Fourteen Glorious Minutes

 

Picture this—you’re 36 years old, crunching numbers by day and playing goalie in a beer league by night. You’re also listed as the emergency backup goalie for the Chicago Blackhawks; a role that’s more about paperwork than playing time. The odds of actually stepping on NHL ice? Practically zero.

However, hockey is a sport built on chaos, and one night in 2018, the chaos came calling. Both Blackhawks goalies went down, and suddenly Scott Foster was told to grab his gear. With a 6–2 lead and six minutes left in the third, the beer leaguer walked into an NHL crease against the Winnipeg Jets. And here’s the crazy part—he didn’t just survive; he shut the door. Seven saves, no goals, and a standing ovation.

The United Center erupted. The officials even named him the game’s first star. One night, one period, one perfect story. Scott Foster went back to being an accountant the next day, but for 14 glorious minutes, he lived every beer leaguer’s wildest dream.

The Road to the Camps: Echoes of a Fascist Past

 

Historically, the most terrible things war, genocide, and slavery have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. – Howard Zinn

The irony is unbearable. Trump has saturated public life in lies, turned immigrants and Black citizens into targets of contempt, and made corruption and violence the grammar of governance. He pledges loyalty to dictators, surrounds himself with sycophants and thugs, and uses state power to abduct foreign students, persecute immigrants, and declare war on the so-called left, grotesquely blaming them for Charlie Kirk’s death, even before a suspect was arrested. What should be a moment of grief over Charlie Kirk’s death has been twisted into a weaponized spectacle, with Trump and his allies rushing to frame the assassination as proof of leftist extremism.

As Jeffrey St. Clair observed, “Leaders of the Right didn’t waste much time counseling their ranks to restrict themselves to ‘thoughts and prayers’ over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even before the assassin had been identified or a motive uncovered, they blamed the ‘violent rhetoric’ of the Left for Kirk’s death.” 

This is not mourning, it is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: accuse first, investigate never, weaponize tragedy to consolidate power. In this poisonous narrative, the real “enemies within” are not the racists, insurrectionists, corrupt corporations, and right-wing extremists who stormed the Capitol, but the critics of authoritarian power as well as groups designated as “other.” 

Against them, Trump and his allies wage war on the First Amendment, turning freedom of speech from a cornerstone of democracy into its target. In their framing, freedom of speech is recast not as a bulwark of democracy but as its enemy. 

From comedians and journalists to students, educators, and independent groups, every dissenting voice is branded a conspirator in imagined crimes–their real offense nothing more than speaking against cruelty when silence was demanded. Or committing the crime of not being loyal enough to Donald Trump. 

As Hannah Arendt once warned, under totalitarianism thinking itself becomes dangerous. Authoritarianism in its many forms arises in part from the failure to think—a prescient warning in the age of manufactured ignorance. The normalization of ignorance, thoughtlessness, and moral blindness in the age of Trump is foundational to creating fascist subjects who cannot tell right from wrong, truth from lies, or justice from evil.

This warning is even more urgent today, for there is a horrifying ignorance in Trump that unleashes predatory passions, stretching from his embrace of war criminals and historical amnesia to the fatal strikes he ordered on three alleged drug-smuggling vessels. For Trump, the legality of such acts is irrelevant.  Violence coupled with criminalizing dissent is central to the logic of annihilation at the core of fascist politics.

This is fascism’s signature maneuver. Hitler did it in 1933 after the Reichstag fire, blaming communists and invoking emergency powers to suspend civil liberties. Mussolini did it in 1925 after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti, turning a moment of crisis into a justification for outlawing opposition and silencing presses.  Orbán has perfected the tactic in Hungary, scapegoating “Soros-funded leftists” to dismantle universities, criminalize protest, and eviscerate the press.

Trump is no exception. He exploits Kirk’s death not to grieve but to consolidate power. His message is blunt: dissent is violence, criticism is terrorism, disloyalty is a crime, and free speech itself is a threat to Trump’s ideological panopticon. The vicious amplification of this line of toxic thinking is evident in Elon Musk declaring “The Left is the party of murder,” and Trump’s consigliere Laura Loomer demanding the state “shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization…The Left is a national security threat.” It reaches hysterical heights in the anti-communist rhetoric of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who has likened the left to a “vast domestic terrorist network,” which he vowed to uproot and dismantle. The rhetoric is chilling not only for its cruelty but for its naked embrace of repression and the threat of violence as policy.

The consequences of Trump’s assault on dissent flare like a blazing neon sign in Times Square, impossible to ignore. Under his lawless reign, even satire is recast as treason, branded a ‘hate crime,’ as though laughter itself had become treason. Academic institutions that keep alive the memory of history and the struggles for freedom are stalked with mob-like threats, extortion masquerading as patriotism, intimidation parading as loyalty.  

Canadian citizens are being threatened with visa revocation simply for making what Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, and others defined as critical comments about Kirk’s death. This sends a chilling message: Trump’s authoritarian reach now crosses borders, extending its silencing power beyond U.S. soil. In this twisted logic, simply making a critical remark about Kirk is branded as a ‘celebration’– a perverse distortion far removed from reality. Kirk’s death should be mourned, but that is distinct from condemning his far-right ideological beliefs.

These acts of silencing are never isolated. They are instruments of power that legitimate broader forms of state violence. Censorship, propaganda, and the glorification of cruelty converge to normalize repression as both necessary and inevitable. 

Corporations and universities bow in fear and greed, sacrificing every shred of public responsibility to feed an unending hunger for power and capital. Nowhere is this surrender more shameful than in higher education, where universities crush dissent and betray their own students by handing over the names of those protesting genocide to the Trump administration. tragically repeating the cowardice of fascist-era campuses. 

Even worse, Ken Klippenstein reports that “the Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and are considering compiling a watchlist of Trans people. 

It is a chilling echo of fascist-era complicities, a moral collapse disguised as institutional neutrality. The echo is haunting and has given rise to a new McCarthyism of campus informants, a reprise of the shameful complicities of fascist-era universities. As journalist David French argued on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes show, the current attacks on free speech and dissidents critical of Trump are worse than McCarthyism, because it is “larger and broader in scope. It is more aggressive. It stretches across all aspects of American society.” 

This is not merely an institutional failure but a moral collapse, a repudiation of knowledge, conscience, and the very democratic commitments that should define the purpose of the academy. What we are witnessing is McCarthyism reborn with a vengeance–surveillance, informants, blacklists.  Higher education has long unsettled the right, especially since the democratizing struggles of the sixties. Today that fear has hardened into something darker: not merely efforts to weaken its critical role, but the imposition of pedagogical tyranny that turns universities into laboratories of indoctrination.

Trump, Rubio, Miller, Bondi, and their cohort of democracy-haters now threaten to strip dissenting Americans of their passports, revoke citizenship, and criminalize free speech. They howl in outrage at being compared to fascists, even as their actions mirror the same grim playbook: militarizing society, crushing dissent, concentrating power in the hands of a cult leader, and reanimating the legacy of white supremacy and racial cleansing.

Trump hails Netanyahu, a war criminal, as a war hero. With grotesque irony, he denounces the left as the true perpetrators of violence. At home, his vindictiveness is just as corrosive: boasting of pressuring ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel. This petty act of vengeance amounts to his own assault on the First Amendment and is a chilling reminder of how fragile free speech becomes under authoritarian whim. Yet no alarm is sounded when Fox News host Brian Kilmeade casually suggests exterminating the homeless through “involuntary lethal injections.” 

Nor does outrage rise in the Trump administration, or much of the mainstream press, over the United States’ complicity in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, where, as the Quds News Network reports, “At least 19,424 children have been killed in Israeli attacks over 700 days of genocide in Gaza, the equivalent of one child every 52 minutes. Among the victims are 1,000 infants under the age of one.” Silence here is not neutrality; it is complicity in barbarism.

When the conduct of comedians is criminalized, it is not simply a matter of taste, decorum, or even misplaced moral outrage, it is a direct assault on the principle of free speech. Comedy has always served as a space where hypocrisy is unmasked, abuses of power are ridiculed, and the absurdities of authoritarian politics are laid bare. 

In fact, when Vladimir Putin first came to power in 2000, one of the early targets of his cultural crackdown was the satirical television show “Kukly” (Куклы, meaning dolls), a puppet show produced by the independent channel NTV. Apparently being called the little Tsar puppet was too much for him to tolerate. This ruthless act of censorship was widely seen as a watershed moment in Putin’s consolidation of power. Of course, the real issue here is that to police or punish comedians for doing what they do is to signal that the state now seeks to control even the spaces of laughter and irony.

This criminalization is more than censorship; it is a canary in the coal mine for gauging the advance of fascism. When jokes are reclassified as crimes, the warning could not be clearer: what begins with comedians will not end with them. It marks the testing of boundaries, the normalization of repression, and the silencing of one of the oldest and most effective forms of dissent. The move reveals the fragility of regimes that cannot tolerate critique, no matter how playful or irreverent, and it signifies a broader project to narrow public space until only official voices remain.

In this sense, the attack on comedy should not be dismissed as a trivial or secondary issue. It is a symbolic and practical escalation of authoritarian politics, one that exposes the contempt fascist movements hold for humor, irony, and dissenting speech. If laughter is made a crime, then resistance itself is already under indictment. 

Repressing dissent has a long history in the U.S extending from the Red Scare of the 1920s to the domestic repression that followed Bush’s war on terrorism. Today’s attacks on dissent are more widespread, damaging, and unchecked than much of what we have seen in the past. To borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton, Trump and his MAGA stooges are drunk “on fantasies of omnipotence” and revel in acts of violence, destruction, and the exercise of boundless state power.

The parallels with fascist history could not be more ominous. The Reichstag fire decree suspended civil liberties and imprisoned communists; today, Trump declares dissent worthy of censorship and if Pam Bondi is to be taken at face value will be labeled as hate speech and subject to state repression. Benito Mussolini used  Giacomo Matteotti’s assassination to further consolidate his own power; today, Trump uses Kirk’s death to silence students, educators, and journalists. Orbán dismantled Hungary’s free press and universities by conjuring enemies; today, Trump and Miller invoke “the radical left” as an existential threat. 

Violence in America’s militarized streets now fuses with what John Ganz calls a “sanctimonious hue and cry … over the martyred dead, hysteria is whipped up about terrorism and public disorder [and] the power of the state is brought to bear against public figures who oppose and criticize the regime.” Fear has become the regime’s preferred weapon, wielded alongside a politics of erasure, historical amnesia, and ruthless denial.

Jeffrey St. Clair noted with grim precision that Kirk’s killing is “awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets”, but the hypocrisy lies in Trump’s silence after earlier acts of MAGA violence: “When two Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch.” 

Violence committed by the Right elicits no outrage, but a single death weaponized against the Left becomes the justification for a war on dissent. As St. Clair recounts, the ledger of right-wing violence between 2018 and 2025 reads like a requiem: the assault on CDC headquarters, the murder of Officer David Rose, the plot to seize Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the massacre of 23 souls in an El Paso Walmart, and the slaughter of 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Every act carried the rhythm of cruelty; every atrocity struck like a warning written in fire and blood.

In spite of the nefarious claims by Trump, Miller, Bondi, and other officials that the left bears responsibility for Charlie Kirk’s death, the facts tell a different story. NBC News reports that “the federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down.” 

The Trump regime refuses to acknowledge this, erasing evidence and fabricating a narrative designed to demonize its critics. This distortion follows a familiar historical pattern, yet what the Trump administration refuses to admit and desperately hide is that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, “since 2002, right-wing ideologies have fueled more than 70% of all extremist attacks and domestic terrorism plots in the United States.”

This is not simply denial but calculated deceit. By inverting reality, blaming dissenters for the violence overwhelmingly fueled by their own ideological allies, the Trump administration wages war on truth itself, weaponizing lies to justify repression. This is the oldest tool of authoritarianism; a script lifted from the fascist playbook in which regimes fabricate internal enemies to mask their own violence.

This is the machinery of fascism: scapegoating, historical amnesia, and the fabrication of a “threat within” to mobilize fear and erase accountability. To remain silent in the face of such lies is to allow history’s darkest patterns to repeat. The ominous rattling of boxcars is no longer mere metaphor; it is rehearsal. The same trains that once ferried enemies of the state, Jews, communists, Roma, and others- to concentration camps echo in today’s discourse of surveillance, detention, and deportation. These echoes abroad make the danger at home impossible to ignore. The first targets are always the vulnerable, immigrants, refugees, students, and the homeless. But the machinery of repression, once primed, sweeps wider. What begins at the margins always moves to the center.

First the masked thugs of state-sponsored terror descended on immigrants, then on student protesters; they occupied neighborhoods, turned cities into militarized staging grounds, and normalized violence as the language of lawless rule. Now the machinery of repression is tightening its grip, moving ever closer to ordinary citizens. A shadow from an authoritarian past has fallen across the republic, and unless it is confronted, the future will echo the grim theaters of repression already unfolding in Hungary, India, and Argentina. 

In all these countries including the United States, leaders of the new fascism speak with vomit in their mouths and blood on their hands. They share a language that Toni Morrison calls “a dead language” It is an “oppressive language that does more than represent violence; it is violence;” Trump and his minions traffic in a repressive language infused with power, censored and censoring. 

Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. It offers mass spectacles, a moral somnambulance, and a psychotic infatuation for those who seek refuge in unchecked power. It forges a community built on greed, corruption, and hate, steeped in a scandal of hollow fulfillment.

In the current historical moment ripe with a politics wedded to revenge, systemic racism, and the building of a police state, language is weaponized, functioning as a powerful force for manufactured ignorance. The Trump administration turns grief into a rallying cry for repression. The radical imagination is now doused in conspiracy theories and civic ignorance. A hollow politics of cruelty now finds its match in the ruthlessness of state terrorism. 

At home, Trump and his political hacks imagine themselves as victims while they spread violence, misery, cruelty, and moral decay both at home and abroad. The stakes could not be clearer: silence is complicity, and to speak, to talk back, and to engage in non-violent action is now the most urgent precondition for building powerful modes of collective resistance. The lights are going out fast, but there is still time to make justice, equality, and freedom the foundation for a radical democracy; resistance is no longer optional but the urgent political and moral task of our time. 

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.

-CounterPunch

How to Protect Yourself from Scammers

Scenario 1:

I was scrolling on social and saw a sale ad for one of my favorite brands. It looked just like other ads I’d bought from before. The discount was really good, so I clicked on it and went to what looked exactly like their website, even with the free shipping headline.

When I went to check out, I thought it was odd I couldn’t find a place for my credit card, just options for digital payment platforms like Zelle^®. But I thought no big deal and paid with Zelle^®. I got suspicious when I didn’t get a confirmation email right away like I usually do. I waited about three weeks, but the merchandise never showed up. I tried to put in a claim for fraud with my bank, but I was told there’s no way to get my money back.

Help protect yourself:

Always type in a company’s website address yourself to see if special sales or promo codes are listed there. If not, the ad you’re seeing and the website it’s taking you to are likely a scam. Where possible use your credit or debit card which offers protection features that may not be there if you pay by other means.

Scenario 2:

I got a giant yellow “alert” that covered my computer screen, saying my computer had been hacked. My cursor was even moving on its own, so something definitely seemed wrong. Another alert appeared that looked legitimately from the same brand as my computer, telling me to call the tech support line.

The man who answered was very professional and said they’d been seeing this attack happening a lot lately. He had me go to a website that had all sorts of cyber security information on it and click on a link. He said it would let him see my screen to gauge how bad the attack was. He had me sign into some unimportant websites like a movie site and my pet store. He said everything looked fine, but I should sign into my bank account to also check it. He said he couldn’t see my password as it showed up with just those dots in the password field.  I told him there were no unusual transactions on my account, so he said it looked like it was all a false alarm and hung up. 

Little did I know, that when I gave him remote access to my computer, he was able to see everything I typed. The scammers later signed into my bank account and transferred thousands out.

Help protect yourself:

Scammers know “virus alerts” immediately put computer users into a panic. Never click on virus alerts, even if they look like they come from your computer company or an anti-virus protection company. If you think your computer was impacted, talk to a reputable service provider.

Be careful when using checks. Scammers can steal checks from mailboxes and those not properly disposed of after being deposited. Then, they can use chemicals to erase and rewrite the checks to themselves. They can also sell your personal info or use it to create counterfeit checks.

Check-writing tips:

-Use permanent ink so it's harder to erase.

-Don't leave empty space before the payee or dollar amount.

-Draw a line through the extra spaces.

-Sign the same way every time.

-Mail checks from inside the post office.

-Keep documents safe.

-Review statements regularly.

-Monitor your accounts and verify the payee and check amounts.

-Consider alternative payment methods like Chase Online℠ Bill Pay, Zelle^® 

Watch out for scammers impersonating banks:

A scammer calls or texts pretending to be from Chase [or from other banks] and says you need to send money to another account using a wire transfer. They may claim it’s to reverse fraud on your account. Don’t fall for it – it’s a scam! 

We will never ask you to send money to yourself.

Tips to help you stay safe:

-Know who you're talking to: You can verify that you're speaking with us by hanging up and calling the number on the back of your Chase card or your account statement.

-Take a moment: Think about what they're asking for, and verify they are who they say they are, especially if it feels urgent or pressured — it could be a scam.

-Be careful when sending money: It's important to verify you're not sending money to a scammer. Once you send money you may not be able to get it back.

-To help protect yourself, always be suspicious of calls, emails, texts or any communication you receive from someone you don't know — particularly if they want money or your personal information. See below for examples of common scams and tips to be more secure.

-Be cautious of unsolicited calls or texts: If a charity reaches out unexpectedly, say you'll call back using the number listed in the CharityWatch, for more information, Opens overlay or the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, for giving options, Opens overlay. 

Phishing: Watch out for suspicious calls, emails and texts:

"Phishing" is when you get an email that looks reputable but asks you to call a fraudulent number, respond to the email or go to a website and enter personal information. You may be asked to look at an attachment, which then gives bad actors access to your computer if you open it.

Suspicious messages may have typos or grammatical mistakes. Don't click on links or attachments in an email if you're not sure who it's from.

You can report a suspicious email to us by reporting it to phishing@chase.com. You may also want to report suspicious calls, emails, and text messages by visiting, https://ReportFraud.ftc.gov, Opens overlay. 

ATM withdrawals:

"Hey, don't forget to use the tap feature on the ATM. I can show you how it works." Don't accept help from strangers at the ATM. Pay attention to your surroundings and watch out for people looking at your screen. 

Computer virus:

"We've detected malware on your computer. Give me access remotely so I can fix that for you." Never give anyone remote access to your computer unless you can 100% verify who they are.

Watch out for charity scams:

Scammers come out of the woodwork to prey on people who are looking to help relief efforts when disaster strikes. Charity scams can appear as fraudulent websites, phishing emails, text messages, crowdfunding sites, phone calls, and postal mail. Being informed is key to protecting your donations. Tactics scammers use 

Impersonation: They mimic established charities or create new ones with similar names.

Emotional appeals: They use heart-wrenching stories and pictures.

Technology: They create and share links to websites that look like they’re legitimate charities.

Verify the charity: Check the legitimacy of the charity and access their official website through CharityWatch, Opens overlay or the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, Opens overlay.

More tips to help you stay safe: 

For sale, hot deal:

"Get a great price on these exclusive sneakers. You can pay using cash or a payment app." Be wary of great "deals" on social media sites. Once you send money you may not get it back.

Someone you 'know':

"I'm with the IRS, and you owe back taxes. If not paid immediately, a lawsuit will be filed against you." Be cautious if you’re told to take action right away. Think about what they’re asking for and verify that they are who they say they are.

'Accidental' payment:

"I didn't mean to send you that money! Please send it back to me right away." Never return any unexpected funds without calling Chase first.

Romance:

"I'm having a medical emergency and need money. I promise to pay it back quickly. Can you help?" Don't send money to anyone you've only spoken to online or by phone.

You've won...!:

"Congratulations! You've won the lottery! We will need to collect taxes prior to your payment." Do not send money to claim a prize. Chances are it's a scam.

Home closing:

"These are the wire instructions to close on your house." Be very cautious of last-minute changes to payment instruction and call your agent or loan officer directly to verify wire instructions before you send money.

Investment:

"You've registered to receive notifications on investment opportunities. Are you ready to invest? I have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!" Research the person or company you're dealing with, and make sure they're legitimate.

Spoofing: Look out for scammers in disguise:

Scammers can "spoof" phone numbers. The caller ID can say the call or text is from Chase even though it's not. They do this to trick people into providing their personal or financial information or to get you to send money.

Remember: 

Even if your caller ID says a call or text is from Chase [or another bank], it could be a scam. When in doubt hang up and call us!

-Chase Bank

"What We Must Do Is Clear"

 

What Trump is doing isn’t politics. It’s the deliberate centralization of power, seizing it from the people and the media, silencing dissent, bending institutions to his will, and cloaking himself in immunity given him by six... Republicans on the Supreme Court.

It looks less like a presidency and more like a throne.

-He declared a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., despite crime being at a thirty-year low.

-He created permanent “quick reaction” National Guard units, ready to deploy into cities at his whim: a standing domestic army the Founders explicitly warned against.

-He rolled the model into Memphis, calling it a “replica” of D.C., and bragged Chicago is next. Occupation, not governance.

Retribution is the centerpiece of his rule.

-Security clearances stripped from Bolton, Milley, Fauci, and dozens of others who dared to oppose him.

-Justice Department staff and prosecutors purged for doing their jobs.

-A $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times designed to bankrupt it for printing facts.

-After Charlie Kirk’s death, networks pressured to fire Kimmel and silence Colbert. Everyday people hunted down online and forced out of jobs, from a Nasdaq employee to a 23-year-old Idaho worker. Fear is the point.

The state itself is being weaponized.

-The FCC warned ABC affiliates they could face investigations, fines, or even license loss after Kimmel’s jokes about MAGA. Within days, Jimmy Kimmel Live was yanked from the air. If ABC can be threatened — and Trump repeated that threat last night — what message does that send to every other network? Stay quiet or be crushed.

-Sanctuary cities are being starved of funds. Immigrants and entire communities are criminalized under Executive Order 14159.

-The administration promises a crackdown on “left-wing groups,” presumably meaning activists, unions, professors, nonprofits, anyone who resists.

And the ambitions don’t stop at America’s borders. Trump has mused openly about reshaping the map of the Western Hemisphere.

-He’s revived his obsession with Greenland, backing a House bill to purchase or “otherwise acquire” it, renaming it “Red, White, and Blueland.” He’s refused to rule out military force if Denmark resists.

-He’s declared the U.S. should reclaim the Panama Canal, calling Panama’s fees “exorbitant” and floating the idea of seizing control in the name of national security.

-He’s even suggested Canada could become the 51st state and slapped massive tariffs on Canadian goods to show he’s serious.

-Mexico, too, is in his crosshairs: trade wars, tariffs, and rhetoric that treat America’s southern neighbor not as a sovereign nation but as territory to be coerced.

And now, in the Caribbean, Trump’s America has gone further: U.S. naval forces have literally blown up three Venezuelan boats. People have died. Maduro calls it aggression, militias are mobilizing, and the two nations are sliding toward war. This is what happens when unchecked power turns outward: war abroad becomes the mirror of repression at home.

Abroad, he crowns this vision by embracing Vladimir Putin. A red carpet rolled out for Putin in Alaska, gifting him legitimacy amid his war on Ukraine and his penetration of NATO airspace in Poland, Romania, and Estonia. Russian state media celebrates Trump’s dismantling of USAID and his praise for Putin. Meanwhile, long-time allies are trashed and abandoned. America’s power abroad is being traded away for the company of strongmen.

Support for Ukraine and NATO is now treated as transactional, not principled. Aid is approved one week, paused the next. The administration signals that restoring Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders are “unrealistic,” effectively rewarding Russian aggression. NATO allies are pressured to “pay up” or risk abandonment, as if the alliance is a mob protection racket rather than a shared democratic defense. 

If America no longer defends democracy abroad, what confidence should we have that it will defend democracy at home?

The same coercive logic drives Trump’s use of tariffs.

-He wields tariffs not as economic policy but as punishment, slapping Canada, Mexico, and Europe with sweeping trade taxes to force compliance.

-Tariffs have become his political weapon: extortion dressed up as trade, a way to bend allies, neighbors, and even domestic industries to his will and intimidate them into giving him gifts like a multimillion-dollar airplane or investing billions in his companies.

-Just as troops in D.C. or the FCC threaten to silence dissent, tariffs silence resistance by making the cost of saying “no” unbearable.

And in Palestine, the U.S. has abandoned even the principle of self-determination.

Humanitarian aid is cut. Palestinian voices are dismissed. U.S. policy aligns squarely with occupation and repression. This isn’t about building democracy; it’s about denying an entire people the right to decide their own future. And when self-determination abroad is treated as expendable, it sends a clear warning at home: your rights, too, can be conditional, your voice too can be silenced when it no longer serves those in power.

The pattern is unmistakable: everything that disperses power — free media, independent science, civic education, state and local authority, progressive nonprofits, judicial independence — is under siege.

-Scientists and public health experts are being fired, programs gutted, data suppressed.

-Justice Sonia Sotomayor implicitly warns that Americans may no longer know the difference between a president and a king. Courts face pressure, judges face threats, and rulings are bent to expand presidential immunity.

-Election laws are being re-engineered to federalize control, cut access, and tilt outcomes.

This isn’t scattershot; it’s systemic. And here’s the truth history tells us: once power is seized, it is rarely given back.

If Trump normalizes troops in cities, that precedent will endure. If he silences networks with FCC threats, that precedent will endure. If lawsuits against journalists succeed, that precedent will endure. Each act rewires the presidency into a throne for a would-be king.

And yet some Democrats act as if this is business as usual while the ground is ripped out from beneath us. Their weakness is complicity.

But democracy is not passive. It has always been the people who’ve seizing power back from kings, dictators, and colonizers. The Founders understood this when they wrote the Constitution to divide power across three branches of government. They fought to prevent a new form of monarchy. And now it’s our fight again.

What we must do is clear:

-Demand Congress block the abuse of emergency powers; contact your elect representatives every week.

-Push courts to stop executive overreach before precedents harden.

-Support independent journalism under attack.

-Push back hard against censorship of the media and corporations that bow their knee to Trump.

-Stand with those being punished: scientists, teachers, comedians, reporters, immigrants, protesters.

-Mobilize peacefully but relentlessly in the streets; No Kings Day is in a few weeks.

-Elect governors, legislators, and mayors who’ll serve as firewalls against federal occupation.

This is about power: who has it, who loses it, and whether it still belongs to the people.

If we do nothing, our children will ask what democracy was like, because they won’t have it. If we fight, we can still preserve the greatest system humanity has ever devised: a republic of laws, not autocrats. Trump wants to be king. He’s already acting like one. The only question is whether we’ll kneel or rise, together, and take our democracy back.

-Thom Hartmann: The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

Trump's administration's actions violated fundamental constitutional rights

 

Several New England affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a new class-action lawsuit that challenges the immigration detention policies of US President Donald Trump.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts announced on Tuesday that it is joining with the ACLU of New Hampshire, the ACLU of Maine, ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, the law firm Araujo and Fisher, the law firm Foley Hoag, and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic to sue the Trump administration over its policy of denying bond hearings to people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The ACLU of Massachusetts described the denial of bond hearings for ICE detainees as “a violation of statutory and constitutional rights” that are “upending decades of settled law and established practice in immigration proceedings.” The end result of this, the ACLU of Massachusetts warned, is that “thousands of people in Massachusetts will be denied due process.”

The complaint contends that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been denying ICE detainees their rights by “systematically reclassifying these people from the statutory authority of 8 U.S.C. § 1226, which usually allows for the opportunity to request bond during removal proceedings, to the no-bond detention provisions of 8 U.S.C. § 1225, which does not apply to people arrested in the interior of the United States and placed in removal proceedings.”

The ACLU of Massachusetts said that the administration’s misclassification of detainees stems from actions taken by the Tacoma Immigration Court in Washington, which in 2022 started “misclassifying § 1226 detainees arrested inside the United States as mandatory detainees under § 1225, solely because they initially entered the country without permission.”

The lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Jose Arnulfo Guerrero Orellana, an immigrant who resides in Massachusetts and has no criminal record, but who was detained by ICE last week and has been denied the right to challenge his detention. The complaint asks that due process be restored for Orellana and others who have been similarly detained and held unlawfully.

Daniel McFadden, managing attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts, argued that the administration’s actions violate fundamental constitutional rights.

“All people in the United States are entitled to due process—without exception,” he said. “When the government arrests any person inside the United States, it must be required to prove to a judge that there is an actual reason for the person’s detention. Our client and others like him have a constitutional and statutory right to receive a bond hearing for exactly that purpose.”

Annelise Araujo, founding principal and owner at Boston-based law firm Araujo and Fisher, argued that the administration’s detention policy “violates due process and upends nearly 30 years of established practice.”

“The people impacted by this policy are neighbors, friends, and family members, living peacefully in the United States and making important contributions to our communities,” she said. “Currently, the only recourse is to file individual habeas petitions for each detained client—a process that keeps people detained longer and stretches the resources of our courts.”

-Brad Reed, Common Dreams

Bromance

 

There’s a new statue on the east end of the National Mall for Washington DC residents and tourists to enjoy. The bronze statue shows two men frolicking, grinning wide and holding hands, each with a foot joyously kicked back.

“We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his ‘closest friend,’ Jeffrey Epstein,” a plaque at the bottom of the spray-painted bronze installation reads. A permit from the National Park Service will allow the statue to stay on the National Mall grounds through 8pm on Sunday.

The fabricator of the statue remains unknown, but it has artistic and thematic similarities to recent art pieces critical of the president.

Past sculptures on the National Mall that paid side-eyed tribute to Trump include a bronze pile of poop perched on a congressional desk to “honor” January 6th protestors, and a statue titled “Dictator Approved,” featuring a golden thumbs up crushing the Statue of Liberty’s crown and the base featuring approving quotes of Trump from Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Kim Jong-un and Viktor Orbán…

-The Guardian

"Donald Trump humiliates himself on the world stage with unhinged, insulting speech at the United Nations"

 

Every day is a new low with this president and his administration of unhinged lunatics, but America hit rock bottom on the world stage today with Donald Trump’s speech to the UN in which he told everyone that he was right about everything and that their countries are “going to hell” by not being monstrously inhumane in their approach to immigration.

“You’re destroying your countries. I can tell you I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.” Flitting from self-aggrandizing delusion to open, naked racism, Trump took credit for ending wars and trashing the UN for not solving wars themselves.

“I ended seven wars. And in all cases, they were raging with countless thousands of people being killed. This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda, a vicious violent war that was, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. It included all of them. No president or prime minister, and for that matter, no other country has ever done anything close to that. And I did it in just seven months."

“It's never happened before. There's never been anything like that. I'm very honored to have done it. It's too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them. And sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them. I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal.”

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that, on the way up, stopped right in the middle. If the First Lady wasn't in great shape, she would have fallen. But she's in great shape. We're both in good shape. We're both still.

And then a teleprompter that didn't work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations, a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much. And by the way, it's working now. Thank you. I think I should just do it the other way. It's easier. Thank you very much.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Trump called climate change the “biggest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and said, “the entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and it must be immediate.”

The most humiliating part, however, was him bragging…about his hats. “During the campaign they had a hat, the best-selling hat ‘Trump was right about everything,’” he told the gathered world leaders while discussing climate change. “And I don’t say that in a bragging way but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”

He’s been right about nothing. A senior foreign diplomat posted at the UN texted a Washington Post reporter and said: "This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans do not see how embarrassing this is?" Yeah, we do.

-Occupy Democrats

"Donald Trump has, allegedly, found 'the answer to autism': Tylenol"/"Trump administration has taken steps to undermine pregnant women’s access to Covid vaccines and antidepressants"

 

On Monday, Trump announced that pregnant women should dramatically limit their use of acetaminophen, known by the brand name Tylenol or internationally as paracetamol, because, he claimed, it raises the risk of autism.

This claim is not supported by science. Research into links between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism have not proved a causal relationship, while medical experts widely agree that growing diagnoses of autism cannot be traced back to a singular cause.

Acetaminophen can be used to alleviate fever and pain during pregnancy. Leaving those conditions untreated can carry “significant maternal and infant health risks”, according to a statement from the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine. Untreated fevers, for example, can lead to miscarriage, birth defects and premature births.

Trump’s announcement was a triumph for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has a track record of making unproven claims about autism and autistic people. Yet it was also the latest move in another emerging campaign within the Trump administration: one that seeks to valorize “natural” pregnancy and motherhood – that is, pregnancy and motherhood without proven medical interventions – to the point where it can corrode women’s health and safety.

Over the past several months, the Trump administration has taken steps to undermine pregnant women’s access to Covid vaccines and antidepressants. These steps have been in defiance of widespread agreement among medical experts that the benefits of these therapeutics tend to outweigh the risks.

In May, Kennedy, who has long questioned the safety of vaccines, said that he “couldn’t be more pleased to announce” that the CDC would no longer recommend that healthy pregnant women get vaccinated against Covid.

Then, over the summer, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hosted a panel about antidepressant use during pregnancy. Predominantly staffed with people who have a history of antidepressant skepticism or who have been consultants in litigation over antidepressants, the panel heavily emphasized the risks of taking antidepressants during pregnancy. One of the panelists, a psychologist named Roger McFillin, said that depression “has devolved into an umbrella term” and “doesn’t even have meaning any more”.

“Are women just naturally experiencing their emotions more intensely?” he asked. “Those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.”

They very well may be symptoms of a disease. Mental health conditions contribute to almost a third of all pregnancy-related deaths in the US, according to a 2025 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Of deaths involving mental health struggles, roughly a third were suicides.

Covid, too, endangers women’s lives – and those of their babies. A 2021 study of 2,100 pregnant women around the world found that women who contracted Covid during pregnancy were 20 times more likely to die compared to those that did not catch the virus. More than 11% of women who contracted Covid also had their babies test positive for Covid.

While the Trump administration casts doubt on whether women should use life-saving remedies to protect themselves against Covid and depression, Republicans have in recent months moved to embrace at least one kind of intervention: “restorative reproductive medicine” (RRM), a constellation of therapies that purport to “restore” individuals’ “natural” fertility without resorting to in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Advocates of RRM say they are working to present women with more options, but pre-eminent medical groups such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine say that there is little evidence that RRM techniques work – and that it is effectively “a pseudonym for a basic infertility evaluation”, as one reproductive endocrinologist told the Guardian this summer.

These moves – the attacks on pregnant women’s access to Tylenol, to Covid vaccines, to antidepressants; the insistence that women should get pregnant without IVF – all adhere to a basic fallacy known as “the appeal to nature”, or the idea that something that comes from the earth is better than anything human-made.

This idea powers much of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, of which Kennedy is effectively the czar. It is also patently false.

There are reasons why you are not supposed to drink unpasteurized, or “raw”, milk. (They’re called campylobacter, cryptosporidium, E coli, listeria, brucella, and salmonella.) And there are reasons why a small cut or a stubbed toe is no longer a death sentence. (They’re called antibiotics.)

When combined with pregnancy, the illogic of the appeal to nature is stretched even further, folding in on itself like Laffy Taffy. Not only should pregnancy – and the women who do it – be handled as “naturally” as possible, but pregnancy and motherhood are themselves women’s natural states.

Authoritarian governments throughout history have sought to convince their people that this is true, in order to subjugate women and to ensure that women are reliable sources of reproduction. That’s why the Trump administration’s drive to diminish pregnant women’s access to Tylenol can’t be divorced from, say, its pronatalist interest in encouraging women to have more babies through $5,000 “baby bonuses”.

Ultimately, all this may lead to fewer options and more pain for women – including those who find parenthood fulfilling, those who are uninterested in it, and those who are everywhere in between. In fact, without Tylenol, that pain may become quite literal.

“All this pressure to become a mother and be a mother is emerging politically, but you’re not supposed to need any help or support,” the journalist Amy Larocca, author of the book How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, said in an interview earlier this year. “You’re supposed to be able to manage it all on your own and [have] no maternity leave, no medical care, no support.”

She added: “There’s a lot of shaming of women who need help and support.”

-Carter Sherman, The Guardian

Lawmakers Demand Answers Over Alleged $50,000 Bribe of Trump Border Czar Tom Homan

 

Accusations of supreme corruption, demands for an investigation, and calls for impeachment proceedings for several high-level Trump administration officials erupted on Saturday after it was reported that a Justice Department probe into Tom Homan, who serves as President Donald Trump’s border czar, was dropped despite documented evidence he accepted a bribe of $50,000 delivered in a bag by undercover FBI agents as part of a sting operation.

Citing multiple people “familiar with the probe,” a review of internal documents, MSNBC was the first to report that during “an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan [...] accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents—who were posing as business executives—win government contracts in a second Trump administration.”

The New York Times, which also spoke to people familiar with the case, reported that the “cash payment, which was made inside a bag from the food chain Cava, grew out of a long-running counterintelligence investigation that had not been targeting Mr. Homan,” and that the encounter, as MSNBC also reported, was recorded. The Times indicates that the recording was audio, while MSNBC‘s version of the evidence suggests that video footage exists.

“Americans deserve disclosure of evidence showing top DHS official Homan accepting a bag full of $50,000 in cash We need to know why the investigation was dropped—all the facts and evidence.” —Sen. Richard Blumenthal

The case implicates both FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney Pam Bondi, who heads the Justice Department. Both were appointed by Trump and are deeply loyal to him politically.

MSNBC reports:

It’s unclear what reasons FBI and Justice Department officials gave for shutting down the investigation. But a Trump Justice Department appointee called the case a “deep state” probe in early 2025 and no further investigative steps were taken, the sources say. On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources.

The federal investigation was launched in western Texas in the summer of 2024 after a subject in a separate investigation claimed Homan was soliciting payments in exchange for awarding contracts should Trump win the presidential election, according to an internal Justice Department summary of the probe reviewed by MSNBC and people familiar with the case.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Texas, working with the FBI, asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to join its ongoing probe “into the Border Czar and former Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan and others based on evidence of payment from FBI undercover agents in exchange for facilitating future contracts related to border enforcement.”

The revelations prompted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) to declare that Trump’s second term is the “most corrupt administration we have ever seen.” Matt Duss, executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, asked: “Seriously though, has anyone ever been handed $50,000 cash in a paper bag for something legit?”

While that’s not a legal standard, news of the dropped case against Homan, given his central role in Trump’s ramped-up attacks on migrants and communities nationwide, sparked an array of outrage, many questions, and a demand for more answers from the Justice Department.

“Who’s the illegal now, Tom Homan?” asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

“Tom Homan should be fired immediately and charged,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.). “Kash Patel should be suspended pending impeachment proceedings, and anyone who aided in this cover-up should be held accountable. Homan’s relationship with GEO Group, who own Delaney Hall in Newark, should be thoroughly investigated, and the facility closed pending that investigation. The amount of corruption in this administration is endless.”

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) had a similar reaction. “Corruption that’s stunning even for this administration,” Markey said. “Homan and anyone who knew and covered this up must resign.”

As the Times reporting notes, the “episode raises questions about whether the administration has sought to shield one of its own officials from legal consequences, and whether Mr. Homan’s actions were considered by the White House when he was appointed to his government role.” In response to questions from MSNBC and the Times, Trump officials downplayed the seriousness of the case. They said that after it was investigated, the bribery allegations did not stand up.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson told MSNBC the probe that led to the recording of Homan was a “blatantly political investigation.” However, it’s clear from the reporting that the original investigation was not targeting Homan at all.

In a joint statement issued Saturday, Patel and Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said the investigation “was subjected to a full review by F.B.I. agents and Justice Department prosecutors. They found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.” That hardly satisfied Democrats in Congress, who said it’s clear the public has a right to know every detail about what occurred and why the case was dropped.

“Release the tapes—Americans deserve disclosure of evidence showing top DHS official Homan accepting a bag full of $50,000 in cash,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “We need to know why the investigation was dropped—all the facts and evidence.”

-Jon Queally is managing editor of Common Dreams.

 

From the Bottom of a Deep Well by Jeff Price

 

I was a regular church attendee, a trustee, and even youth pastor for a short time. My wife, Patricia, taught Sunday school for several years. I did not find God there; nor did I find any redeeming value aside from a collection of good and well-intended people. I would categorize my faith as a well-researched humanist who enjoys debating Christian pastors as they ask for money with which they will likely remodel their suburban kitchens. 

Faith is my favorite subject, and despite incredible effort to be someone who has something of substance to contribute to such conversations, I cannot offer much intellectual debate on the existence or nonexistence of a creator, for I begin with a simple acceptance: given infinite time and all information, humankind likely does not have the capacity to truly comprehend the universe. It is akin to asking our beloved dog not merely to recite poetry, but to craft it—for there are thresholds of understanding that may always lie beyond us.

I have attempted to study many faith traditions, candidly hoping to find meaning there. What struck me most was not their differences, but their echoes. Each tradition seems to claim originality, yet the recurrence suggests either the shared longings of human consciousness or perhaps the repeated whisper of something beyond ourselves, trying to be heard.

Consider, for example, the story of Jesus: a miraculous birth under a star, a herald of peace, a teacher of compassion, who suffers and is ultimately sacrificed. Yet, this story is not wholly unique. Across the world’s myths and religions, one finds strikingly similar figures: divine children born under signs in the heavens, teachers who embody virtue, and martyrs who suffer for the sake of humanity.  Such parallels may point to common borrowing, or they may signal the deep archetypes that human beings have always reached for when trying to tell the story of goodness, redemption, and hope.

One could argue this repetition reveals the fraud in all of them—that religions simply borrow from one another. But one could just as readily argue those overlaps point toward a reality so undeniable that it surfaces in every human attempt to name it.

I find myself caught between those poles and capable of arguing either side compellingly, but believing neither. I am convinced faith is an explanation for some facet of the physical universe that is in harmony with science, but which we are unable to comprehend. While humankind arrogantly claims mastery of science, we look at the sky from the bottom of a deep well. 

I have also come to believe that organized religion, in its institutional form, is too often an overt fraud—an apparatus of control, a tool to make good people feel bad. The Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn captured it well with, "we knew what art was up, what ancient craft."

And yet, if one chooses carefully among its texts, there are fragments of wisdom, like pages of a scattered owner’s manual for life. There is self-help there, guidance for the bewildered, consolation for the grieving. Certain ideals—compassion, justice, sacrifice, mutual reverence—appear across cultures, across centuries, and across sacred texts.

For example, the historical record clearly establishes Jesus of Nazareth as a real figure, attested not only in Christian texts but also in the writings of fastidious Roman historians such as Josephus and Tacitus—leaders of a movement so disruptive it threatened Roman authority and culminated in his execution under Pontius Pilate. The real question is this: is it more extraordinary that he was merely a man whose life and words reshaped civilization, or that he was deemed the Son of God? 

I would argue that he was a mortal, a revolutionary whose parabolic teachings about love, mercy, and justice unsettled both empire and orthodoxy. He suggested that individuals could have their own relationship with the divine, absent the dictates of an organized church and free from the control of the state.

He was a laborer from a remote province, bearing the most common male name of his time, could articulate a vision of love and unity that still resonates across the world is remarkable indeed. The tragedy is that his message, which once invited freedom and solidarity, has too often been recast as a tool of control and division.

His message was one of unity across classes, calling rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, man and woman alike into a common humanity. It is not difficult to see why such an idea was dangerous to the Roman Empire. If he were the Son of God, it would be no surprise that we are still speaking of him today.  

Religious Texts

Much of what’s quoted as ‘anti-gay’ scripture is a translation error, either innocently or to support bigotry. The overwhelming proportion of Christians seem to intuitively recognize this without having factual knowledge. 

The Hebrew Qedeshim—often rendered ‘sodomites’—refers to male temple prostitution and coerces under certain power dynamics (Deut 23:17; 1 Kgs 14:24; etc.), not the people of Sodom or a sexual orientation. Genesis 19 and its parallel in Judges 19 condemn violent domination (gang rape), while Ezekiel 16 names Sodom’s sins as pride, cruelty, and neglect of the poor.

In the New Testament, Malakoi and Arsenokoitai likely target exploitative systems common in the Greco-Roman world—pederasty and sex with slaves—rather than consenting adult same-sex relationships. Read in context, these texts confront sexual coercion and commerce, not same-sex interactions among consenting adults. This is merely one of many modern perversions. 

In exploring these texts, I have found much that is lost in translation. There are also clear examples of hate, violence, slavery, and indefensible evil which are rampant in historical culture.

To study the New Testament in Greek, the Torah and Talmud in Hebrew, the Qur’an in Arabic, or the Upanishads in Sanskrit is to encounter shades of meaning that our modern languages only dimly render. I have read even further afield—the I Ching, the Sutrakritanga, the Pavitra [Hindi] Bible, and countless others—sometimes wrestling with nuanced translations in languages I barely understand. 

The deeper I studied the religions of humankind, the more I realize how little we truly know. Language itself becomes both a window and a wall, describing thought while also bounding it. I still routinely refer to churches as the place where good people are meant to feel bad. The curse of humans developing language is that we cannot process what we cannot shape into words, and so our inquiry into the divine is hobbled before it even begins.

The more I researched, the more religion revealed itself as a mechanism to control populations, to manipulate behavior, and to provide comfort in the face of the unexplainable. And yet, alongside these institutional flaws, the texts also point to something undeniable: that human existence cannot be fully explained.

I have come to believe that one need not be a person of faith to study religious texts and find value in them. Indeed, it is beautiful across time, language, culture, philosophy, and tradition where we find certain universal truths echo with near-perfect resonance.

There is beauty in religious texts, where surviving positive lessons consistently reemerges. I believe there are traits imprinted on humankind and on nature itself, laws written deeper than statute or creed. When we live in harmony with them, we flourish. Some call this ‘the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.’ I hear more of Thoreau in it, though: the transcendentalist’s belief that truth reveals itself when we strip away the noise of society and walk quietly into the woods.

The “Golden Rule” is perhaps the clearest example: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ (Matthew 7:12, Christianity); ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor’ (Talmud Shabbat 31a, Judaism); ‘A man should wander about treating all creatures as he himself would be treated’ (Sutrakritanga 1.11.33, Jainism). Whether attributed to God, Confucius, Muhammad, Jesus, or the Buddha, the concept and even the words are nearly identical.

I tend to believe there is something beyond what we know, and that life is but one state of existence like gas, liquid, or solid, a phase in a continuum we cannot yet measure. Perhaps this is an overly idealistic hope, but it persists in me nonetheless. I concluded as a young man, that effort has executed so much hope I had.

Consider the phrase “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence reflects a long intellectual tradition stretching from ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment. Moreover, the Stoics, especially Cicero, argued that natural law was universal, eternal, and discoverable by reason: “True law is right reason in agreement with nature.” Medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas linked this to divine order, teaching that natural law was humanity’s rational participation in God’s eternal law.

Enlightenment writers, especially John Locke, reframed natural law into natural rights—life, liberty, and property—arguing that governments exist to protect these rights and may be justly overthrown if they fail. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, widely read by the founders, reinforced that natural law was, “dictated by God himself,” and was superior to any human law and invalidated contrary statutes.

When Jefferson and his peers declared independence, they drew on their lineage to justify their cause not as rebellion but as an appeal to a higher law, binding on all nations and rulers, where reason (“Nature”) and divine authority (“Nature’s God”) together affirmed the colonies’ right to be free. This was clever as Blackstone was the King of England's legal counsel. They were revolutionaries that were also heading against treasonous trials in England. 

While I do not see God, at least in the traditional sense of a personified supreme deity, as the source of natural law, I do see it. When I read the works of historical thought leaders like Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Aquinas, Locke, Jesus of Nazareth, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Blackstone, I hear a recurring theme—that there exists a moral order higher than any government, a law written into nature and discernible by reason, which insists on the dignity of human beings and the duty to live justly in accordance with a naturally instilled code. For that reason, I am not a believer in absolute moral relativism.

While culture should indeed evolve, absolute relativism permits devolution, as it denies the anchoring principles that prevent society from sliding backward. Slavery, for example, must never be tolerated again, nor should practices like genocide, systemic oppression, or the subjugation of women—wrongs that some cultures once accepted as normal but which violate the deeper moral law that binds us all.

The single greatest lesson I have taken from twenty-five years of exploring these traditions is remarkably simple: kindness to others is a gift you ultimately give to yourself. It sustains, heals, and deepens our shared humanity.

-Jeff Price