"People Can’t Afford Healthcare": Sanders Rips Pentagon Request for Another $200 Billion

 

US Sen. Bernie Sanders said Thursday that it is absurd for the Trump administration to demand another $200 billion from Congress for an illegal war on Iran after lawmakers already approved $1 trillion in military spending for the year—and while millions of people across the nation are struggling to afford basic necessities.

“You got people all over this country, 20% of households, spending 50% of their income on housing,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an appearance on MS NOW. “People can’t afford healthcare. People can’t afford childcare. And this guy, in addition to giving tax breaks to billionaires, now wants to spend another $200 billion on a war that should never have been fought.”

The senator’s remarks came as President Donald Trump, who has not yet formally requested the funds from Congress, suggested another $200 billion would be a “small price to pay” as the US-Israeli war on Iran heads toward its fourth week with no end in sight.

“I think the Trump people are in a bit of panic,” Sanders said Thursday. “They’re losing ground. Gas prices are soaring. There is massive discontent against this war. It’s got to end, and we’ve got to make sure that Trump is neutered in 2026.”

With the Trump administration considering a plan to deploy thousands of additional troops to the Middle East amid widespread fears of a ground invasion of Iran—which would explode the price tag of an already costly war—the National Priorities Project (NPP) released an analysis highlighting where the $200 billion requested by the Pentagon could be better spent.

The group estimated that $200 billion would be enough for all of the following this year:

-Medicaid for the 17 million people who will lose it due to budget cuts and other policies;

-Food stamps for the 22 million people who will go hungry due to Trump’s budget cuts;

-Medical care for the 1.8 million veterans of the last forever war who still live with disabilities; and

-Tripling the number of kids in Head Start, from just over 700,000 to 1.4 million kids.

“Pete Hegseth would rather the US bomb Iranian families than feed American families,” wrote NPP’s Lindsay Koshgarian, referring to the Pentagon secretary. “We should remember the lies that led us into war in Iraq a generation ago. That war ultimately cost nearly $3 trillion. We must not go down that path again. Our tax dollars should be helping struggling Americans, not feeding new forever wars.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

Illinois Climbs to #2 with Strictest Gun Control that Now Includes Warrantless Inspections and Bans

Illinois has rapidly moved into the top tier of restrictive gun policy, climbing to the second spot nationally for gun law strength and pairing that ranking with a sweeping set of new storage rules, assault weapon limits and expanded enforcement powers. Supporters describe the package as a long overdue effort to curb shootings, while critics warn that aggressive inspections and broad bans risk colliding with constitutional protections and everyday gun ownership.

The state’s new approach now reaches from how firearms are sold and registered to how they are locked inside private homes, with penalties that can reach thousands of dollars and ongoing litigation that could reshape the limits of state power over guns. Whether Illinois has found a template for other states or a legal overreach that courts will pare back is the central question hanging over its new status near the top of the national rankings.

How Illinois Reached the Number Two Spot:

In the latest national comparison of firearm policy, Illinois now ranks second in the country for the strictness of its gun laws. The ranking lists Illinois with a Gun Law Strength score of 87 and a Gun Violence Rate of 12.4, placing it just behind California and ahead of Massachusetts in overall regulation. That move up the list reflects a series of legislative sessions in which lawmakers have repeatedly chosen tighter rules over the status quo.

The same ranking notes that Illinois holds the #2 position for gun laws, up from #3 in the previous year, and groups those metrics under a section labeled Jan and State Details for Illinois. The data set that underpins this comparison is also linked to a broader network of advocacy and research organizations, including Gun Safety Policies, which treats Illinois as a model for how layered regulations can be built into a single statewide framework.

A related set of Jan Highlights on Gun Law Rankings lists California in first place, Illinois in second and Massachusetts in third, describing those three as the leading states for strict firearm policy. That summary frames the rankings as a roadmap for saving 262000 lives from gun violence over the next decade and identifies California, Illinois and Massachusetts as the core of that strategy. The press material, hosted on an advocacy site that also links to the broader Gun Law Rankings effort, presents Illinois as the climber in that top group.

Separate statistical work that tracks leading states for gun law strength also places California at the top of the list and treats it as the most restrictive jurisdiction in the United States. In that context, Illinois appears just behind California in measures of legal toughness, while still facing a higher rate of gun violence than some other highly regulated states. The Statista overview that describes California led the in the United States helps explain why Illinois is framed as following an already established West Coast model rather than inventing a new approach from scratch.

The Legal Spine/ Assault Weapons and the Protect Illinois Communities Act:

The core of Illinois’s modern gun regime is the Protect Illinois Communities Act, a sweeping statute that targets assault weapons and related accessories. On January 10 of a recent legislative session, Governor JB Pritzker signed into law Public Act 102-1116, a measure formally identified as a Public Act and described as the Protect Illinois Community initiative in state materials. A summary posted by the Illinois State Police explains that On January 10 Governor JB Pritzker approved the law, which is cataloged under the number 102 and is accompanied by detailed rules in the Illinois Register.

The Protect Illinois Communities Act bans the sale of a wide list of assault weapons, restricts high capacity magazines and requires existing owners to register affected firearms. A legal overview that describes Illinois gun rules notes that, as of 2025, Illinois continues to enforce a statewide ban on assault weapons, including AR-15 style rifles, and that the law prohibits the sale, purchase and possession of new assault weapons and large capacity magazines unless they were registered before the state deadline. That analysis, framed as a guide titled As of 2025, reinforces the idea that the assault weapon ban is not a symbolic measure but a live regulatory regime that affects common rifle models.

The state’s own description of the Protect Illinois Community law emphasizes that detailed rulemaking is ongoing, with definitions and procedures set out in the Illinois Register and updated by the Illinois State Police. Those rules cover what counts as an assault weapon, how owners must file affidavits and what penalties apply for noncompliance. Together with the statutory text in Public Act 102-1116, they form the legal spine that supports Illinois’s broader ranking as a high control state.

Safe Gun Storage Act/ Inside the New Home Rules:

Illinois’s climb up the rankings is not driven only by bans on specific firearms. Beginning at the start of 2026, the state also put in place a sweeping Safe Gun Storage Act that reaches directly into how residents secure weapons inside their homes. One legal aid overview explains that SB 0008 creates the Safe Gun Storage Act and that gun owners must store their firearms safely if they know or should know that a minor or a person prohibited from possessing guns could access them. The same summary of what Illinois laws on January 1, 2026 notes that the Safe Gun Storage Act is one of the headline changes for residents.

A separate consumer focused guide to new Illinois laws describes the Safe Gun Storage Act as a measure that gun owners in Illinois need to understand, identifying it as Senate Bill 8 and explaining that it changes how firearms must be locked and stored, especially when children are present. That overview, which labels the measure the Safe Gun Storage and ties it to Illinois and Senate Bill language, stresses that anyone prohibited from possessing firearms cannot have access to weapons in a home where the law applies.

Local coverage of new laws taking effect at the start of 2026 goes further into the details. One summary explains that gun storage requirements are tightened and that a new law changes how guns must be stored in Illinois, referring to the Safe Gun Storage Act as The Safe Gun Storage Act and describing it as also known as SB 8. 

The same report notes that gun owners must now report a lost or stolen firearm to law enforcement within 48 hours, a reduction from the previous 72-hour legal requirement, and that violations can result in fines of up to 10000 dollars. Those details appear in a guide to Illinois laws taking at the start of the year, which frames the storage and reporting rules as a package.

Another overview of new Illinois laws in 2026 labels SB 8 as a Gun Safety measure and states that Illinois gun owners will need to take new steps to secure firearms in their homes, especially when children are present. It highlights the requirement to report lost or stolen guns within 48 hours and notes that this shortens the previous 72 hour legal requirement, reinforcing that the state is compressing the window in which unaccounted firearms can circulate. The CBS Chicago report on Gun Safety and other new laws places the storage rules alongside changes in policing and property rights.

From Storage to Tracing/ Expanding State Oversight:

Illinois is not only telling residents how to lock their guns. It is also expanding how the state tracks weapons that move through the legal and illegal markets. When Governor JB Pritzker signed a set of gun bills in late July of a recent year, he approved measures that require gun owners in Illinois to take additional steps to keep weapons out of the hands of children under a certain age and that strengthen tracing of firearms used in crimes. 

A detailed summary notes that Gun owners in will soon be required to take additional measures to keep their weapons away from children and that the same bill package improves how law enforcement can follow a gun’s path from purchase to crime scene.

Coverage of the signing ceremony, which appears in a video clip that notes Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed two new gun laws on a Monday to restrict how weapons are stored and traced, captures the political framing of the move. In the clip, posted under a caption that begins Jul, the governor argues that if the measures prevent even one death or accident they will have been more than worth it, and that Illinois has just changed how firearms must be secured and monitored.

For 2026, another legislative summary groups gun storage and police background check changes together, explaining that gun owners in Illinois must take new steps in 2026 and that the same law package adjusts standards for officers and background checks. The Capitol News Illinois report on new laws notes that these measures are part of hundreds of changes set to affect residents, but singles out gun storage as one of the most direct for everyday households.

What “Warrantless Inspections” Actually Mean in Practice:

The headline claim that Illinois now allows warrantless inspections reflects a broader concern among gun owners that the state’s new enforcement powers could reach into private homes without traditional judicial oversight. The statutory and summary material provided in the available sources, however, focuses on storage rules, reporting deadlines, tracing measures and categorical bans, rather than explicit language granting blanket search authority without a warrant. Based on the sources cited here, any assertion that Illinois has created a general right for police to search homes of gun owners without judicial approval is Unverified based on available sources.

That does not mean enforcement is toothless. The Safe Gun Storage Act and related measures rely on civil fines, potential criminal charges in some circumstances and the threat of losing the right to possess firearms if rules are violated. For example, the requirement to report a lost or stolen gun within 48 hours, backed by fines of up to 10000 dollars, gives police a lever to investigate missing weapons quickly. The tracing bills that Governor JB Pritzker signed give investigators more data on how guns flow through dealers and into criminal hands, which can support targeted inspections of licensed businesses.

Illinois law already allows inspections of certain regulated entities, such as gun dealers, under licensing rules that are separate from the new storage mandates. The new laws reinforce that regulatory approach by tying compliance with storage and recordkeeping rules to the ability to keep a license. However, the materials reviewed here do not spell out a new, explicit program of random home checks for individual gun owners without warrants, which suggests that any such inspections would still need to fit within existing constitutional and statutory boundaries.

The Supreme Court and Illinois Challenges:

Illinois’s aggressive posture on gun control has predictably drawn legal challenges, some of which have already reached the highest courts in the country and the state. One video report describes how the Supreme Court is again considering a gun ban challenge from Illinois, explaining that, as it has been for the past few weeks, observers continue to wait to see what the US Supreme Court will do about a case challenging Illinois’s restriction. The clip, which is linked through a Google redirect and labeled SCOTUS again considering an Illinois case, frames the dispute as part of a broader national fight over how far states can go in limiting assault weapons.

A separate YouTube segment, titled as a Supreme Court update and accessible directly at Jan Supreme Court coverage, elaborates that the justices are weighing whether to take up or act on emergency requests related to Illinois’s law. The discussion in that clip focuses on Illi, a shorthand reference to Illinois used in the video, and suggests that the outcome could influence similar bans in other states that have followed California’s lead.

At the state level, the Illinois Supreme Court is also grappling with the reach of firearm restrictions. A detailed news report explains that the court is reviewing an appeal that challenges an Illinois law prohibiting nonviolent felons from possessing firearms. 

The piece, labeled as an Appeal and credited to Peter Hancock of Capitol News Illinois, describes oral arguments in which justices questioned whether a blanket ban on all nonviolent felons is consistent with recent federal Second Amendment decisions. The same story, accessible through a redirect as Illinois Supreme Court the challenge, underscores that the case could reshape how Illinois treats people with past convictions that did not involve violence.

The same underlying article, available directly at Appeal challenges, notes that the law in question bars nonviolent felons from any firearm possession and that defense lawyers argue this sweep is too broad under recent Supreme Court precedent. The report also highlights that the case is being closely watched by gun rights advocates and prosecutors who see it as a test of how far Illinois can go in limiting access for people with criminal records.

Another video segment, titled Illinois Supreme Court reviews gun control law and accessible at Illinois Supreme Court, summarizes the same dispute in broadcast form. The narrator explains that an Illinois law that prohibits people with non violent felony convictions from possessing a firearm is now under review by the state’s highest court, and that the decision could have ripple effects for thousands of residents who have completed their sentences but remain barred from gun ownership.

How Advocacy Networks Shape the Illinois Model:

Behind the legal texts and court arguments sits a dense network of advocacy organizations that helped shape Illinois’s recent laws and now promote them as a template. The Gun Safety Policies Save Lives rankings that list Illinois with a Gun Law Strength of 87 and a Gun Violence Rate of 12.4 are part of a broader ecosystem that includes Everytown Support Fund, survivor networks and volunteer groups. These organizations link research, lobbying and public campaigns in order to push state legislatures toward specific policy bundles, such as universal background checks, safe storage mandates and assault weapon bans.

The main advocacy hub that connects these efforts is accessible at Everytown, which presents itself as a movement of gun violence survivors and supporters who want stricter laws. Its research arm, available at Everytown Research, houses the rankings data and state by state policy analyses that frame Illinois as a success story. A linked site, Everytown Law, focuses on litigation support and legal strategy, including briefs in cases that challenge or defend measures like the Protect Illinois Communities Act.

Grassroots pressure is channeled through groups like Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, both of which are connected in the citation trail from Gun Safety Policies Save Lives and Everytown Research & Policy. These organizations mobilize parents and students to lobby legislators, attend hearings and support candidates who back strict gun laws. For survivors of shootings, the Everytown Survivor Network offers a platform to share stories that often feature prominently in testimony when lawmakers debate bills like SB 8 or Public Act 102-1116.

The advocacy network also interacts with data platforms and economic analysis tools. One referral from Statista’s work on leading states for gun law strength points to ecdb.com, a site that aggregates economic and market data, and another points to Statista documentation that explains how such datasets are structured. These links illustrate how gun policy debates now draw on a mix of legal, public health and economic metrics, rather than treating firearm regulation as a purely criminal justice question.

Public Reaction/ Between Safety and Overreach:

Public response to Illinois’s new status as a high control state has been mixed, reflecting both support for tighter rules and concern about how far the state is reaching into private life. A local television segment that surveys hundreds of new laws taking effect in Illinois in 2026 opens by saying that many of them will impact residents starting with anyone who owns a gun in the state. The anchor introduces reporter Jen Shan, who explains in the video at Jen Shan that gun owners now face new storage rules, reporting deadlines and potential fines that could catch people who are unaware of the changes.

For supporters, the Safe Gun Storage Act and the Protect Illinois Communities Act are necessary responses to a persistent gun violence problem. They point to the Gun Violence Rate of 12.4 listed for Illinois in the rankings and argue that even with strong laws, the state still suffers from shootings that justify further action. Advocacy groups highlight stories of children accessing unsecured firearms and of assault style weapons used in high profile attacks as evidence that storage and sale rules needed to be tightened.

Critics, including some gun owners and civil liberties advocates, counter that the combination of registration requirements, storage mandates and aggressive tracing could turn ordinary people into inadvertent lawbreakers. They worry that the 48-hour reporting window for lost or stolen guns is too short for some residents to notice a missing firearm, especially if it is kept in a secondary residence or storage unit. Others question whether banning entire categories of weapons, such as AR-15 style rifles, is consistent with the Second Amendment in light of recent Supreme Court decisions that emphasize historical traditions of gun regulation.

-Leo Clark, NewsBreak

Illinois Climbs to #2: Strictest Gun Control Now Includes Warrantless Inspections and Bans - NewsBreak

It is said that laws and their restrictions will never apply to deranged criminals. Moreover, the fact that there are an estimated 400 million firearms already in circulation make it impossible for most gun control laws to have any effect on reducing violent crimes. Because most gun control laws also prohibit people’s self-reliance and self-defense, they can also cost the lives of more innocent victims. 

Nevertheless, I support universal background checks for anyone purchasing a weapon and imposing a waiting period; I support increasing age limits for those purchasing a gun; I support banning high-capacity magazines and modifications on semi-automatic weapons; I support holding firearms manufacturers accountable for their perpetuation of fear through marketing specifically aimed at young male adults; I support red flag laws: legislation that will mandate prohibitions on concealed weapons and possession of firearms by people convicted of violent crimes and people who are considered a public threat; I support interventions where violence is imminent and the removal of all protective legal barriers for any person who has threatened violence; I support banning anyone from owning a weapon on no-fly or watch lists and for anyone taking prescriptions for psychotic and antisocial personality disorders and other psychological illnesses; I also support gun safety at home and keeping weapons away from children and teenagers.

However, instead of sweeping gun control laws that will affect law-abiding responsible citizens who own reasonable self-defense weapons for protection and may conceal and carry those weapons; instead of more political party accusations and useless prayers for the victims, legislators should focus upon and address the causes of violent crimes: domestic white nationalism, racism, bigotry (power, hatred, revenge, anger, notoriety), religious fundamentalism, economic injustice, poverty, unemployment, gang activity, drug trafficking, inefficient law enforcement in high-crime areas, suicide, mental illness and the internet and social media's proliferation of vitriolic commentary, fear, demagoguery and xenophobia.

Let’s pursue a policy goal that shifts “the distribution of gun possession as far as possible in the direction of likely aggressors being disarmed [e.g., those people who are on social media espousing hatred and terrorist ideologies], with as few prospective victims as possible being disarmed [of their handguns!]. To disarm non-criminals [through indiscriminate gun control laws] in the hope that this might indirectly help reduce access to guns among criminals is a very high-stakes gamble, and the risks will not be reduced by pretending that crime victims rarely use guns for self-defense” (Gary Kleck, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control). 

-Glen Brown

The Anti-Voter SAVE Act Must Be Stopped!

 

 

If passed, it would be the most restrictive voting bill ever approved. The SAVE Act, which would be the most restrictive anti-voter bill ever passed by Congress, will soon hit the Senate floor.

Since our nation’s founding, whenever Congress passed legislation regulating elections, it has largely expanded voting rights. In fact, it was 61 years ago this week when President Lyndon B. Johnson called on Congress to pass what would become the Voting Rights Act, which empowered millions of people of color to vote.  

Yet, when a war is raging in the Middle East and an affordability crisis is brewing at home, the Senate is poised to begin what could be a marathon debate on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, a bill that would block millions of eligible American citizens from voting — reversing decades of progress.

President Trump declared that this anti-voter bill should be Congress’s top priority and pledged not to sign any bills (except for funding for the Department of Homeland Security) until Congress sends him the SAVE Act.

It’s a risky gamble for senators to take. When asked what is the most important problem facing the country today, zero percent of voters said “election integrity” in a recent New York Times/Siena poll. Alternatively, a NBC News poll showed that “threats to democracy” has risen to voters’ top issue.

The SAVE Act would effectively require voters to produce a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Research conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, VoteRiders, and the University of Maryland shows that 21 million citizens lack ready access to those documents. That doesn’t include married women who have changed their names and would have to jump through extra hoops to prove their citizenship.

The bill would also require voters to show their papers in person, upending voter registration across the country just months before election day. Voters could no longer register to vote by mail or online or through a voter registration drive. Proponents want to label this a “voter ID bill,” but it does much more than require a photo ID to vote. (The Brennan Center has supported voter ID requirements in the past, such as in the Freedom to Vote Act.) In any case, the ID provision in the bill is more restrictive than in every state except Ohio.

And it would require states to turn over their voter rolls to the DHS, supposedly so it could compare state rolls with its own citizenship data. But this data has historically been filled with inaccuracies, and its use would likely lead to eligible voters being wrongfully booted from the rolls. Republican and Democratic states alike have been fighting off demands for this data from the Department of Justice over concerns about misuse of voters’ private data.

The SAVE Act originally passed the House of Representatives in 2025, but thanks to nationwide public opposition, it did not have enough support to overcome a threatened filibuster in the Senate.

The latest legislative push is again in the name of a conspiracy theory, which wrongly claims that noncitizens widely participate in our elections. Noncitizen voting is already illegal and vanishingly rare. States have multiple checks in place to ensure only American citizens vote. Earlier this year, after conducting a review of the state’s voter rolls, Utah’s top election officer, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, found only one single person registered to vote who was not a U.S. citizen. Zero had actually voted. 

In fact, the lieutenant governor herself was thrown off the rolls in 2022 after being mistakenly identified as a potential noncitizen. The reason? Her father was stationed overseas in the U.S. Air Force when she was born. Similar investigations have been done in Louisiana and Nevada, and all have found that noncitizen voting is incredibly rare. Even the Trump administration itself has combed through tens of millions of voter registrations with little to show for it.

However unpopular, Republicans are continuing to heed Trump’s call. They may try to force a “talking filibuster.” This would effectively bring the legislative process to a halt, allowing Democrats to hold the floor and try to bring endless amendments on any topic, from gas prices to the war in Iran to the Epstein files.

Why is this the top priority?

Since the start of this administration, Trump has led a concerted strategy to undermine our elections. That strategy has only escalated as we draw ever closer to the midterms. It includes the numerous lawsuits brought against states that refused to hand their voter rolls to the Justice Department. 

It includes the February FBI raid in Fulton County to seize 2020 ballots and revamp claims of election fraud. And it involves the lawless executive order signed by Trump a year ago purporting to overhaul election rules. Most provisions in that order have been struck down in federal court. As one judge declared: “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the power to regulate federal elections.”

We have been tracking and warning about this strategy for months. But recently, Trump has begun saying the quiet part out loud. He called for Republicans to “take over the voting,” and the White House has said that the SAVE Act is part of that effort. The bill, Trump said to Republicans, “will guarantee the midterms.”

Sixty-one years ago, LBJ urged Congress to join him in “working long hours,” even “nights and weekends,” to ensure the right to vote. Republicans and Democrats joined together. They recognized that the fundamental right to vote is not a partisan issue.

We now have a president, speaking with the same tenacity and urgency, urging Congress to restrict that very right. We should not be surprised. But we should be prepared.

Senators must stand strong and block the bill. The courts must continue to make clear that the president has no lawful role over elections. And we must all do our part to speak out against this bill and any efforts by this administration to meddle with the vote. As LBJ said on protecting the freedom to vote: “There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us.”

Michael Waldman is president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. He is the author of The Supermajority: How the Supreme Court Divided America and The Fight to Vote. Emily Whitehead is an executive communications strategist at the Brennan Center. Previously, she served on the speechwriting and communications teams at the White House, where she crafted speeches and conducted research for the Executive Office of the President.

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"French General Michel Yakovleff just compared joining Trump's Iran war to 'buying cheap tickets for the Titanic' after it already hit the iceberg"

And then it got even worse for Trump. Yakovleff is no random talking head. He's a three-star general, former commander of the legendary French Foreign Legion, and held senior positions within NATO itself. He is one of the most respected military voices in France and regularly weighs in on matters of international security. So, when he was asked about Trump's desperate pleas for Europe to join his Iran catastrophe, his answer carried serious weight. He didn't mince words. He laid out five distinct reasons why every European nation should flatly refuse. And each one is more damaging than the last.

First, Trump doesn't understand how NATO actually works. You don't get to launch your own unilateral bombing campaign and then invite allies to run a separate operation underneath you. That's not how alliances function. If Trump wants NATO involved, NATO takes command. One operation, one flag, one chain of command. "I don't think he understood that," Yakovleff said. That alone is a devastating indictment of a man who claims to be the greatest dealmaker on earth.

Second, nobody knows what the actual strategic goals are. Beyond forcing open the Strait of Hormuz, what is the endgame? Regime change? Containment? A negotiated settlement? Trump hasn't said. He apparently can't say, because he doesn't know himself.

Third, and this one is particularly brutal, you can't coordinate a multinational military campaign through tweets that change every two minutes. If allied nations are going to put their soldiers in harm's way, they need explicit, written objectives from the United States. As Yakovleff put it, "It's going to be necessary for Trump himself to know what he wants." The quiet contempt in that sentence could strip paint off a wall.

Fourth, there is the fundamental issue of trust. Trump has abandoned allies before and everyone knows he would do it again without hesitation the moment it became politically useful. The Kurds know it. The Afghans know it. Europe knows it. "He would let us down whenever it suited him," the general said. Why would any nation put troops on the line for a leader with that track record?

And fifth, the knockout punch. Yakovleff cited a principle he said he learned at the U.S. Army War College: "You don't reinforce failure. You move on. You find something else." A decorated French general is using American military doctrine, taught in American war colleges, to explain to the world why following this American president into battle would be strategic malpractice.

The global response has been just as damning. Japan said no. Australia said no. The United Kingdom said no. The European Union said no. Meanwhile, Iranian missiles and drones have made the Strait of Hormuz so dangerous that insurance companies won't cover oil tankers passing through it. Twenty percent of the world's petroleum normally flows through that strait. Oil prices are skyrocketing and consumers everywhere are feeling it. Trump started this. He escalated it. He isolated America from its allies in the process.

Donald Trump’s Racism Mirrors Jeffrey Epstein’s

 

Jeffrey Epstein was not only a rapist and a child predator, but also — wait for it — a White supremacist. While some speculate that the Epstein issue is just a distraction from President Trump’s virulent and endless racism, others feel that the video the president posted at the beginning of Black History Month of Barack and Michelle Obama as apes was meant to divert attention from the growing Epstein fallout.

Well, as it turns out, the two crises are not as far apart as you might imagine. Bombshell articles in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and at MS Now pulled the covers off Jeffrey Epstein’s noxious racism.

Reporters culling the most recently released Epstein files discovered numerous pieces of evidence in emails and other documents suggesting that he advocated the faux “science” of racial eugenics and held racist views not distinct from those promoted for decades by Donald Trump.

Epstein built (or at least tried to build) ties and develop friendships with some of the most notorious eugenicists and White nationalists around the globe, including Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist James Watson, political scientist Charles Murray, and artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, among many others. He also circulated posts from White supremacist websites that promoted bogus, supposedly genetically based intellectual differences between the races.

Eugenics is the “race science” that was developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century to justify European slavery and colonialism. Proponents contended that humans were biologically and genetically separated into distinctly unequal “races.” Everything from intelligence, criminality, and attractiveness to morality was, so the claim went, genetically determined.

It should surprise no one that, in such an imagined hierarchy, Whites were at the top and, in most configurations, people of African descent at the very bottom with Asians and indigenous people somewhere in-between. Those four (or five or six) categories were considered immutable. And it mattered remarkably little that, for a long time, social and natural scientists had overwhelmingly argued with irrefutable evidence that racial categories were social constructs invented by humans and distinctly malleable over time as political and social life changed.

The real-world impact of racial eugenics theory long shaped public policy, political status, and life opportunities. In the United States, a belief in the genetic inferiority of Blacks helped foster slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, and led to tens of thousands of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and individuals with physical and mental disabilities, as well as prisoners being sterilized. By 1913, 24 states and Washington, D.C., had passed laws allowing enforced sterilization. President Theodore Roosevelt was a firm believer in such eugenics and supported sterilization in order to prevent what he termed “racial suicide,” a perspective that echoes today’s “Great Replacement Theory.”

In Nazi Germany, eugenics led not only to the sterilization of Jews, Blacks, and the disabled, but to the state-organized mass murder of literally millions of people. It was a core tenet of Nazism that all non-Aryans were genetically inferior and a threat to the White race. The Nazis railed against Jews “poisoning the blood” of White Germans, a term Trump used in describing non-White immigrants from the global South. Despite this history, Epstein came to deeply believe in eugenics and genetic determination, as has Donald Trump. To that end, Epstein sought to connect with the notable race theorists of his day.

Epstein on Race

Perhaps the most notorious book in the modern era advocating a racial basis for intelligence and a social hierarchy that places Whites on top and Blacks at the bottom was The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein, published in 1994. Since then, in multiple books and articles, the research behind that book has been thoroughly debunked and overwhelmingly rejected by scholars in the social and natural sciences.

Yet, at the time, many Republicans and some Democrats embraced its racist argument in order to contend that government welfare programs should be cut back. Murray aligned with Republicans in giving testimony to Congress in the 1990s that blamed the morality of poor people for their poverty (as a debate unfolded around the future of welfare programs).

According to the Epstein files, Epstein himself repeatedly tried to correspond with Murray. However, Murray claims he never received (or remembers receiving) any emails from Epstein and did not correspond with him. Regardless, it’s pretty clear that Epstein was writing because of Murray’s notoriety for his work on race and genetics. This was in 2018, more than a decade after The Bell Curve had been published and Murray had become famous for it.

Epstein, according to The Atlantic, was reportedly provided with Murray’s email address by James Watson. He and Francis Crick had, of course, discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. Nine years later, they and Maurice Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Around 2000, Watson’s regressive views on race began to surface. That year, he told an audience that “dark-skinned people have stronger libidos,” leaning into a centuries-old racial stereotype. In 2007, according to a former assistant in the London Sunday Times, he said that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

Epstein also had ties to a number of other researchers and scientists, including Joscha Bach, who received funding from the convicted felon and was hired at MIT’s Media Lab with his help.

In one exchange in 2016, Bach wrote to Epstein, stating that African American children “have slower cognitive development” and “are slower at learning high-level concepts.” With the release of those files in January, Bach tried to explain why his statements were not racist and that “scientific discussion about the heritability of traits… [is] very complicated and not my area of research.”

Epstein also spent time on hardcore White supremacist websites. For example, he sent a link to a racist article entitled “Race and IQ: Genes That Predict Racial Intelligence Differences” to left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky. The article came from the outright White supremacist website the Right Stuff, according to The Atlantic. Chomsky, over email, expressed his disagreement with Epstein about race science.

According to the Guardian, Chomsky had a “close friendship” with Epstein. There is no evidence that Chomsky participated in or witnessed any of Epstein’s sex crimes, and Valeria Chomsky, his wife, admitted that the couple made “serious errors in judgment” in maintaining ties to him. While the statement vigorously denounced Epstein’s offences, there was, however, no mention of his racist behavior, which few focused on in all those years.

The “Great Gene” President

Epstein’s eugenicist views are in line with the longstanding genetic determinism of Trump. There is no bigger racist science believer than the current occupant in the White House. For decades, he has bragged about his genetic superiority relative to the rest of humanity. The examples are endless:

“Well, I think I was born with the drive for success because I have a certain gene. I’m a gene believer.”

“You have to have the rights — the right genes.”

“Do we believe the gene thing? I mean I do.”

“I have great genes and all that stuff which I’m a believer in.”

And, of course, in opposition to Trump’s “right genes” are those with the wrong kind. From the president’s perspective that would, of course, include migrants. In an interview discussing them, he opined, “You know, now a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Over the years, Trump has also shown little empathy for individuals with disabilities. He famously mocked reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis that affects his joints, by twisting and contorting his body to make fun of him. He also reportedly did not want to be around physically disabled soldiers, according to his former  White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.

Trump often speaks with a strategic ambiguity so that he can later deny that he was disparaging migrants, people with disabilities, or wounded soldiers. He fools no one.

It’s notable that one of Trump’s go-to insults is to call someone “low IQ,” and in nearly every case, his target turns out to be a Black person and disproportionately female ones, including his opponent in election 2024 Kamala Harris and Congressional Representatives Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Green, Jasmine Crockett, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, radio host Charlamagne the God, and New York Attorney General Letitia James among others.

Trump has been careful, at least publicly, to not explicitly say that Black people are genetically predisposed to criminality. However, he has endlessly attacked Black-led cities as crime zones, without ever labeling White-dominated cities or states the same way. He also posted fake data supposedly demonstrating that African Americans commit crimes at a higher rate (with the clear implication that race is the driving factor).

His eugenicist views are most manifest in his immigration policies and dreams. Theoretically, he is not able to run for president again, so he has little incentive to hide his true feelings. After spending years denying it, in December 2025, he proudly admitted that he had referred to nations in Latin America and Africa as “shithole” countries back in 2018. In a December 9, 2025, speech in Pennsylvania, he plugged for White — and implicitly White only — immigration to this country:

“Remember I said that to the senators that came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So they came in. And they said, ‘This is totally off the record, nothing mentioned here, we want to be honest,’ because our country was going to hell. And we had a meeting. And I say: Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden – just a few – let us have a few. From Denmark – do you mind sending us a few people?”

In January 2026, Trump essentially halted almost all refugees coming from Africa. The administration stated that it would admit only 7,500 total refugees from around the world in 2026, the lowest number on record. This meant near zero for Black Africans.

At the same time, the Trump administration sought to process 4,500 White South African refugee applications per month starting in January. The president also issued Executive Order 4204 in February 2025 falsely, claiming that Whites in South Africa were being mistreated and deserved an expedited process to become permanent residents of the United States. The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the State Department dated January 27th and reviewed by Reuters, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

Racial genetics is Trump’s defining worldview (full stop!). That he thinks of Barack and Michelle Obama as less than human should surprise no one who has followed his statements on race over the decades. A compilation of Trump’s views on the former president over all these years boils down to this: Barack Obama is an ape-like radical Muslim (founder of ISIS), and socialist who was not born in the United States but engineered a conspiracy involving thousands to pretend that he was (or maybe he actually was), then fraudulently assumed the presidency and now should be arrested for treason and illegally spying on the Trump White House, and no matter what your eyes and brain tell you, he is not as mentally and physically healthy as I am.

Beginning in the early 1950s, real science, as opposed to the fraudulent versions embraced by Epstein and Trump, was able to make life-changing breakthroughs as a result of access to what became known as HeLa cells. Those cells would be responsible for understanding and creating vaccines and treatment for polio, cancer, HPV, Parkinson’s, measles, HIV, mumps, Zika, and Covid 19, among other diseases. They would lead to the creation of the field of virology.

It is highly unlikely (and would likely have been mortifying) that either Epstein knew, or Trump knows, that those cells came from an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks. They were cynically named HeLa, combining the first two letters of her first and last names.

In 1951, when she was admitted to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, deadly ill with cervical cancer, cell tissues were taken from her body without her or her family’s permission. That unethical theft — legal at the time — would lead to countless billions in profits for pharmaceutical corporations.

After the publication of Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, her story became well known and family-initiated lawsuits proceeded. In 2023, the family reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific, and, in February 2026, another settlement with Novartis, a Switzerland-based pharmaceutical mammoth.

Trump is easily the most intellectually incurious, ill-informed, unread, vacuous, and petulant president in U.S. history. He will never acknowledge — or even understand — that his rise to power was not due to his having any extraordinary talents, skills, or genetically based genius. It was, without qualification, the result of a lifetime of perpetual race, gender, and class privilege.

Clarence Lusane is an author, activist, scholar, and journalist. He is a professor and former Chairman of Howard University’s Department of Political Science. He is author of many books. His latest is Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy.

 -Clarence Lusane, CounterPunch

Gaza is only the start. The new world order is one where the weak are obliterated by the strong, the rule of law does not exist, genocide is an instrument of control and barbarism is triumphant

 

   

The war on Iran and the obliteration of Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age of technologically advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and you are showered with missiles and bombs.  

Hospitals, elementary schools, universities and apartment complexes are reduced to rubble. Doctors, students, journalists, poets, writers, scientists, artists 

and political leaders — including the heads of negotiating teams — are murdered in the tens of thousands by missiles and killer drones.

Resources – as the Venezuelans know – are openly stolen. Food, water and medicine, as in Palestine, are weaponized. Let them eat dirt.

International bodies such as the United Nations are pantomime, useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open borders and international law have vanished. The most depraved leaders of human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses, have returned with a vengeance.

They spew the same hypermasculine tropes. They spew the same vile, racist cant. They spew the same Manichaean vision of good and evil, black and white. They spew the same infantile language of total dominance and unrestrained violence.

Killer clowns. Buffoons. Idiots. They have seized the levers of power to carry out their demented and cartoonish visions as they pillage the state for their own enrichment.

“After witnessing savage mass murder over several months, with the knowledge that it was conceived, executed and endorsed by people much like themselves, who presented it as a collective necessity, legitimate and even humane, millions now feel less at home in the world,” writes Pankaj Mishra in “The World After Gaza.” “The shock of this renewed exposure to a peculiarly modern evil – the evil done in the pre-modern era only by psychopathic individuals and unleashed in the last century by rulers and citizens of rich and supposedly civilized societies – cannot be overstated. Nor can the moral abyss we confront.”

The subjugated are property, commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure. The Epstein Files expose the sickness and heartlessness of the ruling class. Liberals. Conservatives. University presidents. Academics. Philanthropists. Wall Street titans. Celebrities. Democrats. Republicans.

They wallow in unbridled hedonism. They go to private schools and have private health care. They are cocooned in self-referential bubbles by sycophants, publicists, financial advisers, lawyers, servants, chauffeurs, self-help gurus, plastic surgeons and personal trainers. They reside in heavily guarded estates and vacation on private islands. They travel on private jets and gargantuan yachts. They exist in another reality, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank dubs the world of “Richistan,” a world of private Xanadus where they hold Nero-like bacchanalias, make their perfidious deals, amass their billions and cast aside those they use, including children, as if they are refuse. 

No one in this magic circle is accountable. No sin too depraved. They are human parasites. They disembowel the state for personal profit. They terrorize the “lesser breeds of the earth.” They shut down the last, anemic vestiges of our open society.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life,” as George Orwell writes in “1984.” “All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon be purged — is an instrument of repression. The judiciary exists to stage show trials. I spent a lot of time in the London courts covering the Dickensian farce during the persecution of Julian Assange. A Lubyanka-on-the-Thames. Our courts are no better. Our Department of Justice is a vengeance machine.

Masked, armed goons flood the streets of the United States and murder civilians, including citizens. The ruling mandarins are spending billions to convert warehouses into detention centers and concentration camps. They insist they will only house the undocumented, the criminals, but our global ruling class lies like it breathes. In their eyes, we are vermin, either blindly and unquestionably obedient or criminals. There is nothing in between.

These concentration camps, where there is no due process and people are disappeared, are designed for us. And by us, I mean the citizens of this dead republic. Yet we watch, stupefied, disbelieving, passively waiting for our own enslavement.

It won’t be long. The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home. Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.

The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls what is happening “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Oh, the critics say, don’t be so bleak. Don’t be so negative. Where is the hope? Really, it’s not that bad. If you believe this you are part of the problem, an unwitting cog in the machinery of our rapidly consolidating fascist state. Reality will eventually implode these “hopeful” fantasies, but by then it will be too late.

True despair is not a result of accurately reading reality. True despair comes from surrendering, either through fantasy or apathy, to malignant power. True despair is powerlessness. And resistance, meaningful resistance, even if it is almost certainly doomed, is empowerment. It confers self-worth. It confers dignity. It confers agency. It is the only action that allows us to use the word hope.

The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Eric Fromm writes in “The Sane Society.”

We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Lebanon and Iran. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders and the media.

The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,” “ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza. Those who name and denounce this evil are smeared, blacklisted and purged from university campuses and the public sphere. They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the silence of all authoritarian states. Fail to do your duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as the Chair of the F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.

We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.

Those are the only choices left.

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"Trump’s assault on US democracy is truly without precedent"

 

A report released on Tuesday by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden has found that President Donald Trump and his administration are dismantling democracy in the US at a speed that “is unprecedented in modern history.”

In its report, V-Dem categorizes the first year of Trump’s second term as “a rapid and aggressive concentration of powers in the presidency.” In fact, V-Dem says that the Trump administration has accomplished in just one year what most budding autocracies take a decade to achieve, adding that “the speed of decline is comparable to some coups d´état.”

Of particular concern is the failure of the legislative branch of the US government to apply any kind of oversight or check upon the executive branch, the report explains. “The Republican-controlled Congress seems to have abdicated its constitutional role in favor of the executive branch, ceding significant legislative, fiscal, and oversight powers during 2025,” the report says. “The Trump administration has de facto repeatedly taken over the Congressional ‘power of the purse’—enshrined in the Constitution and in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act—unilaterally cancelling or reallocating federal funding.”

The report also points fingers at the US Senate for repeatedly rolling over and confirming unqualified Trump nominees, which it says is tantamount to letting the White House “sideline” the upper chamber’s authority altogether.

V-Dem goes on to document the administration’s repeated assaults on the judicial branch and the rule of law in general during his second term, starting when Trump issued a mass pardon to more than 1,500 alleged or convicted criminals who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Since then, the administration has waged a pressure campaign against judges who rule against it consisting of “impeachment resolutions and misconduct complaints,” while also using executive orders to punish major law firms simply for representing the president’s political enemies in court.

The lone bright spot in US democracy, says V-Dem, is that the administration has not yet been able to attack states’ powers to administer their own elections, although not for lack of effort. “Actions taken in 2025 raise concerns regarding the integrity of the 2026 midterms,” the report warns. “This primarily concerns attempt to assert federal control over election processes, which must be decentralized and state-run, according to the Constitution.”

The report notes that Trump has issued an executive order that attempts to override states’ election laws by restricting mail-in voting and mandating voter IDs at polling places nationwide but adds that “many provisions of this order have been blocked, and others are still being challenged in federal court.”

In an interview with The Guardian, V-Dem founder Staffan Lindberg used historical context to explain why Trump’s assault on US democracy is truly without precedent. “Our data on the USA goes back to 1789,” he said. “What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country.” He also said that other authoritarian leaders have taken much more time in ripping down their states’ democratic institutions than Trump has. “For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years,” Lindberg said, “for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year.”

-Brad Reed, Common Dreams