Shutting Down the War Machine

 

Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.

When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. 

And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.

To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. 

And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.

As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.

The Garrison State and the Reign of the War Profiteers

On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”

And his rhetoric as the ultimate champion of peace has continued during his second term, even as he has indeed launched reckless wars guaranteed to fill the coffers of the “war profiteers” he railed against on the campaign trail. He has, however, also pledged to help the weapons industry quadruple production of the same sort of “$2 million bombs” he decried during the campaign, plus — even better for the arms makers — missile interceptors that cost up to $12 million each. 

Worse yet, the demands of the current war on Iran, coupled with support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself from Russia, have left the Pentagon and the giant weapons corporations complaining that, if the U.S. doesn’t radically increase its production of artillery shells, bombs, and missiles, the cupboard could soon be bare.

Of course, filling that cupboard again to the tune of staggering sums of money is exactly the wrong solution. The answer to the current munitions shortage is not to further supersize this country’s arms manufacturing base, but to refrain from supplying the weapons used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, or to fuel unjustified wars like the current conflict with Iran. The best policy to prevent such stocks of military equipment from running low would, of course, be a more discriminating approach to military aid and a more restrained approach to U.S. foreign policy and war-making (writ large).

Washington should, in fact, put diplomacy first and only engage in military action if there is a genuine threat to the United States itself. We need a smarter policy toward military procurement and military strategy, not the garrison state with its “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than six decades ago.

In addition, of course, the Pentagon needs to shift its procurement strategy toward producing more reliable weapons at a more reasonable cost, while avoiding unnecessary complexity so that they can be made more rapidly and spend more time ready to be used and less time down for maintenance. Such a formula was a watchword of the bipartisan congressional military reform caucus of the 1980s, which at one point included more than 100 members of Congress and helped roll back the extremes of the military buildup launched by President Ronald Reagan.

The Diminishing Economic Returns of Pentagon Spending

In a detailed forthcoming study for the Transition Security Project and in her own writings, investigative journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has charted the diminishing returns from Pentagon spending. Despite a soaring Pentagon budget, direct jobs in arms production are now one-third of what they were 30 years ago, down from three million then to 1.1 million now, according to the arms industry’s own trade association. Unionization rates in the arms production sector are also down sharply, with some big weapons firms like Northrop Grumman having unionization rates of less than 10%. In keeping with that trend, Lockheed Martin moved the production of its F-16 fighter — a staple of foreign arms exports — to the anti-union state of South Carolina.

Even worse, many states provide special tax breaks and other subsidies to attract or keep weapons factories — and that’s on top of the hundreds of billions the industry receives in federal tax dollars. In Utah, the state government staunchly refused to reveal how many jobs Northrop Grumman had promised in return for state subsidies, with one official claiming it would “compromise” the interests of the company to do so. 

Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s work on the Sentinel, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), has been a poster child for dysfunctional weapons development, with the estimated cost of the program as a whole growing by 81% in just a few years. Part of the problem was that Northrop Grumman somehow managed to ignore the fact that its new missile would be too large to fit in existing silos, creating the need for further costly new construction efforts.

The spending of scarce tax revenues goes to ICBMs that former Secretary of Defense William Perry once labeled “one of the most dangerous weapons we have.” After all, a president might literally have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of a potential enemy attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war prompted by a false alarm. And there have been many false alarms and nuclear accidents in the nuclear age (even if not yet an actual nuclear attack loosed on the world), as meticulously documented in Eric Schlosser’s essential book Command and Control.

Then there’s the Golden Dome missile “defense” system, a fantasy of President Trump’s that, in reality, could never provide the promised “leakproof” protection against weaponry ranging from ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to low-flying drones. By now, more than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan promised a perfect defense against ICBMs in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech, it should be all too obvious that such a leakproof shield is physically impossible, since enemy ICBMs with nuclear warheads would come in at 15,000 — and no, that is not a misprint! — miles per hour and could be surrounded by large numbers of decoy balloons that would be indistinguishable from a warhead when floating in space. 

There could be hundreds of such incoming warheads in a full-scale nuclear attack. To even have a chance of intercepting all of them, a defensive system would have to devote as many as 1,600 interceptors to take down incoming missiles. An analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that a full-blown effort to build a comprehensive Golden Dome shield could cost $3.6 trillion just to construct. In fact, the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique, though many such analyses are available. A more reasonable way to deal with it would, of course, be ridicule.

Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s and the founder of the “Up in Arms” campaign to cut Pentagon spending, has taken just such an approach. On April Fool’s Day, he placed a “Golden Hole-in-Dome” statue on the National Mall that included a Donald Trump, fully clothed, being soaked by water leaking through a faux Golden Dome shield. The Daily Beast‘s headline on its piece about the event captured the spirit of that day: “Ben and Jerry’s Co-Founder Humiliates Trump Outside His House.”

Meanwhile, the dysfunctional weapons systems on the Pentagon’s shopping list only continue to grow. Take Lockheed Martin’s F-35 combat aircraft, which was supposed to do almost anything (and does nothing) well. The plane, which could cost $2 trillion for roughly 2,500 aircraft if the Pentagon’s original plans hold, had taken 23 years to develop and still can’t operate as advertised, spending almost half its time in its hangar for maintenance.

Similarly, as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has pointed out, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, which had to dock in Cyprus recently after multiple mishaps including a clogged toilet system that spewed feces onto the flight deck, is a $13 billion nightmare, chock full of fancy, untested, and expensive technology that all too often fails to work as advertised. As he points out, a more viable, less expensive carrier could have been built if proven technologies had not been replaced with high-tech fantasies. Unfortunately, that’s generally not how Pentagon procurement works these days.

Palmer Luckey Will Not Come to the Rescue

Palmer Luckey, the 32 year-old former game designer who now runs Anduril, one of Silicon Valley’s top military tech firms, made news a few months ago when he told a CNBC interviewer that, if the Pentagon were to stop buying the wrong things, it could provide a robust defense for America at a cost of perhaps $500 billion, half of current levels and one-third of the level President Trump is now seeking. Presumably, the wrong things are piloted aircraft like the F-35 and mammoth ships like the Gerald Ford, and the right things are drones, uncrewed submarines, and complex AI-driven targeting and surveillance systems of the type that Anduril and Peter Thiel’s Palantir produce.

But count on this: replacing piloted combat aircraft with swarms of drones won’t automatically be cheaper, depending on how large the swarms are and how complex their designs may prove to be. Early on, the Ukrainian military decided that U.S.-supplied drones from Silicon Valley were too brittle and expensive, so it launched a do-it-yourself drone program that took cheap commercial drones from China and fitted them with bombs and cameras. U.S. arms companies are now trying to get back in the act by partnering with Ukrainian firms to build more sophisticated drones. Don’t be surprised, though, if their price soars and their reliability sinks.

Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities, whether through independent testing of their new systems or measures to prevent price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. At present, the motto of the military tech sector is “trust me.” I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have someone minding the store, so that the tech billionaires don’t simply rob us blind.

Of course, what would it mean if Silicon Valley could deliver cheaper, more deadly advanced weaponry? After all, artificial intelligence systems were indeed used in recent times to accelerate targeting during Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, and they have been used in President Trump’s disastrous assault on Iran. And neither of those situations has yet had a happy ending. 

But that’s the point. The truth is we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing. And that means blunting the political influence of the warmongers and war profiteers that Donald Trump criticized on the campaign trail in 2024 and then so warmly embraced as president.

And to put all of this in grim perspective, he is now presiding over perhaps the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of this republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies — like unstinting support for Israeli aggression — have, sadly enough, had bipartisan backing in Washington. In short, he has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s provision of food, clean water, and public health services abroad or any further engagement in constructive international institutions.

Among other things, he is now narrowing America’s foreign policy options by dismantling civilian tools of statecraft, while doubling down on military approaches that haven’t “won” a war in this century (or the second half of the last one either). Meanwhile, the economic damage and humanitarian costs are spreading globally, including to his own supporters.

The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump’s policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it’s important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace.

-William D. Hartung. CounterPunch, This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

 

The CEO of OpenAI thinks human extinction is a best-case scenario

 

The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, is on a messianic mission to bring about the Singularity, the moment at which artificial intelligence begins to self-improve. If AI is smart enough to build the next generation of even smarter AI systems, this will trigger an “intelligence explosion” resulting in an artificial superintelligence that is more “intelligent” than all of humanity combined.

Some call this “god-like AI.” Elon Musk describes it as “basically a digital god.” Many people, including Altman, argue that ASI will either annihilate humanity or usher in a utopian world of radical abundance, unlimited energy, immortality and cosmic delights beyond our wildest imaginations. “I think the good case,” Altman says, “is just so unbelievably good that you sound like a really crazy person to start talking about it.” “The bad case,” he adds, “is, like, lights out for all of us.”

What everyone misses about Altman’s “good case” scenario is that it would also result in the extinction of our species. His version of “utopia” would entail the complete disappearance of humanity. In a 2017 blog post titled “The Merge,” he writes: “We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”

In other words, we can die out once ASI arrives, or we can “survive” by “merging” with AI. This is “probably our best-case scenario” for making it in the post-Singularity world. Altman says that “merging” with AI “can take a lot of forms: We could plug electrodes into our brains, or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot.”  Becoming best buddies with AI doesn’t sound like a true merge, though. I know of people who’ve developed intimate relationships with AI, but I wouldn’t consider them as having merged with the machines.

What Altman is really getting at is far more radical. Elsewhere in the essay, he writes that if two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it — in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond — they are going to have conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else.

The two “species” here are humans and ASI. Both want to dominate, Altman says, but only one can. Since there’s no way for ASI to become a biological human, the only other option is for humans to become digital beings like the ASI. That’s the sole way for us to form “one team” — humanity becoming the new species to which ASI belongs.

Altman says as much in a 2016 interview with The New Yorker. “We need to level up humans,” he declares, “because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever.” He elaborates: “The merge has begun — and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the AI or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud,” to which he adds, “I’d love that.”

Two years later, he signed up with a startup called Nectome to have his brain digitized when he dies, something he believes will become feasible in the near future. Altman is preparing to become an AI himself…

For the entire article: Sam Altman’s Dangerous Singularity Delusions

Émile P. Torres / Truthdig Contributor

This is not the first time Trump has faced political violence. What stands out after the latest attack?

The events of April 25 underscore how dangerous this political moment is in the United States. For the past several years – certainly since Jan. 6, 2021 – the U.S. has been experiencing a period of increased political violence, which is generally defined as violence that is motivated by politics or is intended to communicate a political message or achieve a political objective.

Researchers at the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab have documented that political violence has increased in the U.S. in recent years. Several recent examples come to mind: the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building; multiple assassination attempts on President Trump; the deadly attacks on Minnesota lawmakers Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman that left Hortman and her husband dead; the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi; the assassination of Charlie Kirk. In my home state of Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted in an attack on the governor’s mansion.

What’s driving that apparent plague of political violence afflicting the country?

There are several important drivers of political violence at work in the U.S. today, according to my own research and research by other scholars. The United States is currently very politically polarized, meaning that Americans are sharply divided against one another along partisan lines. They are suspicious and hostile toward one another, and this produces a tense and volatile environment for politics and public life. This has produced a “zero-sum” environment in which every election and political contest is a “do or die” moment.

What stands out is the moral dimension of polarization in the U.S. Each side views members of the other party not as merely having a different view on politics but rather as evil or immoral. The polarized environment has made political violence more normalized. It has also dampened public backlash against political violence when it occurs. This makes political violence more likely.

Political rhetoric has become much more divisive and violent in nature. This works hand in hand with polarization and helps to further normalize political violence. In particular, when politicians use demonizing or dehumanizing rhetoric to attack their opponents – for example, using words that depict their opponents as subhuman – this fosters extremism and helps motivate extremists to hurt their opponents physically.

Disinformation is also an important driver of political violence. A number of people who have engaged in recent acts of political violence seem to have been motivated by conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation, often gleaned from social media. Disinformation plays a particularly important role in the context of social media communities, where people are exposed to large amounts of disinformation and are hermetically sealed off from other sources that might challenge their worldview. This facilitates radicalization and has been shown to fuel political violence in some cases.

Finally, an important factor is also the current assault on democratic norms and democratic institutions in the United States. U.S. democracy is experiencing pressures that are unprecedented in the modern era. This has had a very damaging effect on Americans’ trust in government, confidence in democratic institutions and value for democratic rule itself.

Bottom of Form

How does this moment of political violence stand out from other violent periods in U.S. history – are we in uncharted waters?

While the U.S. is currently experiencing an uptick in political violence, unfortunately it is not unprecedented. One example would be the highly polarized period in the 1850s in the run-up to the Civil War. In this era, there was a sharp division between abolitionists and advocates of slavery. This culminated in political assassinations, an assault on an abolitionist member of Congress by a pro-slavery member of Congress, and a bloody civil conflict in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery armed groups.

The early 1900s, right after World War I, saw another increase in political violence due to labor issues and violence by the second generation of the Ku Klux Klan. Finally, the 1960s also saw a period of intense political violence surrounding opposition to the Vietnam War and backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. Though there are some unique features about political violence today – namely the influence of social media – we can look for some parallels in these early periods of political violence. 

It is absolutely critical that both Democratic and Republican politicians – politicians from all sides – unite to condemn this attack and all political violence. Political commentators and influencers can also condemn this and all use of political violence.

Research amply shows that what political elites – politicians, political leaders, media commentators, online influencers – say in the wake of these sorts of events has a huge effect on citizens’ attitudes. Political elites can adopt rhetoric that does not normalize this sort of behavior. If the message comes from across the political spectrum, it will be that much more effective at reducing the public attitudes that nurture political violence.

 -James Piazza, Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science, Penn State

"If ever we needed 'truthful but not neutral' journalism and unstinting candor, it is now"

The Chaotic terrifying shooting incident at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner Saturday night reminds us, for the umpteenth time, that gun violence has reached epidemic proportions. We do not have to tolerate this level of fear and destruction; we made a choice to prioritize guns over people, and the results are as horrifying as one might expect.

The prevalence of political violence specifically should not numb us nor habituate us to accept this as the new normal. Whatever the motives of the alleged shooter, we have entered an era in which unstable men (almost always men) with guns try to be political assassins.

Rather than spin false, partisan tales of responsibility for violence (or spend time going after Donald Trump’s enemies or attacking progressive organizations), our federal government needs a level of maturity that has been entirely absent of late. 

More than ever, we need responsible, professional federal law enforcement officials to address the real threats to our safety and security. The contrast between brave agents on the scene who performed with remarkable speed and efficiency and the upper ranks of the Trump regime who are in positions of extreme importance and power could not be greater.

Finally, the incident should also remind us that access journalism — covering politics as a sport or celebrity beat — and normalizing a president who daily shreds the First Amendment must end. Just as we do not have the law enforcement leadership we need, we are missing a credible, fearless legacy media. If ever we needed “truthful but not neutral” journalism and unstinting candor, it is now. To accept anything else is to consign ourselves to never-ending political violence and mayhem.

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The Trump Regime’s Heinous Attack on a Legendary Civil Rights Organization

The Trump administration’s move to indict the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) stands as the latest in a string of preposterous abuses of power and the continued weaponization of our justice system. 

I know many of us were alarmed into action by prior controversial investigations involving high-profile figures (e.g., Leticia James, James Comey). This week’s indictment is perhaps an even more brazen smear — one that raises the stakes for the deployment of government authority against civil society organizations.

I spent time this week on other injustices that you, Contrarians, are enabling me to contest — including David Ellison’s Paramount-Warner merger and my forthcoming court appearance arguing for summary judgment on the renaming of the Kennedy Center. But this publisher’s note spotlights the SPLC battle. 

It’s a stark example of the erosion of institutional norms and the chilling effect such actions could have on free press and expression. 

These concerns underpin a Contrarian special report I co-wrote with my colleague Tom Joscelyn, a senior adviser for Democracy Defenders. We’ll be posting that at noon ET here at The Contrarian. In it, we scrutinize the details of the indictment to share a definitive takedown. You won’t want to miss it!

Here’s a sneak peek, followed by our usual weekly roundup:

During a press conference on Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel announced that the SPLC had been criminally indicted by a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama. “There is nothing political about this indictment,” Blanche insisted. Anyone paying attention knows that is a lie. 

This DOJ attack on the esteemed SPLC is a travesty. This sham regime has unethically abused its power in this ridiculous attack on a legendary civil rights organization. 

As my fellow former presidential ethics counselors Richard Painter (George W. Bush), Virginia Canter (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton), and I (Barack Obama) wrote in a statement issued shortly after the indictment, we will not stay silent while the administration weaponizes the tools of law enforcement to attack groups it disagrees with.

This grievance is not a new one. MAGA Republicans have been gunning for the SPLC for years. 

During a congressional hearing late last year, for instance, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) portrayed the legendary civil rights organization as a bogeyman out to get conservatives and demanded a full investigation into how the DOJ, FBI, and other federal agencies had long relied on the center’s work. Other leading MAGA Republicans have loudly complained when the organization called out their hate.

Donald Trump’s corrupted DOJ and FBI have found a way to use the court system to act out MAGA’s revenge fantasy. 

Absurdly, the Trump regime alleges that instead of seeking to “dismantle” white supremacist groups — the center’s mission for the past 55 years, during which time it helped take down the Ku Klux Klan — it was surreptitiously paying extremists as part of some convoluted conspiracy. Blanche accuses the group of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Patel claims the SPLC “allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public.”

These allegations are a smear. None of them withstands scrutiny. 

The indictment centers on the SPLC’s use of paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist groups. That is not unusual. It is often difficult to get inside groups seeking to overthrow the U.S. government or impose their racist vision on the country. The FBI itself regularly uses informants, and the “courts have recognized” that it “is lawful and often essential to the effectiveness of properly authorized law enforcement investigations.”

Indeed, the SPLC provided intelligence from its informant network to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI — a fact not included in the indictment. 

The exclusion of any mention of the longstanding working relationship between the SPLC and the FBI is outrageous and undermines the entire premise of the case. “We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI,” Bryan Fair, the SPLC’s interim president, said in a video defending his organization.

Patel knows Fair’s statement is true. Patel severed “all ties” between the FBI and SPLC in October 2025, as he wrote on X. Patel’s statement is an admission that the SPLC had those ties and was providing intelligence to the bureau. In fact, before Patel ended the relationship, Republican congressmen and conservative activists frequently complained that the FBI was cooperating too closely with the SPLC.

Nevertheless, the DOJ alleges that the SPLC’s use of informants was part of a “scheme and artifice” to deceive donors. Acting U.S. Attorney Kevin Davidson alleges in the indictment that though SPLC’s “stated mission included the dismantling of white supremacy and confronting hate across the country” it was “unbeknownst to donors,” secretly using “donated money … to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance.”

However, the indictment utterly fails to explain how these payments to extremist leaders undercut the SPLC’s stated mission. Nor does it say how anyone working for the center intentionally deceived donors. Nor could it; if you surveyed donors to the organization, they have already stated or would almost undoubtedly say that investigating hate is exactly what they wanted to support and that these claims are reprehensible.

The DOJ’s entire case centers on the SPLC’s alleged payments to ten informants inside extremist groups. Our special report, which will be posted here at The Contrarian at noon today, details the facts regarding these informants. The report makes evident that not a one justifies the criminal charges brought against the SPLC.

Please check it out! As you’ll read, this is hardly a conspiracy to secretly fund extremism or defraud donors. It is simply intelligence work. In fact, it is the type of information-gathering on white supremacist groups the FBI routinely engages in — or at least used to.

The hollow, desperate accusations underscore the extent to which the Trump regime wants Americans to believe that the SPLC, which has fought white supremacy since its founding in 1971, was secretly sponsoring white supremacy. That is utter nonsense.

-Norman Eisen and Tom Joscelyn. We stand with SPLC and will support the organization however we can. The ability to do so in the court of law and of public opinion through our nonstop journalism is all thanks to you, Contrarians. Your paid subscriptions help fund our legal battles and scintillating coverage. See for yourself in our rundown of The Contrarian’s other work this week, put together as always by my wonderful colleagues.

Fight back against ICE detention camps

Indivisibles,

Tomorrow, [Saturday, April 25], Indivisibles across the country are joining our partners at Detention Watch Network to demand an end to ICE detention warehouses. We’re showing up for peaceful protests, rallies, and vigils outside detention facilities, on street corners, and in front of city halls and courthouses in hundreds of communities.

For months, the Trump regime has been quietly expanding their detention capacity by converting warehouses into detention camps. This is a key part of their plan to deport more than one million people every year. In the process, immigrants will be separated from their families and lawyers, kept in horrific, inhumane conditions, and face increased likelihood of abuse and death.

The detention camps are moral abominations -- but they’re not inevitable. Local organizers have already prevented thirteen of these warehouses from being converted into detention camps and with your help we can prevent even more. 

We all have a role to play in the fight to end the warehousing of human beings and the criminalization of immigration. You can get started by joining the Communities Not Cages National Day of Action.

There are hundreds of events tomorrow, and no matter where you live, there’s an action you can take to fight back against ICE detention camps: 

1️⃣ Join a Communities Not Cages event near you. Stand in solidarity with immigrant communities, connect with local groups and activists leading this fight, and call on your local officials to use every tool to oppose the camps. 

2️⃣ Demand action from Congress. Email your Members of Congress and tell them to publicly oppose any new warehouses or detention centers and block any federal funding that would be used to build, renovate, or operate these facilities.

3️⃣ Check out our resource page for more ways to get involved. From Know Your Rights guides and recorded trainings to toolkits and an ICE warehouse tracker created by our partners, this page has everything you need to join the fight against Trump’s ICE detention camps. 

We hope you’ll join us tomorrow and stand in solidarity with immigrant communities across the country, and after the national day of action we’ll be in touch with more ways to continue organizing against the regime’s detention camps.

In solidarity,
Indivisible Team

A core principle behind all Indivisible events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. No weapons are permitted under any circumstances.

 

"He admired their independence, their serenity, and the magnificent completeness of their indifference to human opinion"

He named his cats Beelzebub. And Zoroaster. And Apollinaris. And Sour Mash. And Buffalo Bill. And Soapy Sal. Names borrowed from scripture, ancient philosophy, frontier legend, and whiskey — because Mark Twain saw no reason a cat should have an ordinary name when a magnificent one was available.

At certain points in his life, as many as nineteen cats lived in his home simultaneously. He did not consider this excessive. He considered it well-populated. "I simply can't resist a cat," he wrote. "Particularly a purring one."

Friends recalled him stopping mid-sentence — mid-thought, mid-argument — when a cat entered the room. He would scoop the animal into his lap and resume the conversation without explanation or apology. The cat's arrival was simply the more important event.

This was Mark Twain: the man who dismantled American hypocrisy with surgical precision, who wrote sentences that still cut cleanly after 150 years, who had no patience for foolishness or pretension — and who would interrupt anything for a cat.

One cat, above all the others, had his whole heart. Bambino had come into the household belonging to Twain's daughter Clara, but these things have a way of rearranging themselves. He was large and intensely black, with thick velvet fur and a faint white patch on his chest, and he had the particular quality of certain cats — a kind of gravity, a settled presence — that makes a room feel more complete when they're in it.

He perched on Twain's manuscripts. He curled at his feet while Twain wrote. The greatest satirist in American literature did his work with a purring cat for company, and there is no evidence he found this arrangement anything other than ideal. Then, one day in 1905, Bambino slipped out of the house on East 21st Street and did not come back.

Twain was devastated in the specific, slightly embarrassed way that people are devastated by things they know are not supposed to matter as much as they do. He placed an advertisement in the New York American.

This was Mark Twain placing a lost-cat notice. It could not be ordinary. Lost — A large and intensely black cat, with thick, velvety fur and a faint white mark on his breast. Difficult to find in the dark. He offered a reward. He asked for Bambino's safe return. And underneath the gentle self-aware humor — difficult to find in the dark — was the unmistakable note of a man who genuinely wanted his cat back. New York responded. 

People arrived at his door carrying black cats. Some came sincerely, hoping to reunite the animal with his family and collect a reward. Others came for the far more valuable prize of spending five minutes in the presence of Mark Twain. He received all of them. He inspected each cat carefully, thanked each visitor warmly, and gently sent them home when the animal wasn't his.

None were. Day after day the parade continued — a procession of black cats, each one arriving with hope and departing without ceremony. Twain greeted them all. His hope rose each time. It wasn't Bambino each time. Then, with the perfect timing of a creature entirely unburdened by other people's anxieties, Bambino strolled back through the front door.

He offered no explanation. He required none. He settled into his usual spot and resumed his usual life, and Twain observed that this was exactly what you should expect from a cat — that the advertisement had been unnecessary, the reward irrelevant, the parade of substitute black cats entirely beside the point. Bambino had returned when it suited him. Not a moment sooner, not a moment later. Twain loved this about cats more than almost anything.

He wrote about them throughout his life — not with the biting wit he reserved for politicians and hypocrites, but with something softer and more direct. Cats, he seemed to feel, were exempt from satire. They had committed no frauds. They claimed to be nothing other than what they were. He admired their independence, their serenity, and the magnificent completeness of their indifference to human opinion.

He believed that how a person treated animals — creatures with no power, no voice, no ability to advance or damage a reputation — revealed their character more honestly than any polished social performance. 

The cats, in this sense, were a test. Twain passed it with remarkable consistency. Behind the public figure who could devastate a congressman in a single sentence was a man who interrupted conversations to pick up cats and who wrote genuinely heartbroken lost-pet notices with elegant final lines.

These were not separate things. They were the same thing — a person who paid close attention to the world and its inhabitants, who noticed what others overlooked, who believed that kindness toward the powerless was not a sentiment but a standard.

Mark Twain died in April 1910. He left behind Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and essays that still draw blood and aphorisms that still circulate daily in languages he never spoke. He also left the names Beelzebub and Zoroaster and Sour Mash, which still make people smile more than a century later.

He left the image of America's greatest satirist doing his work with a black cat draped across his manuscript. And he left one lost-pet notice — a few lines in a New York newspaper in 1905 — that still circulates because it contains, in miniature, everything worth knowing about him: A man of tremendous intelligence and devastating wit, who loved a cat named Bambino with complete sincerity, and was not embarrassed by either.

Difficult to find in the dark. The sharpest minds are often accompanied by the softest hearts. Twain proved it, quietly, every time a cat walked into the room and he stopped everything. 

 -Kelly Oliver Book's Post