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  • The Politics of Change: Why Global Democracy Needs Dissent, by Roland Bleiker

    The Politics of Change: Why Global Democracy Needs Dissent, by Roland Bleiker

    The Politics of Change: Why Global Democracy Needs Dissent

    By Roland Bleiker. Originally published in “Dynamics of Dissent” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. Summer/Fall 2008 pp. 33-39. Used with permission of the author.

    Editors Note: This article was written before the genocide by Israel in Palestine but casts perspective on the global dissent around the genocide. It also invites considering the global significance of the No King’s Day demonstrations and other national acts of dissent in relation to the current U.S. administration. In addition, it addresses the issues of inclusion and dissent around climate change as paramount while the annual global COP conference in regard to the ongoing climate crisis is currenly taking place in Brazil.

    Dissidents are celebrated as heroes when they struggle against oppressive political regimes.1

    In democracies, however, dissent is all too often seen as a dangerous force that undermines stability, order, and the rule of law.

    Vilified as they are, dissidents nevertheless play an important role in democratic practice. This paper explores what may well be one of the key challenges of our day: extending democratic ideals to the global realm. Doing so is essential because processes of globalization increasingly undermine the traditional realm of democratic participation: the national state. Citizens’ daily lives are influenced by political, financial, and cultural forces that transgress state boundaries. For example, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are global, even though most of them are caused by a relatively small number of developed countries. Any solution to the ensuing problems of climate change, from droughts to rising sea levels, can only be found through a concerted and coordinated global effort. People in all parts of the world should thus have a say in how the related issues are addressed, but many global institutions, international organizations, and multinational companies are neither transparent nor accountable to a democratic public.

    Extending democracy to the global level is, of course, a difficult task. Some very limited efforts are already in place. The UN, for instance, offers a forum in which states can debate issues of global concern. Some urge the UN to add an elected and globally repre-sentative assembly to its existing struc-ture, but such suggestions are a long way from being realized in practice.2 Even if they are adopted, a far more difficult underlying problem remains: Global democratic institutions must be embesdded in a global regulatory framework with the power to implement decisions if they are to play the same role as their state-based counterparts. Such a scenario is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. If democracy is to have meaning and significance at the global level, then a more fundamental rethinking of the very notion of democracy is required. This essay recommends how one might productively approach some aspects of the challenges at stake.

    I first suggest, somewhat counter-intuitively, that dissident movements can make a positive contribution to the search for global democracy. This is pre-cisely because dissent disturbs existing political orders and the privileges they mask. I sustain this position through a brief engagement with the anti-globalization movement, focusing solely on the protest element of the movement. Anarchical, disruptive, and at times violent, the protest element is certainly the most contentious aspect of the movement. It also illustrates, however, how dissent can challenge institutionalized relations of power and, by doing so, generate public debate and perhaps even enforce a certain level of accountability otherwise impossible in a global realm that lacks viable democratic institutions. Arguing so is not to deny the importance of democratic institutions but to stress that without periodic political challenges, existing forms of governance tend to establish, uphold, and mask practices of domination and exclusion.

    The second point I wish to make is a conceptual reinforcement of the first: democracy must be viewed not only as a set of institutions, but also as an evolving attitude. Many theorists suggest that our conceptualization of democracy should go beyond institutional models and into a procedural realm.3 William Connolly, for instance, fosters a democratic ethos based not on fundamental principles but on the need to disturb these principles. Connolly is afraid that any institutional order that remains unchallenged poses a serious obstacle to a truly transnational democratic disposition. He thus advocates a “democratic politics of disturbance” and, far-fetched as it may seem, promotes respect for “multiple constituencies honoring different moral sources.” 4

    Globalization and the Changing Nature of Dissent

    Dissent is, at first sight, an unlikely ally in the search for global democracy. More specifically, the anti-globalization movement seems to highlight the problems of globalization rather than the search for democratic solutions.

    For one, the movement is disorganized, chaotic, and seemingly unable to come up with any coherent and positive strategy. Among the diverse and often polarized groups of the movement we find feminists, environmentalists, steel-workers, anarchists, farmers, and students. Their goals are far too diverse to produce a common agenda, and violent elements of the movement, even if they are in the minority, often derail a protest event that was meant to be peaceful. Skepticism is thus warranted about the extent to which such a chaotic dissident movement can make a positive contribution to global democracy. But is this skepticism really justified? A closer look reveals a surprisingly different picture.

    A crisis of legitimacy stems from the weak democratic accountability of the state and multilateral institutions.

    The movement’s first major event that attracted global media coverage was the so-called “Battle for Seattle,” which resulted in four days of massive street demonstrations against a December 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle, Washington. Many commentators consider this event, which brought together some 40,000 demonstrators of different backgrounds and political persuasions, a watershed event in the public awakening to a global consciousness. They speak of an event that symbolized the world’s discontent with the spread of globalization and with policies that seemingly promoted free trade and corporate greed over the inter-ests of average people and the environment.5 Numerous other protest events followed in the years to come, including demonstrations against meetings of the World Economic Forum, the Interna-tional Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank.

    The substantive claims of the anti-globalization movement are highly con-troversial. Its main targets are key liberal economic institutions of the world economy: the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. Protesters strongly lament the lack of democratic accountability within these organizations. The influential voice of journalist Vandana Shiva, who argues that the WTO is enforcing an “anti-people, anti-nature decision to enable corporations to steal the world’s harvests through secretive, undemocratic structures and processes,” is representative of many anti-globalization protesters.6 Many scholars and commentators dismiss such a pessimistic understanding of globalization. Instead, we often hear of the benign story of Western democracy and free market principles bringing progress and economic growth to previously undeveloped parts of the world.7

    The reality lies somewhere in between these extremes, but the message that the anti-globalization movement seeks to convey is perhaps less important than the manner in which it has managed to capture public attention. Since many people around the globe see street protests as the only opportunity to express their opinions, a crisis of legitimacy stems from the weak democratic accountability of the state and multilateral institutions. The anti-globalization movement demonstrates what Joan Bondurant identified as liberal thought’s primary flaw: “the failure to provide techniques of action for those critical occasions when the machinery of democratic government no longer functions to resolve large-scale, overt conflict.”8

    But the situation is not nearly as gloomy as anti-globalization movements claim it to be. The very fact that we are aware of this movement and of its various grievances demonstrates that globalization has provided populations with a new method of participating in political debates. There are at least two reasons for this transformation of dissent.

    First, recent technological innovations have provided dissidents with tools to organize and coordinate their actions. Many of the protesters that went to Seattle, for example, were united through e-mail correspondences and a variety of websites that organized resistance strategies, thus making the movement far less disorganized and aimless than it initially seemed. Mobile phones helped coordinate on-the-ground actions, which resulted in alliances between highly unlikely protest segments. In Seattle, again, the labor and environmental movements joined with anarchists and church groups to present a common front.9

    Second, global media networks have fundamentally transformed the nature and methodology of dissent. Media can deliver images of protest that reach a global audience. The Battle for Seattle will be remembered as a global media spectacle—a rallying call for anti-globalization political movements worldwide. As such, dissidents utilized another way to attack the global economic order.

    Global Democracy as a Politics of Disturbance

    So far I have suggest-ed that globalization empowers average citizens as much as it disempowers them. Effective protest actions may be able to induce political change at the global level. Dissenting protests may even become a new method of accruing power. Are dissenting protests a new kind of democratic participation, then, and do they make a meaningful contribution to the theory and practice of global democracy?

    When viewed from a traditional, institutional democratic perspective, protest actions do not seem to add a meaningful dimension to democratic deliberations. The situation looks more complex, however, if we push our understanding of democracy beyond an institutionalized framework of procedures, such as holding elections. Anti-globalization protests may then be understood as part of broader, transnational democratic processes.

    In an oppressive political environment, longed-for change will often come not from internal and institutionalized reforms, but from an externally induced politics of disturbance. William Connolly suggests that sometimes “it takes a militant, experimental, and persistent political movement to open up a line of flight from culturally induced suffering.”10 Certainly, democratic participation cannot be fully institutionalized. This is particularly the case in a global context that lacks democratic accountability and intuitions that might anchor and regulate popular participation in decision-making procedures. Regardless of the degree to which any political system has developed democratic procedures, it will necessarily include a structure of exclusion. Public scrutiny ensures the legitimacy of even the most democratically advanced society. This constant revisionist tendency promotes adequate and fair political foundations.

    The anti-globalization movement affirms this revisionist tendency because it makes globalization a constant topic of discussion. Protest actions formed around issues like environmental protection and indigenous rights ensure that these issues remain under scrutiny. Anti-globalization protests challenge what Manfred Steger calls globalism: “a political ideology that endows the concept of globalization with market-oriented norms, values, and meanings.”11 Steger argues that the neoliberal approach to globalization rose to such prominence in the 1990s that its fundamental values were beyond contention. Free trade and market expansion were considered politically benign; they were corollaries to globalization’s economic growth. So imperative were neoliberal norms that alternative development models were considered illegitimate, irrational, or even illusory and thus dismissed as protectionist, socialist, or utopian.12

    The preponderance of anti-globalization dissenting movements and world media coverage of their activities questions the belief that free market economics produce seamless global development. As society debates neo-liberalist ideology and considers other perspectives on globalization, belief in an alternative model is becoming more and more popular. Consider the charter of the World Social Forum, the loose institutional element of the global justice movement, which describes a set of values and goals that promote to a pacifist path of development.13 Although many people dis-agree with this agenda, the salient observation is that the anti-globalization movement has forced advocates of neo-liberalism to actively justify the ideology’s political foundations.

    Towards Global Democratic Accountability

    Important as it is, politics of dissent and disturbance are not enough to establish a new, global form of democracy. Yet, how would we justly define norms and prioritize policies when a society lacks a consensus of political opinion as well as a forum for mediating potential conflicts of interest?

    Although it may be too early to realistically imagine how democracy could work beyond the realm of the state, a contemplation of this scenario demands consideration of dissent as a positive force of globalization.

    What, then, are the practical implications of the conceptual arguments I have presented here? Democratic constituencies must make decision. They need to formulate particular positions and clearly distinguish right from wrong. Often, it is not possible to do so by consensus. Excluding certain views is desirable, even necessary—this is why dissent is inevitable in a democracy. But to keep the decision-making process as fair and transparent as possible, these dissident voices must be heard and taken into account in the deliberation process. Established state-based democracies have well worked out procedures to do so, but such procedures do not yet exist at the global level where power relations are far more prevalent than democratic principles. Multinational companies and international organizations are not run according to traditional principles of democratic accountability. The UN is the only truly global institution where most states have a say, but its decision-making procedures revolve around the veto powers of the Security Council, which is dominated by few powerful nations.

    Given the absence of a global institution that could facilitate and implement democratic ideals, dissent becomes an even more crucial tool in the global society. Dissent is often the only way for disenfranchised people to contribute to global affairs, and thus key actors in international politics must be more attuned to integrating outside dissident voices into their deliberations. Take the issue of climate change: The most powerful international actors, such as the United States, the EU, and China, will inevitably shape the types of policies that are being established and implemented in response to the challenges ahead. But the ensuing framework can only be democratically legitimate if the voices of disenfranchised  people—often  those most affected by climate change—are heard in global deliberations. When this is not the case, dissatisfaction grows until it is so widespread that popular resentment erupts in the form of mass protest, revolutionary upheaval, or a terrorist attack. A functioning democratic system, one that listens to and debates grievances and heeds dissident voices, is far more likely to generate political outcomes capable of avoiding such disruptive and often violent scenarios.

    Order is a necessary precondition for democracy, the rule of law, the provision of human rights, and human civilization itself.

    Appreciating the nexus between dissent and democracy requires rethinking the underlying relationship between order and change.14 Most politicians, diplomats, and philosophers have emphasized the importance of order over the forces that promote change. Existing orders tend to be accepted as good and desirable because they reflect the values and institutions that have emerged slowly over time. Alain Joxe, a fierce critic of current international regimes, asserts, “The most formidable enemy one must face in politics is disorder.” For Joxe, order “is always necessary because it pro-vides protection.”15 Most commentators would agree that order is desirable, if not essential because order is a necessary pre-condition for democracy, the rule of law, the provision of human rights, and human civilization itself.

    But the politics of order and the politics of disturbance are more intricate than they might seem. Many injustices, from domestic abuse to torture and genocide, occur not from a lack of order but under an unjust order. The concentration camps of Nazi Germany did not result from the absence of order, but from the meticulous infatuation with an order—which envisioned a racially “pure” state and was determined to pursue its racial agenda with all requisite action.

    Dissent can occasionally be required to challenge oppressive orders and to promote a more just global society. Doing so is an ongoing process and of particular importance in the current age of globalization, which witnesses sudden and unforeseen events that challenge and transform norms, identities, and values. Addressing the ensuing challenges demands a politics of order and a dissident democratic element capable of critically evaluating the value of competing orders. Institutionalizing this scrutinizing process is unrealistic. This is why a healthy dose of dissent is a beneficial—even essential—component in the search for global democracy.

    ***

    Roland Bleiker is professor of International Politics at the University of Queensland. His pubilcations include Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics; Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation; and, as co-editor, Security and the War on Terror. The book Aesthetics and World Politics examines the emotional dimensions of security threats through a range of aesthetic sources, including literature and visual art.

    NOTES

    1. Thanks to Mark Chou and Emma Hutchison for comments on a This essay is an attempt to con-dense, but also further explore work I have previously presented on this topic, most recently in “Visualising Post-National Democracy,” in The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, eds. Mort Schoolman and David Campbell, 121-142. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
    2. Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss, “Toward glob-al parliament,” Foreign Affairs 80 (2001): 212-220; David Held, Democracy and Global Order (Oxford: Polity, 1995), 273; Robert E. Goodin, “Global Democracy: In the Beginning” (The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, March 23, 2008).
    3. John Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunika-tiven Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988).
    4. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 149, 154; Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 51, 155; Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 2002), 195-196.
    5. Margaret Levi and David Olson, “The Battles for Seattle,” Politics and Society 3 (September 2000): 325.
    6. 6 Vandana Shiva, “This Round to the Citizens,” The Guardian, August 12,1999.
    7. Most prominently expressed by Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
    8. Joan Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhi-an Philosophy of Conflict (Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1967), x.
    9. See, for instance, Robert O’Brien, Anne Marie Goetz, Jan Aart Scholte, and Marc Williams, Contesting Global Governance: Multilateral Economic Institutions and Global Social Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 7; Mark Rupert, “In the Belly of the Beast: Resisting Globalisation and War in a Neo-Imperial Moment,” in Critical Theories, World Politics and the Anti-Globalisation Movement, Catherine Eschle and Bice Maiguashca, 46-47 (London: Routledge, 2005; Ronald J. Deib-ert, “International Plug ‘n Play? Citizen Activism, the Internet and Global Public Policy,” International Studies Perspectives 1.3 (2000): 255-272; Michael Hardt, “Today’s Bandung?“ New Left Review, 14 (March/April 2002):117.
    10. Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist,
    11. Manfred Steger, Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism (Lanhan: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), ix.
    12. Steger, Globalism, 8-9.
    13. World Social Forum, “World Social Forum Charter of Principles,” http://www.forumsocial-org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_lan-guage=2 (date accessed March 2008).
    14. See William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 121-126.
    15. Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder, Ames Hodges (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002).
  • Who has betrayed the American people?

    Who has betrayed the American people?

    The Occupation of the United States by our Rogue Government

    The Great Betrayal and Trump’s imitation of Nazi Fascist Tactics.

    Editor’s Note: At the end of this article you will find a video of a System Update by Glenn Greenwald featuring his rebuttal of Stephen Miller, who drives much of Trump’s racist program. In addition, The Guardian has published information they have received of another Trump cohort, tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and whose latest travesty is Palantir, a software that now works with the Department of War and with ICE in analyzing data, among other corporations and government agencies.

    THEIL LECTURES

    Over the past month, Peter Thiel has hosted a series of lectures philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images

    ,  in San Francisco and  / The Guardian / October 10, 2025

    Here is text from talks given by Thiel who had barred reporters and anyone from recording or replicating his talks in any form of public information; the series of four talks attracted large audiences consisting of primarily young white males. The Guardian obtained the excerpts from an anonymous source. Here are Thiel’s influences:

    The Silicon Valley heavyweight drew on a wide swath of religious thinkers, including the French-American theorist René Girard, whom Thiel knew at Stanford University, and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whose work he said helped create the core of his own beliefs. He credited the English Catholic theologian John Henry Newman as the inspiration for his four-part series, saying: “Newman did four, so I’m doing four. I’m happy about it.”

    In the midst of his antichrist hype and meandering, he says:

    Then of course, the global financial architecture we discussed is not really run by shadowy international organizations, it’s basically American. And perhaps always a very important feature is the reserve currency status of the dollar, where it’s sort of the backstop for all the money. The petrodollar regime, there’s sort of crazy ways you have trade deficits, current account deficits, but then in all these ways, the money gets recycled into the US.

    This comment folds in with an offhand comment I heard the other day online about money laundering, Thiel is all over the place in theology; he basicallly sounds somewhat confused if not mad. But money (and how to make it) he understands. However, if the money does get recycled to the U.S. it goes to the corporations, gas and oil and war industries, to the billionaires, not to the common people or for the common good. And many Americans are beginning to understand this fact.

    IMITATION OF FASCIST TACTICS

    NEW ICE ARMY

    ICE

    • The most obvious tactic and strategy right now is ICE with unlimited power. ICE was created during Trump’s first term.
      • ICE stands for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal law enforcement agency within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responsible for enforcing federal laws governing immigration, trade, and border security to promote national security and public safety. Created in 2003, ICE was formed by merging the U.S. Customs Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, giving it a broad range of civil and criminal authorities to address threats related to immigration and trade. (Definition: Google AI)
      • It sounds in bureaucratise like a good thing, whereas it is a deadly consolidation of law enforcement with intelligence and other government agencies. The power of their enforcement arm was enhanced by funding from the passing of the Big Beautiful (Ugly) budget biill this year and ICE police now roam the streets of our cities with impunity and cruelty, arresting and jailing immigrants and other “suspicious” people for deportation.
    • Needless to say, almost all of these arrests are of people of color. The ICE police are simply an imitation of Hitler’s SS/Gestapo:
      • The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany, infamous for its brutality and use of terror to suppress political opposition and persecute minority groups. During the Holocaust, the Gestapo arrested and persecuted countless individuals, using extreme violence and torture to enforce Nazi policies. (Definition: Google AI)
    • The consolidation of these agencies and their intertwining is documented by Unicorn Riot in a rather dense article rife with ancronyms of agencies. (‘ICE Army’ From National Guard, State, Local & College Police)
      • Soon after the article was published an incident proving their coordination and use occurred in south Minneapolis, an Hispanic center of the city, under the rubric of being a drug raid. No doubt there is a drug trade in the Twin Cities, but this “raid’ had the hallmarks of an excuse for ICE, whose officers were present, along with FBI and some anonymous law enforcement who refused to be identified, and local police, The community responded by turning out in large numbers to protest their presence.

    ICE-Led ‘Homeland Security Task Force’ Raid Draws Large Mobilization in Minneapolis: Feds Leverage Assistance from Minneapolis Police & Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office; Debut Action of New Task Force Shocks Lake Street Community; Anonymous Federal Police Identify as “The Others” on Nameplate.By Dan Feidt, Unicorn Riot /

    Interestjngly, the drug trade is also named by the Trump administration as the reason for the raids on speedboats off the coast of Venezuela in international waters, which is illegal by international law. In one such attack 11 people were killed. Speculation is that they were immigrants, not drug-trade criminals. If it was a boat smuggling drugs why were many people in it? If connected to drug smuggling there would only have most likely been two or three.

    Education

    • In regard to student protest Hitler’s action was swift and cruel. A group of students who were leafletting against Hitler called the White Rose were simply arrested and beheaded along with their faculty advisor.
    • Jewish professors under Hitler suddenly found themselves without a job with no good reason for their firing.
    • The destruction of academic freedom around Palestine/Gaza and the suppression and punishment of student protesters and their allies:
      Trump has singled out and attacked professors who support the students and who support academic freedom and are against the genocidal bombing of Gaza. He has attacked faculty and students on many campuses around the country, starting with Columbia and most recently the University of California in Berkeley.
    • Only Harvard has had the resources to challenge the Trump administration that has threated colleges and universities nationwide with withdrawal of federal funds unless they comply with the demanded actions. Currently their lawsuit is awaiting a ruling by a judge regarding an agreement reached. However, the government shutdown may hold back the decision.
    • In the case of Berkely Trump and his cohorts have gone even further, targeting 160 faculty and closing down the office that dealt with these issues of academic freedom.
    • Note: As of Oct. 4 2025 Gov.Gavin Newsom defended his intent to withhold state funds from any California university or college that signs on to Trump’s demands to essentially silence student and academics who support Palestine or question Trump’s education agenda that curtails free speech. This defense continues.
    • Education programs based on DEI are under attack:
      A concerted and multi-pronged attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts in education is underway in 2025, driven by political pressure, new federal policies, and state laws. This has led to the dismantling of DEI programs in hundreds of schools and a climate of intense scrutiny for institutions that maintain them. (Google AI)

    The Camps

    • The Trump administration’s camps that hold immigrants illegally, without due process of law, usually before deportation, are not quite as severe perhaps as gassing people to death in “showers” as Hitler did. But the conditions have proved to be terrible, with the Florida “Alligator Alcatraz” being an example of the worst with inadequate toilet facilities, no medical care, maggots in inadequate food, etc.
    • Many people have already been deported; some are holders of green cards and even U.S. citizens. Often they are shuffled into inadequate spaces to hold them under inadequate facilities. Some are deported back to countries they left as political refugees and fear for their lives, others are sent not to their countries of origin but to places where they have no history with the culture and may not even speak the language. Daily, hourly, people are grabbed from rhe street by the ICE police, sometimes with the aiding and abetting of local law enforcement.

    Racism

    • As you can see the practice of racism is woven throughout the polices of the Trump administration and the Heritage Foundation’s project 2025 with blatant evidence of rampant racism. White supremacy reigns with all its fascist implications. The false idea of a superior race flashes in white neon in front of you every step of its fascist way. The dominance of the corporation typical of fascist governments is also obvious with attempts to privatize what should be government functions.
      • Shutting down DEI in corporations has been controversial. Target immedately stopped the DEI programs started under the Biden administation, resulting in a national boycott. COSCO on the other hand has vowed to keep its DEI program. Those are just two examples of many corporations. A list of those who ended their programs is here.   Many have been boycotted and have lost money; Target is a prime example.
      • Here is a list of companies who have defied the Trump administration around DEI.

    Some parallels that may not seem to be so obviously connected.

    Military Build-up

    • Hitler’s obvious build-up of the military led by the SS, also included conscription of the “common man” into the military and focus on building it as a fighting force. Along with building an army, sophisticated weapons were built and used while the rest of the world was behind Germany in their development at the beginning of Hitler’s invasions.
    • Trump and Co. have continued with their military build-up started in the his first term. It just gets worse and worse. Secretary of War (formerly Department of Defense before Trump renamed it) Hegseth called a gathering of U.S. military to a meeting that Trump spoke at, threatening more occupations of U.S. cities besides LA and DC that have strong antiwar movements with the excuse that they have high crime rates. Examples are Chicago and also DC whose crime rates have actually gone down recently. Such manipulation of the truth is a Trump trademark. He has now included Portland and threatened other cites of a blue stripe, that is, he is targeting cities that voted Democratic in the last election and not for Trump. Out and out revenge. Portland is the latest city to have troops sent in. All cities targeted are “blue,” dominated by the Democratic Party.

    Religion

    • The support of Trump and his agenda by the fundamentalist Christian church has been blatant. Hitler also had the support of a majority of Christian clergy and theologians in the Christian Lutheran Church in Germany. The pope, headquartered in Rome at the Vatican in Mussolini’s Italy, did not speak out against the Holocaust genocide.
    • One exception in Germany was Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who spoke out and was even involved in an unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler that he was imprisoned for, and then executed as the liberating troops approached the camp where he was incarcerated. He wrote Letters and Papers from Prison and succeeded in smuggling the manuscript out of his prison. The book is now a classic and still read widely. This book, read in college in a history of religion class, was influential in my becoming an activist.

    Propaganda/Lies

    • In visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. a number of years ago I was able to visit a special exhibit regarding the heavy use of propaganda against the Jewish people. There are, for example, copies of newspapers that accused Jewish people in grotesque caricature of starting wars they had nothing to do with and other crimes. Also there is a poster about disabled people rhat questions whether money should be spent in taking care of them.
    • Recent lying manipulations include after the shooting of Charlie Kirk when Trump immediately declared that the ‘left’ was responsible although statistics prove that actually more shootings are by right-wingers..
    • Another incidence was the signing of an executive order declaring Antifa a terrorist organization when Antifa is not even an organization. This move is considered a pre-warning that Trump and Co. will try to attack legitimate non-profit organizations that have said something they do not like; their attempt to sllence them is a violation of free speech.
    • The range and amount of propaganda and outright lies by Trump and the Trump administration increases every day. They are often covered or rather uncovered on alternative media such as System Update by Glenn Greenwald and many others. But they are not usually uncovered by the mainstream corporate media.

    The Media

    • Attacks on journalists have escalated, especially in and around Gaza. Many have died in their courage to reveal the truth of the genocide. Most are not western journalists but some are. Many are from Al Jazeera. Many are Palestinian. Some are independent. Numbers differ, but well over 200 have been killed according to the United Nations and others. An actual number is difficult to pin down because of different methodologies in counting.
    • The Western Mainstream Corporate Media, led by The New York Times and Washington Post, have basically been pro-Israel over the Palestine/Israel issue and conflict, especially since Oct. 7, 2023 when the initial attack by Hamas took place. Yet just recently—and at least in part  from UN Gaza rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s statement that Israel’s bombings constitute genocide — here have been some articles that are not as pro-Israel. She opened door for the governments of Western nations to formally condemn the bombings and recognize what Israel is doing as genocide although that has not stopped governments from arresting pro-Palestine protesters.
    • In a recent vote in the UN Security Council all voted against the genocide and for the Palestinians except the U.S.  When Netanyahu spoke to UN representives on his recent visit to the United States, they staged a walk-out; he spoke to a virtually empty chamber.
    • As you undoubtedly know a ceasefire and hostage exchange program is now taking place. But Israel still claims Gaza as theirs.
    • Ukraine
      • Trump continues to make deals, the only way he knows how to operate, but seems to get no place. Many see the conflict as just between Russia and Ukraine, others see it as a proxy war between the U.S and Russia and consider it part of the hegemony struggle for world domination. The U.S. losing its world domination, its imperialistic empire, which it is desperate to maintain; the struggle is playing out in part in Ukraine. Unfortunately, the current rogue rulers have escalated it into an even ‘hotter’ war with missiles going back and forth between Ukraine and Russia.
    • The U.S. mainstream corporate media remains for the most part a tool of the government and government policy.

    Art and Culture

    Hitler banned artists of all types from producing any work that criticized the Third Reich. That ban included paintings, poetry, fiction, dance…all the arts.

    A filmmaker named Leni Riefenstahl made two seminal films for Hitler:

    • In the 1930s, she directed the Nazi propaganda films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), resulting in worldwide attention and acclaim. The films are widely considered two of the most effective and technically innovative propaganda films ever made.
    • Trump has followed in Hitler’s footsteps by taking over the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC and pushing to name it after himself. Trump and Co. have gone through the Center removing any art that is “woke” in their estimation.

    • In general Trump’s regime has frowned upon and is complicit in banning many artists and musicians such as Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame — and winner of the World Beyond War 2025 Artistic War Abolisher Award — and also singer/songwriter David Rovics: They both have had cancellations on planned tours including in Europe; Rovics has had much of his music removed from the internet.

    Corporatism and Fascism  (Google AI)

    Corporatism is an economic and political system in which major interest groups, like labor unions and employer associations, are integrated into the government’s structure. Fascism, a radical, authoritarian political ideology, uses a specific type of corporatism as a central economic tool to exert control over the state and eliminate dissent. While corporatism can exist in other contexts, fascist corporatism is distinct in its use for totalitarian ends.

    Corporatism as a Concept

    • Ideological roots: Corporatism developed in the 19th century as a “third way” between laissez-faire capitalism and communism, advocating for class collaboration over class conflict.
    • Organizational structure: The theory organizes society into “corporations” or guilds based on economic sectors, like agriculture, industry, and professional services. These bodies are meant to represent the interests of their members and work with the government for the national good.
    • Wider application: Outside of fascism, corporatist models have been incorporated into other political systems, such as the social democracies of Nordic countries, where unions and employers negotiate with government mediation. 

    Corporatism within Fascism

    • State control: In practice, fascist corporatism became a tool for state domination rather than genuine negotiation between interest groups. The “corporate state” in Benito Mussolini’s Italy, for example, was designed to reflect the dictator’s will, not the adjusted interests of economic groups.
    • Suppression of labor: In the fascist model, the state destroyed independent labor movements and outlawed strikes, ensuring that organized workers could not challenge the regime. The government created its own controlled “unions” with appointed, not elected, leaders, which served to benefit major business owners.
    • National interest over individual: The core principle was that the national interest superseded the interests of individuals and social classes. Workers and employers were compelled to collaborate under state supervision to maximize economic output for the nation.
    • State-business partnerships: While private property was allowed, the state exerted significant control over the economy through a managed partnership with business. This included subsidizing preferred companies and directing investment toward national priorities like militarization and self-sufficiency (autarky). As historian Gaetano Salvemini noted, profits were privatized while losses were socialized, with the state bailing out failing companies. 

    Key differences between generic and fascist corporatism:

    Feature  Generic Corporatism Fascist Corporatism
    Class relations Aims for collaboration between labor and capital through genuine negotiation, sometimes with government mediation. Eliminates class conflict by force, imposing cooperation under state control, and suppressing independent labor movements.
    State’s role Mediates between organized interest groups to facilitate policy and promote stability. Serves as the ultimate authority, dictating terms and controlling the corporate bodies to enforce the will of the ruling party or leader.
    Decision-making Involves formal mechanisms for negotiation between unions, employers, and state officials. Reflects the will of the dictator, with negotiation being a facade for state-imposed policies.
    Goals Promotes social harmony, stability, and manages economic outcomes within a broader political framework. Subordinates all economic activity to the overarching political goals of the state, such as nationalism, militarism, and autarky.

    Hitler abolished unions in 1933. He was able to simply abolish them.

    • Early on Trump attacked unions and was met with strong resistance from established unions as discussed in The Unraveling of the New Deal  Part 2 on Wings of Change. More recently unions have actively  joined in opposing the rise of fascism under the Trump administration:  (Google AI)
      • As of late 2025, labor unions are actively engaged in resisting the rise of far-right authoritarianism and the policies of corporate elites and their political allies. While the labor movement is a key force in this fight, there is an ongoing debate about whether its efforts are aggressive enough, especially concerning direct challenges to potential fascist threats in the United States.

    POSTAL WORKERS Letter carriers across the country rally to stop the Trump administration from stripping the U.S. Postal Service of its independence and possibly privatizing it. Photo by: Jim West/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

    Union actions and challenges in 2025:  (Google AI)

    • Targeting specific policies: Unions are taking legal and public action against specific policies and political figures they see as anti-democratic and anti-worker. For example, the AFL-CIO is challenging actions by the Trump administration that have stripped collective bargaining rights from federal workers and threatened to illegally fire them during government shutdowns. The AFL-CIO has also publicly opposed Project 2025, a conservative policy roadmap, on the grounds that it would harm workers.
    • Promoting democracy: Unions are advocating for a “Third Reconstruction,” a political realignment that would empower a multiracial democratic movement from below. This effort aims to counter authoritarianism with a proactive vision for a more just economy and robust democracy.
    • Internal divisions and debates: Not all parts of the labor movement are unified on how to confront the threat. Some union leaders have been hesitant to explicitly name the threat of fascism, prompting concern from more militant voices within the movement. Publications like the World Socialist Web Site have criticized some union leadership for inaction, calling for a grassroots rebellion against the established union apparatus.
    • Increasing organizing efforts: Despite low union density in the United States, labor organizing is on the rise, particularly in states with stronger protections for collective bargaining. Unions are organizing in new areas and mobilizing workers to fight for better wages and conditions. This increased activity is often seen as a direct way to build worker power and resist anti-democratic forces.
    • Strong public support: Public approval for labor unions remains high, a factor that strengthens their position in fighting back against corporate and political opposition. This public backing provides a strong foundation for unions’ political and organizing efforts.
    • International perspective: Global organizations, such as the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), also explicitly condemn the rise of authoritarianism and far-right movements, seeing them as direct threats to workers’ rights and democracy. The ITUC’s 2025 Global Rights Index documented a worsening global crisis for workers’ rights fueled by these trends. 

    Acknowledging historical context:

    • The labor movement has a history of opposing fascist and authoritarian regimes. The AFL-CIO passed resolutions in 2017 to condemn and oppose fascism and white supremacist groups, stating there is no moral equivalence between those who fight fascism and those who promote hate. These efforts continue to guide the movement’s stance, but the current political climate poses renewed challenges. 

    Some Previous Tactics by the Trump Administration

    One of several of Donald Trump’s weapons of distraction because the people, including some of his followers, want the Epstein papers released to reveal Epstein’s sick cult exploiting young women as sex objects — blatant sexual abuse — is calling Obama a traitor. Without going into detail about Obama’s presidency, which had high and low points, I hope most people have realized the absurdity of this charge. He then arranged a meeting with Putin in Alaska which came to nothing among other attempts to distract from the possible release of the Epstein papers,

    Because of course the real traitor of the American people is Donald Trump and his administration, and they have taken much of Congress along with them and the Supreme Court.

    The Big Beautiful [Ugly] budget bill that has passed is proof positive that they do not care a bit about the American people, and in Trump’s case only about his millionaire and billionaire buddies. The others in his administration are in it for Money. Power, and Greed. He is the real traitor to American values and to the people of America, slashing aid of all kinds right and left, raising the cost of everything, especially food and housing, essentials for living. And then Medicaid and Medicare. Even Social Security is threatened.

    Many of the proposed changes will not take place until after the mid-term elections so those people who are not informed, many of his followers, will not know what hit them. Even if the Democrats are able to take back the House there’s still the Senate to deal with.

    A lot of what got Trump elected was the fact that so many Americans disagree with further funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but Congress, especially the Senate, is immovable and has “sold the country down the river” regarding funding and arms for Israel. Anti-genocide activists did not vote for Trump but also not for Kamala Harris representing the Democratic Party. The Democrats don’t seem to understand that it lost them the election or if they do still insist on keeping their pro-Zionist stance.

    In many ways the same goes for Ukraine. It’s a proxy war with Russia with the Ukranian people who are suffering the most. Many have died, and yet the war continues. The U.S. wants resources that are in Ukraine, or what’s left of it. It is not just the wheat that fed much of the world, it is evidently mineral resources as well. Congress under Biden approved money and weapons consistently for Ukraine. So he is not off the hook either. And that is a problem for all peace people.

    Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur for Gaza, has courageously spoken out about how the war economy is controlling the government. She has come under attack of course by Trump and Co. I would include the gas and oil industry; these two corporate giants, the war/arms industry and gas and oil, are symbiotic: The gas and oil industry with their fossil fuel — and the corporations that practice fracking — and also the financial institutions that support them, who provide the fuel to the war economy that supplies the polluting jet planes that are used at the 877 U.S. bases around the world. That is just a portion of the pollution the U.S. military causes worldwide. It is a well-established tenet of fascism, and is updated and discussed in detail in Henry Giroux’s book American Nightmare. 

    Definition of fascism and government-directed economy: Fascist governments create a “corporate state” in which the economy is managed collectively by state officials, employers, and workers. In practice, however, the state holds the dominant role, dictating policies and subordinating private enterprise to its agenda. (Google AI)

    So who is the real traitor? It is a trick we have seen before but not at this level. During demonstrations the police would attack demonstrators and then say that the demonstrators had attacked them when they resisted arrest..

    I don’t like saying that the American people are the victims. Yet in spite of demonstrations and protests of all kinds we have been unable to stop Trump and the fascist authoritarianism based on military might instead of the use of diplomacy, for a start.

    What characterizes Trump? A huge ego that is insatiable for starters. His rudeness. His attacks on anyone who even just disagrees with him. Lies, lies, lies. Denial. And no accountability. His racism is blatant and ugly. His fostering of hate, a legacy from his first term, continues in spades. He’s a misogenist, whether or not he participated in the Epstein cult. There really is not much to admire. I just don’t see the attraction but I know many are swayed by this con man. He can sound so sincere when he is lying through his teeth.

    As far as religion is concerned, I certainly cannot see him as a Christian, although many seem to think he is. I do not know what Kool-aid they are drinking, above even his lack of moral fiber he lacks compassion: He clearly does not even know the meaning of the word.

    So maybe, finally, in the Epstein scandal he has met his Waterloo. He may also be under pressure from other officials who are included in those papers about Epstein’s cult. And there are also many photos of Trump with Epstein circulating online.

    In the meantime many more countries. some that are U.S. allies, are joining in recognizing the Palestinian state or have stated that they will.

    Trump, with the brains of Stephen Miller in charge of racist policied, also continues his fight in the colleges against pro-Palestinian protesters and the academics who support them, many of whom like Columbia, are capitulating to his threats so they receive federal funds.

    This is a clip from our show SYSTEM UPDATE, now airing every weeknight at 7pm ET on Rumble. You can watch the full episode for FREE here: https://rumble.com/v6wwl7s-system-upd…

    How will we stop Trump and his fascist regime? How wll we convince well-meaning people who believe his lies that Trump is not saving America but is destroying U.S.?

    Millions have turned out for the NO KING protests called by Indivisible. Daily we have demonstrations, bannerings, protests, workshops and conferences, organized and attended by many people in the U.S., and they represent many different segments of our society and culture. All that is good.

    But the wheels of justice move slowly. Progress is there but slower than we might like, even with the whole world engaged with not just thousands but millions turning out in countries around the world to protest the genocide in Gaza/Palestine often in defiance of their governments, using their people power. “The game is afoot.” And it is not just about the crime that is the genocide being committed by Israel with U.S. support. It is about Decolonization, Demilitarism and instead Human Rights and governments that represent the people..

    Paul Theil links the efforts to save the planet with CO2 and methane (fossil fuel and fracking) to the “antichrist” he talks about when of course the opposite is true. He attacks Greta Thunberg because of her activism to save the planet.

    Such thinking does not contain any truth. “That way madness lies,” to quote Shakespeare’s King Lear. Words and the things they represent get turned around and twisted in this world as it is now, with a need to see through to truths and reality instead of an upside down, inside out world. Language and how it is spoken and written plays a large role in our perceptions and thoughts.

    As activists we continue to gather and act in our communities, to collaborate with each other. To act, no matter which activist path we choose, keeps us sane. So far we have stayed along the path of nonviolence although challenged constantly by police and other authorities, many who do not honor nonviolence.

    We will continue and I think strive to break the barriers that divide us from those who are often our relatives, neighbors, friends and sometimes share a church or religion with us but are still taken in by those who would destroy the good things in our heritage. Yes, there are plenty of actione that are not good, especially around the history of racism in the U.S.A. and of exploitation of workers and oppression of women. But those who argue that shoving the bad things and banning the books and stories that tell of them under a blanket of white supremacy will make America great again are of course wrong. Knowing the truth is not always easy. Learning from our mistakes is I think the cliche but true. If we do not know our mistakes how can we learn from them.

    A first step is acceptance of the new demographics of a large population of people of color who are not different from you and me in their hopes and dreams and how they lead their lives as good people, imperfect as we all are.

    In one job I had the research I was doing led to me an understanding that  Hispanic peoples, at least in south and central America, had a much stronger sense of community and the importance of community lnstead of the individualism our western culture idolizes. Perhaps we can learn, are learning, from them the value of community. Something I think the Black culture in America also has.

    We go forward with nonviolence and critique, truth-telling and collaboration and continued activism in the cradles of communities of love and hope.

    Since this article was published Trump has orchestrated a ceasefire in Gaza/Palestine and a release of prisoners by both Hamas and Israel, one of his “deals.” But as welcome as this ceasefire and also influx finally of food into the starving in Gaza, the future of Palestine is not clear. While many support a two-state solution there is no guarantee that that will happen. Others support a one-state solution. In the ceasefire there is no provision for Palestine’s future. Some of Netanyahu’s govenment officials have stated that the bombing may resume. Even though the ceasefire is working thus far no concrete provisions or conditions have been proposed as to what Palestine will becomd assuming the ceasefire holds.

    At practically the same time of the ceasefire Israel attacked the food for Gaza flotilla of about 50 ships in international waters, which is illegal, and took hundreds of hostages, who were then subject to beatings and other abuse before being released. Such treatment of prisoners is unconsionable. While Trump is taking credit for the ceasefire, the recent pressure on Israel that includes the walk-out refusal to listen to Netanyahu’s speech in the UN. a number of countries, especially in Europe, supporting Palestine in agreeing that what Israel has done is genocide, the massive pro-Palestine demonstrations worldwide, along with the ICC court accusation of Israel of committing genocide.

    In this critical time hearing the voices of truth is all the more important although censorship and attacks on truth-tellers are common. Support Wings of Change as we bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media on the Wings of Change website and Rise Up Times on social media  Access is alway free, but if you would like to help:
    A donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others. 

     “In the end,” Henry Giroux says, “there is no democracy without informed citizens, no justice without a language critical of injustice, and no change without a broad-based movement of collective resistance.”

    Rise Up Times is entirely reader supported.

    Thank you!

    Sue Ann Martinson

     

     

  • Robert Reich on the Government Shutdown and Ralph Nader on the Democratic Party with Chris Hedges

    Robert Reich on the Government Shutdown and Ralph Nader on the Democratic Party with Chris Hedges

    Reich explains the stakes and how we got there. . . Nader decries the impotence of the Democrats and why. . .

    Why This Is Not a Normal Government Shutdown

     

    Why the Democrats WON’T Save Us…

    In this critical time in hearing the voices of truth is all the more important although censorship and attacks on truth-tellers are common. Support WingsofChange.me as we bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media on the Wings of Change website and Rise Up Times on social media  Access is alway free, but if you would like to help:
    A donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others. 

    Rise Up Times is entirely reader supported.

    Sue Ann Martinson, Writer, Editor Wings of Change

  • Glenn Greenwald Reacts to Netanyahu’s UN Speech

    Glenn Greenwald Reacts to Netanyahu’s UN Speech

    Netanyahu speaks to an empty UN chamber… 

    By Glenn Greenwald /  ScheerPost / September 28, 2025

    Glenn Greenwald is a journalist, constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times best-selling books on politics and law. He broke the Snowden leaks in 2013. Greenwald currently hosts a political commentary show for Rumble called “System Update.”  Author Site

    RELATED 

    Netanyahu addresses empty UN chamber

    Subscribe! You are all an inspiration. Please join me on Wings of Change. It’s only the beginning as we still have so much work to do as many activists and organizations make plans for the upcoming years. Wings of Change is pleased and excited to be a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration.

  • War Abolisher Awards 2025, World Beyond War

    War Abolisher Awards 2025, World Beyond War

    From World Beyond War

    The presentation of the 2025 War Abolisher Awards to Ralph Nader, Roger Waters, and Francesca Albanese

    World BEYOND War’s Fifth Annual War Abolisher Awards recognize the work of individuals who directly support one or more of the three segments of World BEYOND War’s strategy for reducing and eliminating war as outlined in the book A Global Security System, An Alternative to War. They are: Demilitarizing Security, Managing Conflict Without Violence, and Building a Culture of Peace.

    The awardees for 2025 are Ralph Nader, Roger Waters, and Francesca Albanese.

    The Artistic War Abolisher of 2025 award goes to Roger Waters for his incredibly powerful combination of song-writing, singing, speaking, and performing against the horrors of war. During the event, we will play a new 8-minute song pre-recorded by Roger Waters called Sumud.

    The David Hartsough Lifetime Individual War Abolisher of 2025 award — named for the late co-founder of World BEYOND War  — goes to Ralph Nader for his brilliant and relentless advocacy, educating, organizing, analyzing, and criticizing war and related crimes and abuses.

    The Individual War Abolisher of 2025 award goes to Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, for her fearless, incisive, and eloquent reporting on the genocide in Gaza.

    Moderating the event will be WBW Board Member and Secretary Robert Fantina, and presenting the awards will be WBW Board Members Alicia Cabezudo and Edward Horgan, and RootsAction Senior Partnerships Coordinator Hanieh Jodat Barnes.

    World BEYOND War thanks RootsAction for helping spread the word about the War Abolisher Awards.

    Sponsored by World BEYOND War

    In this critical time in hearing the voices of truth is all the more important although censorship and attacks on truth-tellers are common. Support WingsofChange.me as we bring you important articles and journalism beyond the mainstream corporate media on the Wings of Change website and Rise Up Times on social media  Access is alway free, but if you would like to help:
    A donation of $25 or whatever you can donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with the opinions and creative contributions by myself and others. 

    Rise Up Times is entirely reader supported.

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  • “Here Comes the Sun”: Bill McKibben on Renewable Energy, “Sun Day” & the “Last Chance” for Climate

    “Here Comes the Sun”: Bill McKibben on Renewable Energy, “Sun Day” & the “Last Chance” for Climate

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And but yet, here we are in the United States, going in the complete opposite direction from what China and the rest of the world are striving for. How do we deal with that situation here in this country?

    As the Trump administration grows increasingly hostile to renewable energy, we speak with acclaimed environmentalist Bill McKibben about his new book, Here Comes the Sun, in which he lays out a hopeful vision for the future that includes avoiding climate catastrophe, reshaping the economy and saving democracy. He says the key to unlock that future is fully embracing renewable energy over the fierce opposition of the fossil fuel industry and its political enablers. He notes that solar and wind are already the cheapest and fastest-growing power sources in history, with more green energy coming online every year.

    “It’s not that we’re going to stop global warming. It’s too late for that. It’s that we really have a chance to reboot the way the world and its economy and its geopolitics works right now,” says McKibben.

    Transcript
    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

    We turn now to the climate crisis. A new report by the clean energy tech research group Ember finds China is, quote, “creating the conditions for a decline in fossil fuel use,” unquote, as it leads the production of solar panels and wind turbines.

    Meanwhile, another new report confirms the Trump administration is openly hostile to renewable energy and has overseen, quote, “the most abrupt shift in energy and climate policy in recent memory,” unquote, which has led to a jump in greenhouse gas emissions in the first seven months of the Trump presidency. Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill not only ended subsidies for renewable power sources, but applies a new tax on solar and wind projects.

    On Friday, the Department of Energy wrote on social media, quote, “Wind and solar energy infrastructure is essentially worthless when it is dark outside, and the wind is not blowing,” they said.

    Trump criticized renewable energy efforts during a recent Cabinet meeting.

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We don’t allow windmills. We’re not allowing any windmills to go up, I mean, unless there’s a legal situation where somebody committed to it a long time ago. We don’t allow windmills, and we don’t want the solar panels that I was speaking with the secretary about, because they take up, you know, thousands of acres of our farmland. You see these big, ugly patches of black plastic that comes from China.

    AMY GOODMAN: Despite all this, the Los Angeles Times reports today renewable energy reached nearly 25% of U.S. power generation in June, up from 18% last year.

    We spend the rest of the hour with Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, founder of the group Third Act. His new book is titled Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.

    You, actually, Bill McKibben, despite Trump going back on renewable energy, people fear going back decades, hold out great hope. You see this as a opportunity we’ve never had before.

    BILL McKIBBEN: Amy, Juan, you guys have been at this for a long time. This is as dark a moment as there’s ever been in our democracy, and our planet is overheating fast. In the midst of that, there is this one big good thing simultaneously happening, and it’s so big and so good that it might help with both the climate and the authoritarianism crisis. And that’s this rise in the last 36 months, a pretty untold story, of just extraordinary amounts of clean energy surging into the world’s energy system. It is centered in China, and the numbers are staggering. May is the last month we have data for. In May, the Chinese were putting up three gigawatts of solar panels a day, a gigawatt being the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant. They were putting up one of those, made out of solar panels, every eight hours.

    California, which has done more than any place in this country, reached some kind of tipping point in the last 18 months. Most days now, California supplies more than 100% of its electricity from renewable energy for long stretches. At night, the biggest source of supply on its grid is batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon. Bottom line, California, fourth-largest economy in the world, is using 40% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were two years ago. That’s the kind of number — that may be the most optimistic thing that I’ve — number that I’ve heard in the 40 years I’ve been working on the climate crisis. It’s the kind of number that begins to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the world eventually gets. And remember, every tenth of a degree means 100 million people moving from a safe climate zone to a dangerous one.

    So, it’s not that we’re going to stop global warming. It’s too late for that. It’s that we have really a chance to reboot the way the world and its economy and its geopolitics works right now.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, I wanted to ask you about this staggering investment that China has been putting into renewable energies. It accounts now for almost a third of all the clean energy investment in the world. It’s producing 80% of all the solar panels, 60% of the wind turbines. And so, all of this investment has actually driven the price of green energy down, so that now it’s in some — according to the Ember report, 90% of wind and solar projects commissioned worldwide produce power more cheaply than fossil fuel alternatives. So, isn’t this — doesn’t this mean that the Global South now will gobble up, the poorer nations of the world will gobble up clean energy alternatives to fossil fuel?

    BILL McKIBBEN: Absolutely, Juan. It’s really important to understand that as of about four years ago, we live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. And China has been leading that effort. We know about petrostates. China is the world’s first electrostate. And now, as you say, that’s leaking out from across its borders.

    Pakistan, right next door, last year, Pakistanis, just basically using TikTok videos as their guide, installed enough solar panels to equal half the country’s national electric grid. Pakistani farmers, who were early adopters of this, because diesel to run their tube wells for irrigation is their biggest cost input, they bought millions of these solar panels. They lack the money to build the metal stanchions to point them at the sun, so, instead, they’re just laying them on the ground. Nonetheless, Pakistan was using 35% less diesel last year than the year before.

    Now this is leaking into Africa, not just the solar panels, but the things that make use of the clean energy that they provide. We’re used to thinking of Detroit as the center of the world’s auto industry. That is not true. It’s now two or three cities in China whose names I find difficult to pronounce. They’re producing the best and cheapest cars on the planet, and they are flooding the markets of the developing world. Forget about Ford. It’s BYD that’s going to be the car company of the future.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And but yet, here we are in the United States, going in the complete opposite direction from what China and the rest of the world are striving for. How do we deal with that situation here in this country?

    BILL McKIBBEN: So, it’s what’s so fascinating. And it’s pretty easy, I think, to explain the success of renewable energy, which is good news for almost everyone on the planet, except the people who own oil wells and coal mines. And for them, it’s an existential threat.

    So, what did they do? You’ll recall candidate Trump last year telling the oil industry that for a billion dollars — I mean, it was kind of Austin Powers moment – for a billion dollars, they could have anything they wanted. They ended up raising about half a billion, between donations, advertising, lobbying, in the last election cycle. And clearly that was enough, because they’ve — the Trump administration has done everything that Big Oil could have hoped — and more, really.

    I mean, I don’t think anyone anticipated that they would actually shut down work on 80% complete wind farms off the coast of New England like they did last week. That’s just insane. I mean, if they keep with it, a thousand years from now, archeologists will be trying to explain how this aqueous Stonehenge emerged off the coast of Rhode Island. We’re — if we keep at this, our role in the world a decade from now will be as the kind of Colonial Williamsburg of internal combustion, a place where the rest of the planet, if they can get tourist visas, come to gawk at how people did things in the olden days.

    And that’s especially aggravating, or should be, for Americans, because this technology was invented here. I mean, the solar cell was invented 20 miles away, in Edison, New Jersey. The first industrial wind turbine was 30 miles south of my house in Vermont in the 1940s. And yet we’re just handing it all to China in order to appease the oil industry.

    AMY GOODMAN: You talk about California. You’re headed, what, to D.C. to speak at Politics and Prose, then the Petro Metro. That’s Houston. You’re headed to Texas.

    BILL McKIBBEN: Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: Texas might surprise people, when it comes to solar and wind energy.

    BILL McKIBBEN: Texas is now putting up clean energy faster than California, faster than any place in this country. Big Oil doesn’t like that. And they tried, in the state legislative session this year, to pass a number of laws, the most prominent of which people called ”DEI for natural gas.” It was going to force anybody who wanted to put up five megawatts of solar to also put up five megawatts of natural gas. People emerged from the hinterlands across rural Texas to say, “Don’t do this. This is how we pay property taxes in our county. This is what keeps the schools open.” And so the Legislature backed off, returned to their project of redistricting Texas to help Mr. Trump instead.

    It’s not clear that even in this country they can beat down the economics of renewable energy, though, obviously, they’re going to do much damage, which is precisely why we’re rallying across the country on September 21st for this thing we’re calling Sun Day.

    AMY GOODMAN: You’re wearing a T-shirt that says “Sun Day.”

    BILL McKIBBEN: Indeed, I am, because there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of events planned for that day. We obviously can’t change policy in Washington in the short term, but we can change policy in states and localities across the country to make it much, much easier to do solar power.

    Amy, it costs three times as much to put up solar panels in the U.S. as it does on your house in Australia or the EU. A tiny bit of that’s from tariffs on solar panels. Mostly it’s because we have 15,000 municipalities, each with their own building code and team of inspectors. It can take months to get done what takes days everyplace else. This can be changed with easy — with ease by local officials. California, Maryland and New Jersey have already adopted this thing called the SolarAPP, that allows a contractor to get instant permitting just by putting a few details into a computer program. We need that across the country, especially in light of federal intransigence.

    AMY GOODMAN: Sun Day is September 21st, the fall equinox?

    BILL McKIBBEN: The fall equinox, exactly right.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, I wanted to ask you — last month, the Environmental Protection Agency formally proposed revoking the Obama-era scientific determination that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare because they cause global warming. Your response to that, and what people can do?

    BILL McKIBBEN: I mean, it’s nonsense, of course. The EPA and the Trump administration can’t repeal the laws of physics, which are the problem here. That’s what’s driving climate change.

    But I think there’s something deeper going on, as we move into this possibility of a world that runs on clean energy. And I was really thinking about it as we were listening to Jeremy report from Middle East. I mean, think about — you guys have run The War and Peace Report for a long time. Think about what this show and this world would have been like for the last few decades if oil was of trivial value on this planet, how many wars and coups and assassination attempts would have been averted. Humans are, you know, altogether too good at starting wars, but figuring out how to start one over sunshine will be a trick.

    I think that this is not just a possibility for dealing with climate change. I think the fact that we have access now to energy that’s available to everyone everywhere, instead of being something concentrated in a few spots, controlled by a few autocrats and plutocrats, that’s a huge, huge potential gift.

    AMY GOODMAN: It’s a real challenge to capitalism, because, I mean, this is decentralized as you can get, unless the Big Oil companies, when they see their days are numbered, just switch over to try to control the access to the sun.

    BILL McKIBBEN: Even if they switch over, which I don’t think they will, I’m afraid, all they can do — and it’s very important, and you can make a lot of money doing it — is build the solar panels. But once you’ve built the solar panels, the sun delivers the energy for free every morning when it rises above the horizon. There’s no way to hoard it or hold it in reserve. The same charismatic object in our galaxy that brings us light and warmth and, via photosynthesis, our food is now willing to provide us with all the power we could ever want. That’s the kind of moment that changes civilization, as thoroughly as learning to harness the combustion of fossil fuel changed civilization. That’s what we call the Industrial Revolution.

    AMY GOODMAN: You’re here in New York. Zohran Mamdani has just shocked the Democratic establishment. Still, the Democratic leader in Congress from New York, Hakeem Jeffries, astonishingly, has not endorsed the Democratic primary candidate. But how do you see Zohran Mandani’s race for mayor of New York as a model for the rest of the country?

    BILL McKIBBEN: Well, I mean, the fact that he’s creative and full of good humor is a shocking thing in our political life, but it’s a real reminder of how much there is that we could do. Across Europe, in cities full of apartment dwellers like New York, millions of people have put up what we call balcony solar over the last three years. They just go to the Best Buy, come home with a solar panel designed to hang over the railing of their apartment balcony, plug it into the wall with a standard plug and producing 20% of the power they use. That’s illegal everywhere in the country, except in the state of Utah, where the state Legislature, that progressive bastion, enabled it by a unanimous vote earlier this year. I’m betting that within weeks of Mr. Mamdani becoming Mayor Mamdani, we’re going to see balcony solar installations sprouting across the five boroughs. And what a nice sign that will be.

    AMY GOODMAN: And you gave this — you started Sunday with another renegade mayor, and that is Michelle Wu of Boston, who Trump is trying to take on.

    BILL McKIBBEN: Michelle Wu, Zohran —

    AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds.

    BILL McKIBBEN: — Zohran Mamdani, people like this, offer a real potential future. And they have an enormous ally in this new technology that really gives us a fresh kind of hope.

    AMY GOODMAN: Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, founder of the organization Third Act. His new book is just out, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. He is on book tour. Tonight he’ll be in D.C. at Politics and Prose, tomorrow in Houston. And he’s organizing a national mobilization for September 21st, the fall equinox, called Sun Day 2025, celebrating solar and wind power. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

    This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.

    The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

    Join me on Wings of Change. We still have so much work to do as activists and organizations make plans for the upcoming months and years. Wings of Change is pleased and excited to be a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration.

    Subscribe to Wings of Change here!

    Donate

    Whatever you are able donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with opinions and creative contributions.

    Sue Ann Martinson

    One place to begin is with reason and truth, and how fundamental they are to creating critically engaged citizens and communities. 

    —Henry A. Giroux

  • Scores of Climate Experts Condemn Trump Climate Report as ‘Junk Science’

    THERE IS JO PLANET BA 435-page review found the authors used standard climate denier tropes to produce a report riddled with errors.

     

    Scores of Climate Experts Condemn Trump Climate Report as ‘Junk Science’

    A growing memorial of wooden crosses lines the banks of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, part of a riverside installation by Dallas artist Roberto Marquez to honor the more than 100 victims of Central Texas’s deadly July 4 flash floods. The crosses — some fashioned from debris swept up by the torrent of the Guadalupe River — stand against the backdrop of its surging waters, the sound of rushing currents filling the air as the community continues to mourn and search for those still missing.Memorials for some of the more than 100 people killed in July 2025’s catastrophic flash flooding in central Texas, which was intensified by climate change. Credit: source/credit info: World Central Kitchen (CC BY 4.0)

    By Sharon Kelly and Emily J Gertz / DeSmog International / Series: MAGA / 

    Analysis

    A group of more than 85 climate experts today released a scathing review of the Trump administration’s “Climate Working Group” report on climate change science, condemning it as “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.”

    The reviewers include MacArthur “Genius” Fellows, a half-dozen members of the National Academy of Sciences, Royal Society fellows, and fellows from other prominent scientific organizations including the American Meteorological Society, which issued its own separate statement criticizing the Climate Working Group report.

    They found that the federal report “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics” in order “to downplay the risks of record-breaking heat, intense rainfall, worsening wildfires, rising sea levels, and widespread health harms – all well-established by decades of peer-reviewed science.”

    The Trump administration’s report was authored by five longtime climate deniers — Steve Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer —as part of its effort to gut federal powers to regulate climate-heating pollution from cars, power plants, and other major sources. The Department of Energy (DOE) released it on July 29.

    On the same day the Trump report was released, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s proposal to rescind the foundation of those regulations: its scientific “endangerment finding” affirming that carbon pollution threatens human health and welfare by creating dangerous planetary warming.

    Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler organized the volunteer effort to review the report, which is being submitted to the Department of Energy during the public comment period that closes on September 2. The public comment period on the EPA’s proposal is open through September 22.

    Announcing the release of the review this morning on his personal blog, Dessler termed the Trump report “a show trial for climate science.

    “Like any good Soviet trial, the outcome of this exercise by the Dept. of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding,” Dessler said. “Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense. You understand why the five contrarian authors were selected: The only way to get this report was to pick these authors. If any other writing team had been chosen, the report would have been 180° different.”

    The Trump report’s authors have previously defended their work, telling the journal Nature that they are “committed to a transparent and fact-based dialogue on climate science and know from long experience that scientific criticism and rebuttal are essential to that process.”

    In response to a request for comment, Curry referred reporters to her blog, where she described the Dessler review as “comprehensive” and a “laudable effort,” noting that it “was prepared in 30 days (sort of weakens the argument that the DOE report was written too quickly, ha ha).”

    The Energy Department’s public comment period on the report was set for 30 days, rather than a more typical 60 days. The agency has not announced an extension.

    After “skimming” the review, Curry said, she “didn’t spot anything in this report that would lead to changing any of the conclusions in the DOE Report.”

    The four other members of the Climate Working Group, as well as the Energy Department, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    “A Wonderful Example of Junk Science”

    The Trump report “is a travesty for U.S. scientific integrity,” said Ryan Katz-Rosene of the University of Ottawa, an expert on climate and sustainability policies and politics, in a statement. “It reads like a list of common climate skeptic tropes — long ago rebutted by the scientific community — being rehashed by a group of disgruntled scientists.”

    The 435-page expert review found that the Trump climate report exhibited a pattern of questionable reasoning, as well as dozens of factual and structural flaws — such as relying on “verifiably flawed and unrepresentative [scientific] literature.”

    It was also riddled with typos, scrambled citations, unsupported claims about climate science, and references to research or data that the reviewers could not find, along with at least one manufactured quote.

    These sorts of errors have become associated with AI slop, though the reviewers didn’t speculate whether the report’s five authors — who the expert reviewers described in a statement as a “tiny team of hand-picked contrarians” — used AI to write their report.

    “I always like to find a silver lining,” climate scientist Andy Miller, a 33-year EPA veteran, said in a statement. “In this case the silver lining is that this document is a wonderful example of junk science that can be used as an example for years to come.”

    Koonin, Curry, and their co-authors used several climate disinformation tactics in their report. Here are just a few.

    Omitting Evidence

    The review found many instances where the Trump report left out vital details — sometimes entire fields of study — that would undercut the administration’s case for deregulation.

    “The only mention of the oceans throughout the entire report is in the context of ocean acidification, coral reefs, and sea level rise,” the review noted. “The glaring omission of the myriad impacts of climate change on the ocean — marine heat waves, changing species distributions, changes in ocean circulation, increased harmful algal blooms, coastal erosion, and economic impacts on commercially valuable fisheries to name a few — is a significant problem with the report.”

    The report also has a bad case of “selection bias,” by elevating minor issues or weak science over well-established and strong science, or issues vital to climate action.

    In one instance, the Trump team heavily downplayed the scientific research at the heart of the Paris Agreement’s nitty-gritty methodologies for measuring carbon emissions, and put a more marginal approach at the center instead.

    “For a report claiming to be a ‘Critical Review’ of greenhouse gas impacts to entirely ignore the primary scientific framework for international and national climate policy is an inexplicable and scientifically unjustifiable omission,” the review concluded.

    In sections where Trump’s climate team claimed that there were no long-term extreme weather trends associated with climate change — such as more frequent and destructive floods and hurricanes —  the review found that they left out key findings that contradicted their conclusion, cherry-picked studies, quoted research out of context, and used outdated materials instead of the best available science.

    The five authors used similar tactics to slant sections on tornadoes and wildfires.

    Zombie Arguments

    The Trump administration report raises questions about climate change that have been asked and answered — repeatedly.  Rehashing these long-settled scientific debates created an opportunity for the report’s authors to deny the fundamental cause of the climate crisis: burning fossil fuels.

    “Those sorts of back-from-the-dead arguments [create] a ‘zombie argument’ that is inconsistent with the state of the best available science,” the expert review concluded.

    One such resurrected claim pointed to record-breaking high temperatures in the 1930s to dismiss climate change as a factor in recent heat waves. However, many of these records have fallen since 2000. “[I]n our calculation, the most recent few years have had as many record-breaking high temperatures as the 1930s,” the review notes. “In fact, the year with the most record-breaking hot days is 2023.”

    The federal report sometimes griped about the absence of their claims from recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change surveys of the best-available science, without acknowledging that climate scientists have moved on from those questions for good reasons.

    “So much literature has been produced to refute the claims of the [Climate Working Group] report authors, and over so long a time period,” the review pointed out, “that these claims are no longer part of the active scientific debate.”

    Echo Chambers

    The Trump administration’s five authors relied heavily on citations to their own climate-related research and analyses, the review found.

    Overall, 11 percent of the report’s citations were self-citations, according to the review — roughly two to four times more than the self-citations in the climate science overview released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2021.

    In a couple of chapters, the self-citations numbered more than one out of every four.

    This echo chamber of self-citations pushes out other, peer-reviewed and published science on the same topics, “of which there is plenty,” according to the expert review.

    Word Games

    The expert review found that conclusions reached by the Trump team sometimes relied on incorrect uses of scientific terms in ways that favored climate denial.

    In one example, reviewers explained that the term ocean acidification “is not used in a way to indicate that the ocean is becoming an acid,” but “the more commonly used term for the phenomena of ocean carbonate chemistry changes because it provides a straightforward terminology to describing the declining pH of the ocean.”

    Elsewhere, the Trump team uses the term “greening” in a misleading way that “implies ‘greening’ is an expansion of vegetation into areas that were previously non-vegetated,“ the review found. This is a key mistake because the report “thus incorrectly interprets the literature on ‘greening’ throughout this section.”

    The Endangerment Finding, Endangered

    Opponents of greenhouse gas cuts have worked for decades to block or overturn the federal government’s power to regulate them.

    The legal basis for this authority is the EPA endangerment finding that — despite being credited to the Obama-Biden administration by Trump officials — dates back to George W. Bush’s second term as president.

    In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in lawsuit brought by Massachusetts and several other states, that CO2, methane, and four other greenhouse gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act. In the ruling the court also found that under the Clean Air Act, the EPA had a duty under to analyze whether they endanger public health or welfare and — if so — to regulate sources of carbon pollution.

    In response to this decision, the EPA produced its endangerment finding. Rather than regulate carbon pollution, however, the Bush White House suppressed the document.

    In 2009 the Obama White House released the finding, and began establishing rules under the Clean Air Act to cap and cut carbon pollution from motor vehicles as well as power plants and other industrial sources.

    Since then, as DeSmog has previously reported, a powerful anti-climate coalition of politicians, oil companies, trade groups, and right-wing networks has been trying to overturn the endangerment finding, culminating in Project 2025 — the extreme-right blueprint for transforming the federal government.

    Project 2025’s chapter on the EPA, which mentions “updating” the 2009 endangerment finding, was written in part by Aaron Szabo, now a high-level Trump appointee to the agency.

    The director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, was one of the main architects of Project 2025, and has publicly supported rescinding the endangerment finding.

    Some members of the Trump climate working group were also part of his first administration. Steve Koonin, a physicist, advised the government on climate change during Trump’s first term, and atmospheric scientist John Christy was on the EPA’s Science Advisory Board.

    Another Trump report co-author, climatologist Judith Curry, was a paid witness for the state of Montana during a 2023 trial on whether the state’s promotion of fossil fuels violated its constitution. The 16 young Montana residents who sued the state won that case.

    UPDATE Sept. 2, 2025: This story has been updated to include a statement from Judith Curry, and to correct the end date of the public comment period for the EPA’s proposal to rescind the endangerment finding.

    Join me on Wings of Change. We still have so much work to do as activists and organizations make plans for the upcoming months and years. Wings of Change is pleased and excited to be a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration.

    Subscribe to Wings of Change here!

    Donate

    Whatever you are able donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with opinions and creative contributions.

    Sue Ann Martinson

    One place to begin is with reason and truth, and how fundamental they are to creating critically engaged citizens and communities. 

    —Henry A. Giroux

  • DN! “The Border Is Invading America”: Jean Guerrero on the Bipartisan Failures of Immigration Policy

    DN! “The Border Is Invading America”: Jean Guerrero on the Bipartisan Failures of Immigration Policy

    The reality is that the border is invading us, and it’s coming not only for the rights of immigrants and for immigrants themselves, but for the rights of all of us.

    AMY GOODMAN: We speak to journalist Jean Guerrero about the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-immigrant crackdown and the bipartisan roots of “anti-immigrant cruelty” in the United States. Guerrero’s latest opinion piece in The New York Times is titled “The Border Is Invading America” and traces the development of U.S. border policies since the Clinton administration. “The brute force that the border once unleashed out of sight, in the desert or behind the locked doors of detention centers, is now erupting on our streets,” says Guerrero. “We desperately need a reckoning with the structural abuses embedded in our immigration system and with how both parties have played a role in sustaining them, because, otherwise, the border is going to continue to coil inward and to destroy our collective rights.”

    Transcript
    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

    As President Trump threatens to send the National Guard to Chicago and a federal judge rules against their deployment to quell ICE protests in Los Angeles, we turn now to Jean Guerrero, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. Her new essay is headlined “The Border Is Invading America.” She writes, quote, “The U.S.-Mexico border is no longer just a line on a map; it is a roaming force, drifting through our cities and ravaging schools, courthouses and workplaces. It has become unmoored from geography, dragging its violence and impunity into the heart of American life.”

    Jean Guerrero is author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda and a visiting professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, joining us from Los Angeles.

    Jean, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t you elaborate again on your piece, “The Border Is Invading America”?

    JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah, of course. Thank you, Amy.

    So, what we’re seeing across the U.S. is that the Border Patrol is now operating deep inside the country alongside ICE, and it’s bringing its Wild West mentality. You know, they’re wearing cowboy hats, and they’re treating Los Angeles and places across the United States like lawless outposts on a hostile frontier. They’ve been deputized to carry the border with them and to enforce its racialized logic wherever they go.

    As we know, the administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow it to continue to use racial profiling in immigration enforcement. And in Southern California, we are routinely seeing people targeted based on their skin color, which is why I wrote that the border is no longer something that only divides countries; it also snakes between white and Brown, between families and neighbors, between citizens and the rights that they once thought were inviolate.

    And the brute force that the border once unleashed out of sight, in the desert or behind the locked doors of detention centers, is now erupting on our streets. For example, in Southern California, we’re seeing fathers killed while fleeing immigration raids. We recently saw a family shot at in their car while trying to get away from agents. We are seeing people violently tackled and disappeared into unmarked vans. And too many Americans continue to believe that the border is meant to stop a, quote-unquote, “invasion.” But the reality is that the border is invading us, and it’s coming not only for the rights of immigrants and for immigrants themselves, but for the rights of all of us.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jean, in your piece, you basically also charge that Democratic leaders have been complicit now for decades in the stoking of anti-immigrant xenophobia in the U.S. You write at one point, quote, “I have repeatedly asked Trump voters about his immigration policies, such as his first term’s family separation. They tend to reply by shrugging their shoulders and pointing at similar actions by Democratic leaders, saying, ‘Obama put kids in cages’ or ‘Obama separated families, too.’” Could you talk about that?

    JEAN GUERRERO: Yeah, I think it’s important to talk about that, because what happened is that the Democratic Party normalized anti-immigrant cruelty alongside Republican administrations. And until we reckon with that bipartisan nature of our racialized immigration system, then we’re not going to be able to restrain it, because we need to hold our elected officials accountable in both parties for what they have created together.

    So, as I wrote in my piece, it was the Clinton administration that oversaw the initial militarization of the border in the 1990s, after which we have seen as many as 80,000 people who have died trying to cross the border. That’s a stadium of human beings who have died of dehydration in the desert, who have died of broken backs falling off of the border barriers, or even from Border Patrol agents’ bullets.

    And after Clinton’s border militarization, we saw President Obama deport 3 million people, more than any previous president. Oftentimes these are individuals who were deported to their deaths. And the Obama administration also oversaw — or, decided against removing exceptions for racial profiling in immigration enforcement. This is a decision that the Biden administration made, as well, and so both of these administrations affirmed a two-tiered system of justice, one in which immigrants and people who merely look like immigrants have fewer rights.

    However, when Trump came along, many Democrats treated his cruel policies as if they were shocking new horrors unique to Republicans. And this is a moral inconsistency and hypocrisy that Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller knew to exploit, which I can talk about in a moment. But the point is that Democratic leaders’ selective outrage on the immigration issue helped fuel the crisis that we’re living today, and we need to reckon with that, because right now too many Democratic Party leaders wrongly believe that we are where we are today because they were too nice to immigrants.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I wanted to ask you particularly, again, about the role of Stephen Miller. There’s been really no one quite like him at the high echelons of federal government in terms of the emphasis on naked mass deportations. Can you talk about him, as well, as the architect of the Trump policies?

    JEAN GUERRERO: Yes, yeah, the architect of Trump’s immigration policies. So, as I wrote in my book Hatemonger, Stephen Miller is a student of liberal hypocrisy. He grew up in Santa Monica, California, where he saw the performative nature of many Democratic leaders’ compassion for immigrants. Santa Monica is a place where many working-class immigrant residents have been pushed into overcrowded apartments or out of the city altogether because of rising rents. So, as Trump’s speechwriter, it was not hard for Stephen Miller to make the case that Democratic Party leaders defend immigrants only as a source of cheap labor or because they want their votes, even though immigrants don’t vote, unless they’re citizens. But essentially, Miller knew that, in practice, if not in proclamation, Democratic Party leaders had normalized indifference and cruelty toward immigrants. And this long-standing indifference toward immigrants that the Democratic Party has, except when they’re wielding this issue as a cudgel against Trump, is something that has worked symbiotically with the racism of Republican leaders to enable the border’s violent encroachment on our lives, which we are now seeing.

    And unfortunately, Democratic leaders are now largely silent on immigration. They are convinced that to win back voters and to win back Americans’ trust, they have to either sidestep the immigration issue or they have to channel the right’s hostility toward immigrants. For example, we were seeing California Governor Newsom approve cutting back on healthcare benefits for the undocumented. He’s really had a more muted tone on sanctuary laws in California. I actually reached out to his office for comment on the deaths of immigrants that we saw this summer, and haven’t heard back. But as Democrats like him appear to see it, the party’s failure is not inhumanity or incoherence on the immigration issue, but rather an overabundance of compassion for the foreign-born. And this delusion would be comical if it wasn’t so costly. It’s a gift for restrictionists like Stephen Miller, who use the disconnectedness of Democratic Party elites to stoke resentment toward all liberals and to bolster the false perception that immigrants are to blame for everything.

    So, really, what I’m arguing for in the piece is that we need — we desperately need a reckoning with the structural abuses embedded in our immigration system and with how both parties have played a role in sustaining them, because, otherwise, the border is going to continue to coil inward and to destroy our collective rights.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jean Guerrero, we want to thank you so much for being with us, New York Times contributing opinion writer. We’ll link to your piece, “The Border Is Invading America.” Jean is also author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda and visiting professor at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

    The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
    Next story from this daily show

    Army Vet Charged with “Conspiracy” for ICE Protest as Trump Expands War on Dissent

    Join me on Wings of Change. We still have so much work to do as activists and organizations make plans for the upcoming months and years. Wings of Change is pleased and excited to be a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration.

    Subscribe to Wings of Change here!

    DonateWings of Change Feather

    Whatever you are able donate will bring you articles and opinions from independent websites, writers, and journalists as well as a blog with opinions and creative contributions.

    Sue Ann Martinson

    One place to begin is with reason and truth, and how fundamental they are to creating critically engaged citizens and communities. 
    —Henry A. Giroux
  • Heather Cox Richardson, Labor, Energy, and Saving America and the Planet

    Heather Cox Richardson, Labor, Energy, and Saving America and the Planet

    [Trump] refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power.

    By Heather Cox Richardson / Letters from an American / August 30, 2025

    August 30, 2025 / READ IN APP (Substack)

    Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.

    These cancellations reflect President Donald J. Trump’s apparent determination to kill off wind and solar power initiatives and to force the United States to depend on fossil fuels. He refers to climate change as a “hoax,” says that windmills cause cancer, and falsely claims that renewable energy is more expensive than other ways to generate power. Former president Joe Biden made investing in clean energy a central pillar of his administration; Trump often seems to construct policies mostly to erase the legacies of his predecessors.

    Reversing the shift toward renewable energy not only attacks attempts to address the crisis of climate change and boosts the fossil fuel industry on which some of Trump’s apparent allies depend, but also undermines a society based on the independence of American workers. In 2023, about 3.5 million Americans worked in jobs related to the renewable energy sector, and jobs in that sector grew at more than twice the rate of those in other sectors in what was a strong U.S. labor market. The production of coal, which Trump often points to as an ideal for American jobs, peaked in 2008. Between then and 2021, employment in coal mining fell by almost 60% in the East and almost 40% in the West, leaving a total of about 40,000 employees.

    Another cut last week sums up the repercussions of the administration’s attack on renewable energy. On August 22 the Interior Department suddenly and without explanation stopped construction of a wind farm off the coast of Connecticut and Rhode Island that was 80% complete and was set to be finished early next year. As Matthew Daly of the Associated Press noted yesterday, Revolution Wind was the region’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm. It was designed to power more than 350,000 homes, provide jobs in Connecticut and Rhode Island, and enable Rhode Island to meet its goal of 100% renewable energy by 2033.

    The Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Eastern Connecticut expressed their dismay at the decision, noting that Revolution Wind employed more than 1,000 local union workers and is part of a $20 billion investment in “American energy generation, port infrastructure, supply chain, and domestic shipbuilding and manufacturing across over 40 states” by Ørsted, a Danish multinational company.

    “Stopping this fully permitted, important project without a clear stated reason not only seriously undermines the state’s efforts to work towards a carbon neutral energy supply but equally important it sends a message to investors from all over the world that they may want to rethink investing in America. The message resulting from the President’s action is a lack of trust, uncertainty, and lack of predictability,” they wrote.

    Connecticut governor Ned Lamont and Rhode Island governor Dan McKee, both Democrats, are working together to save the project. In a statement, Lamont said: “We are working closely with Rhode Island to save this project because it represents exactly the kind of investment that reduces energy costs, strengthens regional production, and builds a more secure energy future—the very goals President Trump claims to support but undermines with this decision.”

    “It’s an attack on our jobs,” McKee said. “It’s an attack on our energy. It’s an attack on our families and their ability to pay the bills.”

    The Trump administration launched this attack on renewable energy at a time when electricity prices are bouncing upward. According to Ari Natter and Naureen S. Malik of Bloomberg, electricity prices jumped about 10% between January and May and are projected to rise another 5.8% next year. Trump has tried to blame those rising costs on renewable energy, but in the country’s largest grid, which stretches from Virginia to Illinois, nearly all the electricity comes from natural gas, coal, and nuclear reactors.

    More to the point is that the region also has the world’s highest concentration of AI data centers, driving power demand—and costs—upward. At the same time, according to Natter and Malik, the infrastructure for transmission is too outdated to handle the amounts of electricity the data centers will need.

    Historically, a system in which local economies support small businesses and entrepreneurs promotes a wide distribution of political power. In contrast, extractive industries support a system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals.

    Trump’s cuts are adding stress to this already overburdened system. Over the next decade, they are projected to reduce additions to the electric grid by half compared to projections from before his cuts. In July, Ella Nilsen of CNN reported that cuts to renewable power generation, as well as to the tax credits that encouraged the development of more renewable power projects, are exacerbating the electrical shortage and driving prices up.

    The Trump administration claims that relying on fossil fuels will jump-start the economy, but higher costs for electricity are already fueling inflation, and in the longer term, more expensive power will slow economic growth. In contrast, China has leaped ahead to dominate the global clean energy industry. Cheaper electricity there is expected to make it more attractive for future investment.

    Renewable energy is crucial to addressing the existential crisis of climate change, but as former president Joe Biden emphasized, developing the sector was also key for building a strong middle class. Well-paying jobs, in turn, help to protect democracy.

    Historically, a system in which local economies support small businesses and entrepreneurs promotes a wide distribution of political power. In contrast, extractive industries support a system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a few individuals. The extractive systems in the pre–Civil War American South, where cotton concentrated power and wealth, and later in the American West, where mining, cattle, and agribusiness did the same, nurtured political systems in which a few men controlled their regions.

    As president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Chrissy Lynch said in July after the Republicans passed the budget reconciliation bill cutting clean energy tax credits: “Working families shouldn’t have to purchase energy from billionaire oil tycoons and foreign governments or let them set the price of our energy bills.”

    Her observation hit home earlier this week, when Joe Wallace, Costas Paris, Alex Leary, and Collin Eaton of the Wall Street Journal reported that the comments of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump at their meeting in Alaska on August 15 in which they talked about doing more business together were not vague goodwill. ExxonMobil and Russia’s biggest energy company, Rosneft, have been in secret talks to resume a partnership to extract Russian oil, including in the Arctic, that had been severed by Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022.

    Lou Antonellis, the business manager of the Massachusetts International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103, added that the cuts to renewable energy projects in the U.S. were not just cuts to funding. “[Y]ou’re pulling paychecks from working families, you’re pulling apprentices out of training facilities, you’re pulling opportunity straight out of our communities. Every solar panel installed, every wind turbine wired, every EV charger connected, that’s a job with wages, healthcare, and a pension that stands for dignity for the American worker. You don’t kill that kind of progress: you build on it.”

    Notes:

    https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-renewable-energy-transportation-8578da8b985b6d4eef20ec4d85c21b5d

    https://climatechange.ri.gov/ri-executive-climate-change-coordinating-council-ec4#:~:text=Goals,for%20Rhode%20Island%20by%202030

    https://www.fox61.com/article/news/local/new-london-county/new-london/revolution-wind-halt-offshore-work-new-london-connecticut-project/520-22253f23-810b-4922-91e0-1ec558a2811f

    https://ctexaminer.com/2025/08/30/dangers-of-pulling-the-plug-on-revolution-wind/

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-27/soaring-power-bills-in-largest-us-grid-pose-risk-for-republicans

    https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/16/climate/china-us-wind-solar-energy-trump

    https://www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/fighting-for-a-livable-future-markey-labor-leaders-workers-speak-out-against-republican-efforts-to-cut-clean-energy-and-climate-investments#:~:text=They’re%20building%20our%20clean,these%20tax%20credits%20are%20repealed.

    https://citizensclimatelobby.org/blog/policy/how-clean-energy-creates-more-jobs/

    https://www.energy.gov/eere/job-creation-and-economic-growth

    https://stateline.org/2025/02/11/blue-states-hope-their-clean-energy-plans-withstand-collision-with-trump/

    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=54579#:~:text=Employment%20in%20the%20coal%20mining%20industry%20also,in%202008%20to%2011%2C115%20employees%20in%202021

    https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/exxon-rosneft-russia-oil-talks-f524e81f

    You are all an inspiration to me. Please join me on Wings of Change. We still have so much work to do as activists and organizations make plans for the upcoming months and years. Wings of Change is pleased and excited to be a part of that work through education, information, and inspiration.

    Subscribe to Wings of Change!

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    One place to begin is with reason and truth, and how fundamental they are to creating critically engaged citizens and communities. 

    —Henry A. Giroux

     

  • How the UN could act today to stop the genocide in Palestine

    We will not be satisfied until Justice rolls down like waters...As a key deadline approaches in the United Nations General Assembly, a little-used UN mechanism, immune from the US veto, could bring military protection to the Palestinian people — if we demand it.

    How the UN could act today to stop the genocide in Palestine

    Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, addresses the opening of the 77th General Debate of the UN General Assembly, September 2022. (Photo: Michael Kappeler/dpa via ZUMA Press/APA Images)

    Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, addresses the opening of the 77th General Debate of the UN General Assembly, September 2022. (Photo: Michael Kappeler/dpa via ZUMA Press/APA Images)

    By   Mondoweiss   23

    After twenty-two months of unprecedented carnage, three things are clear: (1) the Israeli regime will not end the genocide in Palestine of its own will,  (2) the U.S. government, Israel’s principal collaborator, as well as the majority of Israelis, and the regime’s proxies and lobbies in the West, are fully committed to this genocide, and to the destruction and erasure of every remnant of Palestine from the river to the sea, and (3) other Western governments like the UK and Germany as well as far too many complicit Arab states in the region are fully dedicated to the cause of Israeli impunity.

    That means that genocide (and apartheid) will only end through resistance against the Israeli regime, the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, the solidarity of the rest of the world, and the isolation, weakening, defeat, and dismantling of the Israeli regime.

    As was the case in apartheid South Africa, this is a long-term struggle. But even in the face of Western government obstruction, there are things that can be done right now. Things like boycott, divestment, sanctions, demonstrations, disruption, civil disobedience, education, prosecutions under universal jurisdiction, and civil cases against Israeli perpetrators and complicit actors in our own societies. And yes, we can also demand intervention and protection for the Palestinian people.

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    Established by a Cold War-era resolution adopted in 1950, the Uniting for Peace mechanism authorizes the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to act when the Security Council is blocked by the veto of one of its permanent members. Under this mechanism, the UNGA could mandate a UN protection force to deploy to Palestine, protect civilians, ensure humanitarian aid, preserve evidence of Israeli crimes, and assist in recovery and reconstruction.

    And the upcoming deadline set by the UNGA last year for Israeli compliance with the orders and findings of the International Court of Justice, with a promise of “further measures” in the wake of non-compliance, provides a critical moment for action. Indeed, the time for intervention is long past due.

    Models of intervention

    As I have written previously, any country can legally intervene (individually or in concert with others) to stop the genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes of the Israeli regime. Indeed, under the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, and other sources of law, states are legally obliged to do so in the face of such atrocities. International law requires intervention, the State of Palestine has invited intervention, and Palestinian civil society has appealed for intervention. But few states have met this solemn obligation, while Yemen, under Ansar Allah, has been mercilessly attacked by U.S. forces for doing so, and the genocide has been allowed to rage on for almost two years now. Thus, a multilateral mandate could provide the legal, political, and diplomatic cover that most states would need to participate in an intervention.

    Here, caution is warranted. There are many proposals for intervention. But some of these are not about protection for the Palestinian people, let alone their liberation.

    Some have called for civilian monitors for Gaza, essentially a few dozen observers in blue vests armed only with clipboards and radios. But there have been human rights monitors in the West Bank and Gaza for decades, before and throughout the current genocide. While these perform valuable work, they have no deterrent effect, and the Israeli regime views them as no impediment at all to its nefarious designs.

    Others, including the French and the Saudis, have called for a so-called “stabilization force.” But the details of their proposal suggest that such an intervention would not be designed principally to protect the Palestinians from the Israeli regime, but rather to keep an eye on the Palestinian resistance, and to restore the cruel status quo ante before October 2023, with the caging of the Palestinian people, and their slow, systematic annihilation.

    At the same time, many such proposals appear to be designed in large measure to resume the process of normalization of the Israeli regime, and to resuscitate the ruse of Oslo. Needless to say, a return to a kind of Oslo 2.0, as yet another smokescreen for Israeli impunity, wherein Palestinians are told they must negotiate for their rights with their oppressor, as their rights and land are continuously eroded and the regime’s status increasingly solidified and normalized, is not the answer.

    Then there is Donald Trump’s proposal for direct U.S. occupation, ethnic purging, and colonial domination of Gaza, revealing once again the dangerous and deeply racist delusions of the U.S. empire. Finally, the Israeli regime itself has suggested the deployment of a proxy occupation force manned by forces from Arab states that collaborate with the regime. As is self-evident, these proposals are not about ending genocide and apartheid. They are about entrenching them.

    The UN options

    That brings us to the United Nations.

    Mid-September will see the expiration of the deadline set last year by the General Assembly for Israel to comply with the demands of the International Court of Justice and of the UNGA or face “further measures.” Western delegations are scurrying to forestall this ratcheting up of Israeli accountability by shifting the focus to recognizing Palestine or by trying to resuscitate the long-dead corpse of Oslo and the so-called “two state solution,” i.e., another political process that normalizes Israel, marginalizes Palestinians, provides a smokescreen for continuing Israeli abuses, and offers an amorphous promise of a Palestinian Bantustan somewhere down the road. But the UN need not fall for this ruse.

    Of course, the UN itself has much to answer for in this genocide. To be sure, some in the UN have been absolutely heroic: like the UNRWA workers, who have been murdered in their hundreds by the Israeli genocide, many along with their families; other UN humanitarians who have continued to work to relieve the suffering of the people of Gaza, in the face of enormous risk; the UN’s International Court of Justice, which has issued historic decisions affirming the rights of the Palestinian people in the face of enormous pressure not to do so; and the UN special rapporteurs, like Francesca Albanese, who have endured two years of smears, slander, harassment, death threats, and U.S. sanctions, just for telling the truth and applying the law.

    But the political side of the UN has failed miserably. Some, like the UNSG, his senior advisors (on genocide, children in conflict, sexual violence in conflict, political affairs, etc.), the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and other senior political leadership, have failed miserably, not because they could not do more, but because they chose not to. And, of course, the enduring symbol of UN failure is the Security Council, rendered entirely useless under the constraints imposed on it by the U.S. and its Western allies. Uniting for Peace offers a chance to right the UN ship, and to rescue the legacy of the organization from the potentially fatal blow of yet another genocide on its watch.

    Security Council scenarios

    Of course, under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, the Security Council has the power to deploy an armed force and to impose that force even against a country’s will.

    But given that the U.S., UK, and France (all genocide complicit states) have veto power in the Council, there are only two possible outcomes from the Security Council in addressing a proposal for intervention: (1) A mandate that pleases the U.S., as Israel’s proxy, and which therefore would be framed in a way disastrous for the Palestinians, and could be imposed against the will of the Palestinians, under Chapter 7, or (2) A U.S. veto of any force that would actually be helpful.

    Clearly, the Security Council, by design, is no friend to the occupied, the colonized, or the oppressed. As such, the road to protection and justice travels not through the Security Council, but around it.

    Uniting for Peace in the UNGA

    Thus, meaningful UN Security Council action is effectively impossible in a body dominated by the U.S. veto.

    But here is the point: the world need not surrender in the face of that veto.

    The UN General Assembly (UNGA), that will meet in September, is empowered under the Uniting for Peace resolution, to act when the Security Council is unable to act owing to the veto. There are historical precedents. And taking such extraordinary action has never been more urgent.

    A UNGA resolution adopted under Uniting for Peace could

    1.     Call on all states to adopt comprehensive sanctions and a military embargo against the Israeli regime. While it lacks the power to enforce sanctions, it can call them, monitor them, and supplement them as required.

    2.     Decide to reject the UNGA credentials of Israel, as the UNGA did in the case of apartheid South Africa.

    3.     Mandate an accountability mechanism (like a criminal tribunal) to address Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity, apartheid, and genocide.

    4.     Reactivate the UN’s long-dormant anti-apartheid mechanisms to address Israeli apartheid, and

    5. Mandate an armed, multinational, UN protection force to deploy to Gaza (and, ultimately, to the West Bank), acting at the request of the State of Palestine, to protect civilians, open entry points via land and sea, facilitate humanitarian aid, preserve evidence of Israeli crimes, and assist in recovery and reconstruction.

    All of these actions could be adopted by the UNGA with a two-thirds majority, thereby circumventing the U.S. veto in the Security Council. As Palestine has requested intervention, no Chapter 7 action by the Security Council is needed to deploy a protection force. Palestine would retain full authority over when and for how long the mission was to be deployed, obviating fears of yet another occupation force.

    Very importantly, as affirmed by recent World Court findings, Israel would have no legal right to refuse, obstruct, or influence the mission. The Court has affirmed that Israel has no authority, no sovereignty, and no rights in Gaza or in the West Bank.

    The process is simple: (1) First, a proposal is vetoed in the Security Council (this is inevitable, given the role of the U.S. as a proxy for Israel in the Security Council); (2) States call for an emergency special session (ESS) of the UNGA under the Uniting for Peace mechanism (this too is easy, as the 10th Emergency Special Session remains active, and can be easily resumed at the request of a member state);  (3) A resolution is proposed by one or more sponsors, in close consultation with the state of Palestine; (4) The resolution is adopted with a two-thirds majority (a threshold required by the rules for “important matters” such as this. Previous voting patterns on Palestine indicate that this margin is achievable); (5) The UN Secretary-General is instructed to solicit troop contributions from countries, in consultation with the State of Palestine as the requesting entity, and: (6) The mission is assembled and deployed (while likely to be politically challenging due to predictably active U.S. interference, this is technically easy).

    Legally, there are no hurdles. The rules allow it, the UNGA’s Uniting for Peace power has been repeatedly affirmed, and there are precedents, most notably the UNGA’s mandating of the 1956 UN Emergency Force to the Sinai (UNEF) over the objections of the UK, France, and Israel.

    Of course, the U.S. and the Israeli regime will use every available carrot and stick to try to prevent the securing of the necessary two-thirds majority, seeking to water down the text, and bribing and threatening states to vote no, to abstain, or to be absent for the vote. The current lawless government in Washington may even threaten sanctions on behalf of the Israeli regime, as it has already done vis-à-vis the International Criminal Court and the UN’s Special Rapporteur. And they are likely to try to obstruct the protection force itself, once mandated.

    As such, the global majority of states will need to stay the course in the face of U.S. and Israeli threats. And global civil society will need to be steadfast in its demands for protection and justice, ensuring the glare of public exposure under which states will be forced to vote for or against a force to protect the Palestinians from genocide. None will be allowed to hide behind the U.S. veto, throwing up their hands with the familiar refrain of “we tried but the U.S. vetoed it.”

    Once mandated, let the protection force be deployed by air, land, and sea, accompanied by international media and supported by all diplomatic avenues to ensure its successful deployment and to press the regime and its Western backers to stand down. The world has a chance, belatedly, to stop a genocide and other crimes against humanity. All it needs is the will to do so.

    Conclusion

    In the face of historic atrocities such as these, that threaten the very survival of a people, and that could bury the nascent project of human rights and international law in their wake, every tool available must be deployed. The world has not done so. It must try, and quickly.

    Of course, we are not naïve. Success is not assured. But failure is guaranteed if we do not try.

    And time is of the essence. Genocide continues to rage in Gaza and is spreading as well in the West Bank. Famine has been declared in Gaza. Israel is expanding its military presence in Gaza and is rampaging across the West Bank. And September 18 will mark the end of a one-year deadline set by the UNGA for Israel to comply with their demands and that of the World Court or face “further measures.” The time to act is now.r

    Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and former senior United Nations Official. He left the UN in October of 2023, penning a widely read letter that warned of genocide in Gaza, criticized the international response and called for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on equality, human rights and international law. 


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    One place to begin is with reason and truth, and how fundamental they are to creating critically engaged citizens and communities. 

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