"The United States has now experienced two debilitating, unprecedented blackouts across critical infrastructure in two days"

 

An old English proverb anchored in superstition from ancient Greek and Roman beliefs is that bad luck always comes in threes, but that does not mean bad luck was always random.

The United States has now experienced two debilitating, unprecedented blackouts across critical infrastructure in two days. The timing is almost too coincidental to be a coincidence – coming on the heels of the removal of Jensen Huang as Nvidia CEO amidst an affair with a suspected Chinese spy, widespread recriminations about chip exports to China, and demands for tighter export controls and more hawkish policies against China.

Could China and other hostile foreign actors be targeting U.S. infrastructure? It’s too early to know for sure, but the country deserves far more transparent answers than we have received so far.

An extraordinary timeline, too coincidental to be a coincidence?

At 3:54 p.m. ET on Friday, November 13, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded every departing flight in America, “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” It was only the third nationwide ground stop ever ordered. The first came on Sept. 11, 2001; the second more than 20 years later, on Jan. 11, 2023.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would say only that “a communication issue” had struck every one of the 22 centers that guide planes across the country, and that technicians were investigating. A subsequent press conference by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin did little to reassure anyone, with no answers about what happened and little reassurance that it would be fixable anytime soon, with airports sending travelers home and communicating that flight cancellations would persist for many hours at a minimum, if not days.

It was the second time in two days that critical infrastructure the country cannot function without simply stopped, potentially for very nefarious reasons. The day before, Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot went dark in 74 countries and stayed down for hours. Both blackouts struck within a day-and-a-half of the most damaging China espionage story in years.

Two blackouts, measured in billions in lost economic activity and inconvenience

The last nationwide ground stop, in 2023, lasted about 90 minutes and still delayed more than 10,000 flights and canceled 1,300. Friday’s lasted hours with no resolution imminent on the horizon. At the four-hour point of this latest ground stop, 10,243 flights were already delayed and 3,234 cancelled, with flights grounded not only at single regional airports but across the entire nation, suggesting systemic breakdowns rather than localized issues.

Microsoft’s failure began at 11:17 a.m. ET on Thursday and spread across 19 Microsoft 365 services. Within an hour, complaints about Outlook were running at more than 2,000 times their normal level. Microsoft counts more than 450 million paid commercial seats, with many millions of those users locked out entirely from their inboxes and other critical services.

The casualty list reads like a roll call of essential services: the U.S. House of Representatives was substantively incapacitated; a federal appeals court that could not send or receive email; Britain’s Parliament and its National Health Service, where the failure threatened patients’ prescriptions; Australia’s spy agency and federal police were sent offline as well.

When a botched CrowdStrike update crashed 8.5 million machines in 2024, the Fortune 500 alone lost an estimated $5.4 billion. One risk adviser already puts Microsoft’s bill in the billions for Australia alone, not to mention the lost economic value in the U.S. or the rest of the world. This was the first time in history so many users were locked out for so long – with shifting and unsatisfactory explanations. Similarly, this is the first time in global aviation history where there has been a nationwide ground stop with no satisfactory, clear explanation and immediate fix.

Reassurance first, explanation later does not work as a crisis playbook in these extraordinary circumstances. Microsoft wrote the playbook for false comfort. 

For a full day it insisted there was “no indication” of malicious activity while its own bulletins showed it did not know what had broken. If it did not know for sure, then how could they know for sure there was no indication of anything malicious amidst shifting explanations?

First, it blamed elevated load, then servers that had unexpectedly dropped out. It found no recent change that lined up with the failure. Hours later, it was rolling back a network change that did. Early Friday, engineers were still trying to “pinpoint the underlying cause of the traffic influx.”

Only on Friday afternoon did Microsoft name a culprit: a flaw introduced during a network capacity upgrade, “not related to cyber.” That sequence is as nonsensical as it is falsely reassuring. No patient would trust a doctor who swears it is not an infection before he can diagnose the fever. You cannot rule out what you cannot yet explain, and nobody can feel particularly reassured from this disturbing sequence of events and shifting explanations.

Suspicious timing and a 15-year track record

On Thursday morning, Nvidia, whose board failures we dissected in Fortune this week, announced the resignation of Jensen Huang, the chip industry’s loudest advocate for selling to China, after he admitted an affair with a businesswoman U.S. officials suspect of spying for Beijing. Beijing has been vocal in calling it a smear amidst a rapid escalation of U.S.-China tensions. Lawmakers in both parties are demanding testimony and tighter export controls. Within three hours, inboxes went dark from Capitol Hill to Canberra. A day later, planes stopped and were grounded.

Could that really be a coincidence?

Perhaps we are being too conspiratorial, but there is a certain uncanny resemblance to Beijing’s favorite playbook, which is to divert from negative news stories by shutting down internet services and diverting public attention.

For example, in 2011, a petition to free Ai Weiwei got Change.org knocked offline. In 2012, exposés of the family fortunes of Xi Jinping and Wen Jiabao got Bloomberg and The New York Times blocked in China and targeted by hackers. In 2014, as Hong Kong marched for democracy, a newspaper and a voting site were buried under one of the largest attacks the internet had ever seen. In 2015, China’s “Great Cannon” hammered GitHub for days for hosting banned news. In 2019, Telegram and the LIHKG forum were swamped as Hong Kong marched again. In 2022, news of the zero-COVID protests on Twitter drowned in a deluge of spam. Maybe this pattern of untimely hacks was merely a coincidence – or could it have been more than coincidence?

Microsoft knows this adversary better than anyone. 

Hackers tied to Beijing tore through its customers’ Exchange servers in 2021 and stole some 60,000 State Department emails through its cloud in 2023, a breach a federal review board blamed on a “cascade of security failures” at Microsoft. Just three weeks ago, Microsoft itself said a China-aligned group had turned AI agents loose on more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 customers.

Is it time to buy home batteries, water tanks, k-rations and porta potties?

Whatever the cause, the lesson is identical. Some cyber experts are warning about potentially economically destabilizing cyberattacks, with researchers warning that AI-enabled hacking is spreading like a virus: attacks on previously unknown flaws have roughly doubled since capable open-source models arrived.

U.S. agencies say China’s Volt Typhoon hackers have already burrowed into American communications, transportation, energy and water networks, in some cases for five years, positioning themselves to disrupt them. They sat inside one small Massachusetts electric and water utility for more than 300 days. If the inbox and the skies can go dark on consecutive days, why not the grid, or the tap? Is it time for every business and household to buy storage batteries, water tanks, MREs and porta potties?

Of course, regardless of whether this was a Chinese or foreign malevolent actor attack, or whether it was merely the coincidental degradation of antiquated and outdated infrastructure systems, all of this takes place against the backdrop of the substantive hollowing out of U.S. government counterintelligence and cyber capabilities, with more than 1,500 special agents having departed the FBI and almost 1,000 staffers—about one-third of the workforce—have left the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) since Trump returned to office. Domestic commentators point out that this comes despite $1 trillion in Pentagon spending; and that the upgrades needed for aviation infrastructure would have cost $40 billion.

Legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove’s renowned book was titled, “Only the paranoid survives”, suggesting paranoia is not entirely unwarranted. The poet Delmore Schwartz said in 1966 that “even paranoids have enemies.” And everyone from Joseph Heller to Henry Kissinger to Kurt Cobain has repeated some variation of “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

Sometimes, superstition that seems delusional can connect authentic facts. And sometimes it behooves us to look at “worst case” scenarios in an effort to avoid them.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

 

"The bottom line is that this is an administration that has been able to operate however it wants to because of the absence of oversight and now, thanks to American voters, that’s about to come to an end"

 

As Democrats prepare to take control of both the House and Senate come January, they have not been shy about their intent to resume Congress’ duty to act as a check on the executive branch. That will restore the guardrail that has been wholly absent during Donald Trump’s first two years back in office. Needless to say, that seems to be worrisome to the Trump.

Congress’ power to conduct investigations is an important and expansive one. Writing in 1993, the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress defined congressional oversight as the “review, monitoring, and supervision of the executive and the implementation of public policy.” 

The Congressional Research Service (CRS), a nonpartisan public policy research shop located within the Library of Congress (often referred to as Congress’ think tank) has weighed in to suggest that the Joint Committee’s definition “captures the functional core of Congress's oversight of the executive branch. 

Nonetheless, it is the beginning, rather than an end, of understanding oversight as it has been practiced since the First Congress. As outlined in this manual, the purposes, practice, and tools of congressional oversight extend far beyond the confines of a simple definition.

While Congress has a broad reach when conducting oversight, it’s not entirely without constraint. For instance, committees must operate within their sphere of influence: “a congressional committee lacks authority to compel compliance with investigative demands when it acts outside its jurisdiction or fails to comply with its own rules.” 

And Congress must have a legitimate legislative purpose when it investigates. It cannot proceed with investigations merely to expose conduct it disapproves of if it can’t arguably lead to legislation. But the constraints are modest and members are used to working within them.

MSNOW’s Lisa Rubin reported that the House is searching for a new General Counsel. That person will likely take on the role of a wartime consigliere. Politico described the role as “a lawyer to take on Trump.”

The White House reacted like a cornered, frightened animal, puffing itself up to try and look big. They threatened members of Congress who were discussing using Congress’ investigative tools with criminal prosecution. White House Counsel Will Scharf wrote a three-page letter admonishing Congress to stick to investigating with an eye to its legislative role—oh, the irony for anyone who followed the House weaponization subcommittee these past two years. The letter accuses Democrats of intending to “harass and aggrandize rather than to advance any legitimate legislative end.”

Scharf ended up walking his accusations back on Newsmax on Wednesday. “What we’re asking for is nothing more than that everybody plays the rules and that everybody follows the law. That’s the only thing we’re asking for. That’s the only thing my letter asked for,” he said, even though it plainly threatened criminal prosecution.

Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal received a missive from a Texas U.S. Attorney who accused him, in connection with his inquiry into anonymous donors to Trump’s ballroom, of harassing citizens. He threatened the Senator with “significant legal consequences” if he does not make oversight documents available. Blumenthal, a former U.S. Attorney himself, did not seem frightened.

Asked “What specifically have Democrats said that crosses a criminal line” in connection with the White House Counsel’s threat letter in a press conference, Todd Blanche said, “Free speech is allowed but there can come a point when a criticism becomes a threat and when a threat becomes something criminal.”

So how do you know where that line is? You look at the statutes. Blanche should be familiar with it because it’s the same crime they charged Jim Comey with in the seashells case. The case for its use here is even weaker than it is there. The government has to prove a threat to harm someone. Democrats are talking about issuing subpoenas. “Someone” in this administration must be terrified if the Attorney General of the United States feels like he has to go out on such a spindly limb. There are also First Amendment protections and Speech or Debate Clause protections here for Congress. 

The bottom line is that this is an administration that has been able to operate however it wants to because of the absence of oversight and now, thanks to American voters, that’s about to come to an end.  How do Democrats figure out where to focus? Costs, corruption, and competence were the Democrats’ campaign themes, and they are a good place to start. I would add a fourth “c”: cruelty. It is incumbent upon them to investigate the abuses at ICE.

Bloomberg reported earlier this week that “Justice Department leaders plan to force out additional US attorneys while preparing those who remain for wartime footing after their party’s midterms losses, a top official warned the nation’s chief prosecutors Monday.” U.S. Attorneys mostly worry about their jobs when the administration changes and a new party takes over. 

A call for U.S. Attorneys to resign, from the president who appointed them, “if they’re not prepared for full-on battle and to obey the administration’s orders,” is stunning, even if you’re old enough, as am I—I was at DOJ for it—the Bush administration firing of nine U.S. Attorneys. That major scandal is child’s play compared to telling U.S. Attorneys to leave now if they're not willing to prosecute whatever cases Washington tells them to.

So why exactly would the White House Counsel, the Attorney General, and other officials make such specious threats? Donald Trump was quick to personally go on the offensive after getting walloped the polls. Last weekend he took to Truth Social to demand that his Justice Department go on the attack and prosecute members of Congress for having the temerity to suggest that they should do their jobs. Trump posted on Truth Social:

“The Democrats are going around threatening a lot of people, including the Attorney General of the United States, and others, with Impeachment and many other forms of punishment, even though they admit they have no reason to do so, and there have been no impeachable acts committed, or even thought of, by the victims of this illegal process. 

“This is extortion at the highest level, and they should be held accountable for this. Also, they’re threatening our Donors, some of the most respected people anywhere in the World, with imprisonment, and many other levels of punishment, just because they happen to be Republicans, or Republican supporters. 

“This is Weaponization and Lawfare at another level. The Senator from Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, is saying that she is going to go after all young people that believe in Republican Values, and that give even the slightest inclination to be a Republican. The imprisonment should be against these EXTORTIONISTS, and Republicans should get smart, fast! Threatening letters have been sent to many people, all innocent, from Democrat Political Leaders. By copy of this statement, I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Just like clockwork, Scharf, Blanche, and others lined up to do the president’s bidding. Trump’s assertion that “no impeachable acts committed, or even thought of, by the victims of this illegal process” comes off a bit out of touch and gets the cart before the horse, coming out with the conclusion before there has been any investigation. And apparently Trump has now decided he can dispense legal advice about what crimes people have committed, writing, “This is extortion at the highest level, and they should be held accountable for this.” 

I’ve prosecuted extortion cases. The heart of the crime is using a threat, typically of violence, reputational damage, or economic harm, to extract something of value from the victim. That’s not close to what’s happening here. In Trump’s mind, legitimate oversight is an attack, and if that’s not suggestive of having something to hide, well, I don’t know what is.

Trump specifically called out Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, claiming she “is saying that she is going to go after all young people that believe in Republican Values, and that give even the slightest inclination to be a Republican.” Her lawyer, Preet Bharara, responded that it “should not be hard to make clear that we do not live in an authoritarian regime where mere criticism of the powerful can land anyone in legal peril and possibly prison.”

The conclusion of Trump’s post was the kicker: “By copy of this statement, I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!” There’s not even a pretense anymore that DOJ is anything other than a political tool Trump can wield as he will. The proof was the response we saw from Blanche and others.

What Democrats plan to do—engaging in oversight, even vigorous, aggressive oversight—doesn’t come anywhere close to the line Blanche claimed it did. This is just a political charade, meant to keep the emperor who has no clothing happy. While it’s the kind of behavior we have come to expect from this president, it’s behavior that no Attorney General should be complicit in.

We’re going to be dealing with this for the next two years. Trump with his back against the wall and the clock ticking toward the end of the era of deference and privilege being president has bestowed upon him. The smell of accountability is new and apparently frightening for him. So be joyous about the result of the midterm elections. But be prepared for what is coming.

If you value Civil Discourse and aren’t already, I hope you’ll become a paid subscriber today. Here’s why: I want everyone who is interested in what’s happening to our democracy to be able to read the newsletter, whether they can afford a subscription or not. Paid subscribers make that possible. Together, we’re making sure good information about the law and our government gets into more hands, giving people the knowledge and the confidence to make a difference. That’s how we reclaim our democracy, one informed American at a time. I can’t think of a better investment in our future.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance

 

The Enemy at Home

Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry.

No mainstream politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties. Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty.

We are about to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over $4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are slashed.

The new Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases.

None of this is good for us or good for the planet. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting an estimated 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024.

Americans, meanwhile, struggle with rising prices — nearly 30 percent of people go into debt to buy groceries. An estimated114,174. Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance or inadequate health care while a single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of Americans are functionally unemployed. The minimum wage remains frozen, despite Democratic Party promises to raise it, at $ 7.25 an hour.

The elites use war not only for personal enrichment, but to stifle class conflict.

War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, diverts the poor from their real interests. It funnels national frustrations into the “heroic” battle against a common enemy. The nationalist cant, with its endemic racism, seduces those who are alienated or on the margins of society into feeling they suddenly belong. It entices them to sacrifice themselves for a “noble” cause. They become the architects of their own enslavement. They march like sheep into war’s purgatory.

By the time they wake up, it is too late. They are cast aside, as so many of our veterans have painfully discovered, like human refuse. But as a tactic to consolidate power and enrich the billionaire class, it is unbeatable.

Wars will only be curtailed, if not halted, when we nationalize the weapons industry and dramatically reduce the military budget. Until then, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change. Indeed, things will only get worse. No one in Congress — or any other branch of government — will do this for us.

The masters of war sitting in the boardrooms of Boeing, General Dynamics or Northrop Grumman are not praying for peace in the Middle East or coexistence with China and Russia. The generals — who build their careers by orchestrating wars and post military careers enriching themselves working for defense contractors — are not seeking a cessation of global conflicts. They are seeking hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars and government debt to fuel the self-defeating cycle of endless war.

The corporate vultures — especially the war makers — are, as I write, descending on Congress. They are meeting with Democratic Party leaders and holding out promises of millions in cash. They will corrupt, neutralize and compromise most. They will destroy the careers of the very few who refuse to do their bidding.

They hold the real power. They have no intention of surrendering it. The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war are the chief activities of the U.S. government. It is no longer one among other means of advancing the national interest. War and violence are how we speak to the rest of the world.

The “shadow world,” — as the author Andrew Feinstein calls it in his book on the global arms trade — is defined by staggering levels of corruption, deception and senseless death. It is lawless and unregulated. Its criminal activities, cannibalization of national budgets and secrecy are sanctified in the name of “national security.”

Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp, along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Exxon, are the state.

We, including our political class, are the vassals. The voters can send whoever they want to Congress, but until these corporations and the billionaire class are regulated, taxed and controlled, until their vast monopolies are broken up, until we stop squandering half of all discretionary spending on war, nothing will change.

Nothing.

Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They are disemboweled by an uncontrollable and unaccountable military that drains state budgets and plunges dying empires into one military debacle after the next. These decaying civilizations finally collapse from within.

This is where we are headed. The corporations, and the billionaires who run them, buy and trade politicians, academics and journalists like Pokémon cards. Their lobbyists write the legislation. They own the media. They have stifled the academy, shutting down free speech and purging critics. Judges offer them unlimited power. To defy them — and I speak from personal experience — is to be cast into the wilderness.

The military-industrial complex, as Karl Liebknecht said of German imperialists on the eve of World War I, is the enemy within. “Making a Killing: How the West Profits from Slaughter in Gaza and Yemen,” co-authored by Andrew Feinstein, Ruth Rohde and Jack Cinamon — with contributions from Paul Holden and Professor Anna Stavrianakis — examines the global arms trade in the Middle East.

The authors estimate that $130 billion was made from arms exports by Western nations to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the war on Yemen and over $50 billion from Israeli foreign military procurements.

“RTX Chairman and CEO Christopher T. Calio made $18 million in 2024, after being appointed halfway through the year, while his compensation package surged to almost $25 million in 2025,” the authors note. “His predecessor, Gregory Hayes, was remunerated to the tune of nearly $22 million in 2023. Lockheed Martin CEO and former U.S. Air Force pilot Jim Taiclet, who was deployed in Saudi Arabia while serving during the Gulf War, earns an annual package of more than $23 million. Since his appointment in 2020 he has raked in more than $136 million in total Lockheed Martin compensation.”

Phebe Novakovic, the CEO of General Dynamics, has a net worth estimated at $420 million, up $270 million since 2020. But it is not only the CEOs who profit. Members of Congress and their families traded between $24 million and $113 million worth of Pentagon contractor stocks in 2024.

Representative Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey — a Democrat — is a former Clinton speechwriter and a close ally of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Gottheimer, who is heavily funded by the pro-Israel lobby and an ardent Zionist, traded $22 million worth of stock in the top 100 Pentagon contractors, including Microsoft — which received $414 million from the Department of Defense in 2023 for software and cloud computing services — Northrop Grumman and IBM.

Gottheimer serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Financial Services Committee. He is well placed to know which defense companies are enriched by government contracts and which are not.

Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is not any better. She made an estimated $38.6 million profit in one year from her stock trading, the most of any lawmaker, in 2024. These politicians run the Democratic Party. They carry out the same illegal insider trading and have the same conflicts of interest as the Republicans and the Trump White House. Hunter Biden is no less odious than Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.

“Honeywell — which provides sensors and guiding devices to assist the Israeli military in airstrikes in Gaza — is the most commonly held arms company stock among members of Congress, followed by RTX, the company that makes missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome, among other weapons systems,” the authors write.

Members of Congress, they report, “made more than 13,300 trades totaling over $635 million in 2025.” The arms trade, the authors illustrate, has created an unelected, shadowy cabal of foreign policy, corporate and military officials, along with academics, who — no matter who is in the White House or the Congress — feed the military beast.

This cabal, many parked in think tanks funded by the defense industry and given prominent platforms on cable news channels, preach endless war. They ensure the fabrication of bombs, missiles, warplanes, drones, ships, tanks and guns. They ship these weapons around the globe. They sustain the interconnected network of cutting-edge, high-tech systems of information warfare and surveillance, powered by data processing centers, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence.

Once these weapons and tools of surveillance are tested on Palestinians or Yemenis, they are brought back to manage and surveil us — an imperial boomerang abolishing what is left of our civil liberties and freedom.

The tyranny empire imposes on others, as Thucydides reminded us, it finally imposes on itself. The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, is socialism or barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism, if we do not free ourselves from the tentacles of the war industry, we will descend into the Hobbesian world of totalitarian capitalism, failed states, mass migrations, endless war, ecocide and permanent immiseration.

The genocide in Gaza is the harbinger of this coming dystopia. It is a stark message by the industrialized nations to the Global South, especially with the breakdown of the climate. The message is this:

There are no rules. International Humanitarian Law is dead. The strong will annihilate the weak. We control the world’s resources and most of its wealth. We will not relinquish it. Your suffering and lives are meaningless to us. Defy us and you too will be slaughtered.

Fear is the only language these vampires understand. This is a dark fact about human nature. It is why Richard Nixon was our last liberal president. Nixon was not a liberal. He was devoid of empathy. He lacked a conscience. But he was scared of movements. He knew the power of the strike.

It is not our job to take power. It is our job to create radical movements to hold power in check. Without these movements, we are doomed.

“You get freedom by letting your enemy know that you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it,” Malcolm X told young civil rights activists from Mississippi 51 days before his assassination on February 21, 1965. “When you get that kind of attitude, they’ll label you as a ‘crazy Negro,’ or they’ll call you a ‘crazy nigger’ — they don’t say Negro. Or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red, or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough, and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom…So don’t you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who’s depriving you of your rights. They’re not your friends, no, they’re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you’ll get your freedom; and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don’t have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I don’t have any hate. I’ve got some sense. I’m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him.”

The disease of permanent war and militarism is devouring the guts of our nation. These forces snuff out democracy. They turn culture into nationalist cant and sentimental kitsch. They turn education and the media into echo chambers for the rich and the powerful. They wreck the economy. They immiserate the citizenry. They pump toxins into the air, soil and water. They strip us of our liberty. They foster moral nihilism.

War is the apotheosis of this corporate rule, designed to exploit people and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. And time is running out. If we don’t transform this system we, and most other species, will go extinct. Literally. We must mobilize to defeat these forces. This means organized mass disruptions of government and commerce as we have seen in France, Spain and India, and with organizations such as Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil.

If we remain supplicants, if we hope desperately for a feckless political class to save us, the barbarians will triumph.

-Chris Hedges

 

Remembering Veterans Day

 

"He doesn’t care if he kills us all": Psychologist warns Trump is about to "act out"

Following the midterm blowout for the Republican Party that has been viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump’s second term, the president has entered the “third act” of his political career and is more dangerous than ever.

That’s the warning from Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist, former Johns Hopkins University professor and frequent Trump critic, who told the Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles that the president likely took the GOP’s defeat personally.

“Hell, hath no fury like a malignant narcissist scorned,” Gartner said. “I think we’re now in the third act of the tragedy, and I think we’re in more danger now than we’ve ever been.”

According to the Daily Beast, Gartner believes the 80-year-old president may now be even more inclined to wreak havoc. “He’s going to act out in the ways that are destructive—to show his power and dominance, and to gain the sadistic sense of pleasure that he gets from destruction,” Gartner said.

He compared the moment to a dangerous stage in an abusive relationship.

“I feel like we’re at the stage where a woman who’s been abused goes, ‘Thank God. I kicked him out of the house, I have a restraining order, I’m finally safe,’” he said. “And that’s often the time when the really destructive abusers say, ‘Okay, now I’m gonna kill the b---h.’ I think that he is that guy, and we are the b---h. And he doesn’t care if he kills us all.”

Gartner admitted he doesn’t have much advice to offer on how to deal with the impulsive president because he doesn’t believe “anyone can contain him.”

“I don’t think there is a strategy that will work,” he told Coles. “I think that he is going to do what he is going to do, and he’s going to reap maximum chaos, maximum destruction, maximum confusion.”

He warned that Democrats’ victory celebrations may be short-lived. “We’re so elated that Democrats have taken both houses of Congress, but I think he’s going to be successful over the next two years at stymying virtually every effort that they make,” he said.

Gartner argued Democrats will have little leverage because Trump has no agenda he needs them for. “Any bill that they pass that could help America is a bill he wants to thwart. That’s how his psychology works,” he said. “He doesn’t care if shutting down the government hurts the country. Look, he didn’t care that his actions hurt his party, right? He could care less.”

“At no point did he ever think maybe I should change my behavior because it’s gonna hurt my party,” Gartner concluded. “He doesn’t care about his party or his country or anyone else.”

-Tom Boggioni, NewsBreak

Trump plans imperial final act to his presidency

 

Donald Trump, with the clock ticking and congressional investigators closing in, plans to govern even more imperially, hell-bent on stretching executive power, targeting those on his enemies list, pardoning allies, and daring the courts and Congress to slow him down.

Why it matters: Trump and his allies are exploring executive action on new tariffs and immigration restrictions and asserting greater control over spending. 

On X over the weekend, Trump discussed targeting and perhaps jailing Democrats who investigate administration officials. He claimed politically motivated harassment.

Trump is retooling his White House by elevating the one official who's synonymous with his all-gas-no-brakes style: Stephen Miller, who took over for Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff on Monday.

---

Watch Miller and Russ Vought, the White House budget director, to understand how this approach will unfold. Both are architects and advocates of vastly expanding presidential power, believing there are virtually no restraints on what Trump can do as president.

The Swamp can expect tougher sledding: Miller, unlike most of his predecessors, is driven more by ideology than by meetings with lobbyists or industry groups. "Stephen gives zero f*cks what K Street thinks," a Trump confidant told us.

Between the lines: Midterm losses pushed Presidents Clinton and Obama to the center. Trump's instincts are the opposite: Assert maximal power. 

The playbook:

Restore MAGA. Two years ago, MAGA — mostly its network of podcasts, YouTubers and online activists — was a powerful, united force in media and politics. Today it's a hot, divided mess. Trump's attention to his base drifted. Now Vice President Vance and Miller desperately want to rebuild and rev up MAGA. That's why ending the Iran war, curtailing aid to Israel and pushing harder on RFK Jr.'s MAHA agenda are suddenly top-tier topics.

Rule by pen. Miller, Vought and White House lawyers have been drafting executive actions to govern without Congress, with Justice Department opinions ready to defend them, Reuters reported just before the election. 

Remember: Vought was an architect of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 blueprint for maximizing executive power in Trump II.

Target enemies. Before, it was pure payback. Now, it's also a preemptive warning that the Trump administration will target anyone, including elected members of Congress who target them. Trump ally Roger Stone told us: "Many Democrat lawmakers are going to find themselves under indictment and fighting conviction. Watch."

Purge the "deep state." The Supreme Court's ruling in a case about independent agencies, Trump v. Slaughter, widened the president's power to remove officials. 

"The Slaughter case gives the president tremendous powers," Trump said in an Election Day phone interview with CBS News' Robert Costa. The June ruling handed Trump the power to fire the heads of the FTC and other independent regulators (like FERC) for any reason or no reason.

More monuments. Trump's pharaonic need to gild the White House, build a ballroom, erect a triumphal arch and slap his name on buildings is also an exercise in raw power. 

He told New York Magazine's Ben Terris why he's honoring himself: "Nobody will do it once I'm gone. When I leave here, nobody will." No one can stop him.

The Republican resistance: Expect very little inside the new Congress. 

The reason: Most of Trump's Capitol Hill critics are gone. What's left is a much smaller, but more Trumpian, band of middle-aged and older white Republicans with margins too small to matter much.

The Trump bet: Congressional Republicans will quickly feel Democrats are overreaching and unify in solidarity with Trump, even if it's forced or begrudging.

Yes, but: One of Trump's most predictable attributes is his unpredictability. He said on election night that he'll "work together" with Democrats. What that may look like (with a heavy emphasis on "may"), based on reporting by Axios' Marc Caputo:

-Soften aspects of immigration enforcement, particularly regarding masked agents harassing U.S. citizens.

-Find common ground with MAHA's healthy food agenda, which has become the subject of vicious post-election infighting among Trump insiders.

-Sign legislation from the new Congress that would undo massive Medicaid cuts in his "One Big Beautiful Bill."

The bottom line: Trump is still Trump. He's 80 and it shows. But he meets force with force, and he'll go down swinging the more Democrats attack him. "Trump and his team are at our best when our backs are against the wall," one adviser told Caputo. "Trump comes out fighting. We're full-throated and full throttle."

-NewsBreak

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen 

Trump sparks outrage with "wildly disrespectful" claim about troop casualties

 

Donald Trump outraged some political analysts on Sunday after he blurted out a false claim about military casualties in the Iran conflict. Speaking to reporters at the airport in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump claimed no soldiers have been killed in the conflict, a claim that his own Department of Defense has refuted. In October, the Pentagon raised the official death toll in the Iran war to 23, Stars and Stripes reported.

"We won in Iran," Trump said. "It's just a matter of closing it out now. Maybe we'll wait. Some of their neighbors would prefer that we keep it the way that it is. Again, we haven't lost anybody. No soldiers," he added, comparing America's casualties in Iran with larger conflicts like the war of Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Vietnam War.

Trump's comments sparked a firestorm of criticism online. Nick Field, a politics writer, described the president's comments as "f------ horrible" in a post on X, reiterating the number of casualties that have been reported. Quentin Ocama, state outreach officer for the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, posted on X that Trump's claim was also "wildly disrespectful" to service members. 

"Wildly disrespectful of the service members who have been killed or injured in this clusterfuck of a conflict," he wrote. "Our crisis with a lack of serious and competent leadership continues…." Journalist Aaron Rupar described Trump's claims in a post on X as "lies."

-Robert Davis, NewsBreak