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What Protesters Know About Human Nature That Trump Doesn't
They know the real story of human evolution isn't about the strongest or most ruthless individuals surviving. Instead, our story is about cooperation and empathy.
Jun 14, 2025
In Los Angeles, protesters are standing between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and families. In Chicago and New York, all around the country, they're refusing to let children be torn from their communities. They're risking arrest to protect their neighbors, doing what humans have always done: refusing to give up on each other.
These protesters understand something that Trump's administration, and Elon Musk, fundamentally don't: We are not monsters. When President Donald Trump releases lists of "killers, rapists, and drug dealers" to justify mass deportations and disappearances of our beloved community members, when politicians paint entire communities as threats to our survival, they're selling us an ancient lie about who we are. And everyone taking to the streets knows it's a lie.
What the Protesters Understand
The protesters know that Trump's attack on immigrants isn't just inhuman, authoritarian policy, it's also outdated and genuinely bad science that contradicts the very reason our species continues to exist. They understand that when one of us is under attack, we all are.
The lie Trump tells goes like this: Humans are fundamentally selfish, competitive creatures living in a "dog eat dog world" where survival means stepping on others. It's a story that despots have told throughout history because it makes their cruelest policies seem inevitable. If we're all potential monsters, then we need strong leaders to protect us from each other. If compassion is naive, then brutality becomes wisdom.
Every despot in history has had to first convince people that other humans aren't worthy of moral consideration.
Elon Musk made this explicit recently when he called empathy "civilizational suicidal" and claimed that empathy is "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization." The tech mogul and unelected government official described caring for others as a "bug" that's being "exploited" and "weaponized." Musk is attempting to reframe our greatest evolutionary strength as our fatal flaw.
But if this were true, you wouldn't be reading this right now and I would not be writing these words. Our species would have gone extinct long ago. The protesters know this instinctively, and science proves them right.
We Are the Descendants of Carers, Not Killers
What do the protesters understand that Trump doesn't? They know the real story of human evolution isn't about the strongest or most ruthless individuals surviving. Instead, our story is about cooperation and empathy. Early humans knew that we cannot tear ourselves apart because our strength comes from being in community with one another. The humans who shared food during famines, who cared for the sick, who worked together to solve problems, they are our ancestors. Influential early psychologist Sigmund Freud could not be more wrong when he said that we are the descendants of murderers. No, you and I, all of us, are the descendants of carers.
Our caring nature is something we have been able to gather empirical facts about, confirming this across multiple scientific disciplines. Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes has shown how grandmothers caring for offspring allowed for more descendants and drove longevity in our species. Primatologist Frans de Waal has documented empathy and fairness in our closest evolutionary relatives. Even among nonhuman species, generosity is the norm: vampire bats share blood with unrelated bats to prevent starvation, and sparrow-like pied flycatchers will risk their lives to help drive away predators from non-relative birds.
We don't have to look to the past or to other species to see the evidence of our inherent compassionate nature being our strength, not our weakness. We can look at our own children. Toddlers as young as 14 months will spontaneously help others—handing objects to people who can't reach them, picking up dropped items, sharing resources equally even when they could keep more for themselves. This happens before any cultural conditioning, before they're taught to be "good." Research shows that 18-month-olds will help unfamiliar adults regardless of parental presence or encouragement; these fascinating studies suggest that this instinct to help is intrinsic to who we are.
This is our default mode. Cooperation isn't something we have to learn, it isn't a weakness, it isn't destroying civilization. Cooperation and solidarity led to our evolution and are our greatest strengths.
When We Believe We're Monsters, Monsters Win
So why do we keep hearing a different story about our human nature from people like Trump and Elon? Because the lie serves those who hoard wealth and power. When they want to justify policies that violate our moral instincts, they first have to convince us that morality itself is naïve, that empathy is a weakness.
Trump's rhetoric about immigrants is more than dangerous white supremacy in action, it's strategically designed to make us forget who we are. By flooding the media with dehumanizing language about people "poisoning the blood" of America, by claiming immigrants are "not humans" but "animals," by deploying Marines against protesters in Los Angeles, his administration is trying to override our natural empathy and tendency toward care for one another with manufactured fear.
The protesters in Los Angeles and around the country are refusing to dehumanize themselves by allowing anyone in our community to be dehumanized.
Trump's approach is not new, and criticisms of it are not either. As labor organizer Emma Goldman wrote over a century ago, "The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature." Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are charlatans selling us a lie about people in our communities being inherently dangerous. Just like Hitler, who used similar language about "blood poisoning" to justify his atrocities. Every despot in history has had to first convince people that other humans aren't worthy of moral consideration.
The current administration's approach follows historical patterns predictably. First, criminalize an entire population with selective statistics and inflammatory rhetoric. Then, when people naturally recoil from the cruelty of family separations and mass deportations, send in troops to suppress that moral instinct. Finally, frame any resistance as evidence that society is breaking down and needs even harsher measures. Trump has been orchestrating the chaos he needs to justify martial law.
Why This Matters Now
The protesters in Los Angeles and around the country are refusing to dehumanize themselves by allowing anyone in our community to be dehumanized. They are standing up for immigrants, refusing to let children be abducted from schools, because they understand that a society that abandons empathy for some will eventually abandon empathy for all. They know that when we allow the dehumanization of any group, we weaken the very bonds that make civilization possible.
Resisting the lies Trump tells us about human nature is urgent. If we believe the lie that humans are fundamentally selfish, we may become passive in the face of policies that violate our deepest values. We accept mass deportations and disappearances because we're told those who are being removed are monsters. We support militarized responses to peaceful protests because we're convinced our neighbors are our enemies.
But those are all lies. We have to hold on to the truth of who we are. We see that policies based on fear and division make us less safe, not more. We understand that our liberation truly is bound together. We see that people protesting the disappearances of beloved community members are fighting for all of our freedoms and rights. They represent the truth of who we are.
We are not a species of monsters barely held in check. We are not doomed to destroy each other when resources get scarce or when we encounter people who look different from us. We are the species that figured out how to care for each other across genetic lines, how to cooperate with strangers, how to build civilizations based on shared values rather than shared DNA. We have 14-month-olds who instinctively help others, brains that reward us for fairness, and genes that predispose us toward generosity. Moving toward collective liberation is our true nature.
This is what our true nature looks like in action. Not Musk's "bug" to be eliminated, not Trump's weakness to be exploited, but our species' greatest strength. When we stand up for each other, refuse to dehumanize anyone in our communities, and build futures where everyone can thrive, we're not being "suicidally empathetic." We are being magnificently, dangerously, revolutionarily human.
And every act of solidarity proves what despots fear most: that true power is our commitment to one another, our refusal to dehumanize and discard anyone in our community. This is the power that topples empires. Not by denying humanity as they do, but through the simple, revolutionary act of affirming it for everyone.
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Measuring Corporate Power by the Number of Marines in Los Angeles
Trump's authoritarianism didn't come from nowhere. It came from decades of corporate power building a system of exploitation, then using their media and political influence to blame the exploited for everyone's problems.
Jun 11, 2025
So, Matthew Yglesias posted this challenge on Twitter earlier this week: "This is my challenge for people who want to make reducing corporate power the lodestar of their politics — how do you measure this?"
Well, there's a couple of ways. But first, let me tell you what's happening right now: There are 700 Marines in Los Angeles. Marines. In an American city. Four thousand National Guard troops deployed. A union president arrested and facing six years in prison for observing ICE raids. Families torn apart at Home Depot, at restaurants, in the garment district.
This is America, June 2025. Trump's back, and he's moving fast. Marines—actual Marines—carrying out immigration raids in an American city. It's unprecedented, it's shocking, but here's the thing: it's tragically predictable.
This isn't just Trump being Trump. This is the inevitable result of decades of corporate power combining with an authoritarian president. It's been a journey, and we need to understand how we got here.
The system that corporations captured needed a desperate, vulnerable workforce so they could extract more profits.
For 50 years, corporations and the financial elite have been running the greatest theft in human history. The RAND Corporation—the RAND Corporation!—showed that the bottom 90% got paid $79 trillion less than they should have based on economic growth from 1975 to today. By their calculations, median income should be $102,000.
But here's the genius part: they needed someone to blame for this theft. So they pointed fingers at everyone except themselves. Black women on welfare. People getting food stamps. And especially immigrants—documented and undocumented alike.
The system that corporations captured needed a desperate, vulnerable workforce so they could extract more profits. So they made it possible—hell, they made it easy—to hire people who were undocumented. They created an entire infrastructure for exploitation.
Last night, my wife was asking how it is that undocumented people are able to work all these jobs? How is it possible? Well, they have what's called an ITIN—Individual Taxpayer Identification Number. That's something set up by the government to allow people who are undocumented to still pay taxes. They pay payroll taxes, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
Now, does it give them the ability to obtain any benefits from those things? No, it does not. They'll never get Social Security. Even if they get a path to citizenship, even if they become citizens after being here undocumented for 20 years, paying taxes for 20 years, they still don't get access to that money. They only get the past two years.
You see, you've got this system that's set up that has been utilizing the labor, utilizing the hope, utilizing the desire for a better life. Our system of banking was set up for their money. Our system of car sales, home sales, taxes—everything was set up to make sure they could participate in capitalism.
Rules and regulations were changed to welcome and accommodate them economically. Not politically, not socially. No, no, no. That's when the same corporations would fund politicians and media to vilify these workers.
You've got an entire media ecosystem one in the hands of an ever-shrinking number of corporate owners that for decades has been blaming immigrants for our problems. Fox News talking about invasions and hordes. And it's not like we have an alternative media that is actually naming the real people that are taking all our shit, that are putting us in poverty, that are putting their boots on our throats—which of course is the wealthy, the top 1%, their corporations and their lobbyists and their lawyers.
You don't see that $79 trillion theft on TV every day with the faces of the villains and B-roll of corporate boardrooms showing where the money was sucked up, do you? No, you don't. Because the corporations own the media.
It's been a very Machiavellian corporate play. You bring in this thing that helps your bottom line—more desperate labor, more hopeful, more excited people ready to participate in your system. And then you use them as political pawns to maintain your power and prevent people from organizing together. You stoke hatred and class division through racial identity and racism while you keep taking and taking... and taking. Money. Power. Our democracy. They take it all.
This isn't just Trump being Trump. This is the inevitable result of decades of corporate power combining with an authoritarian president.
Here's what enrages me. Democrats thought they could play this game, too. People like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden would say, "Oh, we've got a problem at the border. We've got to do this, we've got to do that." They deported millions, but more quietly. They increased ICE funding. They stoked the flames of fear and jealousy.
Democrats thought they could use this hateful rhetoric for political gain, but keep it contained. They thought they could control people’s frustration with immigrants, whom they blamed for our collapsing lifestyles and shrinking safety nets. They'd validate the "crisis" narrative instead of naming the real villains—the corporations and extractors in our economy. They did that because they didn't want to have the fights.
The Democratic establishment would say, "We have to say, whoa, it's time to move to the center, guys. We'll protect you better than these people will. We won't call out the National Guard. We'll just use the LAPD. We won't go nuts with ICE. We'll just do a kinder, gentler deportation scheme."
And what it ends up being is a party that doesn't really seem to stand for much. You're going to be labeled as a party of open borders anyway. But instead of trying to embrace it and make the case for it, you push back against it.
They say, "Oh, we've got to be the alpha dogs. We've got to show alpha energy." But they really don't understand alpha energy, because by and large, they're bitches. They're little scared bitches that don't know how to stand up and fight for something they believe in. Or they just don't fundamentally believe in much of anything.
Meanwhile, the corporate capture of government continued. You can see how many people from corporations like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Citigroup end up running our economy. Tim Geithner went from the New York Fed straight to Treasury Secretary after helping bail out his Wall Street buddies. Jerome Powell? Private equity guy. Steve Mnuchin? Goldman Sachs partner turned Trump's Treasury Secretary.
Look at Scott Gottlieb, who served as FDA Commissioner, then joined Pfizer's board just 85 days after leaving the agency. Look at Ajit Pai, who worked as a Verizon lawyer before becoming FCC Chairman, where he repealed net neutrality rules that constrained his former employer.
Billy Tauzin chaired the House committee that passed Medicare Part D—which explicitly prohibited Medicare from negotiating drug prices. Upon leaving Congress, he immediately became president of PhRMA at $2 million annually, eventually earning $11.6 million in his final year.
You can look at the number of bills written by ALEC that show up in state legislatures. You can look at all the laws that block unionization. Mandatory arbitration. Right-to-work laws. Guess who pushed for those? Corporations.
How else can you tell corporate power is near absolute? We're seeing cities, towns, and states sell off their assets, sell off their services, privatize all the things that government used to do for people. Everything from trash collection to water to sewer to power.
Chicago sold its parking meters to Morgan Stanley for $1.15 billion in a 75-year lease. Parking rates immediately quadrupled. The private operators recouped their entire investment plus $500 million in profit by 2019, with 60 years remaining on the lease.
Water privatization? Private water systems charge customers $144 more annually on average. In Illinois, companies have acquired 59 water systems since 2013, with over $402 million in acquisition costs passed directly to ratepayers.
That's how we know corporations are in control.
So when an authoritarian comes to power, what does he find? A system perfectly designed for exploitation. A workforce made vulnerable by design. A media ecosystem that's been blaming immigrants for decades. Democrats who validated the "crisis" narrative. And a population primed to accept military force against the scapegoats.
Noah Smith says "unfortunately, he's right" about mass deportations. Young people are swinging hard for candidates like Zohran in New York because they're getting the squeeze economically and they know this is broken. But it's not really all that surprising that people are calling for mass deportations when you've had decades of both parties blaming immigrants for problems caused by corporate theft.
When an authoritarian comes to power, what does he find? A system perfectly designed for exploitation. A workforce made vulnerable by design. A media ecosystem that's been blaming immigrants for decades. Democrats who validated the "crisis" narrative. And a population primed to accept military force against the scapegoats.
Donald Trump deploys not only the National Guard but also the Marines. To round up undocumented house builders, restaurant workers, nannies, gardeners, baristas, retail workers, and factory workers. People that want to be Americans.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass says the city is being used as a "test case" and "an experiment." California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls it "an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism."
But this authoritarianism didn't come from nowhere. It came from decades of corporate power building a system of exploitation, then using their media and political influence to blame the exploited for everyone's problems. It came from Democrats who thought they could moderate their way through fascism.
So when Matthew Yglesias asks how to measure corporate power?
Count the Marines. Count the families torn apart. Count the $79 trillion stolen. Count the privatized water systems and parking meters. Count the pharma executives at the FDA and the Wall Street guys at Treasury. Count the ALEC bills in state legislatures. Count the Democrats who won't fight.
The theft is coming from inside the house. The theft is coming from the people upstairs in the top 10%, top 1%, and they want to blame the people in the economic basement. They have effectively utilized the cheap labor pool that they imported for decades as punching bags for that theft.
And now, when people finally rebel against this system, when they take to the streets to protect their neighbors and coworkers and families - that's when the corporate state shows its true face. Military protection for profits. Combat boots for capital.
You want to know how to measure corporate power? Look to Los Angeles, where decades of corporate exploitation and political cowardice have delivered us to this moment: Marines in American streets, rounding up the workers that corporations brought here to exploit.
That's how you measure it. The question is: what are we going to do about it?
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Trump Is Dragging America Back to Pre-Civil Rights Norms
Permission to dehumanize comes from the top down. This is what the Trump era continues to teach us, as well as how politically convenient it is.
Jun 07, 2025
Basically, everyone knows that “making America great again” means making America racist again—making racism the cultural norm again, unlocking the cage of political correctness and freeing, you know, regular Americans to strut again in a sense of superiority.
This cultural norm was “stolen” by the civil rights movement. Prior to the changes the movement wrought—I’m old enough to remember those days—polite ladies at church could say, “Oh my, that’s very white of you.” And lynchings were not only normal but quasi-legal, or so it seemed, far more likely to result in postcards than convictions.
To worship racism is to deny full humanity not simply to “them” but to yourself.
Permission to dehumanize comes from the top down. This is what the Trump era continues to teach us, as well as how politically convenient it is. Dehumanizing a particular group of people—turning them into “the enemy” of the moment—is such a useful governing tool. And creating the enemy isn’t limited to waging war.
America, America! Half democracy, half slave-owning autocracy: God bless our founding racism, let’s make America as great as it used to be. Here’s how this is done, asAxios reports:
In a tense meeting last week, top Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day... according to two sources familiar with the meeting.
Why it matters: The new target is triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump’s term—and suggests the president’s top immigration officials are full-steam ahead in pushing for mass deportations.
No wonder Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tagents seem like such brutal racists. It’s their job. Perhaps most of them believe in the moral necessity of their work—getting “illegals” out of the country, even if, oh gosh, they’re here legally. But even if they don’t. this is the work they have to do.
It’s not too difficult to scrape past the superficial terms “legal” and “citizenship” to spot the collective dehumanization of brown people. Americans capable of understanding life only in us-vs.-them—me-vs.-you—terms are getting what they long for.
This was exemplified in a recent CNN story about a surge in arrests of fake ICE agents—ordinary American guys harassing, assaulting, and/or pretending to arrest brown people. In one incident, a South Carolina white guy stopped his car on a rural road, blocking the car of brown men behind him. One of the victims recorded the incident on his cellphone.
“You all got caught!” the fake agent blathered. “Where are you from, Mexico? You from Mexico? You’re going back to Mexico!”
He then grabbed the keys from the ignition and started jiggling them in the driver’s face as he mocked his accent. One of the passengers made a call on his cellphone, causing the fake agent to admonish him: “Now don’t be speaking that pig-Latin in my fucking country!” He then slapped the phone out of his hand.
Ah, the enemy! What the incident makes public is not simply the sense of fear the Trumpers are instilling in ordinary Americans, but the fact that they’re returning those ordinary Americans to a sense of... uh, self-worth. We’re better than they are.
But of course this creates fear among everyone in the group declared to be non-American: “the enemy.” As Maribel Hernández Rivera of the American Civil Liberties Union noted to CNN after watching the video:
What we’re seeing here is we have leadership at the top that dehumanizes people who are immigrants and now this is the outcome of that dehumanizing. You end up having a violation of people’s rights, people see and hear this and they feel emboldened to go against immigrants.
Yes, this is part of who we are. Us-vs.-them hatred, fear, and contempt is basic humanity, simplified to its lowest common denominator. It’s so easy to seize a sense of hatred and contempt for an “other”—for someone who seems different. But to worship racism is to deny full humanity not simply to “them” but to yourself. You’re living as half of who you are, locked solely in your certainties—in what you know or think you know—and denying yourself the chance to learn and grow. What someone prone to racism really fears isn’t “the other”—he may well worship having a clearly defined enemy—but, rather, life’s complexity: the unknown.
Removing books from libraries is one example of this—you know, books that make people “uncomfortable,” because they push them beyond their certainties (racist or otherwise). So is the Trump-ICE invasion of universities: arresting and deporting students who make, let us say, politically incorrect statements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As author Christine Greer asked, “What is the point of a university if we have homogeneity of thought and silence?”
Interestingly, we’re also witnessing a seemingly opposite sort of educational confrontation, as Trump education secretary Linda McMahon recently defended a New York state high school’s right to maintain an Indigenous American name for its sports teams: “the Chiefs.” The state had imposed a ban on stereotypical mascot names. As a spokesperson for the National Congress of American Indians said, “These depictions are not tributes—they are rooted in racism, cultural appropriation, and intentional ignorance.”
No matter! America has a right to maintain its stereotypes, that is to say, keep them in public view, front and center. Toss in a few hoots while you’re at it.
I believe this much: We’ll continue to evolve beyond this smirking certainty, regardless how difficult it will be to do so and regardless how long it takes.
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