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Weekly-Opinion
Unmasking the Dangerous Extremism in Young Republicans
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
Oct 17, 2025
Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn’t just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it.
In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.
One message read, “Everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber… Great, I love Hitler.” Another sneered, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”
These weren’t anonymous trolls lurking on the margins of the internet. They included elected officers of Republican youth organizations, embedded in party structures, cultivating power now.
To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism.
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
And if you think that’s alarmist, look around. Nearly 60,000 human beings are currently locked away in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers across the United States. Seven out of ten have never been convicted of a crime.
Many were here legally, waiting for hearings, their status still pending. But under President Donald Trump, they are rounded up by masked agents, hustled into vans, and shipped off to secretive detention centers where families and lawyers can lose track of them for weeks, months, or altogether.
This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.
And Americans, by and large, are looking away.
History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.
But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.
At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”
By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.
That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”
And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at brown people?
They pretend tearing people from their lives without trial is just part of the immigration process.
They pretend spiriting away hundreds of desperate migrants to a foreign dictatorship’s prison is ordinary enforcement.
They pretend masked men grabbing people off American streets are “just following orders.”
But what this really is—and what we must call it without hesitation—is the birth of an unaccountable neofascist American secret police.
This isn’t about whether we want immigration laws enforced; there’s virtually no debate about that. It’s about whether the president can create an authorized, masked secret police force that answers to him rather than the law.
When police are anonymous, when courts are bypassed, when disappearances are tolerated, freedom itself is on the line.
If it can happen to a farmworker in Texas, it can happen to a protester in Portland, a journalist in New York, or a political opponent anywhere in America. It can happen to me, and it can happen to you.
History irrefutably shows us that unaccountable power always expands.
We like to tell ourselves, “It can’t happen here.” But it already is. People are being taken without judicial warrants. Families are left without answers. Courts are being circumvented. Transfers and detentions happen in the dark.
Meanwhile, Americans are being trained to look the other way, just as the “good Germans” did. That is how democracy has died in a nation after nation, from Russia to Egypt to Turkey to Hungary, not with a single dramatic blow, but with the slow normalization of injustice until the unthinkable becomes everyday routine.
And this is why shrugging, shaking our heads, or tweeting our dismay is not enough. History demands more.
The people who stood by in 1930s Germany told themselves it was temporary, or they stayed quiet, or they made excuses. Their silence made tyranny possible.
We must not make the same mistake.
JD Vance brushed off the scandal, telling Americans to “grow up” about the leaked Hitler-loving group chat, calling it “kids doing stupid things.”
As Robert Hubble points out in his excellent Substack newsletter:
The leaders were in their 20s and 30s and held political jobs, including
— Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly member Mike Reilly;
— Staffer for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt
— Communications Assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach
— Employee at New York State Unified Court System
— Employee at Center for Arizona Policy
— Senior Adviser in the Office of General Counsel, US Small Business Administration (in the Trump administration)
In short, these were not “kids,” nor were they “college students.” They were adults with responsible jobs.
To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism. When elected officials defend calls for racially based mass slaughter as harmless immaturity, they tell the country that hate is acceptable, cruelty is normal, and history no longer matters.
Every act of unaccountable state violence must be called out. Every attempt to sideline the courts must be resisted. Every agency twisted into a political weapon must be exposed and reformed.
The Constitution does not protect itself. Democracy does not run on autopilot. Freedom only survives when citizens refuse to accept the unacceptable.
That means showing up at protests, speaking out at meetings, demanding accountability from lawmakers, and refusing to let media normalize secret police tactics in the United States of America.
There was a time in America when Republicans like my father were the ones warning of the dangers of America becoming an oppressive police state. We must reach out to our Republican elected officials and remind them that Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Barry Goldwater would not tolerate this sort of thing.
America is at a turning point. We can let this slide and hope the system rights itself. Or we can recognize that once the precedent of unaccountable detention and disappearance is accepted, it will never stop at immigrants or refugees. It will spread, as it always does, to silence dissent and crush opposition.
Already Trump is publicly going through a new list of people he wants to prosecute. Even Victor Orban hasn’t gone that far; this is pure Putin stuff.
The masked men who today drag away the undocumented will tomorrow drag away the protester, the critic, the rival. That’s how it worked then. That’s how it works now in Russia, the country is Trump is praising and using it as his model.
So I’m asking you, as forcefully as I know how: stand up. Speak out. Call your elected officials, both federal, state, and local, particularly the Republicans.
Show up this Saturday for No King Day and every day after that. Refuse to live in a country where the president commands his own secret police. Refuse to look away when your government disappears human beings into the shadows. Refuse to be a “good German.”
This is still our republic, but only if we defend it. That time is now.
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Blame the Escalating Gerrymander Wars on Chief Justice John Roberts
Nobody has done more damage to US democracy and voting rights in the 21st Century than this one despicable jurist.
Oct 16, 2025
America is currently at war over partisan gerrymandering. The Republican-controlled Texas legislature has just gerrymandered voting districts to create five more safe Republican US House seats, as demanded by Trump.
Then Missouri Republicans were ordered by Trump to enact a gerrymander to increase the states' disproportionate Republican minority from 6-2 to 7-1 by cutting Democratic-leaning Kansas City voting districts down the middle. Now JD Vance is urging Indiana Republicans to gerrymander the only two remaining Democratic House districts out of existence.
In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a ballot measure that would temporarily suspend California's independent redistricting commission until 2030 and let the Democratic legislature redistrict Republicans out of five seats to match what Republicans have done in Texas.
A large majority of voters nationally don't think partisan gerrymandering should be legal. According to a recent YouGov poll, 69% of Americans think partisan gerrymandering should be illegal and only 9% think it should be legal.
Chief Justice John Roberts (and all of his Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court) disagree with this vast majority of Americans. In 2019, Roberts' 5-4 majority opinion in Rucho v Common Cause (joined by the four other Republicans on the Court) held that federal courts do not have the constitutional power to prevent partisan gerrymandering and restored blatantly partisan gerrymanders in North Carolin and Maryland.
Since Roberts' decision, partisan gerrymandering has exploded. According to Michael Li of the Brennan Center, partisan gerrymandering has given Republicans 16 extra seats in the House. Without that, Democrats would have a House majority and Republicans would not be able to pass the so-called "big beautiful bill" which has led to a government shutdown. As the Brennan Center states, "Gerrymandering decided House control."
Roberts' opinion conceded that partisan gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic institutions” and “leads to results that reasonably seem unjust.” But Roberts then invented a procedural technicality to bar Federal courts from doing anything about it or to uphold the Constitutional principle of "one person, one vote." Roberts claimed that partisan gerrymandering is a so-called "political question" that Federal Courts have no right to question and must be left to the states. Of course, when one party controls the state legislature, they have every incentive to draw voting districts to guarantee they never lose political power, no matter what the view of the voters is. Voters don't get to pick their own legislators. Instead, legislators get to pick their voters. In her dissent—joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer—Justice Kagan wrote:
"For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because he thinks the task is beyond judicial capabilities. And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the right participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance their political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy...enabl[ing] politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters' preferences...They encouraged a politics of polarization and disfunction."
Is it any wonder that a NY Times/Siena poll taken last week found that only 33% of voters believe that America's political system can still address the nation's problems, while 64% believe the political system is too politically divided to solve the nation's problems?
As former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Lisa Graves argues in a new book, "[i]n the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one’s reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve."
Citizens have no power to overturn a US Supreme Court decision. However, California citizens have the ability to equalize Texas Republicans' gerrymander of five House seats. On November 4, they can pass Proposition 50 which lets the State legislature temporarily draw new congressional district maps through 2030, at which point the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission would resume control of redistricting, and supports nonpartisan redistricting commissions nationwide.
It won't completely block John Roberts' 20-year long project to undermine democracy and judicially enact the increasingly MAGA Republican agenda. (It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it a "judicial coup".) Indeed, this week SCOTUS heard oral arguments in a case where it appears that Roberts will lead the Republican majority to overturn Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act which protects the right of Black voters to have electoral representation. Such a ruling could likely flip as many as 19 House seats from Democratic to Republican, cementing a Republican House majority for the foreseeable future, regardless of the will of the voters.
Passing Proposition 50 is one thing Californians can do to fight back against Justice Roberts' undemocratic judicial campaign, which has helped enable Trump's authoritarianism. Mail-in ballots have already been sent out so California voters can cast "Yes" votes for Proposition 50 from now until November 4. Beyond that, thanks to John Roberts and his Republican colleagues on SCOTUS, other Blue states will have to be brought into the gerrymander wars and enact their own partisan gerrymanders to balance Republican gerrymanders to the extent possible.
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10 Ways Billionaires Are Making Your Life Worse and 5 Ways to Fight Back
An economy rigged to funnel so much wealth and power to the billionaire class is bad for you and everyone else. It undermines your life in some major ways.
Oct 15, 2025
As a coeditor of Inequality.org, I get a lot of fan mail (and a few complaints). Greg B. recently wrote in, “None of my problems exist as a result of someone else being a billionaire.”
My response to Greg: “An economy rigged to funnel so much wealth and power to the billionaire class is bad for you and everyone else. It undermines your life in some major ways.”
I wrote my new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power are Ruining Our Lives and Planet, for folks like Greg to talk about how extreme wealth inequality disrupts our daily lives. Here are 10 ways you are being burned by billionaires, pulled from my book.
My analysis doesn’t focus on the behavior of individual billionaires—though some are gnarly ones (while a handful show signs of decency). The problem is the system of laws, rules, and regulations tipped in favor of big asset owners at the expense of wage earners and working folks.
When I’m talking about billionaires, I’m thinking of more people than the 905 US billionaires that together control about $7.8 trillion in wealth. I include the top one-tenth of 1%, the 0.1% of households that have over $40 million on up to the billionaire class. People with wealth north of $40 or $50 million have every need and desire met and easily accumulate power. They’re not just buying mansions and private jets but also lawmakers and media outlets. That’s when we need to sound the alarm about “the billionaires.”
Here are 10 of the ways you are personally getting burned by billionaires:
1. The billionaires stick you with their tax bill. By opting out of their tax obligations, the billionaire class is shifting responsibility on to you to pay for everything from infrastructure to national defense to veterans services.
2. They rob you of your voice and vote. With the billionaire capture of the government, what you think barely matters. Your vote might still make a difference, but only in marginal situations where the billionaires haven’t dominated candidate selection, campaign finance, and policy priorities. The billionaires love gridlock and government shutdowns because they can block popular legislation from happening.
3. The billionaires supercharge the housing crisis—and profit from it. Billionaire demand for luxury housing is driving up the cost of land and housing construction, supercharging the already existing housing crisis. Billionaire speculators are buying up rental housing, single family homes, and mobile home parks to squeeze more money out of the housing shortage. Global billionaires are coming to “tax haven USA” to park their money in US farmland, timber and housing.
4. They inflame existing divisions in society. The billionaires don’t want you to understand how they are picking your pocket. So, they invest heavily—pouring millions into partisan media organizations and divisive politicians—to deflect our attention away from their harmful behavior. Their divisive policy and social agenda drives down wages, worsens the historic racial wealth divide, and scapegoats immigrants.
5. They are trashing your environment. The billionaires are the super polluters and carbon emitters, burning up the Earth with their excessive consumption through yachts, private jets, and multiple mansions. While you’re recycling and walking, they are zooming around in private jets and yachts with the carbon emissions and pollution of small nation states. While we all need to do our part, the billionaires make us feel like chumps for making ecological choices and sacrifices.
6. They are making you sick. Billionaire backed private-equity funds are buying up hospitals and health specialties—along with big pharma drug companies—with the aim of squeezing more out of healthcare consumers. Health outcomes in societies with extreme disparities in wealth are worse for everyone, even the rich, than societies with less inequality.
7. They are blocking timely action on climate change. Fossil fuel billionaires spend millions to block the transition to a healthy future. They fund politicians to declare a bogus energy emergency to keep their coal plants open and shut down competing wind projects. They are literally running out the clock for our governments to take action to avert the worst impacts of climate disruption.
8. They are coming for your pets. Billionaire private equity funds know we love our pets like family members and are sometimes willing to go into debt for their healthcare. To squeeze more money out of us, the billionaires are buying up veterinary care, medical specialties, pet food and supply—and even pet care services like Rover.com.
9. They are dictating what’s on your dinner plate. The food barons—the billionaires that monopolize almost every sector of the food economy—are dictating the price, ingredients, and supply of most food stuffs.
10. They are corrupting charity and philanthropy. Billionaire philanthropy has become a taxpayer subsidized form of private power and influence. As philanthropy gets more top-heavy—with most charity dollars flowing from the ultra-wealthy—it distorts and warps the independence of the nonprofit sector.
11. Bonus: They are buying up and hijacking the media. The billionaires are buying up the media: broadcast, social media, news outlets. We need more news and social media outlets that are independent of billionaires, like this one!
Burned by Billionaires isn’t another gloom and doom book. I talk a lot about what we can do together to fight the billionaire hijacking of our society and democracy. And you can read about our faces on the frontlines in our Inequality.org newsletter every week to see how people are taking action. A few action steps you can undertake today:
1. Talk to your neighbors about these 10 ways they are feeling the billionaire burn. Organize a discussion group of Burned by Billionaires. Don’t act alone. Join with others.
2. Advocate for taxing the rich and ensuring that billionaires pay their fair share. When your neighbor understandably complains about local and state taxes, explain how the billionaire class has lobbied for tax law changes—to shift taxes off the wealthy and onto everyone else; off federal tax systems onto local; off taxes on income from wealth and into taxes on wages.
3. Game-changing campaigns. Advocate for policies that tax billionaire wealth and invest in housing, educational opportunity, and the energy transition away from Earth-cooking fossil fuels. If federal changes are blocked by the billionaires, work at the state and local level. Tax luxury real estate transfers to fund affordable housing. Tax private jet fuel and fund green transit. Tax billionaire inheritances and fund debt-free higher education and job training.
4. Join the satirical resistance: Trillionaires For Trump! We see the power of comedians and late-night talk show hosts. You can join a new comic resistance effort, see www.trillionairesfortrump.org. Have fun while imitating and parodying the powerful billionaires and join their new health campaign, “Go Fund Yourself!”
5. If you haven’t already checked out Inequality.org, the web site I coedit. Please sign up for our weekly newsletter HERE. Every week we lift up action campaigns and heroic “faces on the frontline” of people working to reverse extreme wealth inequality.
If this intrigues you, I hope you’ll buy Burned by Billionaires from your local independent bookstores or online. Learn more at www.burnedbybillionaires.com.
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American Soybean Farmers Sold Out by Trump While Argentina Gets Bailed Out
"The farm economy is suffering," says the head of the American Soybean Association, "while our competitors supplant the United States in the biggest soybean import market in the world.”
Oct 14, 2025
Trade policy isn’t sexy, but it is weighty, economically speaking. Jobs and wage-income are at-stake. Take President Trump’s trade policy, notably his fondness for tariffs, a tax on US imports that businesses and workers pay.
We begin with the Trump administration’s decision to provide a $20 billion “swap line” (currency exchanges between central banks) with the government of Argentina. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is the point man for the White House on this financial and political issue. Behind Bessent is a Wall Street hedge fund manager, Rob Citrone, a major foreign investor in Argentina, CNN reported.
The Latin American country is in financial distress over its issuance of foreign bonds since President Javier Milei slashed public spending to spur economic growth. Such economic policy goes by the name of austerity.
However, Milei’s so-called pro-growth approach has had the opposite effect. Hunger and poverty among the Argentine working class are up. Workers’ household income is down.
“Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency,” reports The Guardian, “offering the first hard evidence of how the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population.”
What in part preceded such measures slamming the Argentine people was inflation, a general rise in prices.
In the meantime, the Milei government cut the export tax on soybeans. Chinese buyers jumped at this opportunity, reportedly purchasing some 20 shiploads of soybeans from Argentina.
That tax holiday cut revenue to the Argentine government, and created the trade conditions for lower export prices for foreign buyers. That arrangement didn’t fix the tax revenue problem for the Argentine government, however.
Meanwhile, American Soybean Association President Caleb Ragland shared this statement on some impacts of Trump’s trade policy of tit-for-tat tariffs between the world’s two biggest economies:
US soybean farmers have been clear for months: the administration needs to secure a trade deal with China. China is the world’s largest soybean customer and typically our top export market. The US has made zero sales to China in this new crop marketing year due to 20% retaliatory tariffs imposed by China in response to US tariffs. This has allowed other exporters, Brazil and now Argentina, to capture our market at the direct expense of US farmers.
According to Politico, the use of tariffs in China-US trade is having far-reaching effects on American agriculture generally. “The 20 percent retaliatory tariff that Beijing has imposed on US imports hasn’t just pounded soybean producers. All agriculture exports to China were down 53 percent in the first seven months of 2025, compared with the same period last year, according to USDA data.”
Ragland, head of the ASA, continues his criticism of Trump’s trade policy on American soybean farmers. “The frustration is overwhelming. US soybean prices are falling, harvest is underway, and farmers read headlines not about securing a trade agreement with China, but that the US government is extending $20 billion in economic support to Argentina while that country drops its soybean export taxes to sell 20 shiploads of Argentine soybeans to China in just two days.
“ASA is calling on President Trump and his negotiating team to prioritize securing an immediate deal on soybeans with China. The farm economy is suffering while our competitors supplant the United States in the biggest soybean import market in the world.”
What will the White House do to relieve the pain from the decline of demand from China for American agricultural products? Well, the president is considering a $10-$15 billion bailout for agriculture commodity producers.
Wait. There is a federal government shutdown. In other words, the allocation and distribution of a federal bailout for farmers experiencing a shortage of buyers from China will have to wait for the government shutdown to end. Your guess is as good as mine when that happens.
Such contradictions of economics and politics drive history, according to Marx. The federal government shutdown over health care spending while US Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops deploy on the streets of American cities for reason of so-called public safety are two cases in point. Trade policy that harms domestic agriculture generally and soybean growers particularly is another.
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