America: "Recommit to Ukraine!"

 

I recently returned from an incredible (and dangerous) trip to Ukraine. The people inspired me, showing amazing resilience in the face of Vladimir Putin's illegal war. I came away with one major takeaway: 

They deserve so much better from America.

Getting to Ukraine isn’t easy because you can’t just hop on a flight into an active war zone. I ping ponged from Munich to Warsaw then a bus and a train. Basically two whole days to just get to Kyiv. Then we took a convoy of twenty vans running seven hours to Kharkiv before turning around and doing the reverse all over again to get back home. So why, you might ask, would I go through all that? Well, buckle in, I've got a long dispatch for you.

The trip was organized by an organization called With Honor, which exists to fight polarization in Congress by supporting principled veterans of both parties. They work alongside a bipartisan group in the House and the Senate to move legislation on national security, national service, and veterans’ affairs and care deeply about the future of Ukraine.

The centerpiece of the trip was the Yalta European Strategy conference, a gathering of world leaders and thinkers. The truth is, it mattered that Americans showed up. There’s a perception right now, pushed from the very top of our own government, that America is done with Ukraine. 

Going there in person was a way of saying that millions of Americans still care about and stand with Ukraine. There’s another reason too, and it’s more personal. I’ve been to war. But I want to be honest with you: my war was a very different war than this one. You cannot understand the battlefield picture of this conflict until you’ve seen it all around you. What I saw in Ukraine confirms exactly where the future of warfare is heading and that the US needs to get onboard immediately.

We met with leaders from Ukraine’s F-16 program. We toured a drone manufacturer and got a rundown of what they’re building, and I’m telling you, the innovation is staggering. Let me give you one example. They’ve developed a totally unique air defense with drones. A fighter drone goes up, carries an interceptor drone toward an incoming threat, releases it onto the target, and then a human operator takes over visually to finish the intercept.

Instead of firing a multimillion-dollar Patriot interceptor at a cheap incoming drone, you knock it down with something a fraction of the cost. This is the exact kind of technology Ukraine offered to share with the United States before our war with Iran, and we turned it down. If we’d listened, it would have saved lives, and it would have meant we weren’t burning through our most precious missiles to stop threats a drone could have handled.

This is the future of warfare, and the truth is that the United States and most of the world are behind on it. Ukraine is ahead because they’ve had no choice but to be.

I want you to really understand what daily life looks like there now. Until fairly recently, Kyiv might absorb a few attacks in a night. Now it’s constant. In the time I was there, I personally heard something like four impacts over the course of a few hours outside, plus anti-aircraft fire going up to meet what was coming down. A gas station was struck. Civilian targets, with no military value at all, were hit over and over.

In Kharkiv we met with medical units and drone units, and I saw a demonstration of the range of what these systems do, everything from carrying supplies to carrying munitions. The medical side of their innovations truly stunned me.

In the American military we live by “the golden hour.” If you’re wounded, we move heaven and earth to stabilize you and get you to a hospital, often in under an hour by whatever means necessary. In Ukraine, on parts of that front, a wounded soldier might have to hold on for a month before evacuation is even possible. So, they’ve adapted. They fly drones out to wounded troops carrying medicine and supplies. They run telemedicine, a doctor on a video call walking someone through what to do. They’re using unmanned ground vehicles, some for offense, some to drive in and carry a wounded person out so that a rescue doesn’t turn into multiple casualties.

It’s hard for the American mind to comprehend the realities that Ukrainian soldiers face on the front lines. A wounded soldier, stuck in a position for a month, kept alive by a doctor’s face on a screen and a drone dropping supplies. The physical toll is obvious. The mental toll of that month is almost unimaginable. And they endure it, and they innovate through it, because the alternative is losing their country.

The numbers are the same they’ve always been. Ukraine is badly outnumbered on personnel compared to Russia. So they win with innovation and grit. They invent something new, and for five or six months it devastates the Russians. Then Russia studies it, adapts, and counters, which we’re now seeing especially in air defense and in faster jet-powered Shahed drones. It’s a brutal, relentless cycle of adaptation, and the Ukrainians are extraordinary at it. But you cannot out-invent a much larger enemy forever without help.

And that brings me home, to us.

There was a time, not that long ago, when standing with Ukraine was a bipartisan issue. I think of the leaders in my old party who understood, in their bones, that American strength meant standing against Russian aggression. That consensus has been deliberately blown up. 

This administration has stepped back from the fight, treated our support as a favor to be bargained away rather than a strategic necessity, and left the Ukrainians guessing about whether the arsenal of democracy still has their back. When we don’t send what we’ve promised, people die.

Leaving Kharkiv, because I was in a van convoy, I took the road. Others from the conference took the train back out, a train we could have been on. That train was hit by a strike that landed about ten minutes before it crossed the border. I could have been on that train. Everyone made it, thank God.

But I’ll be straight with you. I wasn’t personally afraid in the moment, but it was the most real danger I’ve been in since I was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the difference is, I got to come home to my own bed. 

The people of Ukraine wake up to that every single day, and they have for four and a half years, with the air raid sirens going off hour after hour without safe harbor.

Now let me tell you what makes my blood boil, and why I can’t write about Ukrainian courage without being perfectly honest about the stark contrast with the Trump family. While Ukrainians are keeping wounded soldiers alive by drone and this administration slow-walks the weapons that would keep Ukrainian children from being pulled out of bed by sirens, we learned this week that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin secretly bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding.

According to ProPublica, a man named Umar Kremlev, whom Putin personally recognized with a state honor, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for Trump Jr.’s lavish Bahamas celebration. He rented one of the private islands. He paid for the fireworks. His team helped plan it. And a large group of fellow Russians attended the intimate, roughly fifty-person wedding that Trump Jr. said, “was really small, like, just really close friends.”

A retired FBI counterintelligence official put it plainly: “if I’m paying for your wedding, at some point you’re going to owe me something.” This should be unthinkable for the son of a president, especially when Kremlev is connected to an organization facing sanctions for its alleged role in abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territory.

This is who Putin is. A man who bombs gas stations and apartment blocks, who steals children, and a man who sends the same drones I heard overhead to terrorize civilians night after night. And rather than stand against him, Trump and his allies are stepping back from Ukraine while a member of Putin’s circle picks up the tab for a Trump family party. The corruption is staggering.

So, I travelled halfway around the world into an active war zone. Now what? Great question. I think it’s clear we as Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Ukraine for their steadfast defense of freedom and the fight they’ve taken directly to Russia. 

The isolationist crowd would have you believe that America has no business intervening in overseas conflicts. But we know what happens in Ukraine will have effects around the world for decades to come. It is not just the right thing to do; it is in America’s interest to support Ukraine.

So, beyond what we can do as individuals, here’s my ask of our leaders in Washington:

First, recommit to Ukraine! Send what we promised. America’s word means something. And people die when we don’t follow through.

Second, protect the idea that free nations stand together against tyrants, because that alliance is the only thing that has ever reliably kept the tyrants in check.

Finally, reject Putin, plainly and without hedging, and reject the leaders here at home who keep making excuses for him.

That’s the least we can do.

I saw spirit in Ukraine that I won’t forget. I saw resolve in people living under a sky that poses a threat every night. And I saw a level of military readiness and invention that, frankly, we should have humility to learn from. The Ukrainians are holding the line for all of us. The least we can do is refuse to drop our end of the agreement.

Slava Ukraini!

— Adam Kinzinger

A Few Questions for Our Would-Be AI Overloads by Jean-Marie Kauth

Are you creating a species to replace our own, then, oh mighty AI Overlords? It seems the answer to that is yes since you believe there is a 10% chance AI will wipe out humanity entirely and are proceeding heedless, nevertheless. Then I have just a few questions, I beseech you, before your planned apotheosis into the electronic ether.

Just as we have killed off all but 4% of wild mammals by weight, with another 60% for food, will the species that succeeds us likewise dramatically deplete us to sustain themselves? Will we be kept for food or some such? We need the ecosphere, but they might not so long as they reduce our numbers by billions, preserving just a few to feed and serve them.

Here’s my next question. Will AI creatures voluntarily constrain their own numbers and level of consumption so as to be themselves sustainable? Or will they also spin out of control, further and further destroying the ecosystem on which all of us, including AI Overlords, depend?

I wonder, whether the overlord species is human or AI, how this unlimited growth and insatiable voracious hunger will NOT ultimately destroy the planet on which all lives (even those in silico) depend? Or is that part of the plan, with Mars and all?

Could we not instead imagine a real revolution in intelligence, one consonant with a living planet and all its species, right down to the microbiota, to actually sustain continued life and mutual prosperity on Earth in the long-term? Can we imagine the plastic intelligence of AI coexisting long-term with the living biosphere?

If you are going to bring about the apocalypse, shouldn’t we also think about how to prepare our children? Will atrophying their brains and stunting their ability to solve problems and encounter adversity prepare them for anything but a future of cognitive surrender and abasing service to machines? Or is pacifying and mesmerizing them just the thing as we prepare them for the altar of sacrifice? Is that what you are already doing with the toxic combo of Tik-Tok and brain-stunting pesticides from the womb onward? 

How clever. Destruction of the natural world, which AI is accelerating, means that we cannot continue on this way. Instead of college, should we be preparing our students for a world without lightbulbs, clean water, healthy food, or indoor plumbing, much less the Internet?

Is all this just a distraction from climate change as AI ramps up the real damage to our ecosphere, tainting the air, spewing out CO₂, sucking dry the aquifers, sullying our soil, and cluttering our planet with a slatternly scattering of endless e-waste? Is AI both a smokescreen for bringing back coal-burning power-plants (pun intended) and also an accelerant poured on the already burning fires of our planet?

Do our would-be AI overlords have no children? Do they love no other human being or any of the rare fruits of human civilization?

There is a poignant, tragic plaint, not long ago a joke, patiently pacing the lonely hallways of the internet: “In the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley, the way you quit says everything about where you work. When someone leaves a normal job, they say, ‘you know, I’ve had a great time here, and now it’s on to the next adventure.’ When someone leaves an AI tech job, they say, ‘I have stared into the abyss. I am retiring to write poetry. Please spend time with your families.’”

And this sounds almost verbatim like the warning a resigning Anthropic safety lead issued just months ago: “The world is in peril. And not just from AI or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences. 

Moreover, throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions…. I feel called to writing that addresses and engages fully with the place we find ourselves, and that places poetic truth alongside scientific truth as equally valid ways of knowing, both of which I believe have something essential to contribute when developing new technology. I hope to explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech.”

As a literature professor, the appeal to poetry tickles my soul, but don’t we think we need to also do something more concrete to avert disaster? What about commonsense regulation? What about Garrett Hardin’s “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon”? Who does not feel disappointment that so many are giving up without a fight for our world, for all we love, without so much as a bang or a whimper?

-Jean-Marie Kauth

The book I have worked towards for more than 20 years, Poisoning Our Children, is now available for pre-order at https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/54124/poisoning-our-children

Pre-orders are hugely important, as they affect whether bookstores stock the book, how algorithms surface it, and how seriously publishers take authors. Your support matters more than you know. All author profits will be donated to Environmental Health non-profits.

Figure 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/06/05/dont-fear-robot-overlords-ais-will-rule-the-world-through-humans/

Just How Bad Is It?

 

Before last week, the name Jacob Coxon was probably not one any of us would have known. But as he announced his resignation from his role as a researcher for AI giant Anthropic and published a warning that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade” kicked off a global conversation about the scale of the potential threat of out-of-control artificial superintelligence.

Soon after, Anthropic released a report detailing recent misuses of its powerful AI models, including designing missiles and bombs, creating deadly pathogens and surveilling dissidents. And CEO Dario Amodei, rather than dismissing Coxon as yet another disgruntled ex-employee, announced that he largely agreed with him, calling for a new regime of monitoring, coordination and even regulation. What followed was a rare show of unity and contrition from big tech bosses.

For the TechScape newsletter, Blake Montgomery wondered why Coxon’s warning has cut through, while Nick Robins-Early, David Smith, and Chris Stein reported on Donald Trump’s dismissive reaction, which provoked a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats. David also reported on the unlikely pairing of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, who shared a stage to argue for more protections. Nick asked experts how likely it is that AI CEOs will follow through on pledges to slow the pace. 

And, among the many fascinating opinion pieces we published, make sure you read the one by Alex Turner, a former Google DeepMind staffer who said we really should be listening to the warnings, and the one by Stuart Russell, one of the leading AI experts in the world, on why Amodei’s call for “pacing the frontier” is not enough.

That we’re at this point is as bizarre as it is scary, especially as we’re still working out the impact of the AI models we’re already using in day-to-day life. That’s been a constant theme of our journalism recently. I’d urge everyone reading this to listen to series two of our brilliant podcast series Black Box, presented by Michael Safi and executive produced by Joshua Kelly. 

In Black Box: the Chatbots, Michael meets ordinary people who have become convinced they have made scientific breakthroughs, cured diseases or invented new technologies using AI chatbots, symptoms of what’s now known as “AI psychosis”.

This excerpt of Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s brilliant new book End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World is a must-read, too, examining the motives of the infinitely rich men behind some of this technology and their alliance with the far right. The piece is a call for action to urgently defend what we love – the planet and fellow humans. 

Naomi was also interviewed by Zoe Williams and, with Astra, joined Carter Sherman on our US podcast Stateside to discuss why the convergence of recent climate, far-right and tech crises are creating an atmosphere of apocalypse, and how “hereness” is our way through the doom. I love the idea of “hereness”, particularly in the context of the Guardian’s mission to report on “many somewheres”.

As another antidote to the dire warnings, Nick Evershed wrote a somewhat comforting column urging us not to accept AI domination as inevitable and reminding us that we have the power to change things for the better, as we have done before. And Lois Beckett compiled the definitive list of books to make sense of it all. We could also always talk to each other.

-Katharine Viner, The Guardian

"Monsters Walk Among Us"

 

We have many monsters to destroy. –George Seferis

But how can anyone tell the truth about fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against capitalism, which brings it forth? –Bertolt Brecht

More than four decades ago, the Greek composer and public intellectual Manos Hadjidakis issued a warning that now reads less like a reflection on fascism than a prophecy of our own time. The greatest danger, he suggested, comes when we grow accustomed to the monster, when its presence no longer shocks the conscience and its violence begins to merge with the routines of everyday life. Tolerance does not diminish the monster; it multiplies the conditions that allow it to flourish, strengthening its presence in public life until monstrosity itself acquires the authority to govern. In this instance, the collapse of conscience is inseparable from the uncoupling of “belief from judgment, conviction from action.”

We have reached such a moment.

The monsters are no longer hiding in the shadows. They occupy presidential offices and ministries, command armies and police forces, control digital platforms, dominate television screens, administer borders, build detention centers, and transform the suffering of others into political theater. Their language of racial purification, mass deportation, extermination, vengeance, and disposability no longer produces the outrage it once might have summoned. Cruelty is displayed as strength. Humiliation becomes entertainment. The spectacle of suffering becomes a source of political pleasure. What should be unbearable becomes familiar; what should provoke resistance is absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life.

The monster triumphs not simply when it commits atrocities, but when its language becomes ordinary, its violence becomes acceptable, its weaponization of racial and class divisions goes unnoticed, and its presence no longer disturbs the moral imagination. 

Toni Morrison gave us another language for understanding how monsters become ordinary. She called it “dead language,” a language emptied of ethical responsibility and enlisted in the service of domination. Morrison’s dead language is itself monstrous.  As she writes, oppressive language “does more than represent violence; it is violence.” It is a language that “drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.”

Morrison’s insight reaches beyond rhetoric. Monsters require a language that prepares the ground for their violence, strips their victims of humanity, and teaches people to accommodate the unthinkable. Dead language is one of the conditions that allows monstrosity to pass into everyday life disguised as common sense.

Primo Levi once observed that “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Levi remains right about the role of unthinking functionaries, but today the monsters themselves have acquired institutional power and public legitimacy. Emboldened by staggering economic inequality, empowered by the machinery of high-tech authoritarianism, and legitimated by an expanding culture of state violence, they have moved from the political margins to the commanding heights of American society.

Here Hannah Arendt’s warning about the failure of thinking takes on a renewed urgency. Monstrosity thrives when judgment is surrendered, when the obligation to think becomes a burden, and when ignorance is transformed from an absence of knowledge into a cultivated refusal to know. We might call this the banality of ignorance: the willful suspension of judgment that allows people to see suffering without confronting it and to hear lies without rejecting them. The monster does not merely demand obedience. It needs subjects who have learned not to think about what their obedience makes possible.

Yet Hadjidakis’s warning poses a question more disturbing than whether monsters now govern us. What does it mean for a society to begin to resemble its monsters? And what pedagogical forces are at work in creating and normalizing that resemblance? Resemblance does not mean that everyone becomes a killer or a fascist. It means that the habits of thought, structures of feeling, and forms of indifference on which monstrosity depends begin to penetrate everyday life. The banality of ignorance becomes a social condition, a cultivated form of moral blindness in which not knowing offers a refuge from responsibility and refusing to think becomes a condition of belonging. But such ignorance does not exist outside the realm of desire. It has an emotional register, a psychology of authoritarianism and a pedagogy of terror through which people learn not simply to live with cruelty but to bathe in its emotional charge, finding pleasure and belonging in “patterns of domination and submission [that harden] into a syndrome of attitudes regarding hierarchy, power, sexuality and tradition.”

The monster has a long history, born in the darkest regions of the social imagination where fear, difference, and power converge. As Manvir Singh has observed, monsters have long haunted the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, the familiar and the terrifying, the civilized and what it casts outside its gates. But monsters are never simply creatures of fantasy. They are warnings, projections, embodiments of collective fears, and often weapons for deciding who belongs within the circle of humanity and who can be expelled from it. What matters politically is what happens when the monster steps out of myth and fantasy, takes possession of the institutions of power, and acquires the authority to decide who may live, who must suffer, and who can be made disposable.

There is, however, another problem with the metaphor of the monster itself. To imagine Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu, or other architects of contemporary authoritarian violence simply as monsters risks placing them outside history, as if their cruelty originated in some private pathology detached from the society that produced them. The monster can then become an alibi for the society that created him. 

Moral outrage becomes individualized, while the institutions, economic interests, racial hierarchies, cultural apparatuses, and political forces that make organized cruelty possible disappear. This is the crucial insight in Jorge Gonzalez Arocha’s argument that turning perpetrators into monsters can itself become a way of looking away. Arocha argues that “reducing the perpetrator to nothing more than a monster protects us from recognizing ourselves as potential perpetrators. It distances us from the event and its reality, while placing us in a position of moral superiority…. [It] is a way of denying that the ability to destroy also belongs to us, that it forms part of the human condition.”

The problem is not that monsters do not exist. The problem begins when monstrosity becomes an explanation rather than a question. Monsters do not descend upon society from somewhere outside history. They are produced within history, cultivated through institutions, protected by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, financed by powerful economic interests, amplified by media, and normalized through culture. The political significance of monsters lies not simply in the horrors they commit, but in the social order that makes those horrors possible, useful, legitimate, and eventually ordinary. A singular focus on monsters can obscure the deeper structure of gangster capitalism, a system that “prioritizes certain forms of power over the common good and enables the gradual dehumanization of our societies.”

The question must therefore change. We must move from monster to machinery, from the pathology of the individual to the political economy of organized cruelty, and from there to the cultural and educational forces that teach people how to live with the suffering such machinery produces. Monsters do not act alone. Their power becomes visible in the institutions that protect them, the wealth that sustains them, the laws that authorize them, and the violence that follows in their wake. We see their handiwork in streets stained with blood, in migrants brutalized and left to die in detention centers, in the torture documented in Israeli prisons, and in the bodies of children and families torn apart by Israeli and American bombs in Gaza. 

Behind these abstractions are torn limbs, dismembered bodies, children pulled from rubble, families burned and buried beneath the ruins of their homes, and human beings reduced to flesh and bone by systems in which cruelty has been organized, authorized, and repeated until even the most horrific violence threatens to lose its capacity to shock.

The horror lies in a society’s growing accommodation to monsters, in the silence surrounding their crimes and the erosion of moral and political boundaries that once made their actions intolerable. Such silence is never innocent. It is the rigor mortis of ethical and political decay, the point at which a politics organized around death begins to pass as ordinary life. 

The nightmare no longer lurks in the shadows; it claws its way into daylight and is met with indifference, resignation, or applause. The question is how people learn to live amid mass suffering and eventually look away. What forms of power require such silence? What institutions cultivate it? What culture teaches people to turn away from the bodies left behind? And most important, what pedagogical machinery teaches millions not merely to tolerate cruelty but to identify with those who inflict it, desire the power they embody, and experience the suffering of others as the price of their own imagined liberation?

Political economy, culture, and pedagogy converge here. The monster becomes inseparable from gangster capitalism, pedagogical terrorism, and the culture of cruelty. Gangster capitalism does not accidentally produce monsters. It increasingly requires them, along with publics capable of loving them.

Arendt’s concept of radical evil takes this argument further, moving us from the failure of judgment to the political machinery that renders human beings superfluous. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, radical evil emerges from a political order capable of stripping human beings of rights, history, individuality, and finally their claim to membership in the human community. The concentration camp represented the most extreme realization of this logic, but its political significance extended beyond the camp. Totalitarianism required institutions capable of transforming human beings into disposable matter.

Arendt’s later account of Adolf Eichmann complicated the picture further. Eichmann did not appear before her as a demonic figure possessing some unfathomable depth of evil. He appeared frighteningly ordinary: bureaucratic, careerist, obedient, incapable of thinking seriously about the consequences of his actions. The banality of evil did not mean that his crimes were banal. It meant that extraordinary crimes could be administered through ordinary routines, bureaucratic language, professional ambition, obedience, and the suspension of judgment.

Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Nazi machinery of terror and mass murder, represents another configuration of the political monster. Here ideological fanaticism, administrative intelligence, and extraordinary institutional power converged. Eichmann and Heydrich should not be collapsed into the same psychological type, but both expose the inadequacy of treating atrocity simply as the work of monsters. Modern systems of terror require administrators, lawyers, technicians, police officers, propagandists, intellectuals, journalists, and functionaries. Evil becomes most politically dangerous when it acquires an office, a budget, a bureaucracy, a vocabulary of necessity, and a public willing to accept its premises… .

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.

from When Monsters Walk Among Us - CounterPunch.org

 

45 Days to Midterms

The biggest problem Democrats may have if they, as seems increasingly likely, win majorities in one or both houses will be deciding where to begin in their investigation of Donald Trump’s reign of incompetence and corruption.

The urgent need for congressional oversight got a boost this week with ProPublica’s damning article detailing how a Russian oligarch, Umar Kremlev, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to help host Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding reception — just the latest example of egregious foreign influence peddling. 

“For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections,” ProPublica noted. “Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.” 

This should alarm all Americans, as it raises more troubling questions about Trump’s pro-Putin stance in the Ukraine war. As the article posed, “National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlin to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?” One can only imagine. But as bad as this is, it is only one instance of one category of egregious misconduct that Trump and the Republicans have countenanced.

Democrats will have their hands full, as was evident in a recent Washington Post article that laid out the categories of potential investigations:

-self-enrichment by Trump and his families and cronies;

-handouts and pardons to supporters;

-self-glorifying construction projects; immigration abuse; spotlighting misconduct allegations against immigration officers; the detention of lawful residents and citizens; the rising death toll in immigration detention centers; the deployment of the National Guard in liberal cities; and the alleged mishandling of spending and contracts by then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem;

-dismantling/destroying the federal government;

-prosecution of enemies; pressure campaigns on corporations, universities, and law firms, “often in violation of the First Amendment”;

-foreign affairs: “the Board of Peace, a multinational group meant to end conflicts; the new presidential plane gifted by Qatar; tariffs and trade deals; the Iran war; military intervention and strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in Venezuela; and the redevelopment of Gaza”; and

-the Epstein files.

It’s an impressive list, with many specific scandals that could easily be slotted into the categories above (e.g., DOJ attorneys’ possible violation of professional ethics and federal court rules, nominees and officials’ alleged lying under oath and/or misleading lawmakers, racism and discriminatory practices at the Pentagon and elsewhere, widespread Hatch Act violations by Cabinet officials).

The most obvious concern about embarking on this ambitious plan — “the lawless Trump gang will refuse to cooperate” — is a further indictment of the Trump regime’s unfitness to serve and its contempt for democracy. 

But it is also an example of counterproductive fatalism. For starters, not even the Trump goons can stop everyone from cooperating. There are ex-regime employees, victims of abuse, private sector collaborators (who fear consequences of ignoring Congress), whistleblowers, and yes, even some responsible current officials who will show up and testify truthfully under oath. There are also written documents that cannot be concealed or destroyed.

Congress should be clear that failure to cooperate and testify truthfully will have serious, ongoing ramifications. These include the defunding of relevant government departments, referral for criminal proceedings in a future Democratic administration (or to state and local authorities who may have jurisdiction for underlying misconduct), and civil suits against individuals and government entities — for which courts will have jurisdiction to hand down contempt sanctions for noncooperation.

Other anticipatory objections to the investigations smack more of self-defeatism: ‘Nothing will happen to these people. Trump cannot be impeached or go to jail.’ Such complaints get the process backward. First, Congress compiles the record, then Congress, the courts, and the voters decide what to do about it.

Moreover, the absence of maximalist penalties for Trump (who cannot be certain that the MAGA Supreme Court’s absurd grant of criminal immunity extends, for example, to acts of pure personal enrichment having nothing to do with his core duties as president) leaves a universe of potential ways to hold wrongdoers accountable. These range from clawing back ill-gotten gains to professional sanctions (e.g., disbarment) to criminal prosecution (federal, state, or local) for lower-level officials to military discipline to permanent exclusion from federal jobs.

Let’s not overlook one of the key reasons for the entire exercise: To make an historic record that removes any reasonable doubt about the extent of the cruelty, incompetence, malfeasance, and lawlessness of this regime. Voters in future elections should have no doubt as to who enabled what misconduct, who looked the other way, who profited from office, and who put party loyalty and personal interest above their obligations to the Constitution and the American people.

Protect Democracy, the nonpartisan pro-democracy organization, in its 2022 report observed the wide-ranging purposes oversight and accountability can provide: “[C]omprehensive fact-finding and truth-telling can combat disinformation and work towards creating a more shared reality; lay the political groundwork for institutional reforms; and generate support for other critical accountability measures, such as criminal prosecutions.”

It is vital that those who engaged in wrongdoing is not allowed to waltz away with reputations untouched by their participation in conduct that should shock the conscience of decent Americans:

Accountability can break the revolving door of wrongdoers cycling in and out of power and recommitting offenses—using their time out of power to rehabilitate reputations. In the absence of accountability, history may favor glossing over the breadth and gravity of transgressions that occurred and create an environment amenable to reputationally rehabilitating wrongdoers.

Anyone running for office who served under Trump will have to account for his or her record; anyone seeking important positions in civil society (e.g. partners in law firms, corporation board members) will also need to explain their conduct. Every voter, every public entity, and every private sector employer or philanthropic organization will make an evaluation of past conduct — then themselves be held responsible if they decide to entrust former Trump lackeys with new positions.

In sum, the task of investigating Trump regime wrongdoing may seem overwhelming, but Democrats have no choice but to proceed swiftly, on multiple fronts. Delay, non-confrontation, and “bottom-up” investigation of Jan. 6 under the well-meaning but hapless former Attorney General Merrick Garland had disastrous ramifications for democracy. Congressional Democrats should not repeat that pattern. They should be prepared, focused, and determined to search out wrongdoing at the highest levels of the Trump regime as soon as they take office. 

We will not get a second chance to investigate and hold responsible those who have inflicted so much harm on so many.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is community-supported. Help fund bold journalism and critical lawsuits to stop Trump’s corruption by becoming a paid subscriber. Join the fight now.

 

“To destroy things he can’t possess, or control is his essential nature.”

 

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia refused to permit the Kennedy Center board, stacked by Trump with his own loyalists, to return Trump’s name to the facade of the building. Cooper reiterated that Congress had prohibited such an addition and would have to change that law in order to make the addition of Trump’s name legal.

The board of the Kennedy Center promptly appealed and voted to close the venue for two years for renovations. Then Trump posted on social media that those renovations couldn’t take place unless the court approved the addition of his name to the building. Without that, he posted, “unfortunately, the building is destined to doom. Isn’t that too bad?”

Although the Kennedy Center board insisted that only Trump’s name on the building would restore donations, in fact, the Washington Post reports that ticket sales and fundraising plunged when Trump added his name to the building in the first place. Nonetheless, Trump posted that he is the only one who can save it, “because I have the ability to raise the money, and the ability to construct—that few others have. I also have the strength and power of the Presidency, which will be needed [to] do what must be done, and give it a strong shot at Greatness again!”

As George Conway of the Bulwark noted, “To destroy things he can’t possess, or control is his essential nature.” It is also as if Trump is self-soothing by celebrating his core identity even as his incompetence and greed have driven the United States, and the world, into crisis.

But even that is not providing him comfort these days. Representative Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board and the member who sued over his takeover of the center, explained to Symone Sanders-Townsend of MS NOW that Trump called into the board meeting after the court decision and “went into a tantrum.”

While most people appear to have refused to confront Trump to his face—Maine governor Janet Mills’s “We’ll see you in court” was so rare it made headlines—Beatty took him on. She recounted: “It was the most unprofessional thing that I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of it.” But after he called her “an obstructionist” and “dumb” and said he thought she was “incompetent,” she retorted: “I know you’re incompetent.” Beatty appealed to the chair to stop Trump’s unprofessional behavior, but when he continued to berate her, claiming it would be her fault if someone were killed at the center, she responded: “You’re already killing people, we’re at war.” And when he talked about what a great developer, he was, she “reminded him that he had more bankruptcies than anybody in the room. I mean, it really went there,” Beatty told Sanders-Townsend. “I was not going to let him bully me, intimidate me. And the facts stand for themselves.”

Indeed, these days, facts across the board are challenging Trump’s image of himself. Panic is sounding across the U.S. about oil prices. The Houthis in Yemen, backed by Iran, are threatening the Bab el-Mandeb strait at the outlet of the Red Sea on its way to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean, threatening another 4% of the world’s oil supply to global markets. Saudi Arabia had diverted oil shipments from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the East-West pipeline across the country, but officials have closed the pipeline after strikes. Today, senior executives from Shell and Equinor warned that the world is looking at tightening supplies of oil and “price volatility” as the industry is losing the ability to offset the disruptions.

On X, Patrick De Haan, a petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, charted the rise of diesel prices in the U.S. this week. Diesel jumped $0.82 a gallon in Fort Stewart, Georgia; $0.82 in Moorhead, Minnesota; $0.75 in Athens, Georgia. In the twelve hours before 1:30 this afternoon, Eastern time, gasoline jumped $0.30 a gallon in Lawrence County, Ohio, and Edwardsburg, Michigan. It jumped $0.28 a gallon in Des Moines, Iowa. De Haan reported that gas prices in and around Chicago appeared to be rising to $4.99 a gallon today.

As De Haan noted, it was “no shock, with diesel setting new all-time records and showing no signs of slowing,” that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates today for the first time since July 2023. Trump has been adamant that he wants to see interest rates lowered and has threatened to cut off trade with certain countries unless the Fed lowered them. But rising inflation meant that the board instead voted unanimously to raise rates by a quarter of a percentage point to a target range of 3.75% to 4%.

Trump did not take the news well. “Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World—BY FAR,” he posted. “LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!”

At a political rally in North Carolina, Trump suggested that the Fed is attacking him personally. “They’re raising the rates to make Trump do as bad as they can possibly do,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. “The problem they have is that we have the greatest economy in history.” “So, they’re raising that only for political reasons and that’s a raise against Trump.”

In Ireland, where he traveled for the Irish Open golf tournament at his course in Doonbeg, Trump told reporters on Sunday that the U.S. might stay in Iran and “keep the oil” as the U.S. did in Venezuela. He claimed Venezuelan oil has “paid for the war many times.”

But—even aside from the fact invading a country and taking its resources violates the U.N. charter—there is no record of that money or where it is going. In January 2026, a U.S. official told Jarrett Renshaw of Reuters that the U.S. had completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil, valued at $500 million. That money was to be held in a U.S. account in Qatar, not the U.S. Treasury.

Yesterday, testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused to answer questions Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) asked about the Venezuelan oil money. Bessent refused to say how much money from Venezuelan assets—including gold, as well as oil—had flowed through Treasury accounts or accounts managed by Treasury since January and said he had no knowledge of whether the money was flowing to “the U.S. government, U.S. persons, or U.S. corporations.” He deflected by saying simply: “Again…this is the, uh, one of the largest assets that maybe ever to go on the U.S. balance sheet.”

Yesterday was a big day for revelations about the war on Iran. Jonah Kaplan of CBS News published photographs showing the damage caused to buildings, vehicles, and equipment at U.S. bases in the Middle East by Iranian strikes. Active service members leaked the photos to CBS News because, as one said, “This is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public. We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.” “We’re not defending these bases,” the service member said. “We’re just watching them get destroyed.”

John Ismay of the New York Times reported on a new report from the Pentagon’s inspector general on Monday explaining that the first four months of the Iran war caused “strategic inventory shortfalls”; that Iranian strikes have destroyed “hundreds of buildings and structures” at U.S. bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; that dozens of military aircraft have been damaged or destroyed; and that the Defense Department has limited facilities for medical treatment in the region and has had to relocate helicopters for medical evacuations from Iraq and Kuwait.

A new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said that the Iran war, which has taken 18 U.S. lives and wounded more than 800 servicemembers, has also cost the U.S. about $38 billion as of August 1 and could cost as much as $2 billion a month while it goes on, and that it will continue to drive inflation.

For the third time, the House passed a war powers resolution directing Trump to remove U.S. military personnel from hostilities against Iran unless Congress explicitly authorizes him to keep them there. Seven Republicans joined the Democrats to pass the measure by a vote of 220 to 204. Yesterday Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) blindsided House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) by introducing eight counts of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The first three articles accuse him of “waging war in contravention of the War Powers Resolution of 1973.” The fourth accuses him of “ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties.” The fifth accuses him of directing “the extrajudicial killings of at least 221 persons aboard seagoing vessels” in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The sixth accuses him of “suppressing free speech” through his attempts to silence Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a Navy veteran. The seventh article accuses him of the “kidnapping of a sovereign foreign leader,” Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. The final article charges Hegseth with waging an “unlawful war in Yemen,” in 2025.

Massie told CNN that he had kept his plan secret to prevent House leadership from keeping him from the floor to read the articles. To protect Republican lawmakers from having to take a stand either for or against the Iran war, Speaker Johnson canceled votes set for Thursday and sent the House home until November 9, 2026, after the midterm elections.

Johnson blasted Massie, saying: “Secretary Hegseth has done an extraordinary job, the Department of War. We’re in the middle of international conflicts right now, and we should not be playing games with national security.” As for sending lawmakers home early, he said: “It’s time for our members to go home to their districts and make their case to the American people, to go and explain all the great things we’ve done.”

Trump apparently does not think voters will swing behind the Republicans based on their record. News broke on Monday that the Supreme Court would not allow him to implement new rules that would allow the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots, something Trump insisted was imperative to purify voting.

On Tuesday, he dropped the facade that the rule was about anything other than rigging the election and expressed anger that his three hand-picked appointees to the Supreme Court did not do his bidding. “Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court,” he posted. “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years. These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court; they are merely a shell of their original selves.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

The Plague of American Authoritarianism

 

“…Rather than forcing a populace to adhere to a particular state ideology, the general public in the United States is largely depoliticized through the influence of corporations over schools, higher education, and other cultural apparatuses. The deadening of public values, civic consciousness, and critical citizenship are also the result of the work of anti-public intellectuals representing right-wing ideological and financial interests, a powerful corporate controlled media that are largely center-right, and a market-driven public pedagogy that reduces the obligations of citizenship to the endless consumption and discarding of commodities. In addition, a pedagogy of historical, social, and racial amnesia is constructed and circulated through a highly popular celebrity culture and its counterpart in corporate-driven news, television, radio, and entertainment to produce a culture of stupidity, censorship, and diversionary spectacles…

“What is particularly troublesome is the manifestations of totalitarianism in the discourse and proposed policy measures of the extremists that now govern the Republican Party and how this is taken up in the mainstream media. One finds in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and others a mix of war like values, expressions of racism, a hatred of women’s rights, unabashed support for the financial elite, a religious fundamentalism, a celebration of war, and a deep-seated hostility for all things public. Chris Christie sells himself to the American public as a bully and believes that threatening violence is a crucial element of leadership. This was on full display when he recently stated that teachers’ unions ‘are the single most destructive force in public education in America [and deserve] a punch in the face [xi]. 

“Threatening violence appears to be a powerful ideological register shared by many of the Republican Party candidates. Donald Trump comes close to supporting a form of racial cleansing by threatening to depart 11 million undocumented Mexican immigrants all the while demonizing them as rapists and criminals. This script has been played out before just prior to the genocide promoted in Nazi Germany. Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker want to abolish a woman’s right to abortion and go so far as to argue that they would not permit women to get an abortion even if their lives depended on it. Huckabee takes this threat even further. When Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi asked Huckabee if he would send ‘the FBI or the National Guard to close abortion clinics,’ he answered 'We'll see when I'm president' [xii]. Huckabee is a real piece of work stating at one point that he would deny an abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim [xiii]. This hatred of women and the need to control and domesticate them to the crudest forms of male hegemony and control is central to all fascist regimes…”

from the Plague of American Authoritarianism by Henry Giroux

[xi] Chris Christie, “Chris Christie: Apologize for Threatening Teachers,” AFT A Union of Professionals, (August 15, 2015). Online at: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/chris-christie-apologize-for-threatening-teachers

[xii] Matt Taibbi, “Inside the GOP Clown Car,” Rolling Stone (August 12, 2015). Online: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-the-gop-clown-car-20150812

[xiii] Emily Atkin, “Huckabee Supports Denying Abortion to 10-year-Old Rape Victim,” Think Progress (August 16, 2015). Online: http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/08/16/3692100/huckabee-paraguay-rape-abortion/

Originally posted on this blog on August 26, 2015.