Jonathan P. Baird

The human rights crimes of the Israeli state keep accumulating. As an independent American Jewish observer, I have watched with horror. What is the worst? Is it the murder of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians who happened to live in Gaza? Is it the calculated starvation of a generation of Palestinian children? Is it the laying waste to the entire civilizational infrastructure of that region to make it uninhabitable?

Then there is the deliberate targeting and killing of journalists who are trying to get the story out. Is it that? Or is it the fanatical actions of West Bank settlers who use violence and thievery to murder and steal land that doesn’t belong to them while the Israeli authorities look the other way? It is hard to keep up.

Even so mainstream a writer as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has written that Israel is making itself a pariah state. He writes that Israel is committing suicide, homicide, and fratricide. By the depraved actions of the Netanyahu government, Israel has entirely squandered the sympathy it received (and deserved) after the October 7 attacks.

But today I am not interested in categorizing whether Israel’s actions should be classified as genocide or ethnic cleansing. More interesting is how and why Israel transformed from a country in the 1960’s and 1970’s with a mildly left, Labor Party-led government to a country ruled by a coalition of far right extremists and ultra-nationalists.

The leaders of major American Jewish organizations want to uncritically defend Israel and pretend everything is the same as it was 50 years ago but it clearly is not. They indulge in willful blindness.

While no one person can entirely explain this massive shift, I believe that one key actor in this change was Meir Kahane. He was assassinated in 1990 but I think his influence has been highly consequential.

The veteran Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy, has described what has ensued since the October 7 attacks as the country’s first Kahanist war. Levy wrote:

“Almost everything about it was meant to appease the fascist, racist population-transferist far right. The spirit of Kahanism seized control over its goals and content.”

The ideology of Netanyahu’s governing coalition is an amalgam of ultra-nationalism, hyper-Orthodox fundamentalism and religious Zionist messianism. It is a Jewish supremacist vision rooted in the dehumanization of Palestinians, mirroring Kahane’s views. Kahane believed that Jewish lives were more valuable than all others.

Kahane was born in the United States in 1932. From early on, he claimed violence was a Jewish value. He was a founder of the Jewish Defense League in 1968 and the JDL carried out many acts of vandalism, shootings and bombings. In that era, Kahane was focused on the struggles of Soviet Jewry.

He was arrested and charged with a number of violent offenses but managed to evade jail time. Like his father, Kahane became a rabbi. While he had a sanctimonious exterior, he had a secret double life as a swindler and a womanizer. He maintained the image of a family man with a wife living in Queens but he had another side. He abandoned Estelle Evans, a non-Jewish girl friend, two days before they were supposed to get married. She jumped to her death from the Queensboro Bridge because he fooled and dumped her.

Kahane left the United States in the early 1970’s because things were getting too hot for him with the JDL crime spree. When he arrived in Israel he realized that anti-Arab racism would be the path he could use to shock, gain attention and mobilize followers. He told Israelis “I say what you think”. He led his cadre of followers on hate marches through East Jerusalem and other Palestinian-majority towns chanting “Death to Arabs”.

He founded a political party, Kach, which made ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza its central demand. For Kahane, ethnic cleansing was a religious imperative. For a long time Kach was irrelevant but in 1984 Kach won a seat in the Knesset. The party was actually banned in the 1988 election and the political establishment tried to cordon them.

It remained on the political fringe for almost 25 years but Kahane’s use of vulgar anti-Arab racism grabbed Israeli media attention. He wanted a totalist Jewish ethnostate. He called for banning marriages between Jews and Arabs and he favored criminalizing sex between Jews and gentiles. He was a sensationalist in all the worst ways.

As mentioned, Kahane was shot and murdered in 1990 in New York but his persistence had created a band of fanatical loyalists. Among them was Baruch Goldstein who in 1994 ruthlessly shot and murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers at a mosque in Hebron. Yigal Amir, the 1995 assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was also inspired by Kahane and Goldstein.

Subsequent events, particularly the second intifada, which lasted from 2000-2005, changed the fortunes of the Israeli far right movement. Unlike the first intifada which was largely about mass protest, in the second intifada, suicide bombings and violence were far more prominent. The bloody tactics both repulsed Israelis and opened far more to a Kahanist perspective. Kahanism has been like an infectious disease spreading through the population.

Kahane’s disciples made it their business to oppose any peace deal or two state solution. They remain dedicated to the goals of annexing the West Bank and Gaza and expelling all Palestinians from there. Kahanists want to replace the secular state with a theocracy.

Meir Ettinger, one of Kahane’s 37 grandchildren, is a leader of the Hilltop Youth, a group of young West Bank settlers who have terrorized Palestinians, carrying out violent physical assaults, establishing illegal outposts and torching crops.

When Bibi Netanyahu formed his coalition with the far right in 2022, he boosted leaders like Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir is a graduate of the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea, a seminary Kahane established. He has hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the Hebron mass murderer, in his living room.

Kahane exemplifies the danger of a charismatic demagogue. When conditions changed, his message resonated widely. No doubt there are many, many Israels who were and are disgusted by Kahane and his acolytes but they are now in the background. Kahane’s legacy is relentless bellicosity, disregard for Palestinian life, and widespread acceptance of anti-Arab racism among Israelis.

During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, demonstrators, with ropes and chains, pulled down the statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike. It had been the only outdoor statue of a Confederate military leader in Washington D.C. For decades the statue had been controversial with many calling for its removal. The D.C. Council sought its removal in 1992 and Mayor Muriel Bowser had reached an agreement with congressional leaders in 2017 for that result. No date had been agreed to when the statue was dragged down.

It is revealing that the Trump regime wanted Gen. Pike’s statue re-installed. Pike had a checkered, less than honorable career. He was born in Boston in 1809 but left Massachusetts in 1831 to move to Arkansas. Pike was a lawyer and he played a role for the Confederacy in negotiating treaties with some Native American tribes. The Confederacy commissioned Pike a brigadier general in their army in August 1861. He was assigned to the Department of Indian Territory but his soldiers were accused of atrocities and he was accused of military incompetence. He had to resign from the Confederate Army in disgrace.

It is disputed whether Pike was a member of the Ku Klux Klan but his Klan sympathies are not historically disputed. In his writings Pike held racist views and advocated against Black suffrage. He believed white people should solely govern the country.

Pike thought slavery was a necessary evil and claimed slaves wouldn’t be able to hold any other job. He thought slaves were well treated by their masters. He admitted to owning his own slave. In 1858, he had joined with eleven others in signing a circular that encouraged people of Arkansas to expel free Blacks from the state.

This is the person the Trump regime wants to honor with a statue re-installation in Washington D.C. They are, apparently, not big on vetting. I was going to note that at least he wasn’t Grand Dragon of the Klan but there are historians who believe he was the Arkansas Grand Dragon.

Who a nation chooses to commemorate signifies who it deems essential to remember. The National Park Service is planning the Gen. Pike re-installation but this enterprise provides psychological sustenance and succor to white supremacists only. Not only does Gen. Pike not deserve any honor but it must never be forgotten that Confederates like Pike were traitors, not freedom fighters. They had sworn loyalty to the United States but then betrayed that loyalty.

The re-installation of the Gen. Pike statue is part of a propaganda campaign to launder slavery. Donald Trump just said the Smithsonian focused too much on “how bad slavery was” and not enough on the “brightness” of America.

I would submit that America has never come to grips with how evil slavery was and white supremacists have spent enormous energy constructing a false narrative in which they present themselves as victims fighting to preserve state’s rights.

The history of slavery remains poorly understood. Under the slave system, the South was a white supremacist stronghold with a deeply entrenched racial hierarchy which was designed to perpetuate racial inequality. That system was based on violence and control by any means necessary.

After a brief respite during Reconstruction, violence, lynchings and massacres were used to maintain white dominance. The South defended what it saw as its way of life. That way of life systematically excluded, disenfranchised, disempowered and marginalized black people.

Trump’s ambition is to rewrite America’s official history to reflect a glorified narrative. That means scrubbing out slavery. The Trump ideal picture of America is white wealthy men being financially successful. His DEI campaign is about censoring and disappearing minorities and women. He wants a narrative of progress with a happy ending.

In contrast to our American failure to confront slavery and racism is the German denazification effort. There are no monuments celebrating Nazis left in Germany. You will not find any Hitler statues there.

In her book, Learning from the Germans, Susan Neiman describes the multi-pronged German effort to acknowledge its crimes. In addition to a Holocaust Memorial, there are decentralized stumbling stones (small brass plaques recording the names and dates of birth and deportation of Jews, gays, Sinti and Roma who lived in the houses before which they stand). Over 107,000 stumbling stones have been laid across Europe in more than 30 European countries. They commemorate victims of Nazi terror and they constitute the largest decentralized monument in the world.

Bryan Stevenson has suggested that Southern buildings be renamed after white abolitionists and anti-lynching activists. That is far preferable to honoring slavery defenders like Gen. Pike. Taking down Pike’s statue was the right thing to do. His statue could be placed in an obscure museum. That is not erasing him. It is placing him in a well-earned location. He doesn’t deserve the honor of being remembered with a public monument.

What is most shocking about the Gen. Pike statue re-installation is the absence of shame. The project is not an innocent remembering of a benign past. Slavery is not something to recall with pride. Pike is at best an embarrassment and at worst an utter humiliation.

The Trump regime is attempting nothing less than the burial of actual history. They stand in the long historical tradition of white supremacists who have ruthlessly opposed the black vote by gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Just as happened after Reconstruction, the new redistricting is a form of racial engineering to dilute Black and Latino voting strength. Republicans are cracking and packing Black and Latino neighborhoods to reduce minority voting power. With a greatly weakened Voting Rights Act, they may well be able to get away with it.

This is what the lack of shame will get you.

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them

Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves

Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture

Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own

Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed

Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
And their freedoms to be washed away

My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

In the last seven months, conventional thinking about American politics has been tested and it has proven inadequate to describe what is going on. All the cliches about three co-equal branches of government and checks and balances have not come close to describing and naming the Trump power drive. He has hollowed out federal agencies and largely gotten the okay from the U.S. Supreme Court while turning law enforcement into his private army.

Most alarming has been his calling out the National Guard first in Los Angeles and now in Washington DC. Trump said Washington DC has been overtaken by “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people”. Stephen Miller, his aide, said “DC was more violent than Baghdad”.

These allegations are entirely false, even ridiculous. According to the Justice Department’s own data from the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington DC recorded its lowest crime rates in over 30 years with a 20% decrease in total violent crimes compared to the previous year.

In both Los Angeles and Washington DC we have seen military troops meandering around cities with no mission. In his first term we saw him do something similar in Portland Oregon. Masked agents in unidentified vehicles pulled people off the street. Trump’s calling the troops out is a stunt, an attention-grabber and an obvious effort to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal but he is threatening to repeat this in other cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago.

The point is partly about intimidation but it is also about laying the groundwork for more and worse. Trump is testing the American public to see if we will accept authoritarian rule. How the public reacts may well influence his next moves. If reaction is weak in his eyes, ratcheting up both the authoritarianism and his gangsterism is likely. He is using a manufactured crisis to justify a crackdown, the erosion of civil liberties and increased power for the Executive branch.

Trump is following a well-established authoritarian playbook of power consolidation. Becoming a dictator requires neutralization and submission of competing power centers. Trump had tried unsuccessfully to overturn an election and violently halt the counting of electoral votes. Now he is seeking to chip away at all institutional, legal and political constraints on his power. Too many universities, law firms, media companies and legislators have voluntarily capitulated with minimal fight back. As was clear at his inauguration, the billionaires are on board.

Neither the creation of a network of concentration camps nor the fact that thousands of immigrants are being wrongfully detained in horrible conditions without due process have roused enough Americans. It is summer and people prefer distraction and vacation (if they can get one) before fall reality hits.

What has to be a major concern is Trump using the bogus excuse of an invasion, a rebellion or a crime wave to institute martial law. He has raised the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. That law could allow the use of active-duty military personnel to perform law enforcement duties inside the U.S.. Of course, there is no rebellion or invasion so the justification is entirely lacking.

Still we are talking about someone who spins webs of disinformation and facts that aren’t happening. Whatever he says, most of his followers will believe him.

The law is not on Trump’s side. The Posse Comitatus Act criminalizes the use of federal armed forces to conduct civilian law enforcement. The military mission of officers and soldiers is to defend the country against foreign enemies, not be a cop on the beat. There is a trial in California going on now where the state of California is raising the Posse Comitatus Act as grounds for why Trump’s actions are illegal.

California is also correctly arguing that Trump is violating the Tenth Amendment which reserves to the states all powers not expressly given to the federal government. Policing is typically a use of state and local power. Trump has shown no regard for state sovereignty.

This case will land at the U.S. Supreme Court like so many other Trump initiatives and it is impossible to have confidence in the majority of that entity. If Trump does declare a national emergency and martial law, I would expect him to suspend the Constitution.

At that point, all bets are off. Authoritarian leaders do not typically want to give up power. In so many countries like Russia and Turkey, they have proven difficult to dislodge. They often ignore legal limits on terms of office and find a way around that. Trump has joked about staying on. Just the profitability and his monetizing the presidency are factors that might lead him to want to stay on. He has plenty of other reasons too like possible prosecution for his own corruption. If he has suspended the Constitution, the 22nd Amendment which forbids more than two terms would carry no weight.

Among things Trump does care about, retribution would appear to matter and questions abound about how aggressively he would pursue vengeance. Would he jail Obama or Hillary Clinton or others like Jack Smith? Would he go after a much wider swath of opponents like fascists in other regimes have done? It is hard to know what goes on in that mind. We know he cares about winning the Nobel Peace Prize and getting his head on Mt Rushmore but what else is not clear.

In his first term, he famously wanted the military to shoot protesters in the leg after the George Floyd protests but he was stopped by sensible advisors like Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. With advisors like Pete Hegseth, Trump in 2025 might take a far more aggressive approach.

I fear that Trump is looking for his Reichstag fire moment where a protest or event he can dress up will give him a green light to demolish the democracy that remains. With such an excuse, he would cancel mid-term elections and possibly any future elections. He would say there is a national emergency of some kind no matter how incongruous that was.

The MAGA movement has multiple components including far right extremists, evangelical Christians and tech billionaires. All would stand behind an authoritarian takeover that marginalizes people of color, subjugates women and forces gay people back in the closet. Some evangelical Christians are currently advocating repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment which gave women the right to vote.

Sugarcoating and pretending there is no authoritarian threat could not be more dangerous. There has never been a greater need for American patriots who will stand up to fascism and fight back.

As a student of American history, I believe there are some very important heroes who have never received the acknowledgement and acclaim they deserve. Charles Sumner from Massachusetts is one of those heroes. If I was guessing I would estimate 95 out of 100 Americans have never heard of Sumner. It appears to be the fate of many 19th century protagonists, no matter how outstanding. They were famous long ago.

Along with Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, Charles Sumner led the struggle for abolition of slavery in the United States. Both as a lawyer and as a U.S. Senator from 1852 to his death in 1874, Sumner steadfastly fought the Slave Power. His story is beautifully told in The Great Abolitionist, a 2024 biography by the historian Stephen Puleo.

Sumner was an unlikely hero. At the same time as he was ferociously principled, he was painfully shy, almost geeky. He was wealthy, intellectual and pretentious but his oratorical skills and his bravery were undeniable. He hung out with a high-powered literary crowd that included his best friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He experienced some awful tragedies in his life. At age 33, his sister, Mary, who was 22, died. They were very close and that death rocked him to his core. He married at age 55 to a much younger, beautiful woman. It didn’t end well. To call it disastrous would be entirely accurate.

Most historically well-known, Sumner was the victim of a vicious assault on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 22, 1856 by a Congressman from South Carolina, Preston Brooks. With a cane of gutta-percha, he repeatedly beat Sumner over the head, nearly killing him.

Sumner survived but it took him over three years to recover. The effects of the traumatic brain injury were life long. It’s likely as Puleo surmises that Sumner also had PTSD. For years he suffered severe headaches when he would re-enter the Senate. His condition improved whenever he left the Senate floor.

Brooks attacked Sumner because of an anti-slavery speech he made called “The Crime Against Kansas”. Brooks considered the speech a libel. In his speech, Sumner had singled out Brooks’ cousin Senator Andrew Butler for vicious criticism. Sumner was the most outspoken anti-slavery advocate in the Senate and that was true for Sumner’s entire tenure as a senator.

As Puleo wrote, from the Brooks perspective, “Sumner represented a dangerous group of Radical Republicans who threatened the South, its sense of order and its cherished institutions”.

Even before he became a U.S. Senator, Sumner had distinguished himself. 105 years before the U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v Board of Education which was decided in 1954, Sumner and an African American lawyer Robert Morris litigated Roberts v City of Boston. In that case, the plaintiffs argued against segregated schools.

It is not an exaggeration to say that in Brown, Thurgood Marshall made the same argument Sumner made in Roberts. Sumner lost then but the argument that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal did eventually win both in Brown and in the state of Massachusetts. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature forbade racial discrimination in schools, something that proved extremely difficult to prevent in practice.

To appreciate the greatness of Sumner, you have to recognize the minority status of abolitionism in the 1840’s. Abolitionists were not just hated – they were an absolutely despised fringe. Abolitionists were subject to physical assault, mob attacks and social ostracism. It was not until the mid-1850’s that the tide turned. The assault on Sumner elicited much sympathy and propelled the abolitionist movement. He became a revered figure in the North while becoming a pariah in the South.

Sumner had made his first major anti-slavery speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1845. He spoke against the admission of Texas into the nation as a slave-holding state. He turned on the ruling class of his time, including his own world of Boston high society, and he excoriated their accommodation with slavery. He spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Act, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Puleo wrote that Sumner was relentless in his view that American slavery was a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the laws of God.

When Abraham Lincoln became President, Sumner remained a close friend but he always pushed Lincoln toward the goals of equality and total emancipation for black people. Before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Sumner consistently pressured Lincoln to free the slaves and to allow them to serve in the Union army. He did not want to re-admit the Confederate states to the Union after the Civil War unless they agreed to universal suffrage.

Sumner was way ahead of his time. Very ambitiously, he had wanted to re-make the South. He anticipated the voting rights problems which have bedeviled the Southern states since Reconstruction. Before he died, he worked on the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which President Ulysses Grant signed. The law forbade discrimination in public accommodations. In 1883, the Supreme Court largely reversed it but Sumner was correct in seeing the problem.

Sumner was integrally involved in passage of the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery. He wanted it to be stronger than the version that passed. Congress repealed all fugitive slave acts, allowed “colored ” persons admission into railroad carriages and allowed “colored ” testimony in United States courts. Sumner had introduced all those measures. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Freedmens’ Bureau.

When Sumner died in 1874, his coffin was placed in the center of the Capitol rotunda and many thousands came to pay their respects. It was the first time in American history a senator was so honored. What was unique about Sumner was that he more resembled a revolutionary intellectual than a party politician.

With voting rights so threatened now and with an inert Congress, we could so use more brave and principled legislators like Charles Sumner.

It is a brutal time for Democrats. Wimpiness could be their brand. Polls have shown Democrats have their lowest favorability rating ever. Only a third of those questioned in a Wall Street Journal survey said they had a favorable view of the party. A July CNN poll put Democratic favorability at 29%. That is the lowest mark for Democrats in the entire history of CNN polling, going back 30 years. It is a 20 point drop since January 2021.

This is happening at a time when Donald Trump’s approval rating is in the toilet. CNN has his approval rating at 41% with 57% disapproval. CNN says Trump is down 7% points since February. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 37%.

You might think Trump’s unpopularity would translate into Democratic advance but that is not what has happened. Democrats have bottomed out. So the question must be asked: why are the Democrats viewed so unfavorably?

I know opinions vary widely among Democrats but I will offer one perspective as a frustrated progressive Democrat. The Democrats don’t know how to fight back and they fail to see what they are up against. They also don’t know how to message.

The Republicans are no longer a traditional conservative party. They have transformed into a fascist cult that doesn’t tolerate internal opposition.

Bullying, insulting and pathological lying are the Trump tools of trade learned at the knee of the fixer, Roy Cohn. For his treatment of those he disfavors, Trump resembles an emotional abuser. Name-calling and gaslighting are his favorite pastimes. Anything that casts him in an unflattering light is automatically dismissed as fake news. Trump’s firing of the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, is a perfect example. Not liking what the statistics showed, he demands propaganda that presents the picture he wants.

Probably it is the Democrats” passivity in the face of the MAGA onslaught that is the most maddening. The weakness and quiet response of so many Democratiic leaders has the feel of acquiescence. They are getting punched in the face everyday and very few call it out. They normalize MAGA fascism.

While maybe it is not fair to cite a single vote, my NH Democratic senators, whom I respect, voted along with five other Democratic senators to support the Homeland Security Secretary nomination of Kristi Noem, the puppy slayer. I know there is such a thing as realpolitik but I don’t get that vote. It reflects the absence of any spirit of defiance. Unqualified capitulation like that gives MAGA more oxygen.

Whatever one’s stance on the Democratic side, whether moderate, liberal or left, we all should be on board with pushing back hard in street demonstrations, other protests, social media and in writing. To say we plan to turn the tables in the mid-term elections in November 2026 is a grossly inadequate response. It is too little too late. No one knows for sure if there will be normal elections then.

Democrats want strong fighters for our side. That is a big part of why Zorhan Mamdani captured the imagination of so many New Yorkers in the New York City mayoralty race. With both charm and fire, Mamdani captivated people. There has been little of that on the Democratic side. Mamdani embodied youth, charisma, integrity, authenticity and social media smarts with an FDR-like politics that was entirely oriented to the needs of the working class.

Mamdani ran on an affordability platform. He recognized the economic crisis facing the great majority. To me, his ideas were anything but radical. They were more like common sense measures to help around the increasingly exorbitant cost of living. Mamdani advocated lower rents, free buses, universal free child care and higher taxes on the ultra-rich.

In a new Gilded Age economy that is now only serving the 1%, he acknowledged the need for systemic change. The labor writer Hamilton Nolan has written:

“When reality becomes radical, moderates become fools. We are living through a lawless, dictatorial descent into autocracy and oligarchy.”

The Democratic gerontocracy needs to be replaced by a new generation of leaders. After the hellish defeat in 2024, it should have been obvious that the old leaders needed to go. Whatever contributions they made in the past, the threat we are facing calls for more combative leadership more connected to younger voters. The old leaders cannot turn out the youth vote which is critical to Democratic success.

Very respected Democratic pollster Celinda Lake has studied why six million Democratic voters who had voted for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024. She found that many of the voters didn’t think the Democrats offered an alternative. The group of non-voters skewed younger with two-thirds under 50. These voters actively disliked Donald Trump. They were very tuned into social media. Some didn’t want to vote for the lesser of two evils and some were upset with the Democratic silence on Gaza but most wanted the Democrats to offer a genuine alternative on the economy and health care.

The Democrats need to give the people good reasons to vote. That means reforms that speak to immediate needs like housing and health care. Americans don’t want major cuts to essential programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps to fund billionaire tax cuts.

Many Democrats who are tied to corporate money have favored a mush message advocated by the Democratic consultant class. In the 2024 race the Democrats entirely failed to have a coherent message. That led to Donald Trump defining the issues.

There is no mystery in what could work for the Democrats but they have to get over their fear about having a strong message. As awful as the MAGA message of hate on immigrants and LGBTQ people is, they are not afraid to push absolutely debased positions .For Democrats, a mush message couched in fear is no way to fight fascism. Democrats need to call out fascism and not be afraid to name it. Nor should they fear calling to abolish ICE which is the military wing of our fascism. ICE is creating concentration camps.

It is the 1% versus the 99%. Back in 1936, FDR said about the rich: “ They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred”. I wish the Democrats today had one-tenth of FDR’s fighting spirit.

In the just-passed Trump budget bill, Congress allocated $45 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. That represents a massive increase in detention spending. ICE is getting 13 years of current funding which has to be spent within 4 years. With this money, ICE becomes the largest domestic police force in the U.S..

This windfall gives the agency the money to tremendously expand jailing capacity. They plan to double detention beds and carceral space while hiring 10,000 new agents.

A police state requires material underpinnings and the money is now there for its establishment. The Trump regime is creating a new prison-industrial complex where many thousands will be detained in a national network of concentration camps. They will need to fill the beds and private prison companies have a financial incentive in making that happen.

No legislative or judicial body has put a stop or even a slow down to this emerging behemoth. The failure of checks and balances exemplified by both Congress and the Supreme Court’s acquiescence with Executive Branch overreach has allowed us to reach this point. The Trump regime has been wrongly using private data gathered from federal agencies like the IRS to confirm migrants’ home addresses.

The lines between federal, state and local law enforcement are getting blurred by the Trump regime as all are being recruited to carry out immigration enforcement. Law enforcement professionalism is being replaced by a fascist mentality steeped in xenophobia, sadism and hate. It is common to see ICE agents telling people they stop that they have no rights while demanding access to their devices.

ICE is also increasing its surveillance capacity. The Washington Post has reported that ICE is sharply increasing the number of immigrants they are shackling with GPS-enabled ankle monitors. The goal is to bypass due process, arrest huge numbers and fast track a high quota of immigrants out of the country.

The Department of Defense just awarded a Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics, a $1.26 billion contract to establish and operate a 5,000 bed short-term detention facility near the Mexican border at Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. It would be the largest such facility in the country.

Because they lack the capacity for the detention space they desire, the Trump regime is looking for detention space outside the world of already-existing prisons and jails. They are following the Project 2025 recommendation for the use of “low level temporary capacity (for example, tents) once permanent space is full”.

Alligator Alcatraz is the tent model in practice. Instead of jail structures with walls, floors and insulation, tents will cover chain-link cages crammed full with bunk beds and surrounded by barbed wire.

Fort Bliss is not the only military base where the Trump regime intends to place immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has told Congress that the Department of Homeland Security plans to use military bases in New Jersey and Indiana for immigration detentions on a “temporary” basis. Trump himself has suggested that 30,000 immigrants could be detained at Guantanamo.

Considering the cruelty of the Trump regime, inhumane conditions for detainees are a reasonable expectation and Human Rights Watch has already released a report showing physical abuse, medical neglect and unsafe living conditions at three Florida detention facilities.

Human Rights Watch found officers at these facilities were often abusive to those being held. In one instance, after a group of detainees waited hours to receive food, officers forced the men to eat while their hands were bound. One man wrote in the report:

“We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.”

One guard who worked at Alligator Alcatraz and quit after two weeks said:

“The mosquitoes are filling the bathrooms, the showers. You go in the shower, you shower with a million mosquitoes, They give you bug spray but that still doesn’t help.”

The tents at Alligator Alcatraz are flood-prone and sewage back-ups have resulted in cages flooded with feces. Detainees have reported worms in their food. Authorities have been denying media access and have illegally limited Congress people from inspecting. They have not been allowing lawyers to meet with clients. This is a retreat from any constitutional standard.

The idea that these facilities are being set up to protect national security against an invasion is absurd. There is no invasion as the Southern border has been effectively sealed. Trump’s campaign against immigrants is targeted on folks in the interior U.S. and it is based on the Big Lie that immigrants are more likely to be murderers, rapists or violent perpetrators of crime.

U.S. born citizens are far more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants. Last year, U.S. Border Patrol arrested 17,000 criminal aliens. 29 were for homicide or manslaughter. 221 were for sex crimes. The overwhelming majority were for unlawful entry into the country. They became “criminals” for violation of civil immigration law.

The massive infrastructure being created is for people who have often lived in the U.S. for decades who have committed no crime. They are being scapegoated. They pose no threat to the American public. Many perform essential jobs in agriculture, construction and home care that others won’t do.They also include such evildoers as graduate students and activists who have dared to exercise First Amendment rights.

The whole enterprise of masked agents in unmarked vehicles using ruses and ploys to gain entry into homes to disappear immigrants and perceived opponents violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. Nothing could be more un-American than creating a police state.

Fortunately, such a state is not consolidated. Americans still have some civil liberties as well as some courts that don’t roll over. Resistance remains absolutely necessary however we can all do it. We did not defeat fascism in World War 2 to passively stand by and watch our rights evaporate less than 100 years later.

When the catastrophic flooding happened in Texas along the Guadalupe River, President Trump responded that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming” and that “this is a once-in-every 200 year deal”. Not to be outdone, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the Texas floods as a “1000-year event”.

What is striking about these responses is their lack of comprehension of climate science and climate change. Extreme floods and sea level rise have become almost routine. It makes you wonder if we have all been inhabiting the same planet. It is not like climate science is something new. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen persuasively presented the risks of climate change in testimony to the U.S. Senate. Since that time, an overwhelming international scientific consensus has supported and reinforced Hansen’s perspective

Global warming has made events like the Texas flood much more common and more extreme. I was struck by the similarities between the Texas flood and Hurricane Helene which devastated North Carolina last year. I also think of the 2023 floods in Vermont. However, instead of seeing the Texas disaster in the context of many other similar events, the Trump regime remains in climate denial.

Trump has called climate change “a hoax”. With his mantra of “drill baby drill”, his administration is actually committed to worsening global warming as quickly as possible. He has increased subsidies for fossil fuels. It is like they are trying to remove climate change out of existence by scrubbing out the words off government websites. Their motto could be: “backwards at warp speed”. It is like a death wish.

The Trump regime accepted no responsibility for the Texas flooding. They did not see the mass layoffs at Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration or the National Weather Service as having anything to do with their lack of preparedness and the government’s inadequate and late response. At least 135 people died from the flood and 3 remain missing.

Since the Texas flood, there has been an assessment of blame going on. On July 3, the National Weather Service issued its first alert predicting rainfall totals of six inches in twelve hours. That initial forecast proved to be an underestimate. The National Weather Service office in nearby San Antonio was missing both a chief meteorologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.

The National Weather Service issued two more warnings early on July 4 but the warnings failed to get through to the residents who lived near the water. The water rose more than 25 feet in 2 hours. There was a lack of coordination between the National Weather Service and the locals. Kerr County Texas locals had tried to get FEMA funding for a flood warning system for years but the State of Texas had turned down the request.

In 2019, the owners of the girl’s camp, Camp Mystic, that suffered so many casualties, had performed a multi-million dollar renovation. For reasons that are unclear, the camp did not move its most vulnerable cabins out of the flood zone. They built more cabins inside it.

Immediately after the flood, FEMA’s response was poor. Homeland Security Secretary Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue Teams until Monday July 7 more than three days after the flooding began. Normally FEMA would have been at the site of the flooding much sooner.

Also, almost inexplicably, Noem fired hundreds of contract workers at FEMA emergency centers on July 5, a day after the flooding started. On July 6 and 7, FEMA did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line. Noem also had recently enacted a new cost-cutting scheme where she had to sign off personally on any expense over $100,000. Noem’s red tape delayed FEMA response time.

While politicians like Texas Governor Greg Abbott attempt to squirm out of responsibility by saying only losers try and understand to assess blame, if we, as a society, want to prevent more such events, understanding matters.

What is crazy is that the Trump regime is actively moving to disband federal agencies that help Americans cope with our ever-more frequent climate catastrophes. Trump has called for the elimination of FEMA “as it exists today” although he has gone back and forth on that. He cancelled a $4.5 billion program that helps protect hard-hit communities from flooding.

He plans to increase the amount of damage a storm has to do before the federal government will declare a disaster. This will make it harder for states to be eligible for federal assistance. This is consistent with his plan to send disaster relief back to states that lack the resources to do recovery.

The Trump regime’s response to climate is rooted in a hatred of science. The climate scientist, Andrew Dessler, has written:

“They hate science because it leads to regulation, so they want to do everything they can to stop science from being used to regulate.”

I think they also hate science because it is the ultimate woke discipline. Science is a repository of secular truths which conflicts with the conspiracy theories and religious beliefs that motivate so many MAGA followers.

Not only does the Trump regime want to dismantle federal agencies that respond to disasters, they want to purge our collective ability to understand climate and weather prediction.

They have fired hundreds of scientists who were working on the next version of the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report used to prepare endangered U.S.communities for extreme weather and sea-level rise. They also have taken apart the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a 35 year-old effort to track global climate change that was established by Congress.

The Trump plan will cause forecasting havoc and it will lead to needless death. They are looking to close the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the National Severe Storm Laboratory and the High-Impact Weather Research and Operation. Without question, reducing accurate and timely weather warnings endangers the public.

Humans are heating up the planet, melting the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. We can expect many more Texas-style disasters which I guess we are supposed to meet with an Alfred E. Neuman “what me worry” response. Disaster relief has become a passe concept.