn’t enough right now. He has decided to return to the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was a possibility that everyone thought about, and bring back the godless commies. Oh my God, they’re back under our beds! But they’re Americans now: Democratic socialists. And somehow they’re on the rise politically.
Welcome to what’s starting to look like the end of actual democracy. If Trump succeeds, that’s what it may well be. Candidates will base their campaigns on vicious insults, not policies of any sort. Every last breath of reality could get squeezed out of our elections. Watch out, the commies are coming!
And they want to kill you. Here’s the truly unbearable irony of Trump’s words. It takes one to know one. Trump’s fearmongering is just a cover for his administration’s fear creating. It’s not godless communists who are walking around, arresting and sometimes killing Americans, it’s the Trump Gestapo, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Eleven people, for instance, have been killed by ICE or Customs and Border Patrol, agents during the second Trump administration, including two men in the past week: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, age 52, was shot while driving to work in Houston, Texas on July 7; and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, age 26, was shot in Biddleford, Maine on July 13. He was also driving to work.
In both incidents, federal officials claimed that the victims had attacked the agents with their vehicles and were killed in self-defense. The agents were not wearing body cameras and no evidence supports this claim. But in both cases, witnesses say that’s not what happened. The vehicles were not “weaponized,” and the men were shot for no reason (except, perhaps, racism).
And both victims were husbands and dads, and their families have been tossed into horrific shock and grief. Guerrero, for instance, had a 3-year-old daughter. His wife posted a photo of him on social media a day after his killing and wrote: “I love you. I have no words for this pain, my life, my love, watch over me, help me to have strength, I love you, stay with me always—don’t leave me alone, I beg you, my love.”
Yeah, better blame this—and so many other deaths—on the godless commies. So far there have been 11 killings by Homeland Security agents this year, along with 21 deaths in immigrant detention centers. Not to mention multi-thousands of arrests, with many detainees essentially disappeared from their loved ones’ lives.
And then there are the wars, the trillion-dollar military budget... on and on and on. I certainly don’t blame this solely on Trump. He's only making the best (by which I mean the worst) of the system he inherited.