5
#000000
#FFFFFF
voting rights
As Agents Pull Guns on ICE Observers, Lawmakers Make Stand Outside DC Headquarters: 'Fire Kristi Noem'
"We must not allow ICE to kidnap children and bring them to prisons where they profit off their pain, misery, and suffering," said Rep. Joaquin Castro.
Feb 03, 2026
A group of Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday demanded the termination of US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as new footage emerged in Minneapolis of federal immigration officers drawing guns on unarmed observers.
More than a dozen Democrats serving in the US House of Representatives stood outside the Washington, DC headquarters of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday and demanded that President Donald Trump fire Noem, who has taken heat for making false claims in recent weeks about Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were gunned down by federal agents last month.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) delivered a brief speech at the event where she described her home city of Minneapolis as being under "occupation" by federal agents sent by Trump and Noem.
"We do not exaggerate when we say we have schools where two-thirds of the students are afraid to go to school," she said. "We do not exaggerate when we say we have people who are afraid to go to the hospital because our hospitals have occupying paramilitary forces. We do not exaggerate when we say our restaurants are shutting down because there are not enough people to drive the employees to work and from work."
Omar went on to reiterate her past calls to abolish ICE, which she described as "not just rogue, but unlawful." She also said that “Democrats are ready and willing to impeach" Noem if Trump doesn't fire her.
Later in the event, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) spoke of his meeting last week with Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old boy from Minneapolis who had been detained at a Texas ICE facility before a judge last weekend ordered his release.
"While detained, he became lethargic and sick," Castro said, speaking of Ramos. "His father said that he'd become depressed. He was asking about his mother and his classmates, and most of all, he wanted to go home. But he also said that he was scared of the guards... he had clearly been traumatized."
Castro emphasized that, even though Ramos and his father have been freed from detention, there are still too many children being held at the facility, including at least one as young as two years old
"This is a machinery of cruelty and viciousness that Secretary Noem has overseen, the Trump administration has built, and people like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have been complicit in upholding," he said. "We must not allow ICE to kidnap children and bring them to prisons where they profit off their pain, misery, and suffering."
As Democrats were making their case for Noem's removal, new footage emerged of federal immigration officers in Minneapolis pulling legal observers out of their cars at gun point.
In a video posted on social media by independent journalist Ford Fischer, agents can be seen swarming a vehicle with their guns drawn and demanding and its passengers exit the car.
Just now: ICE agents pull handguns and arrest observers who had been following them this morning in Minneapolis. pic.twitter.com/s3uIwWS3AA
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) February 3, 2026
After the observers were pulled from the vehicle and detained by officers on the scene, one officer in the video claims that the people in question had been threatening them with "hand guns."
An observer then asks the officer if he means that the people being taken into custody were waving firearms at them, and he replies that they were making fake guns with their fingers, not brandishing actual weapons.
As the officers left the scene, they were heckled by protesters.
"Put away your weapons you douchebag, nobody is threatening you!" yelled one.
Keep Reading
Show Less
'Making America Unsafe Again': Alarm Over Environmental Review Exemption for Nuclear Reactors
"I think the DOE's attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment," said one expert.
Feb 03, 2026
Less than a week after NPR revealed that "the Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public," the US Department of Energy announced Monday that it is allowing firms building experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews.
Citing executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in May, a notice published in the Federal Register states that the DOE "is establishing a categorical exclusion for authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors for inclusion in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing procedures."
NEPA has long been a target of energy industries and Republican elected officials, including Trump. The exemption policy has been expected since Trump's May orders—which also launched a DOE pilot program to rapidly build the experimental reactors—and the department said in a statement that even the exempted reactors will face some reviews.
"The US Department of Energy is establishing the potential option to obtain a streamlined approach for advanced nuclear reactors as part of the environmental review performed under NEPA," the DOE said. "The analysis on each reactor being considered will be informed by previously completed environmental reviews for similar advanced nuclear technologies."
"The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents."
However, the DOE announcement alarmed various experts, including Daniel P. Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote on social media: "Making America unsafe again: Trump created an exclusion for new experimental reactors from disclosing how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and from a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident."
Foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen described the policy as "terrifying," while Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a scholar at the University of Sussex's Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, called it "truly crazy."
As NPR reported Monday:
Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real-world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they're built.
"The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents," Lyman said.
"I think the DOE's attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment here in the United States," he added.
Lyman was also among the experts who criticized changes that NPR exposed last week, after senior editor and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel obtained documents detailing updates to "departmental orders, which dictate requirements for almost every aspect of the reactors' operations—including safety systems, environmental protections, site security, and accident investigations."
While the DOE said that it shared early versions of the rules with companies, "the reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety," and "the department anticipates publicly posting the directives later this year," Brumfiel noted that the orders he saw weren't labeled as drafts and had the word "approved" on their cover pages.
In a lengthy statement about last week's reporting, Lyman said on the Union of Concerned Scientists website that "this deeply troubling development confirms my worst fears about the dire state of nuclear power safety and security oversight under the Trump administration. Such a brazen rewriting of hundreds of crucial safeguards for the public underscores why preservation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as an independent, transparent nuclear regulator is so critical."
"The Energy Department has not only taken a sledgehammer to the basic principles that underlie effective nuclear regulation, but it has also done so in the shadows, keeping the public in the dark," he continued. "These long-standing principles were developed over the course of many decades and consider lessons learned from painful events such as the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. This is a massive experiment in the deregulation of novel, untested nuclear facilities that could pose grave threats to public health and safety."
"These drastic changes may extend beyond the Reactor Pilot Program, which was created by President Trump last year to circumvent the more rigorous licensing rules employed by the NRC," Lyman warned. "While the DOE created a legally dubious framework to designate these reactors as 'test' reactors to bypass the NRC's statutory authority, these dramatic alterations may further weaken standards used in the broader DOE authorization process and propagate across the entire fleet of commercial nuclear facilities, severely degrading nuclear safety throughout the United States."
Keep Reading
Show Less
There Is No Good Reason for the US to Attack Iran
A new US attack on Iran, besides being an act of aggression contrary to the United Nations Charter and international law, would only exacerbate rather than resolve any of the issues that have been raised as possible rationales for war.
Feb 03, 2026
Shifting justifications for a war are never a good sign, and they strongly suggest that the war in question was not warranted.
In the Vietnam War, the principal public rationale of saving South Vietnam from communism got replaced in the minds of the war makers—especially after losing hope of winning the contest in Vietnam—by the belief that the United States had to keep fighting to preserve its credibility. In the Iraq War, when President George W. Bush’s prewar argument about weapons of mass destruction fell apart, he shifted to a rationale centered on bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq.
Now, with President Donald Trump threatening a new armed attack on Iran amid a buildup of US forces in the region, the Washington Post’s headline writers aptly describe the rationale for any such attack as being “in flux” and, for the online version of the same article, ask, “What’s the mission?”
A related question about the latest threat to attack Iran is: “Why now?” The initial peg for Trump talking up the subject during the past month was the mass protest in Iran that began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar in late December and rapidly spread through Iranian cities during the next couple of weeks. Trump urged Iranians to “keep protesting” and promised that “help is on the way.” This rhetoric led to widespread expectations, not least of all inside Iran, that US military action was imminent.
The answer to the question “why now?” is to be found... in domestic politics, including the motivations of diverting attention from political troubles and being able to claim some accomplishment regarding Iran that is bigger or better than what a predecessor achieved.
No such action materialized, and perhaps a valid reason it did not is the difficulty in identifying targets for military attack that would be more likely to help the protesters than to hurt them. If a regime is gunning down innocent citizens in the street, there is no target deck an outside military power can devise that would distinguish the gunners from the innocents on that street.
A brutal crackdown by the Iranian regime that has quelled the protests leaves a couple of implications. One is a sense of betrayal among Iranians whom Trump encouraged to risk their lives by protesting without delivering any help that supposedly was “on the way.”
The other implication is that, without an ongoing protest, the link between any US military action and favorable political change inside Iran is even more tenuous than it would have been a month ago. Iranians—like Americans or any other nationalities—can distinguish between their domestic grievances and external aggression. Another Israeli or US attack out of the blue risks helping the Iranian regime politically by enabling it to appeal to patriotic and nationalist sentiment. Statements from such prominent reformist leaders as former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi are simultaneously calling for sweeping constitutional change and explicitly rejecting foreign intervention, including military intervention.
An alternative view is that with the Iranian regime at least as weak as it has been for years, an armed attack from outside might constitute just enough extra pressure to precipitate the regime’s collapse. But the idea that the Islamic Republic is just one nudge away from falling has been voiced many times before, including during previous rounds of protests.
Moreover, the operative word is “collapse,” with all that implies regarding uncertainty about what comes next. Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to recognize that uncertainty when asked in a Senate hearing last week about what would happen if the Iranian regime were to fall and he replied, “That’s an open question.” The Iranian opposition lacks a unified leadership and structure ready to take power comparable to the movement led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that toppled the shah in 1979.
Regime decapitation to oust current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be even less likely to yield a regime responsive to US wishes than the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. A more probable successor regime in Iran would be some kind of military dictatorship dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Regime change in Iran is a classic case of needing to be careful what one wishes for.
Trump has been vague about what Iran would need to accept to avoid being attacked, but there appear to be three issues at play. One is a demand for Iran to end all enrichment of uranium. But Iran is not enriching uranium now and does not appear to have done any enrichment since the Israeli and US attacks last June. If this issue is to make a difference in determining whether the US attacks Iran, it means war or peace would hinge on a demand that makes no practical difference, at least in the short term.
A formal commitment by Iran to forgo enrichment forever conceivably could have value over the long term, but history shows that expecting such a commitment is not realistic. Moreover, to place importance on such a commitment is a tacit admission that Iran is better at adhering to its obligations on such things than the United States is, given Trump’s reneging on an earlier nuclear agreement despite Iran observing its terms.
A second issue involves limiting the range and number of Iran’s ballistic missiles. There is a strong case to be made for a region-wide agreement limiting missiles in the Middle East, but neither the Trump administration nor anyone else has explained why Iran should be singled out for such restrictions while no one else in the region is, or why one should expect Iranian policymakers to accept such disparate treatment. Iran considers its missile capability to be a critical deterrent against the missile and other aerial attack capabilities of adversaries. A deterrent—to be used in response to being attacked—is how Tehran has used its missiles, as in responding to the US killing of prominent IRGC leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and to Israel’s unprovoked aerial attack on Iran last June.
The Israeli government would, of course, like to see Iran’s retaliatory capability crippled. This would leave Israel—the Middle Eastern state that has started more wars and attacked more states than any other country in the region—freer to indulge in more offensive operations without having to worry about even the amount of retaliation that Iran mustered last year. Those operations may include attacks that, like the one in June, drag in the United States. This sort of Israeli freedom of action is not in US interests.
The third reported US demand is that Iran cease all support to groups in the region it considers allies, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Palestine. Despite the habitual application of the label “proxy” to such groups, they are separate actors with their own agendas, as illustrated by how the Houthis acted against Iranian advice in capturing the Yemeni capital of Sanaa.
As with uranium enrichment, Iranian support to these groups is a “problem” that is being solved without new Iranian commitments. Iran’s severe economic difficulties, coupled with popular demands within Iran to devote scarce resources to domestic programs rather than foreign endeavors, are already making it difficult for Iran to sustain its support to regional allies.
As with the missile issue, a demand to end such support as part of an agreement disregards how much that support is a response to aggression or predations of other governments. Aid to the Houthis, for example, became of significant interest to Iran only after Saudi Arabia launched a large-scale offensive against Yemen that was the most important factor in turning that country into a humanitarian disaster. The Iranian-supported establishment of Hezbollah and the group’s early rapid growth were a direct response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The nature and methods of Hamas, like those of many other Palestinian resistance groups, have been responses to Israeli subjugation of Palestinians.
Also like the missile issue, any such demand disregards the outside support that other governments give to parties to some of the same conflicts in the Middle East. This includes, of course, the voluminous US aid to Israel. Iran is being told it cannot have a full regional policy while others do. It is unrealistic to expect any Iranian leader to agree to that.
None of these issues, individually or collectively, constitutes a casus belli. The answer to the question “why now?” is to be found less in those issues than in domestic politics, including the motivations of diverting attention from political troubles and being able to claim some accomplishment regarding Iran that is bigger or better than what a predecessor achieved.
Claimable accomplishments that serve not just such domestic political needs but also the US national interest are possible through diplomacy with Iran. President Trump is correct when he says that Iran wants a deal, given that Iran’s bad economic situation is an incentive to negotiate agreements that would provide at least partial relief from sanctions. Feasible diplomacy would not entail Iranian capitulation to a laundry list of US demands but instead a step-by-step approach that might start with an updated nuclear agreement, which could build confidence on both sides for coming to terms on other issues.
The Trump administration’s saber-rattling is not building such confidence but instead is having the opposite effect. The Iranian regime’s lethal response to the recent popular protests shows that it believes the regime’s survival depends on not showing any weakness in the face of pressures either domestic or foreign. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said last week that Iran would negotiate directly with the United States only if Trump stops threatening a military attack against Iran. Araghchi also ruled out any unilateral limitations on Iranian missiles, which he described as essential for Iran’s security.
A new US attack on Iran, besides being an act of aggression contrary to the United Nations Charter and international law, would only exacerbate rather than resolve any of the issues that have been raised as possible rationales for war.
A US attack would disadvantage Iranian oppositionists by associating them with an assault against the Iranian nation. It would strengthen the position of those within the regime who argue that Iran should seek a nuclear weapon. It would raise, not lower, the importance Tehran places on its alliances with nonstate groups in the region. And Iran would use its missiles to retaliate in ways that probably would hurt US interests more than its response last June did.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Fascist Trump Has No Moral Authority to Criticize Iran
The offing of Renee Nicole Good didn’t differ in kind from the deaths inflicted on dissidents by the Iranian state.
Feb 03, 2026
The pro-democracy protesters in Iran deserved so much better. They deserved the support of a democratic United States that could sincerely urge the rule of law and habeas corpus (allowing people to legally challenge their detentions) be respected, not to speak of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly in accordance with the Constitution. Unfortunately, President Donald J. Trump has forfeited any claim to respect for such rights or a principled foreign policy and so has proved strikingly ineffective in aiding those protesters.
The arbitrary arrests and killings committed by agents of Trump’s authoritarian-style rule differ only in number, not in kind, from the detainments and killings of protesters carried out by the basij (or pro-regime street militias) in Iran. In fact, they rendered hisprotests and bluster about Iran the height of hypocrisy. Above all, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis by a Trumpian Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent haunted his response, providing the all-too-grim Iranian regime with an easy rebuttal to American claims of moral superiority.
Rioters and Terrorists
Trump’s threats of intervention in Iran came after the latest round of demonstrations and strikes there this winter. In late December, bazaar merchants in Iran decried the collapse of the nation’s currency, the rial. For many years, it had been under severe pressure thanks to Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, renewed European sanctions over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, and incompetent government financial policies. In December, the rial fell to 1.4 million to the dollar—and no, that is not a misprint—having lost 40% of its value over the course of the previous year. Inflation was already running at 42%, harming those on fixed incomes, while the rial’s decline particularly hurt the ability of Iranians to afford imported goods.
Such currency instability contributed to economic stagnation, as many merchants went on strike and halted commercial transactions altogether, given the heavy losses they were suffering. For the rest of December and early January, those striking traders were joined by professionals, workers, and students nationwide, some of whom wanted not just a better economy, but a less authoritarian government. The government responded, of course, with grimly repressive tactics, but the size of the crowds only grew, even in the capital, Tehran, while some of the protesters began demanding an end to the Islamic Republic.
Trump’s America now stands on increasingly shaky ground when it accuses other regimes of atrocities.
A turning point came on January 8, when security force thugs began shooting down demonstrators en masse and stacking up bodies. Until then, the demonstrations had been largely peaceful (though instances of vandalism had been reported), but the government began alleging that more than 100 police had been killed. Human Rights Watch reported that “verified footage shows some protesters engaging in acts of violence.” That some dissidents had turned to violence, however, can’t in any way justify the scale of the slaughter by security forces that followed.
By mid-January, human rights organizations were estimating that thousands of demonstrators had been mown down by the Iranian police and military. Even Iran’s clerical leader, Ali Khamenei, confirmed that thousands were dead, though ludicrously enough, he blamed Donald Trump for instigating their acts. On January 9, perhaps as a cover for its police and military sniping into crowds, the government cut the country’s internet off, while denouncing all protesters as “rioters” and “terrorists.”
Antifa-Led Hellfire
And here’s the truly sad thing: While such unhinged rhetorical excesses were once the province of dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes like those in Iran and North Korea, the White House is now competing with Tehran and Pyongyang on a remarkably even playing field. The Trump White House, for instance, excused the dispatch of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, last year on the grounds of a “Radical left reign of terror,” “antifa-led hellfire,” and “lunatics” committing widespread mayhem in that city, even deploying “explosives.” Of course, Trump’s image of Portland as an apocalyptic, anarchist free-fire zone bore no relation to reality, but it did bear an eerie relation to the language of the authoritarian regimes in Iran and North Korea.
That means Trump’s America now stands on increasingly shaky ground when it accuses other regimes of atrocities. Similarly, Washington’s full-throated backing of Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza raised questions about its alleged support for populations in the Global South demanding freedom. Nor could Trump’s naked power grab in Venezuela, explicitly carried out for the sake of stealing that country’s petroleum, have been reassuring to the inhabitants of a petrostate like Iran.
The killing of poet and mother of three Renee Nicole Good, a Christian who had done mission work, by a belligerent ICE agent on January 7 in Minneapolis and similar killings (which continue, as with Alex Pretti) don’t, of course, compare in scale to Tehran’s grim treatment of Iranian protesters in January. This country may, however, be considered closer to such a—can I even use the word?—model, if we include those who were brutalized and killed once Trump offshored them to the notorious CECOT mega-prison and torture facility in El Salvador (about which, by the way, right-wing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s new propaganda outlet, CBS News, attempted to avoid informing us).
We may come closer still if we include Iranian-American dissidents and those of other nationalities deported by Trump, after he arbitrarily denied them asylum, raising questions about the fate of hundreds or possibly thousands of activists being returned to despotic home countries–or sometimes to third countries like South Sudan in the midst of civil war. That the Trump regime (like the Iranian one) is willing to sacrifice massive numbers of people for the sake of ideology is clear. Oxfam estimates that Trump’s destruction of the US Agency for International Development led to the deaths of 200,000 children globally in 2025 (and that, of course, isn’t even counting dead adults).
The point, however, is not equivalency in scale. There’s an anecdote from the 1930s about then-media-magnate Max Aitkin (also known as Lord Beaverbrook), a British-Canadian politician. He was said to be at a cocktail party conversing with an attractive woman, when the conversation turned to ethics. He then asked her if she would sleep with someone for a million British pounds. She replied that she would. He then asked, “Would you sleep with someone for five pounds?” She replied indignantly, “Certainly not, what sort of woman do you think I am?” And he observed dryly, “Madame, we have already established that. Now we are just haggling about the price.”
In the same vein, we’ve already established that Trump’s minions are lawless kidnappers and killers—now we’re just haggling about the number of their victims (so far) compared to those of other authoritarian regimes. In truth, the offing of Renee Nicole Good didn’t differ in kind from the deaths inflicted on dissidents by the Iranian state. She was murdered by an ICE agent in a fit of pique for a nonviolent protest. He (or one of his compatriots) then muttered of that gentle Christian, “Fucking bitch!”
An American Basij?
Even the spin the Iranian and American governments put on their crackdowns was essentially indistinguishable. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the Iranian protesters “saboteurs” and “vandals.” Similarly, cartoonish Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ghoulish White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller denounced Renee Nicole Good as a “domestic terrorist,” while the spineless Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) accused her of “impeding law enforcement.” Administration officials also denounced her as a “professional agitator” and President Trump justified her killing, saying that her actions had been “tough.”
Such allegations fly in the face of the straightforward record offered from the many videos of the incident released by bystanders and even by the killer, which show that an inoffensive Good said, “I’m not mad at you, dude,” just before her life was taken. In other words, the Trump regime vindicated ICE on that killing on the same grounds that Khamenei and his officials excused the carnage against protesters in Iran.
The Good slaying came on the heels of numerous Trump administration attempts to provoke civil unrest by illegally sending the National Guard into the cities of Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, DC, Memphis, New Orleans, and Chicago, all politically controlled by Democrats, allegedly to “protect” masked, armed ICE goons. The intent was to erode the 1888 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using federal troops in local law enforcement. Nevertheless, National Guardsmen in Los Angeles detained American citizens. Even ICE does not have any statutory authority to arrest, order around, or tear-gas citizens not reasonably suspected of immigration offenses or of violence toward persons or property. (Nor are the plainclothes members of the basij paramilitary in Iran, loyal to Khamenei’s person, properly considered “law enforcement.”)
Though it’s not mentioned in our news world, it couldn’t be clearer that Ayatollah Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei share a bloodthirsty perspective on “law and order.”
Yet ICE now routinely arrests (and in Good’s case executed) Americans doing no harm, while attempting to interfere with their right to assemble peaceably or record public actions. As one such victim told journalist Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, “My name is George Retes Jr. I’m 25 years old. I was born and raised here in Ventura, California. I’m a father of two, and yeah, I’m a US citizen. The day I was arrested by ICE agents was July 10.” Similarly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, sometimes basing themselves at historic sites of genocide against Indigenous nations, have arrested some of their members, whose families began coming to North America 30,000 years ago.
Such ironies have not been lost on Iranian officials. As Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in Beirut recently, speaking of Good’s death: “We have seen Trump trying to deploy the National Guard in his own country. In the last two days we saw how [ICE] killed a 37-year-old woman.” He then added, “And we found Trump is the one who defended this action by the police. But in his dealings with the Iranians, we see him telling the government if you shoot a bullet against those protesters, then I’ll come for you.”
It’s One of Those Things
The autocrats in Tehran proved all too capable of bringing Trump around to their point of view, at least for a moment. In mid-January, after he had spent a week threatening war against Iran’s ayatollahs over their atrocities, he heard Araghchi’s interview on Fox News and abruptly executed an about-face. “They said people were shooting at them with guns, and they were shooting back,” Trump remarked. “And you know, it’s one of those things. But they told me that there’ll be no executions, and so I hope that’s true.”
Though it’s not mentioned in our news world, it couldn’t be clearer that Ayatollah Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei share a bloodthirsty perspective on “law and order.”
Trump has no principles, and so he didn’t back off even temporarily in mid-January from initiating a war on Iran on ethical grounds. Instead, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, who have cultivated close relationships with the American president, argued that bombing Iran could work against the protesters, uniting the country against a foreign attacker. They also worried about the regional instability and disruption to oil markets that a US strike might bring about. After all, in the summer of 2025, after Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, that country struck out at al-Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar, which is leased to the US military.
Above all, however, at that moment of indecision, Trump seemed unable to imagine a way personally to profit from an assault on Iran, unlike Venezuela.
In short, Trump is the least plausible critic imaginable when it comes to the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. After all, how can an administration promoting a fundamentalist attack on science and sexual rights lecture fundamentalist Iran? How can an administration that arranged for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to balloon into a $75 billion agency, that routinely disregards the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments, criticize Iran for maintaining a force of 90,000 pro-regime basij militiamen? How can Trump, with his white Protestant nationalism dedicated to expelling untold numbers of Hispanic Catholics, lecture Iran over deporting 1.5 million Afghans in 2025?
Ringing Fatally Hollow
Notoriously, US administrations apply a hectoring human-rights discourse only to states they view as enemies, not to friendly ones. Absolute monarchies, autocracies, or dictatorships that routinely jail, torture, and execute dissidents like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and El Salvador are neither singled out for public denunciation nor threatened by the White House, as long as they are seen as serving Washington’s interests.
The extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, still committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and assiduously pursuing the crime of apartheid in the Palestinian West Bank, is showered with praise and billions of taxpayer dollars in weaponry. State Department spokespeople deal with such Himalayan-sized hypocrisy by a studied silence or by weasel words (which some of them may later repent).
Trumpism can’t possibly succeed in the necessary work of human-rights advocacy because his American form of fascism doesn’t believe in constitutional or human rights, not abroad or, for that matter, at home.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not arguing that what’s happening in Iran is no different from tolerated atrocities elsewhere and therefore should be disregarded. The egregious violence of the Iranian government toward protesters this winter far outstripped even what’s grimly normal in that country. In the much more sustained and widespread demonstrations of the Green Movement in Iran in 2009, the agents of the ayatollahs killed between 70 and 200 people. Now, the government itself admits that its victims are in the thousands.
Nothing hurts more than the image of idealistic young Iranians pawing through corpses searching for loved ones. Nothing would please me more than to see Iran move toward democracy. The problem is that Trumpism can’t possibly succeed in the necessary work of human-rights advocacy because his American form of fascism doesn’t believe in constitutional or human rights, not abroad or, for that matter, at home. In short, if Donald Trump can’t denounce the killing of Renee Nicole Good, his denunciations of the killings in Iran ring fatally hollow.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular