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Juneteenth Is Not a History Lesson We Can Afford to Forget
A PragerU video about the holiday is an example of how history can become propaganda.
Jun 23, 2026
Juneteenth celebrations in my town were lit. There were so many events I had a difficult time choosing which ones to attend. As a grandmother, I ended up at the event on the grounds of the Historic Harriet Barber house (circa 1875) in Hopkins, South Carolina, where my daughter and her 3-year-old son were drumming. The celebration was filled with spirited performances, great food, and camaraderie. Historical reflections centered on the origins of Juneteenth, commemorating June 19, 1865, when African-descended people who were enslaved in Texas finally learned of their freedom—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had officially declared them free. Many gave shout-outs to African American ancestors for all of their visions, sacrifices, and accomplishments. It was a joyful space.
While we are still in the Juneteenth celebratory spirit, we should not sleep, lest it will be another two-and-a-half years when we wake up and realize that our freedom has been lost through a series of recent institutional white supremacist political maneuvers such as: weakening voting rights; attacks on Black political districts, and bans on African American studies.
In his classic 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, warned Black people not to believe the lies taught in school that are full of distortions, intentional inaccuracies, and omissions. He also warned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation. Nearly 100 years later, we are still facing the revision and erasure of Black history.
For example, PragerU—a conservative website that promotes conservative viewpoints via digital media—has produced a series of edu-tainment videos full of revisionist historical distortions and half-truths.
Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told.
One video, "The Inconvenient Truth About Juneteenth," is narrated by a young Black man, Xaviaer. In the 56 second TikTok-style video, the narrator presents himself as an “influencer” and is casually walking down the street, iced coffee in hand, as he opines that Black folks are mentally enslaved for believing the conventional story about Juneteenth.
Immediately, evoking the name of Rosa Parks, Xaviaer signifies that Rosa should have made the viewers sit in the front of the bus and take a history class. The cleverness of the misinformation, though, is apparent when he says that Democrats kept Black people enslaved two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This slight of hand fails to clarify that the ideologies of the Republican and Democratic parties switched around 1870. Before that time, Republicans controlled the government and used its power to protect Black people who were formerly enslaved and guarantee their civil rights during Reconstruction. Most Democrats, particularly in the South, opposed many of these efforts. However, as the nation shifted its attention toward economic growth and industrial expansion, support for Reconstruction began to wane. Many Northern Republicans became less willing to invest political capital in protecting Black rights in the South.
By the mid-to-late 1870s, the Republican Party had largely retreated from its commitment to reconstructing Southern society and safeguarding the rights of African Americans. Following the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, White Democrats regained political control across much of the region and systematically dismantled many of the gains Black people had achieved during Reconstruction. Over the following decades, political allegiances gradually shifted, and by the mid-20th century, many African Americans increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party, particularly as it became more supportive of civil rights initiatives.
Xaviaer concludes "The Inconvenient Truth about Juneteenth" by admonishing Black people for referring to Juneteenth as a Black Independence Day. He argues that the political left has repackaged the holiday through what he characterizes as a segregationist lens. He adds a mocking remark, suggesting that if viewers truly believe Juneteenth is a separate Black Independence Day, he does not want to see them "twerking on a boat" on the Fourth of July—not resisting the urge to slide in a stereotype.
The comment is intended to be humorous, but it serves a deeper purpose. By ridiculing those who celebrate Juneteenth, the video dismisses the historical reality that many enslaved African-descended people were excluded from the freedoms celebrated on July 4, 1776. Rather than engaging this historical contradiction, the video substitutes mockery for analysis and caricature for historical understanding.
From a critical perspective, Black people should not be getting history lessons from social media influencers, political propagandists, or organizations masquerading as educational institutions. History is too important.
Fortunately, other scholars have challenged the distortions and omissions that permeate traditional historical narratives. While Dr. Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro remains one of the most important warnings about the dangers of accepting history uncritically, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, exposed how textbooks sanitize and distort the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States intentionally centers the experiences of people who were oppressed, marginalized, and excluded from dominant historical accounts.
Misinformation is not merely about getting facts wrong. It is about shaping how people understand themselves, their communities, and their possibilities. Dr. Carter G. Woodson once reflected that it took him 20 years after earning his doctorate from Harvard University to recover from what he described as his intellectual conditioning. James Baldwin similarly observed that it took years to free himself from the myths and falsehoods he had been taught about race, history, and human worth.
The stakes are especially high when misleading narratives are packaged in entertaining videos designed to reach young people. And by the way, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, father of Black History Month, cautioned that one of the most effective tools of institutional white supremacy is to recruit Black voices to legitimize and advance ideas that work against Black liberation.
Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is not simply a legal status. Freedom requires historical memory, vigilance, and the courage to question what we are told and the understanding of the need to seek truth from credible sources.
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I'm Boycotting Trump's State of the Union and So Should You
If he doesn’t believe he’s my president, why should I treat him as my president and watch his State of the Union?
Feb 23, 2026
I’m not going to watch the State of the Union address Tuesday night. I urge you not to, either.
I hope Nielsen (or whoever makes such estimates these days) will find that far fewer Americans watched President Donald Trump’s State of the Union than have watched any other State of the Union in recent memory. It will drive Trump nuts.
There are plenty of other reasons for not watching.
First, he doesn’t deserve our attention. He’s abused and defiled the American presidency, even worse than he did in his first term.
I already know the real state of the union. It sucks.
He’s openly taken bribes. He’s blatantly usurped the powers of Congress. He has overtly used the Justice Department to punish people he considers his enemies and pardon people loyal to him. He has willfully rejected the rule of law, broken treaties, literally destroyed part of the White House, thumbed his nose at our allies (including our closest and heretofore loyal neighbors), and utterly failed his constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. He lies like most people breathe. He’s a fraud and a traitor.
Second, we already know what he’s going to say because he’s already stated and restated his lies every chance he gets. He says the economy is in wonderful shape, that he’s settled six wars, that he’s brought peace to the Middle East, that he’s made America safer and more secure, that the 2020 election was stolen from him, ad nauseam.
He assumes that if he repeats these lies often enough, people will believe them. Why should we give him more of an audience for his lies?
Third, he refuses to be president of the United States but only of the people who voted for him in 2024.
He talks in glowing terms about “my” people while denigrating “them”—those of us who didn’t vote for him, who still disapprove of him, or who refuse to give him whatever he wants.
He won’t even fund so-called blue states. So far this year he’s axed over $1.5 billion in blue-state grants, contrary to the wishes of Congress.
If he doesn’t believe he’s my president, why should I treat him as my president and watch his State of the Union?
Fourth and finally, I already know the real state of the union. It sucks.
The economy has been good for big business and wealthy Americans but shitty for small businesses and average working Americans.
Although Trump repeatedly promised that his tariffs would reduce US imports, shrink the trade deficit, and lead to a revival in American manufacturing, the opposite has happened. The annual trade deficit in goods last year hit a record high. And US manufacturers cut 108,000 jobs.
In the 2024 election, Trump also promised to bring down prices, but inflation is still steaming ahead. Prices grew at an annual rate of 3% in December. He’s so out of touch with what most Americans are enduring that he calls the crisis of affordability “fake news.”
He promised to control immigration, but 6 out of 10 Americans think he’s gone “too far” by sending federal agents into American cities who have caused mayhem and murder.
He promised to avoid foreign entanglements, but he abducted the president of Venezuela, killed more than 150 Venezuelans, and is now planning to attack Iran.
His menacing the Middle East has created another inflation risk: The possibility that a key oil export route will be disrupted has caused the price of Brent crude to soar.
For all these reasons, I’m not going to watch Trump’s State of the Union. I recommend that you don’t, either.
Your senators and representatives in Congress should boycott it, too. You might call their offices to suggest this. (Some Democrats are already planning to skip it, opting instead for a counter-programming event on the National Mall dubbed “The People’s State of the Union.” Good!)
And why the hell should justices of the Supreme Court show up, especially after he says he’s “ashamed” of the six who decided his tariffs exceeded his authority—calling the three Democratic appointees a “disgrace to our nation” and the three conservatives who voted against him “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats,” “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution,” “swayed by foreign interests,” and “an embarrassment to their families”?
Boycott the State of the Union. It’s the least we can do.
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America’s ICE Crisis Is Political and Psychological
A society cannot remain mentally healthy when its members are repeatedly told not to trust what they see, feel, or know.
Feb 06, 2026
Following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, people are glued to their phones, televisions, and computer screens with both curiosity and dread. There is a pervasive feeling of unrelenting anxiety and fear. It creeps into otherwise ordinary moments, leaving people unmoored and unable to rest.
As therapists, we traditionally spend our time helping clients unpack what they are experiencing internally. But now, we are facing a moment when we don’t have to invest much in discovering what is causing that pervasive feeling of unease. It’s a collective experience causing individual pain.
There is a longstanding belief that therapy and politics should be kept separate, and that the treatment room ought to be sealed off from the chaos of the outside world. In quieter times, that is a reasonable expectation. But when fear, instability, and disinformation saturate the social atmosphere, pretending those forces stop at the therapy door becomes unrealistic and, at a certain point, irresponsible.
We are living through a period of sustained psychological assault. Constant chaos, relentless distortion, and the normalization of cruelty erode people’s internal sense of reality. When power is exercised without restraint or accountability, confusion and anxiety do not remain abstract. They show up as panic attacks, depressive collapse, insomnia, somatic symptoms, relational breakdowns, and despair.
It would be a mistake to minimize the pain people are experiencing right now or to underestimate how deeply it is shaping mental health.
This is not a partisan claim; it is a psychological one. When psychologically underdeveloped men become intoxicated by power, the effects are predictable and terrifying. Fear increases. Trust erodes. Nervous systems remain on high alert. People begin to doubt their own perceptions. Over time, this destabilization becomes chronic, not only for individuals but for the collective psyche.
Therapists are seeing this every day. Clients who once came to therapy for familiar struggles now arrive carrying an added layer of dread. People of color describe the fear of living in communities that feel increasingly targeted and unsafe. Protesters speak about the psychic toll of being criminalized for dissent. Immigrants and their families live with the constant anxiety of disappearance or deportation to foreign jails known as torture camps. Others describe something harder to name but no less corrosive—the sense that reality itself is no longer reliable.
Those outside the United States are not insulated from this either. When imperial powers posture and threaten, entire populations live in constant fear of destabilization or invasion.
History tells us that these cycles recur, and that eventually, they are resisted and reversed. However, that knowledge offers limited comfort to people living inside the rupture itself. It would be a mistake to minimize the pain people are experiencing right now or to underestimate how deeply it is shaping mental health.
What we call democracy in this country is valuable, but also deeply flawed. Systemic racism and a war on the poorest among us always have been standard fare.
But today, we seem to be entering a new phase where democratic norms are undermined openly and where cruelty is reframed as strength. When the truth is being treated as optional, the psychological cost is profound. A society cannot remain mentally healthy when its members are repeatedly told not to trust what they see, feel, or know.
This is where the fantasy that therapy exists in a political vacuum collapses. Policy decisions shape bodies, relationships, and futures. When people’s lives are destabilized by political forces, the reverberations show up in the quiet despair of the patient on the couch: What is happening? Why do I feel this way? What should I do?
Therapy is an act of reality restoration. It helps people reclaim their perceptions, reconnect with their values, and rebuild trust in themselves and others. Care, in this moment, is not passive. It requires naming harm, recognizing where terror is being manufactured and distributed, and understanding that the psychological health of a society depends on more than individual coping strategies. It depends on truth, accountability, and the protection of human dignity.
Therapists will continue to do what we have always done: Show up, listen carefully, and hold space for transformation. But we should not be asked to pretend that the storm outside has nothing to do with the distress inside. America’s crisis is not only political; it is psychological too.
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12 Years of Lies, Torture, Drones.... and Hope?
I began writing for TomDispatch during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe Trump 2.0.
Jan 13, 2026
“Tom, I got nothin’.” That’s all I wanted to say to Tom Engelhardt, the kindly and incisive editor of TomDispatch.com. He’d called to check in and see what I was planning for my next piece. I wanted to tell him, “I’m staring at starvation and genocide, the destruction of American democracy and the rule of law, along with the ongoing incineration of our planet. I’m a damp ball of grief, and I’ve got nothing useful to say about any of it.” Furthermore, I wanted to add, “Anything I could say about the present disaster has already been said comprehensively and better by someone else.” That “someone else” includes myriad excellent journalists who have departed (voluntarily or otherwise) from a mainstream media that has repeatedly acquiesced to Trump, succumbing to a malaise of self-censorship at flagship newspapers like the Washington Post and even the New York Times.
People with nothing to say would generally be wise to shut up. Unfortunately, the wisdom to choose to remain silent has never been my most salient characteristic, something even strangers seem to notice about me. Years ago, I was introduced to a woman at a party. Before I’d even opened my mouth, she said, “Oh, good, another short, pushy Jewish dyke from New York!” Must be something in the way I move.
In any case, having nothing for Tom this time around led me to think about all the times I have had something to say and how grateful I am to have had TomDispatch as a place to say it.
So, feeling stuck, I decided to examine my output over all these years. As it happens, there’s a lot of it, 98 pieces in all. I began during Barack Obama’s somewhat disappointing second presidential term, observed with horror Trump’s first time around, slogged through the Biden years, and now find myself reaching for a noun more resonant than “horror” to describe my reaction to the first year (and counting) of Trump 2.0.
It was far too much to read through in one sitting, but not surprisingly, a few general themes did emerge. Most of them had to do with the importance of working to discern—and tell—the truth about the world we live in.
Thinking about Epistemological Anarchy…
My first TomDispatch piece appeared in 2014. It marked the beginning of an oddly personal chronicle of a time that the poet W.H. Auden might once have called “a low dishonest decade.”
That’s the phrase Auden used to describe the period leading up to September 1, 1939, the day Adolf Hitler’s German army invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. I think we can fairly say that the Trump years, and even those preceding his first election, constitute a low, dishonest decade.
Of course, Trump himself is an avatar—a human embodiment—of the principle of dishonesty. Indeed, the Washington Post recorded more than 30,000 “false or misleading claims” he made during his first four years as president. This time around, most media outlets have given up counting, although several marked his first 100 days with reports on his 10 (or more) most egregious lies. The purpose of “flooding the zone with shit,” as right-wing podcaster and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once put it, is not really to convince anyone that any particular lie is true but, as I wrote during Trump’s first term, to convince everyone that it’s impossible to know whether anything is true. As I argued then:
We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean “towards action”) as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way. And indeed that kind of propaganda has long existed, as with, for example, wartime books, posters, and movies designed to inflame patriotism and hatred of the enemy. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. ‘In fact,’ as Russian émigrée and New Yorker writer Masha Gessen has put it, "the purpose of totalitarian propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.”
Back in 2019, I was writing about “totalitarian propaganda” in the past tense, speaking of 20th-century authoritarian regimes. But I was already worried about what Trump’s wild epistemological anarchy portended. “Eroding the very ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy has been,” I wrote, “however instinctively, the mode of the Trumpian moment as well, both the presidential one and that of so many right-wing conspiracy theorists now populating the online world.” For many Americans, it was no longer worth the effort to discern the truth. “When everybody lies, anything can indeed be true. And when everybody—or even a significant chunk of everybody—believes this, the effect can be profoundly anti-democratic.”
In fact, I suggested, “this popular belief that nobody really does or can know anything is the perfect soil for an authoritarian leader to take root.” Trump 2.0 has confirmed that intuition.
“September 1, 1939” was the title of W. H. Auden’s most famous poem, the one that began with a reflection on the previous “low, dishonest decade.” It also contained these lines about what he then imagined was to come:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
…And Memory Holes
That first article of mine was about the evil done by the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. This was not a surprising topic for me, since I had recently published a book on the subject, specifically about institutionalized state torture as practiced by the United States during what came to be known as the “War on Terror.” It was pretty much all I was thinking about in those days.
In that piece, I pointed out that we had never gotten a full accounting of the torture committed in our names in Afghanistan, Iraq, and globally at CIA “black sites” (their secret torture arenas). I blamed that reality in significant part on President Barack Obama’s “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards” and pointed out that not “one of the senior government officials responsible for activities that amounted to war crimes has been held accountable, nor were any of the actual torturers ever brought to court.” When, through a 2009 executive order, Obama finally closed those black sites, he argued that, “at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders.”
Of course, that “need to look forward” (not over one’s shoulder) effectively tossed the history of torture under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney into an Orwellian memory hole. And to this day, there has never been a full accounting of the Bush torture program. As a result, I pointed out then, “the structure for a torture system remains in place and unpunished,” which meant that the next time an administration chose to invoke and weaponize a public fear of dark, foreign others, we could well see torture’s resurgence.
Of course, that is indeed what happened under Donald Trump. Beginning with his first campaign speech in 2015, in which he inveighed against Mexican migrants as rapists bringing drugs and crime into this country, he has continually escalated his attacks on the foreign-born, particularly those from places he infamously called “shithole countries.” By his third campaign for the presidency in 2024, he (along with his running mate JD Vance) was routinely telling his followers that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were dining on other residents’ cats and dogs. In his second term, eschewing earlier euphemistic dog whistles, President Trump has been making it very clear that what distinguishes the migrants he characterizes as “garbage” (Somalis) from good migrants (“nice Scandinavians”) is their color.
As a result, this year I found myself reflecting again on the scourge of Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, writing that:
“t’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.
Honestly, though, I don’t think any of us could then have imagined a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) run by Kristi Noem. She’s the Trump appointee who posed in her DHS baseball cap and $50,000 Rolex watch in front of hundreds of half-naked prisoners like the ones she’d illegally dispatched to CECOT, the notorious Salvadoran “Terrorist Confinement Center.” In ordering the deportation of immigrants to a penal institution well-known for torturing its inmates, Noem was reprising the Bush-era crime of “extraordinary rendition,” a practice that is, of course, illegal under US and international law.
Because of excellent reporting by outlets like the Guardian, we know that those men, now thankfully freed and repatriated to Venezuela, “suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault.” We also know that the Trump administration tried to tip the whole episode into its capacious memory hole by successfully preventing CBS’"60 Minutes" from airing a segment on the abuse of US deportees at CECOT. (That segment ran briefly in Canada; however, and a full transcript of it is now available, courtesy of The Nation magazine.)
Extrajudicial Killings (Also Known as “Murder”)
Another theme I’ve returned to over the years is the US penchant for murder-at-a-distance. Indeed, our country pioneered what now appears to be a significant part of the future of warfare: remotely directed attacks on individual human beings. In 2016, I wrote about the increasing use of military drones and the implications for military ethics:
The technical advances embodied in drone technology distract us from a more fundamental change in military strategy. However it is achieved—whether through conventional air strikes, cruise missiles fired from ships, or by drone—the United States has now embraced extrajudicial executions on foreign soil. Successive administrations have implemented this momentous change with little public discussion. And most of the discussion we’ve had has focused more on the new instrument (drone technology) than on its purpose (assassination). It’s a case of the means justifying the end. The drones work so well that it must be all right to kill people with them.
I was still writing about the subject six years later. In 2022, TomDispatch published my piece about the push to develop LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems). This US goal had first emerged in the previous century during the US war in Vietnam with the (expensive and largely unsuccessful) automated battlefield. Half a century later, such automation, including the use of so-called artificial intelligence to make kill decisions, is now available in cheap, easily replaceable drones. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the United States has over the years resisted any attempt to outlaw autonomous weapons. “The European Union, the UN, at least 50 signatory nations, and (according to polls), most of the world population believe that autonomous weapons systems should be outlawed,” I wrote in 2022. “The US, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Russia disagree, along with a few other outliers.” I hardly expect the second Trump administration to take a different position.
In fact, despite what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might think, contemporary American soldiers probably don’t need to do pull-ups. They only need to sit down—in front of a screen—to cause mayhem globally.
Today, we take our ability to kill at a great distance for granted, as the Trump administration’s actions have demonstrated. We accept with disturbingly little question the now routine murders by drone of more than 100 people in small boats off the Venezuelan coast and in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Only when it emerged that one of those unpiloted aerial attacks on defenseless human beings included a “double-tap”—a second strike to kill two survivors floating in the water by their devastated boat—was there widespread objection, including from members of Congress.
Hope in Strange Times
Before the 2016 election, I wrote a piece about how the rest of us needed to learn to claim our victories. “In these dismal days,” I said, “of climate change, imperial decline, endless war, and in my city, a hapless football team, I seem to be experiencing a strange and unaccustomed emotion: hope.” How could that be, I asked. “Maybe it’s because, like my poor San Francisco 49ers, who have been ‘rebuilding’ for the last two decades, I’m fortunate enough to be able to play the long game.”
At that moment, however, I did find one thing especially encouraging: “We seem to have finally reached Peak Trump, and the reason why is important.” Or so I thought.
Calling Mexicans rapists and drug dealers didn’t do it. Promising to bring back waterboarding and commit assorted other war crimes didn’t do it. Flirting with the white supremacist crowd and their little friend Pepe the Frog didn’t do it. But an 11-year-old audio tape of Trump bragging about grabbing women "by the pussy" seems to have been the drop of water that finally cracked the dam and sent even stalwart Republican leaders fleeing a flood of public revulsion.
Well, even Cassandra can get things wrong once in a while and I was certainly wrong about that one. Today, Trump no longer simply “flirts” with white supremacism. He’s all in. And I’d be surprised now if even a demonstrated association with Jeffrey Epstein’s many predatory crimes will be enough to bring him down. In any case, there’s a solid backbench of genuine fascists—Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and of course Vice President JD Vance—to take over, should Trump take one nap too many and fall off his gilt-edged chair.
A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”
I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me—or any of us—back in that bottle.”
I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle.
Auden concluded his poem with the following lines. Almost a century later, they still remain an apt response to our contemporary confrontation with fascism and our latest night terrors:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Maybe I still have something to say after all.
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We Shouldn't Have to Watch a Woman's Murder to Counter Government Lies
Right-wing leaders are trying to convince all of us that what we saw on video with our own eyes was not actually what we saw, and for far too many, it seems to be working.
Jan 13, 2026
None of us should have to watch videos of our fellow citizens and neighbors being killed to get factual information about what happened. Yet the way President Donald Trump and Kristi Noem, the secretary of Homeland Security, described the moment an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a 37-year-old mom and American citizen in broad daylight was so blatantly far off from what happened that I fear we will need to keep seeing for ourselves.
I never watch videos of people being killed on purpose. Yet, I clicked on a video of a woman in Minnesota in her SUV who seemed to be in a heated verbal exchange with an ICE agent. I saw her try to pull away from an agent who was reaching into her car, only to be shot at close range as she was trying to leave. It happened so quickly I hoped that she got away and the bullet did not hit her, but my hopes gave way to a nauseating pit in my stomach as her car veered off and hit a pole, the way one does when a driver falls asleep. Only, I knew she didn’t fall asleep because moments earlier, I saw an angry man in ICE uniform shoot at her. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, and she was an award-winning poet, wife, and mom of three, her youngest child only 6 years old.
Surely everyone would condemn this killing, I thought to myself. I immediately sought out comments sections on the internet and official accounts of various politicians hoping for a solidarity and decency that has eluded us since Donald Trump arrived on the political scene. I just knew that everyone—regardless of political party or support for Donald Trump—and perhaps even those in the current administration, would condemn this brazen murder by an ICE agent who was filmed losing his temper, shooting, and killing a woman as she tried to drive away. At the very least, I thought politicians who support ICE would call it a tragic accident. Admittedly, I especially thought this would be true when I learned that the victim was white, a citizen, and a mother—identities that have often provided cover from the deadliest encounters with those across law enforcement entities.
Instead, I read a statement on Instagram from The Department of Homeland Security that insinuated Renee Good was a rioter. They said that she used her Honda as a weapon and began to weave together a familiar narrative that amounts to: ICE was blameless, and the mom in her car was part of an organized movement that should be considered domestic terrorism. The comments were divided. Some people expressed their deepest sympathies and outrage that she was killed that way. But far too many others repeated the story from Homeland Security’s written statement and from Kristi Noem’s testimony. I’d seen comments like those before. “She should have complied” and “FAFO” (fuck around and find out).
We must fervently resist the attempts made by this current administration to gaslight and pacify us in the face of deadly injustice, and we must challenge those who seek to override the best of our humanity with their institutionalized and wildly funded cruelty.
In the past six years we've watched the American right-wing push narratives that encourage the general public to support police officers when they kill unarmed Black people and squash any suspicions of their wrongdoings. The same messages that were used to criminalize Philando Castile and paint Trayvon Martin as an aggressor, the same messages that were used to try and excuse away Breonna Taylor’s murder, are the talking points we are hearing now about what happened to Renee Good in Minnesota. And they are yielding the same divided responses, only this time in response to the killing of a white mom as we live out the cautions in the famous “First They Came” poem.
Right-wing leaders have spent years telling people that, to put it simply, there are good guys and bad guys and law enforcement officials, including ICE, are always the good guys and anyone opposing them are always the bad guys. They have also convinced too many that “bad guys” deserve to be executed on the spot, no trial necessary.
Now, most alarmingly, they are trying to convince all of us that what we saw on video with our own eyes was not actually what we saw, and for far too many, it seems to be working.
We must fervently resist the attempts made by this current administration to gaslight and pacify us in the face of deadly injustice, and we must challenge those who seek to override the best of our humanity with their institutionalized and wildly funded cruelty. It starts by recognizing the predictable playbook they have been using since George Floyd died crying for his mama and saying, “I can’t breathe.” We must work to restore these bipartisan basics:
- Shooting people is not an acceptable resolution to misbehavior and nonviolent confrontation;
- Trained professionals should know how to deescalate and remain calm, not shoot when they feel threatened (or more accurately, angry);
- Protests are not inherently riots and are a constitutional right;
- Rather than playing “good guys or bad guys,” we must acknowledge good actions vs. bad ones, legal actions vs. illegal ones, and use due process to determine guilt and consequences when things go wrong; and
- No matter what a government official or even the president says, what you see with your own eyes is more trustworthy than a story they concoct to spin events to serve their agendas.
Renee Nicole Good should still be alive to mother her children, love her wife, and write poems. We will not allow them to distract us from that with lies.
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Trump Is Attacking Our Ability to Find Out What Is Going On in Our Country
Erosion of the ability to accurately describe our reality hobbles every aspect of our collective decision-making. The current program of erosion is steady, deliberate, and already well underway.
Aug 28, 2025
Alarms are sounding across the political and ideological spectrums about America’s collapsing federal data structure. But what is the big deal? Why does access to data, specifically from the federal government, matter so much?
At the heart of all work in this space are three questions:
- What happened before?
- What is happening now?
- What might happen?
A society cannot make good decisions without knowing how prior decisions turned out, assessing the current situation, and developing reasonable predictions about possibilities under consideration.
Federal statistical work is how we find out what is going on with the 300 million people and 11 million businesses across the complex network of federal, state, and local systems that make up the world’s largest economy. Issues at that scale are too big for intuition or “common sense.” We need comprehensive information produced by rigorous, capable people who are not afraid to tell us the truth. We should be deeply and profoundly alarmed by the offer of anything less.
Each researcher approaches their work from a different direction with a different area of focus, which results in a wide range of conclusions on a variety of topics. But the common ground is the data.
Voters are beginning to understand the damage our economy and our society sustains when we turn our backs on the truth.
Reliable, comprehensive, nonpartisan federal datasets like the American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, historical data tables from Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income, economic reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, scoring from the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, and other quality federal data products provide a stable point of reference to which most agree to calibrate their work, even though there may be different policy perspectives. We know we are all standing on the same ground, and that the ground is reasonably solid.
Until now, these data have been produced by teams of dedicated experts who understand that their job is to collect and report the numbers as accurately as possible. Sometimes the best available methods are imperfect. Sometimes estimates need adjustment based on the latest information. Sometimes the team responsible for a particular report does not have the ideal amount of funding or enough staff. But the reports have always been created in good faith by extremely competent people. The current threats to that are inexcusable.
Erosion of the ability to accurately describe our reality hobbles every aspect of our collective decision-making. The current program of erosion is steady, deliberate, and already well underway.
Statistical agencies have been aggressively hollowed out in terms of both funding and staff and are notifying the research community to expect certain products to be released late or not at all. Important research programs are suspended indefinitely.
Information on entire subjects—such as race, gender, and climate—is no longer being collected and, in some cases, being excised wholesale from existing data. Legislators are arguing that publicly traded corporations should not have to disclose critical information about their activities. Careful, diligent staffers are losing their positions for doing their jobs and, if replaced at all, being replaced by people who think good data science begins and ends with typing a prompt into a chatbot.
Highly qualified leaders defending data integrity, privacy, and the mission of their agencies are being kicked to the curb in favor of individuals whose primary qualification appears to be willingness to produce reports that say whatever the current administration wants and suppress those that do not.
The ability to find out what is going on in our country is under attack. That is definitely a big deal, but the research community is not taking it lying down. The authoritarian playbook always includes attacking the truth, so this did not come as a surprise. As soon as the 2024 election results were called, data preservation coalitions got to work archiving existing data in multiple locations. The agency leaders are not going easily or quietly. And voters are beginning to understand the damage our economy and our society sustains when we turn our backs on the truth. American civil resistance has a proud history, and this assault on our public information is an opportunity for involved citizens to prevent authoritarianism from taking hold.
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Trump’s Firing of the BLS Commissioner Is Part of a Larger Attack on Government Data
An alarming approach is emerging on job creation, economic growth, and tax collections: If reality doesn’t conform to the narrative, destroy the evidence.
Aug 07, 2025
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, in retaliation for publishing weak jobs numbers in the bureau’s monthly employment report. The Trump administration rightly received criticism for spooking investors and undermining the creditability of government data for this reckless move. But this is just the latest act in a broader erosion of the federal data infrastructure.
President Trump provided zero evidence to support his claim of a “rigged” report created to make him look bad. Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, described the firing as “the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
It’s crucial to understand the BLS is an independent, non-partisan, and highly respected agency tasked with producing data on jobs, wages, and prices. This data serves as the backbone for a broad swath of public and private decision-making. Researchers depend on these data to study the impacts of government decision-making on the economy, budgets, and people’s lives.
Trump’s latest attack on the BLS contributes to an alarming trend. For years, federal statistical agencies have been chronically underfunded. Under the Trump administration, additional budget cuts, federal hiring freezes, and mass layoffs are further straining agencies.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go.
The collection of quality data is often labor-intensive, sometimes requiring massive field operations. When agency funding and staff levels cannot support the full collection effort, we risk losing the kind of data that is the hardest, and most essential, to collect: data in rural areas, smaller geographies, and often historically undercounted populations. This kind of slow data erasure poses serious challenges for tax policy research and modeling.
For example, the Census Bureau employs thousands of field representatives to interview households and businesses for a range of surveys. But since January, 1,300 Census Bureau employees have reportedly left, further hamstringing data collection in an already understaffed agency. Previously, when the agency faced funding shortfalls in 2016, it cancelled its field testing aimed at improving counts in Spanish-speaking areas and on Indigenous reservations for the 2020 Census. These hard-to-count communities are often central to our analyses of tax equity.
BLS faces similar challenges. Inflation data relies on data collectors to record price data from thousands of retailers across the country. These operations are being forced to scale back due to shrinking resources and in some cases have stopped altogether. Despite this, Trump’s 2026 budget proposal reduces the BLS budget by $56 million and proposes a major restructuring of the agency. This data is foundational to many aspects of modeling; it allows us to compare the impact of policy over time in “real” terms and project policy impacts out into the future.
At the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), staffing levels in the Research, Applied Analytics, and Statistics office have decreased by 29% since January. As a result, the IRS has indefinitely postponed its Joint Statistical Research Program, which produced original research and novel data sets that the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy frequently relies on to inform our own modeling of tax policy and taxpayer behavior.
Distrust in data will harm every American, leaving businesses less able to prepare for a recession, labor unions less equipped for potential layoffs, families less able to predict how far their paycheck will go. At the height of Covid-19 deaths in June 2020, Trump famously said, “if we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases if any.” A similar approach is emerging on job creation, economic growth, and tax collections: If reality doesn’t conform to the narrative, destroy the evidence.
The federal government’s statistical agencies are full of nonpartisan career economists and statisticians who work hard to be responsible stewards of our nation’s data. And they continue to do so even under tight resource constraints and amid a fiercely partisan political environment. But last week’s attacks on BLS fuel growing fears among researchers and policy analysts that the data we rely on to understand policy may one day be compromised, suppressed, or deleted altogether.
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Trustworthy US Jobs Info Is the Latest Victim of Trump’s War on Facts
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot.
Aug 02, 2025
I spent much of the 1990s as U.S. secretary of labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.
So what does President Donald Trump do? With one fell swoop Friday he destroyed the BLS.
Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May. Revisions in monthly jobs report are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger, and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he approves of.
Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else—presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot. Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger, and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he approves of.
So we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.
Trump is in the process of trying to do the same thing with the Federal Reserve—demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.
What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell give in to Trump? It loses it. In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation, as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat, and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.
Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency. It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy, and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of Indigenous people. He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.
This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.
This is what fascism looks like, friends.
We must fight this with everything we have.
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Don’t Believe Trump’s Disinfo Campaign About His Budget Bill and Social Security
Instead of eliminating taxes on Social Security, the One Big Beautiful Bill weakens Social Security’s ability to pay full benefits for current and future beneficiaries.
Jul 09, 2025
Over the summer, GOP members of Congress and the Trump administration—particularly President Donald Trump—will try to sell the American people on his “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB). One of the claims that will be made is that the legislation ends taxes on Social Security. Ending taxation of Social Security benefits was one of the major campaign promises made by Trump when he was campaigning for reelection.
Contrary to claims made by the White House, the president himself, and GOP members of Congress, the OBBB does not end taxation of Social Security. As MSNBC reporting points out, it is procedurally impossible to enact changes in Social Security through the process of reconciliation:
First and foremost, the idea that the megabill (OBBB) eliminates federal taxes on Social Security—a claim Trump has made repeatedly of late—is plainly false. In fact, congressional Republicans relied on the budget reconciliation process to advance the package, and it’s procedurally impossible to change Social Security through this complex process.
Take a moment to let this fact register with you. It is impossible to enact the kind of Social Security changes that the President Trump and his supporters claim.
So, how did misinformation about the impact of the OBBB on Social Security get started? Well, not surprisingly it starts with the White House. A White House press release on July 1 boldly proclaims that “No Tax on Social Security is a Reality in the One Big Beautiful Bill.” The White House disinformation campaign on Social Security went to an unprecedented level when the Social Security Administration (SSA) sent out misinformation on the elimination of taxes on Social Security in the OBBB. As The Washington Post points out:
The Social Security Administration sent an email to millions of Americans soon after the passage of OBBB saying that the landmark legislation “delivers long-awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans” and includes “a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples.”
So, how does the OBBB impact Social Security? Tara Siegel Bernard, of The New York Times, points out what the OBB does is to establish an enhanced tax deduction that will help reduce a household’s annual income, including Social Security. Furthermore, as Bernard points out, “Nor will the extra deduction benefit all Social Security recipients. Retirees who are 62 through 64 are ineligible.”
While Bernard and MSNBC’s coverage of this issue have been outstanding, much of the rest of the mainstream media has been disappointing on a couple of levels. First, the mainstream media has not condemned in clear terms the Trump administration’s politicalization of SSA’s communications with Social Security beneficiaries. Can you imagine the uproar you would hear had President Barack Obama done something similar?
The mainstream media is either too afraid to criticize the Trump administration or too lazy to try and understand the impact of the OBBB on Social Security, which amounts to millions of dollars of Americans’ earned benefits.
Another thing that almost all of the mainstream media is missing is that the OBBB weakens Social Security’s finances and makes the program’s fiscal challenges even more severe. The logic here is easy enough to follow: If you cut the money going into the Social Security trust funds, you weaken the program and push up the date of insolvency for the trust funds.
So, not only is the Trump administration misrepresenting what the OBBB does on the taxation of Social Security benefits, they are not telling you and me that they are weakening Social Security’s ability to pay out full benefits in the near term.
We are not powerless here. Each of us has the ability raise this issue with our members of Congress and with the media. Our answer to Trump’s false claim that the OBBB eliminates taxes is to simply tell the truth—instead of eliminating taxes on Social Security, the OBBB weakens Social Security’s ability to pay full benefits for current and future beneficiaries. Remember, as George Orwell pointed out: “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
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A Personal Tribute to Bill Moyers, Who Never Stopped Pushing
I would never claim to be an heir to Bill Moyers’ legacy, but I am among the millions of ordinary Americans for whom he was a powerful source of inspiration.
Jun 30, 2025
On June 26, America lost an iconic force for good. I lost a great friend.
A Life of Public Service
A partial summary of Bill Moyers’ impressive life fills entire pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post—treatment reserved for royalty and rock stars. Bill was both.
In those pages you’ll read about his illustrious political career as President Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant, press secretary, and key architect of the “Great Society”—a collection of programs that are now in danger, including the War on Poverty that produced Medicare, Medicaid, the Food Stamp Act, and the Economic Opportunity Act; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965; and more.
You’ll marvel at his unparalleled journalism that resulted in landmark documentaries, best-selling books, dozens of Emmy Awards, two Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia University Awards, nine Peabody Awards, three George Polk Awards, and the first-ever Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from the American Film Institute.
A Source of Private Inspiration
I’m going to cover different ground that you won’t find anywhere else. During the final years of Bill’s life, I had the honor of working directly with him on one of his most important missions: preserving democracy.
The Times obituary reported that Bill “retired in 2015 at the age of 80.” That’s incorrect. His online site, “Moyers on Democracy,” continued for years after that. Other outlets, including Common Dreams and Alternet, republished its articles and interviews regularly. Much of it remains available at BillMoyers.com.
In late 2016, Bill invited me to become a regular contributor to his site. It was the beginning of a collaboration that developed into a friendship I will always cherish. Amplifying my voice to his millions of readers, he put his remarkable reputation on the line for me. In one of our conversations, he explained why.
He often asked me, “Can democracy die from too many lies?” We agreed that the answer is yes, and the problem is eternal.
While meeting in the Oval Office with President Lyndon Johnson, Bill mentioned Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous line, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
President Johnson became animated.
“That’s bullsh*t,” he said to Moyers. “You have to keep pushing, and pushing, and pushing… and then hope to bend it just a little.”
“Johnson was right,” Bill told me 50 years later. “And you’re pushing.”
Later he flattered me with the ultimate compliment that now moves me to write this tribute:
“I think we are kindred spirits,” he said. “A kindred spirit about what? Our country, our professions, the truth... as close to it as we could get.”
“My only regret is that our paths didn’t cross 30 years ago,” I said.
I would never presume to know Bill as well as others who enjoyed longer and deeper personal and professional relationships with him. But his private messages about my articles for BillMoyers.com encouraged me to keep pushing:
“This is a keeper. Your work is making all of us proud!”
“This is brilliant!”
To that private encouragement, he added public support. Preferring the depth of coverage that today’s cable news seldom provides, he told me that he didn’t want to be a “pundit.” But he made an exception for me. To amplify my voice and our work, we appeared together on MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.”
After Bill broke that ice, I made several more solo television appearances.
“I’ll be watching,” he always said.
Bill also interviewed me several times and posted our extended conversations on his site. His probing questions had the same insight that had characterized his award-winning interviews with far more illustrious individuals—including Elie Wiesel, Jimmy Carter, Maya Angelou, Pete Seeger, Desmond Tutu, George Lucas, and Joseph Campbell. His interviews with Campbell on “The Power of Myth” attracted 30 million viewers and led to another best-selling book.
Even after Bill finally retired and archived BillMoyers.com in 2021, he continued to follow and encourage my work. Here are just a few of his messages to me:
“Your mastery of the story is so impressive, but the story is so equally frightening I can’t get it out of my mind. I am circulating it.”
“Please know I miss our collaboration.”
“Very strong, as usual. You are effectively decoding the news for people who can’t follow it, including, alas, much of the press.”
“Very powerful piece. And brave.”
“Powerful! Go for it!”
“Your piece is stirring… It is so good to see how you continue to serve the truth.”
“Terrific!”
A Troubling Possibility
In our conversations, Bill told me that America was unlikely to lose its democracy in the dramatic fashion that autocrats sometimes conquered nations. U.S. elections and the three branches of government won’t merge into dictatorship, he suggested. Instead, another scenario was more insidious—a slide into a false democracy, like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey where voters still cast ballots, but the outcomes are predetermined and the strongman chief executive is above the law.
He often asked me, “Can democracy die from too many lies?”
We agreed that the answer is yes, and the problem is eternal: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. But that’s no excuse for abandoning the fight for the truth or, as Bill would say, as close to it as we can get.
I would never claim to be an heir to Bill Moyers’ legacy. Many people are far ahead of me in that special line. But I am among the millions of ordinary Americans for whom he was a powerful source of inspiration. Two of his private messages remind me that he still is:
“A strong piece, Steve. Keep it up.”
“I am so very grateful to you for continuing the fight. You see connections between the twinkling where others see only UFO’s.”
The fight—and the pushing—continues.
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