How to Feel Whole in a Broken World: An Astronaut’s Antidote to Despair

 

Once our basic physical needs for sustenance and shelter are met, most of our psychological suffering is a problem of selfing — contracting the scope of reality to the pinhole of the self and using that to explain, always painfully, the actions and motives of others, the course and causality of events. 

As this cognitive corkscrew of rumination burrows deeper and deeper into the inner world, the outer — the world of clouds and crocuses and flickering spring light — recedes further and further past the horizon of our awareness, isolating us from all that is beautiful and true and full of wonder. Despair is nothing more than the pinch of the pinhole, reducing the immense vista of reality to a particular interpretation of a particular moment.

The more we unself by widening the aperture to let the world in, the less we suffer. This is why seeing with an astronaut’s eyes may be the most powerful, most salutary lens-clearing, for astronauts alone can widen the aperture enough to see the whole world, rising and setting against the black austerity of spacetime as a single blue marble, all of our sorrows and worries swirling there remote as the Cambrian.

View from inside the ISS. (Image: NASA)

While orbiting a war-torn world aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Chris Hadfield took questions from earthlings in a Reddit AMA. Asked for his advice to anyone on the brink of giving up and his own approach to those moments of darkest despair, he offers:

"I remind myself that each sunrise is a harbinger of another chance, and to take quiet, unrecognised pride in the accomplishments I get done each day. Each evening my intended list is unfinished, but I celebrate what I’ve done and resolve to do better tomorrow. Also, nothing is ever as good or as bad as it first seems. Keep at it with optimism — it is your life to tinker with, learn from, live and love."

This ongoingness of creation — the fact that this world is unfinished and our story unwritten — is nowhere more visible, life’s ceaseless insistence on itself nowhere more palpable, than when seen on the scale of the entire planet. Hadfield captures this elemental calibration of perspective:

"It’s endlessly surprising how continually beautiful our changing, ancient, gorgeous Earth is. Every one of my 1,650 orbits, I saw something new. And I was up long enough to watch the seasons swap ends on the planet, like Mother Earth taking one breath out of 4.5 billion breaths."

A single gasp of elemental beauty is enough to reanimate the deflated lung of life, to undermine the narratives of despair. “They should have sent a poet,” gasps Jodie Foster’s astronaut character in the film based on Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, and it is with a poet’s sensibility that Hadfield describes one such living antidote to despair — the Bahamas, seen from space in all their “huge visual onslaught of coral reefs and shallows, pierced by the deep tongue of the ocean that gives it a butterfly-like iridescence of every blue that exists.”

The Bahamas seen from the ISS. (Image: NASA)

Before we lifted off from Earth toward the farthest reachable reaches of the cosmic unknown, those last unexplored frontiers of the unknown were the extremes of Earth itself — the poles. Polar explorers were the astronauts of the nineteenth century. Many died to know the unknown. Many sank into “soul-despairing depression” during the six-month polar nights, black and edgeless as spacetime. Over and over, they were saved by wonder.

Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.

In the first year of the twentieth century — that liminal epoch between the age of polar exploration and the age of space exploration — the twenty-nine-year-old Danish artist Harald Moltke was invited to join two young physicists on a polar expedition to study the aurora borealis — that elemental conversation between our planet and its star as fluctuations of the Sun’s corona send gusts of solar wind across the cosmos to ripple our Earth’s magnetosphere, exciting its electrons into magic.

Northern Lights by Harald Moltke, 1900.

Harald Moltke (left) with his companions.

Setting out to capture the ineffable majesty and mystery of Earth’s most otherworldly phenomenon, Moltke made a mobile studio of his reindeer sledge and loaded it with his elaborate painting equipment. (“I realized that it had to be oil paint,” he wrote, “that could most closely reproduce these fantastic phenomena.”) He had read about the northern lights, but nothing had prepared him for the embodied encounter.

Not a religious man, he found himself having a profoundly spiritual experience when faced with these “huge, luminous beams with folds… now shining brightly, now fading away to arise elsewhere… like keys on which invisible hands begin to play, back and forth, back and forth.” He writes in his memoir:

"The northern lights are like nothing else on our planet. They are breathtaking! They surpass all human imagination to such an extent that one cannot help but reach for notions like 'supernatural, divine, miraculous.' I, who had been so bold as to dare to portray these seemingly unreal visions, sank to my knees spiritually the first time I saw them. I need not be ashamed of that… I had imagined the northern lights as clearings in the sky, luminous domes and twilights. And then they were independent phenomena with their own light, their own movement, their own emergence, development and movement, its own resurrection, development and ending and resurrection again, its own mysterious unfolding."

-Maria Popova, Marginalian

"Their failure to sufficiently fight back 'against a war-crazed Trump administration'"

 

A coalition of peace groups last Wednesday launched a new national campaign calling for the top Democrats in Congress—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—to resign from their leadership roles, citing their failure to sufficiently fight back “against a war-crazed Trump administration.”

The coalition, which includes Peace Action and RootsAction, launched a petition declaring that it is “time for congressional Democrats to replace Schumer and Jeffries with leaders who are willing and able to challenge the runaway militarism that has dragged our country into launching yet another insanely destructive war,” this time against Iran.

“Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries have not acted to prevent war on Venezuela or the current war on Iran,” the petition reads. “They worked to delay a vote on Iran until after the war had started, while failing to clearly oppose it before or after the launch of the war. Schumer and Jeffries have shown that they cannot be trusted to prevent more wars, more threats of wars, or the transfer of another half a trillion dollars a year into the war machine.”

Kevin Martin, president of Peace Action—the largest grassroots peace network in the US—said in a statement that he doubts “at this point whether many people look to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries for ‘leadership’ in Congress, but we would settle for them getting with the program and representing their base, and the majority of Americans, who want them to stand strongly against Trump’s illegal wars and domestic terror campaigns against the American people.”

“They need to speak out loudly and clearly, and get their caucuses in line, to oppose the upcoming $50 billion or more for Trump’s illegal war of aggression on Iran, and to cut off US weapons to Israel,” said Martin. “Failing to do so will only increase calls for them to step down or be replaced by colleagues who understand where the American people are on these and other critical issues.”

Since the start of the illegal US-Israeli assault on Iran, Schumer and Jeffries have focused largely on procedural objections to the war, the Trump administration’s incompetence, and the president’s failure to clearly articulate his objectives, rather than explicitly opposing the military onslaught.

In an appearance on NBC‘s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Jeffries declined to say whether he would oppose the Trump administration’s expected push for $50 billion in new funding for the unauthorized war on Iran. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Jeffries said, chiding the administration for failing to “make its case as to the rationale or justification for this war of choice in the Middle East.”

Sarah Lazare and Adam Johnson wrote for The Nation last week that “it’s not enough to check the box, to do the bare minimum, to reinforce every argument for war only to balk at the process and ask whether there’s a ‘plan’ for after the myriad war crimes have already been committed.”

“The only way to read this half-hearted response from the Democratic Party leadership,” they argued, “is de facto support.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

A Tale of Trump’s Wrongdoing and The Contrarian's Pro-Democracy Pushback

 

Two weeks of Donald Trump’s war on Iran, this much is clear: It is a colossal foreign policy blunder. The Iranian leadership seems substantially intact with another, and reportedly more fundamentalist, Khamenei at the helm. Collateral conflicts have been set off across the region, with hundreds of civilians and 13 U.S. service members dying. 

The Strait of Hormuz has been mined and turned into a missile proving ground. The price of oil soared to over $100 a barrel, staggering the world economy and worsening the affordability crisis for American families. For Americans, it’s among the most unpopular commencements of a war ever. And with no endgame in sight, Trump’s low polling numbers are likely to meet the same fate as oil shipping traffic: continued bombardment.

Iran is certainly the worst of Trump’s foreign policy fiascos, but it by no means is the only one. Indeed, there have been so many that it’s hard to keep track. That’s why I decided for this week’s column, I would catalog Trump’s Top 10 foreign policy failures as the latest entry in our Contrarian Top 10 lists. I drew on my experience as a U.S. ambassador among many other sources (including colleague Jen Rubin’s own version of this list for 2025).

As you will see when you look at the list, this is not only a tale of Trump’s wrongdoing – it’s also the story of our pro-democracy pushback. Despite the difficulty of litigating foreign policy snafus, with your support we have often found a way to do that in the courts of law as well as, of course, in the court of public opinion, including through our coverage here at the Contrarian. You make all of that possible with your paid subscriptions.

1. Insane Iran Illegalities

In a matter of days, Trump has somehow managed to combine the worst aspects of our most foolish wars, from Vietnam to Iraq. It is also outlandishly illegal, as I explained with a bipartisan group of experts last week in the Contrarian. We are working up a litigation rejoinder — stay tuned!

2. Terrible Tariff Troubles

Trump’s erratic and ill-defined tariffs policy has alienated allies, shaken the global reputation of the U.S. economy, and penalized millions of American small businesses and working families with an illegal tax, as the Supreme Court recently ruled. Because there is an enormous amount of damage to rectify, Democracy Defenders Fund and our wonderful partner Platkin LLP have filed a lawsuit against the government over the collection of tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. We will fight to recover funds that were unlawfully seized from our wonderful client Busy Baby LLC and its owner Beth Benike, fighting on behalf of all small businesses. And I hosted New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin and Benike at the Contrarian this week:

3. The Maduro Mess

Trump’s trial run on regime changes unilaterally began in our own backyard. Two months ago, the United States launched strikes against the Maduro regime, seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in the process and bringing him and his wife to the United States for trial. Whatever you think of that end, it should not be achieved by illegal means. At DDF, we filed a bipartisan ethics complaint from our all-star team of ethics experts, representing the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, seeking an investigation of the lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel who gave the wrong legal advice.

4. Maritime Massacres

The illegal use of power in Latin America began with strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that the administration claimed to be carrying drugs. Not only does it appear that some people on these boats may have been innocent civilians, but, even worse, defenseless survivors were apparently killed. We at DDF make sure that the rule of law is applied to everyone, and I, alongside fellow ethics experts Ginny Canter and Richard Painter, filed a complaint at the Justice Department demanding that this illegal advice be exposed to the public.

5. Undermining Ukraine

​​Despite Trump claiming he’d negotiate peace between Russia and Ukraine within a day of taking office, the war between Russia and Ukraine has only intensified under his watch. In fact, 2025 was the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since the war began. For President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine, and Europe, Trump has been the worst of allies. That has sent a message to our friends everywhere that we cannot be trusted. But fortunately Trump does not speak for all Americans, and he certainly does not speak for the Contrarian, where we have been vocal in standing up for Ukraine and for American alliances.

6. Greenland Greed

Trump’s obsession with treating sovereign nations like real estate is nothing new. In his first term, he tried to buy Greenland — an idea that was quickly shot down by the Danish government. This time around, he decided to send Donald Trump Jr. to advance the deal in Greenland, during which the junior Trump met with locals with a message from his father promising that the United States would “treat [Greenlanders] well.” Unsurprisingly, Denmark and the rest of our NATO allies rejected the offers resoundingly.

Ultimately, at the World Economic Forum, NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte and Trump announced a “framework of a future deal” that would renegotiate American military presence in Greenland but ultimately prevent the United States from acquiring the territory. As I told the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the absurdity of acquiring another sovereign nation’s territory is only “made worse by allegations that Trump[’s] associates have ties to companies who could benefit from the president’s actions.”

7. Undoing USAID Unlawfully

The complete gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development has been nothing short of catastrophic. Once one of the world’s largest funders of disaster relief, food security, clean water, and disease prevention — credited with saving more than 90 million lives over two decades — it has been all but dismantled. According to estimates from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, more than 500,000 children died in the first year alone as a direct result of these cuts. This is abhorrent — a betrayal of every principle we claim to hold.

We at DDF were the first to sue over Elon Musk’s actions through DOGE and the legality of his appointment. The case is ongoing, and we are now fighting to take his deposition and prove the wrongdoing. We won’t stop until justice is done.

8. Canada Clown Show

Trump’s repeated attacks on our ally Canada are unhinged. He has battered our peaceful neighbor with a series of erratic tariffs, publicly ridiculed Canadian leaders, and even joked about taking over the country and making it the 51st state. In doing so, he has squandered the goodwill Canadians have long held toward the United States, turning a trusted partner into a wary skeptic increasingly inclined to distance itself from us. Just ask the bourbon industry — and many others.

9. A Chinese TACO

By contrast, Trump seems never to have met a dictator to whom he won’t kowtow. One of the more humiliating examples was his about-face on China. His initial tariffs on that nation were met with pushback, setting off an escalating trade war. Unfortunately, Trump neglected the fact that we need China’s rare earth minerals for a wide variety of U.S. uses. China cutting off those exports brought Trump to his knees. He ultimately made concessions, including dramatically cutting back the tariffs he had imposed. Who knew that TACO was Chinese food?

10. Voiding Voice of America

Voice of America and other U.S. government global media have long been crown jewels of American soft power around the world. Countless people have relied on the news our nation provides, particularly where free media is scant. As a former ambassador in Prague, I know this well. So many foreign friends told me how they counted on “the radios” broadcasting VOA and more.

Over the past year plus, that has been systematically dismantled, profoundly affecting our interests and reach as a nation. Here, too, with wonderful partners and clients, my democracy litigation colleagues and I have pushed back, with win after win. Most recently, we secured a court order that Kari Lake’s appointment as interim CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media was illegal and her actions invalid. The battle continues – thanks to your paid subscriptions.

11. Bonus: Donald’s Domestic Defeats

Of course, in a sense, all of our 267 legal cases and matters help counteract Trump’s foreign policy fiascos. That is because domestic victories also act as guardrails on Trump’s power, preventing him from veering even further off the rails. Conversely, when our allies see that the rule of law is holding, they are reminded of what really makes America great and that our nation will be back.

-The Contrarian

 

When will this war end? "When I feel it in my bones."

 

Donald Trump did not commit to a definitive timeline for the war in Iran, saying in a Friday interview that the fighting would end when he feels it “in my bones.”

Trump told Fox News Radio that he didn’t think the war “would be long.” But he suggested that only he will know when it will be over, saying the conflict will end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals on the length of the war, with senior administration officials suggesting at times that the war could last anywhere from days to months. Trump on Friday said he expected the conflict to end soon but added that it could also continue indefinitely if necessary. The president dismissed reports that the U.S. was facing a munitions shortage.

“Nobody has the technology or the weapons that we have,” Trump told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade. “We’re way ahead of schedule. Way ahead.” He later said the U.S. had “virtually unlimited ammunition. We’re using it, we’re using it. We can go forever.”

While the president suggested the decision to end the war will ultimately be based on his personal judgment, he said he was consulting with senior advisers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance. “Operation Epic Fury will continue until President Trump, as Commander-in-Chief, determines that the goals of Operation Epic Fury, including for Iran to no longer pose a military threat, have been fully realized,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement when asked for comment.

Earlier on Friday, Hegseth suggested victory was a certainty and attacked the press for what he viewed as unfriendly media coverage about the war. Trump also sought to downplay any economic ramifications of the conflict, saying the U.S. economy was the greatest in the world and would “bounce right back, so fast.”

The Trump administration has sought to quell concerns over rising oil and gas prices after U.S.-Israeli military action against Iran began in February. The war triggered the largest oil supply disruption in history and cost $11 billion in its first week, according to the Pentagon. The president’s messaging around the run-up in crude prices has caused a potential public relations nightmare for the oil industry. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social. 

-Politico

Trump's "Concentration Camps" for "tens of thousands of immigrants — men, women, and even children"

 

Donald Trump’s brutal ICE detention facilities have been blasted as “concentration camps.” This is a freighted term — summoning more than a century of deplorable history. 

But experts in the field have no hesitation in using these words to describe the network of facilities that the federal government is using to literally warehouse tens of thousands of immigrants — men, women, and even children — snatched out of their communities by masked federal agents.

The activist group 50501 recently hosted a video call on this topic. It featured Andrea Pizer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, as well as journalist Frank Abe, co-editor of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration and a longtime activist in pursuing redress for the abuses of America’s World War II camps.

In his introductory remarks, Abe insisted that Trump’s new ICE warehouses “are nothing but 21st Century American concentration camps.” He added that the subject was personal to him: “I’m a third-generation Japanese American, and I know a concentration camp when I see one.”

The words “concentration camp,” for many, evoke the horrors of Hitler and of facilities like Auschwitz, where more than 1 million people were murdered by the Nazis. But Pitzer drew a firm distinction (as do other experts) between “extermination centers” and concentration camps. 

The latter are not synonymous with “death camps” — although people held in concentration camps often die by disease, deprivation, or indifference.

Concentration camps have been around since the 1890s and documented on six continents. Pitzer, who has traced that history, offered the audience her own general definition: “A concentration camp is a mass detention of civilians on the basis of identity — something you are, rather than what you’ve done,” she said. “It is generally used without due process. And it is done to entrench and expand political power for an authoritarian-style government.”

The label “concentration camp” has always been controversial. Nearly from the beginning, Pitzer explained, authorities running concentration camps have routinely denied that they are, in fact, running “concentration camps.” The first camps were established by the Spanish in Cuba — followed shortly by the British in southern Africa.

But even those Brits were adamant that their camps were different. “Literally from the beginning of concentration camp history, every country that had concentration camps would argue, ‘No. These aren’t really like those other camps,’” making the claim that their regime of mass-incarceration was somehow justified on the basis of public safety, rather than cruelty and control.

“This is a dialogue and a debate that still goes on today,” Pitzer underscored. “So, if you hear that about immigrant detention today — ‘Well, it’s not really concentration camps’’ — it is very much so.” 

A key indicator that Trump’s ICE camps fit the definition, for Pitzer, is the lawless way the administration is filling them. “You have masked secret police that don’t identify themselves on the streets, kidnapping people,” she described, “and taking them quickly from a local detention to a transit camp — so attorneys can’t find them to give them legal rights.”

And then there is the “dismal” reality of ICE camps themselves — where detention conditions are a threat to human health and so noxious that many detainees agree to deportation rather than pursuing their rights to due process. 

“People in feces [from overflowing toilets]. People without clean water to drink. People without adequate food,” Pitzer said, reeling off a litany. “They’re denied medical care. They’re denied their own medicine, even if they brought them in. There have been multiple deaths — with one of them even declared a homicide.”

Emphasizing that these are the early days of a system that is unlikely to improve, Pitzer added: “We are already looking at a tremendous amount of suffering” — including outbreaks of deadly disease ranging from measles to tuberculosis.

That suffering is attributable, in part, to a mad rush by the administration, and state allies like Florida, to expand detention capacity by erecting makeshift tent-walled camps. These include Camp East Montana — the largest facility in the ICE network, built at an El Paso military base that was previously the site of a Japanese “internment camp;” and Alligator Alcatraz, a Florida-state facility that operates in conjunction with the Trump regime. (Tallahassee and the MAGA administration are now feuding over who should pay for the $600 million camp.) 

The experience at both facilities have been hellish for detainees, but also logistically: “Hygiene, water, weather, disease outbreaks — different things [are] just going horribly for them,” Pitzer said.

The administration is now pivoting to more permanent facilities — seeking to spend as much as $38 billion to acquire new detention centers. Many of these will consist of caged bunkhouses, built inside huge industrial warehouses — with the goal of adding tens of thousands of additional bunks to the ICE system. The largest facilities, described by the government as “mega-centers,” — could house 10,000 people apiece.

That scale that would put ICE camps on par with the federal camps opened during World War II to incarcerate Japanese Americans. “That’s the size of a Manzanar or Tule Lake,” said Abe, naming two giant “relocation” facilities that have been acknowledged in federal records (and by the Truman Library) as “concentration camps.”

Abe helped secure a national apology during the Reagan administration to Americans of Japanese descent who were imprisoned at such camps, including his father and stepfather. “We won that in 1988. We thought, Mission Accomplished; America will never do that again,” Abe said. “And yet, here we are.”

ICE is currently detaining about 70,000 people, nearly three-quarters of whom have no criminal record, and whose only alleged wrongdoing relates to civil violations of immigration statutes. 

Nonetheless, the government is working overtime in the courts to prevent such individuals from being released on bond until their immigration cases are resolved. The number of ICE detainees has soared by about 75 percent since Trump took office. 

And if anti-immigrant zealots in the White House, like Stephen Miller, have their way, the administration is just getting started. “Their goal is to deport 15 to 20 million people,” Pitzer said. “For historical context, that is [the size of] the Soviet Gulag. The Soviet concentration camp system had 18 to 20 million people move through it in more than 20 years.”

The Trump regime is seeking to move much more quickly. “That is impossible to do without a tremendous amount of death and suffering — even if we never reach the stage of extermination camps that we saw in Nazi Germany,” Pitzer said, adding: “I don’t think that we are close to those.” But the concentration camp scholar emphasized that stopping short of Nazi crimes against humanity is a cold comfort. 

“There can be plenty of deaths without ending up with gas chambers and mass executions,” she said. “The system itself will do a lot of that.”

The hour-long 50501 presentation is well worth your time and includes success stories of local activists who marshalled their communities to block the administration’s planned acquisition of warehouse space. The video is available at the link below:

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Tim Dickinson is the senior political writer for The Contrarian

 

Thursday in America by Joyce Vance

 

Judge Amy Coney Barrett was in conversation with the Chief Justice’s Counselor, Judge Robert M. Dow Jr. (we discussed Judge Dow and the role of the Counselor here), at the 2026 Supreme Court Fellows Program Annual Lecture at the Library of Congress today.

“Freedom of speech and freedom of religion commit us to pluralism,” she told him. “They commit us to tolerance. They commit us to having to respect and allow to be heard even those viewpoints that we might disagree with.”

So, what does she make of a president who is not committed to freedom of speech or freedom of religion? Are we to draw the obvious conclusion? Or is she just speaking generically here?

Justices speak publicly at programs like this, but they usually attract little attention. It’s unlikely, with public confidence in the Court at an all-time low, that it’s lost on the Justices that they present a unique opportunity for the Court to try and reclaim some of that ground. 

But words like these are easier to say than live by today. Justice Barrett is correct that these rights make the country more open, more accepting, more diverse, and much more rich and interesting. But we live in an era when they are undeniably being constricted, as we discussed last night.

The president of the United States has taken to calling his war in Iran an “excursion” as though we are all off on spring break. Seven American are dead, possibly more following today’s news that an incident involving two KC-135 refueling aircraft, one that did not involve enemy or friendly fire, resulted in one of the planes crashing. Recovery efforts are still underway.

Now that Trump has his war, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. He appears to have had no plans in place for either the future or Iran or protection for the straits of Hormuz. Instead, the White House account on Twitter is posting videos that equate war with video games or football. It did that here, using video of University of Nebraska receiver Kenny Bell’s blind-side block on a Wisconsin defender during the 2012 Big Ten title game and other sports footage mixed in with footage of U.S. strikes on Iran. Bell told the Washington Post that the White House’s video made him sick.

There were two shootings in the U.S. today, one at Old Dominion University, the other at a reform Jewish synagogue in Michigan, Temple Israel, where children were in daycare when the shooter drove his vehicle into the building. 

There is a rising tide of antisemitism in this country that continues to grow. The administration pays lip service to opposing it, even as Trump encourages a tide of hate against people because of their race, religion, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation. They are not unrelated. Legitimizing hate begets more hate.

The shooter at ODU, who is now deceased, spent over a decade in federal prison for material support of terrorism. He took the life of an army ROTC officer who was in his classroom, a horrific act. But there is risk in these moments that when a person or a small group commits acts of violence motivated by hate directed at Jews, Muslims, or anyone else, the criminal acts are ascribed to a group broadly to justify dehumanizing that group. 

That leads to more hate and more hate crimes. The dehumanization is an effort to make it acceptable to attack American Jews if you don’t like Israel’s policies or condemn all Muslims for the acts of two men who committed odious crimes today. It is much the same as pretending all immigrants are violent criminals or all transgender people pose a threat to kids. These are the kinds of passions most administrations try to tamp down on.

Not this one. Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville received some support from his side of the aisle for a tweet Democrats condemned:

The federal judiciary continues its pushback against the administration’s politicization of how taxpayer dollars are spent. Tonight, Judge Manish Shaw told the Trump administration it could not stop funding health care in states led by Democrats, which it had tried to do to the tune of $600 million. The Judge called the effort “contrived” and held that it was an illegal effort to punish the states for trying to protect immigrants with sanctuary policies.

The Judge explained how the administration was penalizing the four states, “Plaintiffs are four states that usually receive billions of dollars in federal funds through the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Homeland Security. Other states receive federal funding from similar sources and based on similar criteria. 

But these four are on a list that the federal Office of Management and Budget pushed out to agencies in January 2026. Around the same time and over the next few days, word got out (formally and informally) that there would be no money from grants administered by HHS and no funds obligated from DOT and DHS to the four states. 

These funds support health and safety initiatives, infrastructure modernization projects, and disaster recovery and relief—projects deeply embedded in basic operations of state and local government. The funds are authorized by Congressional appropriations that are unrelated to immigration policies or political pique, and, for many grants from the Centers for Disease Control, that set a floor for required spending.”

He continued, “On January 13, 2026, the President announced that starting February 1, 2026, the federal government would not make any payments to ‘states having sanctuary cities.’” These are the facts. And they do not line up well for the government here. It’s left to argue that the plaintiff states have some evidence, but it’s not enough to get the injunction they seek. The states want to stop the federal government from discriminating against them. The Judge concluded that “the public interest is ‘served by an injunction in that it acts as a check on the executive’s encroachment of congressional power that violates the separation of powers.’”

Whether it’s the economy and affordability, Trump’s wars, the Epstein files, or the state of our democracy, there is little good news for Trump as the primaries continue and midterms come closer. I turned on the TV tonight, to find that Fox News was telling its viewers about Dr. Jill Biden’s new biography as CNN discussed the disruption in the oil markets and MS NOW highlighted Trump’s ongoing efforts to pass the SAVE Act.

The SAVE Act, which far too many people assumed was a dead letter, has cropped back up. Hopefully, Marc Elias, who said Tuesday night when we spoke to Big Tent that it would not pass in the Senate (and that if it did he will challenge it), will prove correct. Because ultimately, it’s up to voters to decide the future of the country.

For Trump, pushing the SAVE Act is about the only perceived path to success in the midterm elections—keeping eligible Americans from voting. Trump has had success at using his war to turn attention away from the Epstein files. But he knows he’s still vulnerable. His party is in danger and it’s in danger because of him. There is no telling what a man who cannot tolerate losing, who incited the January 6 insurrection to pretend it didn’t happen in 2020, will do when he is backed into a corner. We should be prepared for anything and ready to do whatever it takes to vote.

If you read Civil Discourse because you want to understand what the headlines actually mean—and not just react to them—paid subscribers make that level of analysis possible. For the price of a couple cups of coffee each month, you get the perspective of someone who has spent decades inside the legal system explaining how the pieces really fit together.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

“If the road to war with Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire and political class to march beside everyone else’s kids, would we still be there?”

 

The drumbeats for expanding our (and Israel’s) war with Iran are loud. Cable news panels talk about strategy. Politicians talk about deterrence. Pentagon briefings talk about targets and timelines. But there’s one thing missing from almost every conversation in Washington. Risk. Not the geopolitical kind. Not the think-tank kind. Real risk. The kind that lands in your living room in the form of a letter from the government telling your family that your child is being sent to war.

For most of modern America’s leaders — and certainly for generations of the Trump family — that risk simply doesn’t exist. We live in a country where fewer than one percent of the population serves in the military. The burden of fighting America’s wars has been placed on a narrow slice of our people. They’re mostly working class, many come from rural communities, and many join because it’s one of the few stable ways to get healthcare, education benefits, and a future.

Meanwhile the people who debate whether we should be bombing Iran are almost never sending their own kids. That didn’t used to be the case. During World War II nearly every American family had someone in uniform. War was a shared national sacrifice, and politicians understood that every decision they made could cost the life of one of theirs or their neighbor’s son or daughter.

I remember well how Vietnam brought that reality home in a different way. I hated it, protested against it, got kicked out of school for those protests, and still curse LBJ and Nixon for their lies that killed over 50,000 of my fellow citizens. But that, in retrospect, is exactly how it should be. That protest/debate was a good thing for our nation, every bit as good as the war was wrong and bad.

The draft lottery meant that millions of young Americans suddenly had skin in the game of war. College campuses erupted in protest not because students were uniquely radical but because they knew they might soon be the ones crawling through rice paddies under machine gun fire in a war that the country had, by then, fully realized was based on lies.

The draft was what forced our country, our families from coast-to-coast, to confront the human cost of war. And eventually it forced our government to end that war. In 1973 Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and created today’s all-volunteer military. The argument sounded reasonable at the time, particularly after the upheaval of Vietnam. A professional military would be more skilled and more motivated, they said. It would be more competent, even more lethal.

But then something else happened because the draft ended: war became easier for politicians to throw our military into, because the dissenting voices in the ranks had vanished. When only a tiny slice of Americans is at risk for fighting, bleeding, and dying, the political price of launching a war drops dramatically. 

Congress members can vote for military action without worrying that their own children or those of their constituents will pay the price. Television pundits can cheer for bombing campaigns without imagining their own kids in uniform.

The result has been nearly nonstop war for half a century, from Reagan’s attack on Grenada straight through to today. Afghanistan lasted twenty years. Iraq dragged on for nearly two decades. The United States has been involved in military operations across the Middle East and Africa that most Americans can barely locate on a map.

Now we’re staring at the possibility that Trump’s attacks against Iran could metastasize into World War III. The stakes here are much higher than George W. Bush’s wars that he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, were fought to get him a second term in the White House. Iran isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan: it’s a nation of nearly ninety million people with a large military, deep regional alliances, and the ability to disrupt global energy markets overnight. It’s twice the size of Iraq or Texas.

And a war there could ignite the entire Middle East, which could easily spread to Europe (and already has, in a minor way, with Iran’s attacks on Cyprus and their missiles sent at Turkey). As we deplete our munitions, it might also encourage China to try to take Taiwan. Yet the discussion among Republicans in Washington sounds strangely casual. Analysts debate air strikes on TV and guess about retaliation scenarios the way sports commentators pontificate about playoff strategies. Pete Hegseth struts and preens for the camera like a tough guy. All because it’s easy to talk that way when you know your family won’t be fighting.

Now, imagine a different system. Imagine that the United States had a national draft that applied equally to everyone. Rich kids and poor kids. Red states and blue states. The children of senators, CEOs, and television hosts alongside the children of factory workers and teachers.

This is how it works today in Norway (includes women), Sweden (includes women), Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Greece, Israel (includes women), South Korea, Singapore, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Norway, and Sweden young people can opt to serve in the nonprofit sector (like hospitals or environmental work) instead of the military.

The draft provides a rite of passage into adulthood for young people; something found in the history of every society. Those who serve for a year could be rewarded with free college or trade school. They’d get out of their local bubble, see the world, meet and work side-by-side with people who don’t look or speak or pray like them. These are all good outcomes of national service.

And it’s successful: other than Israel, which has its own unique problems, you’re not hearing much bellicose war rhetoric from any of those nations’ leaders. If we had that here, do you think Republicans would still talk so casually about war with Iran? Would Congress rush to authorize military force if their own sons and daughters might be called up next month? History suggests the answer is no.

Countries with universal service become more cautious about war because the entire society feels the consequences. Parents ask harder questions, students organize, and communities demand clear, explicit, detailed answers about why a conflict is necessary and exactly what victory would look like.

Shared sacrifice, in other words, produces democratic accountability. And right now, America doesn’t have that. Instead, we’ve created a system where war is something that happens to somebody else, that roughly one percent who volunteer. It’s fought by someone else’s kids. It’s endured by someone else’s family.

That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work. The Founders of our republic deeply distrusted standing armies, so much so that they wrote into the Constitution that the army must be funded every two years or it will cease to exist. It’s right there in Article I, forcing our country to reevaluate our military and its use every time Congress reconvenes:

“The Congress shall have Power…To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;” They believed that America should only go to war when the public truly understood the stakes and Congress had engaged in a vigorous, public debate about it. That’s why declaring war was not among the powers the Constitution gives the president.

“The Congress shall have Power…to declare War…” When there was a national consensus, and only then, would we go to war. Citizen soldiers were supposed to ensure that war remained a last resort rather than a convenient tool of foreign policy. This BS like Republicans today are doing as they hold briefings for Congress behind closed doors would have horrified them.

And ignoring that concern is how Trump got us here: the all-volunteer military quietly erased that safeguard. Don’t take me wrong: the men and women who volunteer to serve our nation deserve enormous respect. They’ve carried the weight of America’s wars with courage and sacrifice. The problem isn’t them: it’s the rest of us. 

When the risks of war are concentrated in a small segment of society, the rest of the nation stops paying attention. Politicians face less pressure, military interventions multiply, and wealthy defense contractors prosper.

The human cost of war, in other words, gets hidden. But a fair national draft would change that overnight. It wouldn’t make America more warlike: history shows it would do the opposite. If every family knew their children could be sent to fight, Americans would demand diplomacy first, second, and third. Wars would still happen when they truly had to, but they wouldn’t happen so casually. A president who just orders the troops to start shooting at a country like Iran would be held to account by every family in the country.

As the war with Iran grows hotter, we should be asking a simple question that almost nobody in Washington wants to hear: “If the road to war with Tehran required the sons and daughters of the billionaire and political class to march beside everyone else’s kids, would we still be there?”

-Thom Hartmann