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political violence
Why Haven't We Set the World on Fire to End This War?
My country bombed a girl's elementary school. My country killed around 160 girls in an instant. Then, we all go to work on Monday—like nothing ever happened.
Mar 11, 2026
"To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger." —James Baldwin
An aerial photo shows rectangular tracings etched into dirt, one rectangle after the other, creating a grid across the land. A yellow excavator pulls piles of earth out from within the rectangular lines until each rectangle is six feet deep, then it moves onto the next. Men jump into the graves and shovel out what the excavator couldn’t reach. We don’t know if these men are the ones burying their own daughters, or if they knew the girls at all. But in my mind, I think they do—maybe they’re the uncles or the older brothers, and I hope to God it isn’t their fathers having to do something so devastating.
Wars have existed throughout all of human history, and this isn’t the first time hundreds of graves have been dug at once. I do wonder, though, if I were born in another time, if I would have seen such an image. The only thing I can be sure of is the reason why I saw the picture in the first place.
My country bombed a girl's elementary school. My country killed around 160 girls in an instant. My country is the reason that the men and women who loved those little girls have to pull their severed, bloody limbs from the rubble; find their backpacks covered in blood; and bury them forever. Then people like Karoline Leavitt, who will be remembered forever for being the spokeswoman for the human meat grinder, will refer to the mass slaughter as “propaganda” when asked about it. Then, we all go to work on Monday instead of setting the world on fire—like nothing ever happened. Like 160 girls’ lives weren’t extinguished while neocons and liberals alike justify regime change on the basis of state-sanctioned violence against women. Have we not all been here before?
When people are being gunned down in the street for resisting immigration raids, and environmental activists are shot execution style in the woods—to be committed is to be in danger.
This carnage is not new to anyone who’s been paying attention. The protests in response to President Donald Trump’s war on Iran were small, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t depress me. Have we all gotten so used to this? Did seeing the videos of children broken to pieces in grocery bags or hanging from their own intestines from the sides of destroyed buildings in Gaza wear down our nerve endings? As time goes on, and the depravity continues, are we more content with our lives if we ignore our own humanity?
Ultimately, and this may be for my own sanity, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not because Americans do not care about the slaughter being carried out in their name. James Baldwin wrote in a letter to his nephew about racism, explaining why white people don’t act differently, even if they know racism is wrong, he says:
Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
He goes on to describe that if white people were to accept that they weren’t superior to Black people, it would turn their whole world upside down. It would be uncomfortable, for an undefined amount of time to live in a world where everything you “knew” to be true wasn’t anymore.
It would take an exhaustive amount of time to describe how life would change in the United States if people within the country decided that war wasn’t the answer to all of our problems—which has been our country’s fundamental “truth” for decades and decades. Our economy which is so centered around creating weapons and selling them, would need to be restructured completely. We would have to have a government that cannot act against the will of its people.
We would have to accept the “consequences” of not being able to plunder the Earth to its core and take over any country to seize its resources that we happen to need to fulfill the fantasy of endless growth and endless comfort. Eventually, the purpose of life wouldn’t be to have better and better things and be more and more convenient. The purpose of life would be to live, and live with dignity, and live with care. All of this, though, would come later.
The first hurdle in our way is the obvious repression that the pedophile warmongers in the White House can and will put us through if we collectively decide that we aren’t okay with them killing kids anymore. When people are being gunned down in the street for resisting immigration raids, and environmental activists are shot execution style in the woods—to be committed is to be in danger. That repression and that violence are just the tip of the iceberg. If history has taught us anything, it’s that the danger is worth it, that the “truth” we had before is nothing compared to the freedom we will have later. I hope we can all see that clearly, and I hope we’ve sat with it long enough to act, and act seriously.
In the coming weeks, how do we collectively decide to be brave instead of comfortable?
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Broadening Assault on the Left, Trump Designates EU Anti-Fascist Groups as ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’
Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein warns that the designation opens up US citizens to government surveillance, asset seizure, and material support charges.
Nov 14, 2025
President Donald Trump's State Department on Thursday broadened his efforts to use "terrorism" to crush his enemies on the left, designating four European groups as "foreign terrorist organizations" based on their alleged connections to the vaguely defined network of leftist agitators known as "antifa," short for "anti-fascist."
Following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September, Trump turned his attention toward waging a war on left-wing protest groups and liberal nonprofits, describing them as part of a vast, interconnected web that was fomenting "terrorism," primarily through First Amendment-protected speech.
As part of that effort, Trump formally designated "antifa" as a "domestic terrorist organization," even though it is not a formal group with any structure, but rather, a loose confederation of individuals all expressing an amorphous political belief. Civil rights advocates warned that the vague nature of the designation could be extended to bring terrorism charges against anyone who describes the Trump administration's actions as fascist or authoritarian.
Shortly after, Trump also signed a little-reported national security order, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which mandated a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Some of the indicators of potential violence, the memo said, were “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity," "extremism on migration, race, and gender," and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.“
Referencing NSPM-7 explicitly, the State Department on Thursday spread that crusade against the left overseas, slapping four German, Greek, and Italian anarchist groups with the label of "foreign terrorist organization" (FTO). The same designation has been given to groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, and al-Shabaab.
The groups targeted were Antifa Ost in Germany; the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/FRI) in Italy; Armed Proletarian Justice in Greece; and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, also in Greece.
The State Department said:
The designation of Antifa Ost and other violent Antifa groups supports President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, an initiative to disrupt self-described ‘anti-fascism’ networks, entities, and organizations that use political violence and terroristic acts to undermine democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental liberties.
Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas.
Each of the accused groups has had members charged with or convicted of violence, often against Neo-Nazis or adjacent far-right causes. But while they are more organized than America's anti-fascist movement, they are still broad-based and diffuse.
Mirroring what studies have shown in the US, the far-right is responsible for the overwhelming bulk of political violence in the European Union. A 2024 study by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) found that across Europe, the far-right was responsible for 85% of the violent targeted incidents they tracked.
Though Greece was one exception, where far-left violence was more prevalent than far-right violence, Mary Bossis, an emeritus professor of international security at Piraeus University in Athens, told The Guardian that Greece's anti-fascist movement has little to do with it.
"It is highly exaggerated to say that the antifa movement in Greece employs terror tactics," she said. "They even run in elections and have never shown any sign of violence.”
While most social movements have some violent adherents, Bossis said, "that does not mean, as in the case of antifa, that the whole movement is either violent or supportive of terrorism. In fact, it is very much not the case… Standing against fascism does not make someone a terrorist.”
As Mark Bray, a Rutgers University professor who teaches a course on the history of antifascism, pointed out in The Guardian, Antifa Ost is the only one of the four groups designated by Trump that self-identifies as anti-fascist.
“The others are revolutionary groups,” he said. “This shows how the Trump administration is trying to lump all revolutionary and radical groups together under the label ‘antifa’. By establishing the (alleged) existence of foreign antifa groups, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for declaring American antifa groups (and all that they deem to be ‘antifa’) to be affiliated with these supposed foreign terrorist groups.”
Ken Klippenstein, an independent investigative journalist who has warned about NSPM-7 since its release, noted that this marks the first time that an entity in any of these three European countries has ever been slapped with the label of an FTO.
"The move seems an attempt to make people accustomed to white Westerners being treated as terrorists," he wrote Thursday. "That, after all, is the goal of Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7."
While there is no law on the books to back Trump's designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, there is such a designation for foreign terrorist groups.
Being designated as a member of a foreign terrorist organization can subject one to significant sanctions, including having assets in American banks frozen, being unable to enter the country, or being prosecuted for "material support."
The government has used accusations of terrorism to go much farther, including carrying out extrajudicial assassinations of targets. Over the past two months, the Trump administration has bombed over a dozen boats in the Caribbean using the unsubstantiated justification that their passengers are "narco-terrorists" shipping drugs for cartels, which the administration has also designated as FTOs. The attacks have killed at least 76 people.
Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested last month that the Trump administration planned to use the "same approach" to antifa as it has with cartels, leading many to fear that might include assassinations.
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the media outlet Zeteo, said the designation of these groups as terrorist organizations was "super bad for US citizens, especially on the left of the spectrum," because it "gives this authoritarian administration potentially the power to surveil and go after US citizens on spurious 'funding of FTO' grounds."
The State Department noted in a fact sheet on the designations that it is also seeking to target those in the US accused of supporting these groups.
"US persons are generally prohibited from conducting business with sanctioned persons. It is also a crime to knowingly provide material support or resources to those designated, or to attempt or conspire to do so," the memo said. "Persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with those designated today may expose themselves to sanctions risk. Notably, engaging in certain transactions with them entails risk of secondary sanctions pursuant to counterterrorism authorities."
Klippenstein said that while Trump's "domestic terrorist" designation was limited, "with an FTO designation, the gloves come off," opening Americans up to "FISA surveillance, seizure of financial assets, [and] material support charges."
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We Live in an Age of Public Bullying; What Can We Do About It?
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.”
Oct 19, 2025
Professor Emeritus Roddey Reid could have retired from the University of California San Diego to a life of deserved leisure. Instead, he has just published a handbook on "Political Intimidation and Public Bullying," which is increasingly dominating government, business, and civil society.
A guest this week on my radio show and podcast, Professor Reid was followed by Professor of Law Robert Fellmeth from the University of San Diego, a leading critic of unbridled anonymous speech fostered by Silicon Valley companies to boost profits.
Reid argues, Newt Gingrich launched this political onslaught in 1994 when he took over the GOP, led the Republicans to victory and became house speaker. “To be clear,” Reid continues, “political intimidation and public bullying are forms of psychological and physical political violence… meant to injure, humiliate, isolate, coerce, and even destroy opponents and entire communities.” These interviews should spark a civic rebellion.
The political intimidation operates in both open sight—from the belligerent bully-in-chief Donald Trump, and in the shadows with serious anonymous threats to members of Congress, judges, and their families. Combined, this viciousness has meant the difference in razor-thin votes in Congress. For example, the violent-talking, unfit secretary of defense being confirmed by the Senate. Other Trump nominees, who are also staggeringly inexperienced, totally obeisant to Trump’s wrecking of America in daily violation of the Constitution and federal laws, have also squeaked through Senate confirmation votes.
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Reid is systemic and illustrative in his fast-paced book titled Confronting Political Intimidation and Bullying–privately published to make it very up to date through August 2025. In his last chapter, he conveys 13 strategies for citizens to use locally in response.
Cumulatively, this mass “callout” could descend upon Congress and state legislatures for a more systemic regulatory agenda.
Such legislative activity in Sacramento, California is already taking place to deal with the central delivery mode of such bullying—ANONYMITY—according to Professor Fellmeth. A long-time advocate of curbing the dangers of internet anonymity, including to children. Fellmeth urges a decisive ban on most anonymous assaults, leaving open some exceptions for whistleblowers and others with a need to protect their privacy and self-defense. To accomplish this selectivity has to involve regulation of the Silicon Valley profiteers and electric child molesters, led by the duplicitous Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of META. His major declared mission is to drive people from reality and live their lives in his virtual reality. A quick safeguard is to require anonymous speech to be pursued by law enforcement when it embodies physical threats and deliberate psychological torture. Naming and prosecuting the perpetrator will serve as deterrent to other potential anonymous predators.
Moreover, Fellmeth, who has written several articles on AI’s rapidly intensifying damage to youngsters, wants a regulation mandating identifying AI creations as such to forewarn the public. (See Professor Fellmeth’s article: "AI is already harming our children. Are California lawmakers going to do something?" January 30, 2025).
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.” That means those attacked with nicknames need to counter with nicknames, rebutting phony allegations and revealing the brutal impacts of their bullying on innocent people and families in both red and blue states by the vicious and cruel Trumpsters. Otherwise, the “Big Lies” without rebuttals become soliloquies, and therefore believable to millions of people and influence millions of susceptible voters. (See our prescient and useable book Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.)
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
His latest vindictive cuts—some boomeranging against his own desired policies—were outlined in a recent Washington Post feature by lead reporter Hannah Natanson. His latest “firings”—suspended by a federal district judge in California–targeted services for students with disabilities, inspectors who check the defects of federal housing, and employees who help regulate hazardous waste and pollution, according to the Post. Frothing at the mouth, Trump called those fired “people that the Democrats want,” as if conservative Trump voters and their families want to breath and otherwise be exposed to dangerous pollutants. The same flailing dismissals will strike what the Post described “as vulnerable Americans–school children, low-income families, homeless people, and senior citizens.” Trump is steered by the seriously hateful Russell Vought, the White House Budget chief and preparer of the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s fascist dictatorship. It doesn’t matter that these and previous firings, without cause, are illegal in numerous ways. After all, didn’t Trump tell you in July 2019 that “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President”?
Here is an illustration of the institutionally insane wielding of the axe by indiscriminate haters that is hurting Trump voters and families alongside their Democratic counterparts. Trump and Vought want to layoff “workers with top secret clearance responsible for monitoring and protecting the United States from biological, chemical, and nuclear threats.” Earlier Trump and Vought drastically cut federal health scientists, safety regulators, and critical benefit dispensers in the tens of thousands.
Another instance of mindlessly cutting federal support for slammed hard-pressed community colleges, the recipient of lavish praise by Trump over the years for their job training curricula.
He is betraying Trump voters, with regular treachery! It is time for the people to say, “Donald Trump, you are fired.” (See my May 2, 2025 column: “YOU’RE FIRED!”–GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE REJECTING TRUMP)
You can listen to these interviews on radio stations in central cities or by visiting RalphNaderRadioHour.com.
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