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political violence
Voter Fears Grow as Trump Continues to Lie about Election Integrity
New data find that Americans’ concerns about political violence, democratic participation, and safety at the polls remain alarmingly high.
Jun 20, 2026
President Donald Trump has baselessly claimed that there was fraud in California’s recent elections. The Department of Justice sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles, and the US attorney appointee has said there are “multiple election fraud investigations under way.”
These false allegations levied for years against our election systems by Trump are taking their toll on voters. New data find that Americans’ concerns about political violence, democratic participation, and safety at the polls remain alarmingly high.
This constant stoking of fears over nearly nonexistent voter fraud by Trump and other political figures is harming people’s faith in the system: 44% of Americans across the political spectrum are not confident that our elections will be free and fair, and 59% are now afraid of voter fraud either by ineligible individuals or election officials. People are afraid of each other.
Worse, voters are fearful of exercising their rights and have multiple concerns about involvement in the democratic process. In political situations, only 48% of respondents feel completely safe going to their polling place. Only 22% feel completely safe at events like political rallies and candidate forums, and only 17% feel completely safe attending a demonstration or protest. These numbers are alarming and speak to the lack of trust in our institutions and could be an indicator of significant unwillingness to participate in important aspects of our democratic processes.
When those people were asked who or what was to blame for the divisions, the top answer was President Trump and the Republican Party.
Most concerning is that a full 15% of voters would leave without voting if they witnessed or experienced harassment or intimidation at the polls. That includes 21% of Black people and 22% of Latinos compared with 11% of white people. And 19% of Gen Z and 23% of Millennials would leave. This obviously presents a challenge at a time when it’s imperative that young people are brought into the democratic process and their faith in the system is bolstered.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is also stoking fear. A disturbing number, 33% of Americans, say they are very worried about future violent attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), higher than fear of groups like the white supremacist Proud Boys at 26% or armed militias at 27%. When asked about an ICE attack, 70% of Black and Latino people reported being worried, while 49% of white people did so.
Of those who feel less safe than in 2022, mass shootings at 57% and general crime at 52% are the top two reasons, as would be expected, but continued political divisiveness is blamed by 51%, right behind crime. Tragically, 70% of Gen Z feel less safe because of mass shootings. And a third of respondents cite the cultural divides created by targeting specific groups as bad for the country. Another third blame fear of extreme right-wing groups as a reason for feeling less safe, compared with 17% who named fear of extreme left-wing groups.
At this moment, the political landscape of America seems to be one where acts of violence and unrest are expected. Furthermore, expectations of disruption, dispute of election results, and even the advent of another January 6 following the next presidential elections are high. Throughout the survey, people cited political and racial divides as areas of concern when it comes to fears and violence. When asked if our nation and people are as or more divided as we were at the Civil War, 69% said yes. The response was 68% four years ago.
And when those people were asked who or what was to blame for the divisions, the top answer was President Trump and the Republican Party. The number has risen to 52% in 2026 from 41% in 2022. Most significant are the changes in the Republican and Independent responses since 2022. Republicans reported a sharp increase from only 8% in 2022 to 19% in 2026 saying that Trump is to blame for the nation’s divided nature. And Independents went from 38% to 50% blaming Trump in 2026.
Given these fears, what can secretaries of state and election officials do to ensure voters feel safe exercising their rights? Well, there is one issue that is broadly agreed to by those polled: 68% of Americans fully support banning guns within 100 feet of polling stations, including 62% of gun owners. Black and Latino Americans report their greatest fear is others carrying guns at the polls. Today, 17 states have prohibitions on open and concealed carry of firearms at polling places and a total of 20 ban concealed carry. That’s up from 12 states in 2022.
Based on this alarming data, we recommended to secretaries of states across the country earlier this month that states:
- Ban all weapons in and around polling places;
- Communicate early and clearly plans and assurances that the elections will be fair and honest;
- Use the authority of the secretary of state offices to counter any misinformation about the elections;
- Communicate to the public instructions for what a voter should do if intimidated or harassed; and
- Reject any possible federal efforts to place ICE or other federal agents near the polls.
In addition to stopping the false election fraud narrative, taking these actions is critical to protect voters, especially as President Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has not taken the usual steps to establish a “command center” to monitor and address the typical emergencies that pop up around Election Day, and which would address things like voter intimidation and targeted disinformation meant to interfere with a fair process.
The DOJ has also canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting elections offenses, fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section, and failed to replace the director of its Election Crimes Branch. It is up to state governments to fill the breach.
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Why the People of Bolivia Are Revolting
To understand why Bolivia is on the brink, we must understand a fundamental betrayal of the people by their political representatives.
Jun 18, 2026
For over six weeks now, Bolivia has been engulfed in a national revolt. What started as sectoral demands over public employee salaries, fuel subsidies, and land rights has metastasized into a full-throated cry for the resignation of Trump-aligned President Rodrigo Paz. The country is paralyzed by more than 100 road blockades that have severed the capital, La Paz, from the rest of the nation, cutting off food, fuel, and medicine. Ten people are dead, dozens more injured, and over 300 have been arrested. Journalists and activists have also been caught in the violence.
The government’s response has been a schizophrenic mix of hollow calls for peaceful dialogue and negotiation, and brutal repression. Paz has signed deals with some social sectors, and organized a Social Economic Council, while jailing the leaders of the groups he’s “negotiating” with.
Thousands of militarized police have been deployed, using tear gas, rubber bullets, and, according to persistent rumors the government denies, live ammunition. Leaders of various protest groups, including the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), the largest trade union in the country, and radical Aymara defense force Ponchos Rojos, have been jailed. The Wiphala, the sacred flag of Bolivia’s Indigenous majority, has been burned in public squares by counterprotesters while the state itself no longer displays it publicly.
As Argentinian President Javier Milei’s expatriated adviser Fernando Cerimedo put it, this government is fighting against “dirty leftists.” Cerimedo was reportedly crucial in deporting a human rights mission from Argentina this week. Protest leaders and politicians have been kidnapped in broad daylight, including one senator with the Movement Toward Socialism, taken by police in plain clothes.
When a government disregards the voting blocs that got it into office, blocks every avenue for democratic change, criminalizes dissent, and rules on behalf of a foreign-aligned racist elite, it leaves the people few political options for engagement and representation.
Far-right groups and “The Resistance” have re-popularized the slogan, “Make the homeland, kill an indian,” which had become a popular rallying cry in the 2019 coup. Those same far-right groups were also seen in San Julian, near Santa Cruz, using illegal weapons and explosives against protesters, alongside state security forces. The Paz government has not rebuked any of these figures, statements, or actions, and instead cracked down further on the left.
Internationally, the reaction maps perfectly onto the new ideological conflict dividing Latin America. The right-wing autocrats, from Argentina’s Milei and Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado to the Trump administration, have been unequivocal. They have labeled the protesters “narco-terrorists” threatening democracy itself, with the government applauding their solidarity.
US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared that the US “will reject all attempts to overthrow the legitimate government.” President Donald Trump himself expressed solidarity for Paz at the Shield of the Americas, held at his very own Trump Resort in Miami. This support has emboldened the Bolivian far-right, which is openly pushing for a full “state of exception,” a euphemism for martial law that has been developed by various autocrats including Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, to crush democracy and opposition in the name of a “war on drugs.”
That scenario is likely for Bolivia, too, where protesters labeled “narco-terrorists” would be the subject of that war on drugs. Paz and the government coalition in the Plurinational Assembly have already passed and signed a law modifying the state of exception law. The old law was passed in 2020, after the pro-US unelected government of Jeanine Anez committed multiple massacres against opposition in that state of exception, to try to tamper state abuses.
Now, many safeguards have been removed, with the law giving carte blanche to state agents to kill, seize property, shut down telecommunications, and suspend political rights. The president has also declared a 90-day humanitarian emergency, which allowed for the deployment of militarized forces in El Alto, leading to the death of one protester and multiple injuries.
To understand why Bolivia is on the brink, we must understand a fundamental betrayal of the people by their political representatives. Rodrigo Paz ran under the banner of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), a big-tent coalition with Indigenous currents previously aligned with the left, populist anti-corruption crusaders, and hard-right figures from the Santa Cruz elite. Voters, exhausted by the chronic crises of the Luis Arce administration and facing a nightmare choice against the far-right former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (who was vice president to former pro-US dictator, Hugo Banzer), held their noses and voted for what they believed was the least destructive option.
They were promised “Capitalism for Everyone,” a softer, more competent alternative that would see public programs and social rights protected while opening up the country further.
Instead, Paz’s first months have been a masterclass in neoliberal shock therapy, looking to privatize energy, cutting public services and subsidies, restructuring debt with American financial institutions, and proposing to reform Indigenous land tenure, which communities correctly interpreted as a prelude to opening communal lands to private extraction. Key subsidies ensuring many citizens’ very survival, including fuel and food subsidies, have also been cut, jump kicking the cost of living for the most vulnerable.
The result is the political destitution of the Bolivian left, which represents the vast majority of the country. The old vehicle, Evo Morales’ MAS, is decapitated and adrift. Evo himself is practically in exile with an arrest warrant hanging over his head. His protege, Andronico Rodriguez, has been a ghost in public life, and his Alianza Popular has not been able to build much momentum.
Former President Luis Arce, Evo’s former minister and now sworn enemy, is in prison, in preventive detention. Other socialist leaders, politicians, and activists have been jailed, while the cabinet has ironically vowed to continue crackdowns “against lawfare.”
The Paz government has been jailing the key leaders of the socialist era while releasing convicted terrorists and far-right racists linked to the 2019 coup government and its subsequent massacres, like Jeanine Áñez, Luis Fernando Camacho, and leaders of far-right youth groups deemed the equivalent of the Proud Boys. It has also brought back the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had been kicked out by the Morales government over alleged election interference.
Despite running as the left’s only option, and as the counter to the right, since taking office, Paz’s policy proposals, rhetoric, and platform have mostly been directed at the white, Christian, conservative elite in the tropics, rather than to the Indigenous majority in the Altiplano.
This betrayal is creating a crisis of representation in a country where trust in institutions and democracy is already very low—and in the poorest country in South America. Most of the activists in the streets voted for Paz, while many unions endorsed the PDC, but are now expressing their discontent at their interests being disregarded. One protester in La Paz told me, “We have to remind these oligarchs who the Casa Grande del Pueblo is for, and reclaim it.”
The government and its allies have worked overtime to criminalize the rage that has come from this betrayal. In the face of this repression, some groups have decided to fight fire with fire, arguing Paz’s repression has made negotiation unviable. The COB itself said it would be willing to do anything, “as in a war,” and has vowed to “increase radical pressure measures.”
As Quya Reyna, a writer, activist, and social leader argued in a manifesto for the protest movements, repression will only bring further suffering, and, if the government refuses to negotiate, this is the social cost it will bring. Another manifesto signed by some indigeneist protest groups now explicitly endorses armed resistance.
When a government disregards the voting blocs that got it into office, blocks every avenue for democratic change, criminalizes dissent, and rules on behalf of a foreign-aligned racist elite, it leaves the people few political options for engagement and representation.
The state is using its monopoly on force not to protect its citizens, but to protect the privileges of the few against the many. It cannot, then, be surprised at the rage it engenders by doing so. As Reyna added, “if you want peace, listen to the people and negotiate, don’t repress.”
Faced with this brick wall, the social movements are left with little choice but to play outside the system. In the long term, this is a terrible development for peaceful, stable, social democracy, as it may create a vicious cycle between faith in political institutions, and political violence. As one piece of graffiti scrawled in La Paz by protesters declares, “Let there be no peace for the oligarchies if there is no bread for the majority.”
Vice President Edmand Lara, a populist former police officer who was crucial to Paz’s election, has broken dramatically with the president, condemning the repression and inviting the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to monitor the country.
The vice president has also denounced the cabinet’s own links to drug trafficking, though he has called for further crackdowns on crime, and Evo Morales. On the right, former president Tuto Quiroga, billionaire Marcelo Claure, Áñez allies, and others have pushed for Paz to step aside and allow security forces to rule, through a state of exception (essentially, martial law), while continuing economic “liberalization.”
Some reports have also indicated the military is interested in pushing Paz out, while embracing further right-wing figures. To satisfy them, Paz has given even more power to the hardliners like Ernesto Justiniano, the anti-drug czar, now minister of defense, while further alienating social sectors and moderate progressives within his cabinet, like José Luis Lupo, Lara, and billionaire Samuel Doria Medina, all of whom have urged for dialogue over repression.
This government is eating itself, while Bolivian democracy has perhaps never looked weaker.
The hard-fought promise of the Plurinational State, a multiracial social democracy with strong rights and constitutional protections, has been hollowed out by a new form of external rule for the elites, far-right racists, foreign states, and the security state. The majorities, meanwhile, have felt betrayed, and are using every means at their disposal to regain representation.
That popular movement now believes the only way forward is a fresh start—calling for Paz to resign, and for fresh elections. Until then, they will continue blocking the country, and forcing the government’s hands, to remind them of their power. Though, the right will continue blaming “dirty leftists” and “indians” for “destroying the country” and “stopping progress,” instead of blaming themselves.
To move forward, the country's leaders will have to realize that, whether in a democracy or dictatorship, they will have to govern with, and for, the Indigenous majorities, not without and against them.
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Jewish and Arab-American Solidarity Is More Important Than Ever
At a time when authoritarianism thrives on division, the solidarity between Arab and Jewish communities rooted in justice and human dignity is a powerful response to fear and hate.
Mar 24, 2026
Our country is at war. The American-Israeli attack on Iran has plunged the Middle East and the Arab world into chaos, displacing millions and causing thousands of casualties.
Here at home, this war has consequences for the safety of Jewish and Arab American communities. Last week, a man drove a car containing explosives into a synagogue just outside of Metro Detroit. Reports indicate he held Jews responsible for the death of several members of his family in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon. At the same time, multiple congressional Republicans have decided anti-Muslim bigotry will be a key part of their strategy for the midterms. This, after their language dehumanizing Palestinians and Arabs, went generally unchallenged.
This moment requires solidarity.
As we hold our breath with every new development abroad and at home, our hearts break. Our hearts break for the loss of life. Our hearts break for the fear felt by Jewish and Arab-American communities. And our hearts break again when we consider how this may fuel more of both antisemitism and anti-Arab racism.
The same politics that justify illegal wars abroad target communities at home.
Meanwhile, many American communities are also the target of the same state violence that launches unlawful wars. The National Guard has been deployed to cities across the country, and agents from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are targeting Black and brown people in mass raids that have led to tens of thousands of abductions, detentions, and deportations, tearing families apart. Racial profiling has Latinos, Somalis, Asians, and other immigrant communities in fear of leaving their homes. Immigration agents have killed Americans on the streets, and a record number of people have died in ICE custody over the past year. 2026 is on track to surpass those devastating numbers.
Right now, the Trump administration is using antisemitism as a smokescreen to target protesters, particularly immigrants who are people of color, and most particularly those who are Palestinian or Arab. We reject the assertion that this is how we fight antisemitism. We reject the assertion that one of our communities must be harmed to ensure the safety of another. Not only does doing so bring no lasting safety to Jews and Arabs, it invites more danger by weakening all our rights in a democracy under attack—the opposite of how we attain safety for everyone.
The administration’s willful disregard for the rule of law extends far beyond executive powers. Students are being arrested and detained for First Amendment-protected speech advocating for Palestinian human rights, teachers are worried about lesson plans that include the history of slavery, and libraries are being forced to remove LGBTQ+ books while transgender Americans in entire states are being stripped of their documentation.
Our nation’s essential nonprofits are under threat from our own government, and political dissent and protest is labeled “domestic terrorism.” And one of our most important tools to fight back, our vote, is under assault. The Voting Rights Act itself is in jeopardy, with the potential of taking us back six decades. These realities are deeply interconnected.
The same politics that justify illegal wars abroad target communities at home. State repression is creating fear and the erosion of our basic civil rights and liberties, as well as the abandonment of democratic norms.
In the case of Arab Americans and Jewish Americans, many choose to paint our communities as adversaries or, if we’re lucky, as unlikely allies. Neither is true, and our work together is not novel. At a time when authoritarianism thrives on division, the solidarity between Arab and Jewish communities rooted in justice and human dignity is a powerful response to fear and hate. It is also how we fight back.
This is a time of convergence for many important holidays. Arab American Muslims are preparing for the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Jewish Americans will soon celebrate Passover. The Passover Seder has us place ourselves in the story of those fleeing oppression. The Ramadan fast has us place ourselves in physical hunger and thirst, feeling what it is like to be without.
Those for whom that oppression or hunger is enduring, who await a relief that may not be forthcoming, are the reason we do the work we do. The reason we do the work we do together. Our solidarity is with each other and with them—the marginalized, the least protected, the hungry. We pledge to keep working hard together—and with all who believe in the promise of a better America where everyone is safe and thriving—until our collective liberation is achieved.
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Why Haven't We Set the World on Fire to End This War?
My country bombed a girl's elementary school. My country killed around 160 girls in an instant. Then, we all go to work on Monday—like nothing ever happened.
Mar 11, 2026
"To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger." —James Baldwin
An aerial photo shows rectangular tracings etched into dirt, one rectangle after the other, creating a grid across the land. A yellow excavator pulls piles of earth out from within the rectangular lines until each rectangle is six feet deep, then it moves onto the next. Men jump into the graves and shovel out what the excavator couldn’t reach. We don’t know if these men are the ones burying their own daughters, or if they knew the girls at all. But in my mind, I think they do—maybe they’re the uncles or the older brothers, and I hope to God it isn’t their fathers having to do something so devastating.
Wars have existed throughout all of human history, and this isn’t the first time hundreds of graves have been dug at once. I do wonder, though, if I were born in another time, if I would have seen such an image. The only thing I can be sure of is the reason why I saw the picture in the first place.
My country bombed a girl's elementary school. My country killed around 160 girls in an instant. My country is the reason that the men and women who loved those little girls have to pull their severed, bloody limbs from the rubble; find their backpacks covered in blood; and bury them forever. Then people like Karoline Leavitt, who will be remembered forever for being the spokeswoman for the human meat grinder, will refer to the mass slaughter as “propaganda” when asked about it. Then, we all go to work on Monday instead of setting the world on fire—like nothing ever happened. Like 160 girls’ lives weren’t extinguished while neocons and liberals alike justify regime change on the basis of state-sanctioned violence against women. Have we not all been here before?
When people are being gunned down in the street for resisting immigration raids, and environmental activists are shot execution style in the woods—to be committed is to be in danger.
This carnage is not new to anyone who’s been paying attention. The protests in response to President Donald Trump’s war on Iran were small, and I would be lying if I said it didn’t depress me. Have we all gotten so used to this? Did seeing the videos of children broken to pieces in grocery bags or hanging from their own intestines from the sides of destroyed buildings in Gaza wear down our nerve endings? As time goes on, and the depravity continues, are we more content with our lives if we ignore our own humanity?
Ultimately, and this may be for my own sanity, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not because Americans do not care about the slaughter being carried out in their name. James Baldwin wrote in a letter to his nephew about racism, explaining why white people don’t act differently, even if they know racism is wrong, he says:
Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.
He goes on to describe that if white people were to accept that they weren’t superior to Black people, it would turn their whole world upside down. It would be uncomfortable, for an undefined amount of time to live in a world where everything you “knew” to be true wasn’t anymore.
It would take an exhaustive amount of time to describe how life would change in the United States if people within the country decided that war wasn’t the answer to all of our problems—which has been our country’s fundamental “truth” for decades and decades. Our economy which is so centered around creating weapons and selling them, would need to be restructured completely. We would have to have a government that cannot act against the will of its people.
We would have to accept the “consequences” of not being able to plunder the Earth to its core and take over any country to seize its resources that we happen to need to fulfill the fantasy of endless growth and endless comfort. Eventually, the purpose of life wouldn’t be to have better and better things and be more and more convenient. The purpose of life would be to live, and live with dignity, and live with care. All of this, though, would come later.
The first hurdle in our way is the obvious repression that the pedophile warmongers in the White House can and will put us through if we collectively decide that we aren’t okay with them killing kids anymore. When people are being gunned down in the street for resisting immigration raids, and environmental activists are shot execution style in the woods—to be committed is to be in danger. That repression and that violence are just the tip of the iceberg. If history has taught us anything, it’s that the danger is worth it, that the “truth” we had before is nothing compared to the freedom we will have later. I hope we can all see that clearly, and I hope we’ve sat with it long enough to act, and act seriously.
In the coming weeks, how do we collectively decide to be brave instead of comfortable?
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Broadening Assault on the Left, Trump Designates EU Anti-Fascist Groups as ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’
Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein warns that the designation opens up US citizens to government surveillance, asset seizure, and material support charges.
Nov 14, 2025
President Donald Trump's State Department on Thursday broadened his efforts to use "terrorism" to crush his enemies on the left, designating four European groups as "foreign terrorist organizations" based on their alleged connections to the vaguely defined network of leftist agitators known as "antifa," short for "anti-fascist."
Following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September, Trump turned his attention toward waging a war on left-wing protest groups and liberal nonprofits, describing them as part of a vast, interconnected web that was fomenting "terrorism," primarily through First Amendment-protected speech.
As part of that effort, Trump formally designated "antifa" as a "domestic terrorist organization," even though it is not a formal group with any structure, but rather, a loose confederation of individuals all expressing an amorphous political belief. Civil rights advocates warned that the vague nature of the designation could be extended to bring terrorism charges against anyone who describes the Trump administration's actions as fascist or authoritarian.
Shortly after, Trump also signed a little-reported national security order, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which mandated a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Some of the indicators of potential violence, the memo said, were “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity," "extremism on migration, race, and gender," and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.“
Referencing NSPM-7 explicitly, the State Department on Thursday spread that crusade against the left overseas, slapping four German, Greek, and Italian anarchist groups with the label of "foreign terrorist organization" (FTO). The same designation has been given to groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, and al-Shabaab.
The groups targeted were Antifa Ost in Germany; the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/FRI) in Italy; Armed Proletarian Justice in Greece; and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, also in Greece.
The State Department said:
The designation of Antifa Ost and other violent Antifa groups supports President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, an initiative to disrupt self-described ‘anti-fascism’ networks, entities, and organizations that use political violence and terroristic acts to undermine democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental liberties.
Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas.
Each of the accused groups has had members charged with or convicted of violence, often against Neo-Nazis or adjacent far-right causes. But while they are more organized than America's anti-fascist movement, they are still broad-based and diffuse.
Mirroring what studies have shown in the US, the far-right is responsible for the overwhelming bulk of political violence in the European Union. A 2024 study by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) found that across Europe, the far-right was responsible for 85% of the violent targeted incidents they tracked.
Though Greece was one exception, where far-left violence was more prevalent than far-right violence, Mary Bossis, an emeritus professor of international security at Piraeus University in Athens, told The Guardian that Greece's anti-fascist movement has little to do with it.
"It is highly exaggerated to say that the antifa movement in Greece employs terror tactics," she said. "They even run in elections and have never shown any sign of violence.”
While most social movements have some violent adherents, Bossis said, "that does not mean, as in the case of antifa, that the whole movement is either violent or supportive of terrorism. In fact, it is very much not the case… Standing against fascism does not make someone a terrorist.”
As Mark Bray, a Rutgers University professor who teaches a course on the history of antifascism, pointed out in The Guardian, Antifa Ost is the only one of the four groups designated by Trump that self-identifies as anti-fascist.
“The others are revolutionary groups,” he said. “This shows how the Trump administration is trying to lump all revolutionary and radical groups together under the label ‘antifa’. By establishing the (alleged) existence of foreign antifa groups, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for declaring American antifa groups (and all that they deem to be ‘antifa’) to be affiliated with these supposed foreign terrorist groups.”
Ken Klippenstein, an independent investigative journalist who has warned about NSPM-7 since its release, noted that this marks the first time that an entity in any of these three European countries has ever been slapped with the label of an FTO.
"The move seems an attempt to make people accustomed to white Westerners being treated as terrorists," he wrote Thursday. "That, after all, is the goal of Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7."
While there is no law on the books to back Trump's designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, there is such a designation for foreign terrorist groups.
Being designated as a member of a foreign terrorist organization can subject one to significant sanctions, including having assets in American banks frozen, being unable to enter the country, or being prosecuted for "material support."
The government has used accusations of terrorism to go much farther, including carrying out extrajudicial assassinations of targets. Over the past two months, the Trump administration has bombed over a dozen boats in the Caribbean using the unsubstantiated justification that their passengers are "narco-terrorists" shipping drugs for cartels, which the administration has also designated as FTOs. The attacks have killed at least 76 people.
Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested last month that the Trump administration planned to use the "same approach" to antifa as it has with cartels, leading many to fear that might include assassinations.
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the media outlet Zeteo, said the designation of these groups as terrorist organizations was "super bad for US citizens, especially on the left of the spectrum," because it "gives this authoritarian administration potentially the power to surveil and go after US citizens on spurious 'funding of FTO' grounds."
The State Department noted in a fact sheet on the designations that it is also seeking to target those in the US accused of supporting these groups.
"US persons are generally prohibited from conducting business with sanctioned persons. It is also a crime to knowingly provide material support or resources to those designated, or to attempt or conspire to do so," the memo said. "Persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with those designated today may expose themselves to sanctions risk. Notably, engaging in certain transactions with them entails risk of secondary sanctions pursuant to counterterrorism authorities."
Klippenstein said that while Trump's "domestic terrorist" designation was limited, "with an FTO designation, the gloves come off," opening Americans up to "FISA surveillance, seizure of financial assets, [and] material support charges."
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We Live in an Age of Public Bullying; What Can We Do About It?
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.”
Oct 19, 2025
Professor Emeritus Roddey Reid could have retired from the University of California San Diego to a life of deserved leisure. Instead, he has just published a handbook on "Political Intimidation and Public Bullying," which is increasingly dominating government, business, and civil society.
A guest this week on my radio show and podcast, Professor Reid was followed by Professor of Law Robert Fellmeth from the University of San Diego, a leading critic of unbridled anonymous speech fostered by Silicon Valley companies to boost profits.
Reid argues, Newt Gingrich launched this political onslaught in 1994 when he took over the GOP, led the Republicans to victory and became house speaker. “To be clear,” Reid continues, “political intimidation and public bullying are forms of psychological and physical political violence… meant to injure, humiliate, isolate, coerce, and even destroy opponents and entire communities.” These interviews should spark a civic rebellion.
The political intimidation operates in both open sight—from the belligerent bully-in-chief Donald Trump, and in the shadows with serious anonymous threats to members of Congress, judges, and their families. Combined, this viciousness has meant the difference in razor-thin votes in Congress. For example, the violent-talking, unfit secretary of defense being confirmed by the Senate. Other Trump nominees, who are also staggeringly inexperienced, totally obeisant to Trump’s wrecking of America in daily violation of the Constitution and federal laws, have also squeaked through Senate confirmation votes.
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Reid is systemic and illustrative in his fast-paced book titled Confronting Political Intimidation and Bullying–privately published to make it very up to date through August 2025. In his last chapter, he conveys 13 strategies for citizens to use locally in response.
Cumulatively, this mass “callout” could descend upon Congress and state legislatures for a more systemic regulatory agenda.
Such legislative activity in Sacramento, California is already taking place to deal with the central delivery mode of such bullying—ANONYMITY—according to Professor Fellmeth. A long-time advocate of curbing the dangers of internet anonymity, including to children. Fellmeth urges a decisive ban on most anonymous assaults, leaving open some exceptions for whistleblowers and others with a need to protect their privacy and self-defense. To accomplish this selectivity has to involve regulation of the Silicon Valley profiteers and electric child molesters, led by the duplicitous Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of META. His major declared mission is to drive people from reality and live their lives in his virtual reality. A quick safeguard is to require anonymous speech to be pursued by law enforcement when it embodies physical threats and deliberate psychological torture. Naming and prosecuting the perpetrator will serve as deterrent to other potential anonymous predators.
Moreover, Fellmeth, who has written several articles on AI’s rapidly intensifying damage to youngsters, wants a regulation mandating identifying AI creations as such to forewarn the public. (See Professor Fellmeth’s article: "AI is already harming our children. Are California lawmakers going to do something?" January 30, 2025).
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.” That means those attacked with nicknames need to counter with nicknames, rebutting phony allegations and revealing the brutal impacts of their bullying on innocent people and families in both red and blue states by the vicious and cruel Trumpsters. Otherwise, the “Big Lies” without rebuttals become soliloquies, and therefore believable to millions of people and influence millions of susceptible voters. (See our prescient and useable book Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.)
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
His latest vindictive cuts—some boomeranging against his own desired policies—were outlined in a recent Washington Post feature by lead reporter Hannah Natanson. His latest “firings”—suspended by a federal district judge in California–targeted services for students with disabilities, inspectors who check the defects of federal housing, and employees who help regulate hazardous waste and pollution, according to the Post. Frothing at the mouth, Trump called those fired “people that the Democrats want,” as if conservative Trump voters and their families want to breath and otherwise be exposed to dangerous pollutants. The same flailing dismissals will strike what the Post described “as vulnerable Americans–school children, low-income families, homeless people, and senior citizens.” Trump is steered by the seriously hateful Russell Vought, the White House Budget chief and preparer of the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s fascist dictatorship. It doesn’t matter that these and previous firings, without cause, are illegal in numerous ways. After all, didn’t Trump tell you in July 2019 that “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President”?
Here is an illustration of the institutionally insane wielding of the axe by indiscriminate haters that is hurting Trump voters and families alongside their Democratic counterparts. Trump and Vought want to layoff “workers with top secret clearance responsible for monitoring and protecting the United States from biological, chemical, and nuclear threats.” Earlier Trump and Vought drastically cut federal health scientists, safety regulators, and critical benefit dispensers in the tens of thousands.
Another instance of mindlessly cutting federal support for slammed hard-pressed community colleges, the recipient of lavish praise by Trump over the years for their job training curricula.
He is betraying Trump voters, with regular treachery! It is time for the people to say, “Donald Trump, you are fired.” (See my May 2, 2025 column: “YOU’RE FIRED!”–GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE REJECTING TRUMP)
You can listen to these interviews on radio stations in central cities or by visiting RalphNaderRadioHour.com.
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Meeting Our Angry Moment With Fellowship and Laughter
What we can do is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation.
Oct 08, 2025
One strangely hot November afternoon, I waited for my elementary-school-aged kids to arrive at their bus stop. The quiet in our rural area was eerie. It captured the mood in the days after a national election that no one in my little community yet knew exactly how to respond to.
In my rush out the door, I’d grabbed my baseball cap, with the logo for my preferred presidential candidate on it, to shield my eyes from the sun’s glare.
The bus arrived and left. I collected my charges and, just as we were preparing to walk home, a tall young man leapt from the passenger seat of a battered Chevy pickup truck parked at the side of the road. He shook one sunburned finger at my hat and yelled, “Traitor! Traitor!” his face red with rage, or possibly alcohol—who knew? I gripped the pepper spray I carry in my pocket and told my kids to run home. They disappeared into the woods.
Luckily, the man scuttled back into his vehicle and drove off as soon as I looked him in the eye and sized him up. (Maybe word hadn’t yet spread that masks could do more than protect from illness. They could also let a man harass families without the moral weight of the act landing on him. How little we understood, just months ago!)
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain.
Once his truck disappeared, I walked home, rattled, not sure how to explain what had happened to my kids. But in the foyer, they explained the whole scene for me in their own satirical way.
One child shook a finger and yelled, in a mockingly deep voice, “Traitor!” Another pretended to swoon in response. “Oh no! I am so scared! What a big, brave man!” They collapsed in giggles.
This is the sort of anti-bully cosplay I’ve come to see often in recent months: Kids I know strutting around with their chests puffed out like roosters, imitating a neighborhood bully who insults immigrants. Expressions of fake awe about motorcycle gangs that pass by displaying Confederate flags and other racist symbols of the old South and revving their engines for attention. (“Wow! They are so strong and tough! I want to shake their hands!”)
As private as this mockery tends to be, lest (sadly) someone retaliate with violence, it gives us a way to express our sorrow at what is happening to the American value of peaceful coexistence, while lightening the mood. Such laughter diminishes the bullies among us, at least in our hearts. As leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and comedian Jimmy Kimmel show so well, it can diminish them publicly by holding up a mirror to their bluster and overreach.
Humor as Resistance
The use of parody against authoritarian leaders is nothing new. Among my favorite models is Serbian activist Srdja Popovic’s book Blueprint for Revolution. Recounting his own experiences with the student movement that, in the 1990s, resisted then-dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Popovic explains how jokes about ruling elites can make them look less invincible, while also puncturing widespread fear. And better yet, leaders who try to suppress such humor tend to look ridiculous. For example, Serbian police arrested (so to speak) a barrel with Milosevic’s face painted on it after Popovic and his fellow activists encouraged citizens to line up and hit it with a bat.
We in the mid-Atlantic region got a taste of how such mundane gestures can goad leaders into buffoonery when then-Justice Department employee Sean Charles Dunn threw his sandwich at one of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers President Donald Trump recently deployed in Washington, DC. The Department of Justice tried to charge Dunn with assaulting a federal officer, a felony, but a grand jury declined to bring such charges against him. Whether or not Dunn actually meant to be funny, that incident reminds me of how a seemingly small act of resistance can indeed expose executive overreach.
As I walked in a September protest against President Trump’s National Guard occupation of Washington, I watched leaders of the tens of thousands of marchers hoist a banner depicting Dunn with his sandwich and felt strangely encouraged by the raucous cheering that echoed through the capital. He has, in fact, become a potent symbol of the anti-Trump resistance.
Men and Rage
I guess there’s nothing new about angry men, either—at least not in my neighborhood. My home sits in a valley, and the nearby rural highway often feels to me like a repository of white male road rage. I moved here in 2020 and, just in that first year, I watched two drivers at two different moments plow, purposefully or not, into the vehicles in front of them. In one case, the driver got out and began hurling racial slurs at the group of Latino farmworkers he had slammed into.
If you’re unlucky enough to be standing by the side of that road, you’d better believe that you could get hurt, even if it’s just by someone speeding. The battered guardrails at the valley’s nadir attest to that. Once, a cop pulled me over when I was walking home along that very road after my car broke down to warn me that I could get hurt by the reckless drivers there. Safe in my white suburban mom identity, while pointing at the dimpled metal of the rails along that stretch of road, I replied, “No kidding. Why don’t you pull more of them over instead of me?” He blushed and actually agreed before letting me go home.
What causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
And mind you, those guys on my road are anything but aberrations. Many signs these days point to a scourge of anger and despair among American men, who all too often don’t seem to have been raised to express a wide range of emotions. A Pew Research study from early 2025 found that 57% of US adults think children’s caretakers place far too little focus on teaching boys to talk about their feelings when they’re sad or upset. Less than a third said the same about girls. In another survey, at least two-thirds of parents felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, and insecurity. Nearly half of those parents also felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of love. By and large, while women and men might feel anger in similar numbers, men are significantly more likely to act out their anger using verbal or physical aggression.
Though laughter offers a wonderful way to respond to stress, it turns out that it, too, is remarkably gendered. Women are more likely to laugh in social settings, while we as a society tend to expect men to make other people laugh through jokes and humor. Right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan is a notably popular exception to such a generalization in his ability to express vulnerability and laugh at himself. An analysis by Industry Leaders Magazine argues that his largely male audience does indeed value his willingness to admit he’s been wrong and his openness to laughing at himself. As one example, in an interview with English comedian Russell Brand, Rogan poked fun at himself as a child, a kid then learning martial arts, calling himself “so weird” and laughing.
When we express ourselves peaceably rather than by being accusatory, threatening, or violent, we connect with others, as Rogan shows so well (regardless of what you or I may think of his politics). And the ability to connect that he has—a trait conservative activist Charlie Kirk arguably had as well—may otherwise be in short supply among today’s male adults, especially on the political right. About a third of Americans report that they are lonely at least some of the time, though women tend to reach out more often to friends or loved ones when they feel that way. It’s probably no accident that men in this country are four times more likely than women to die by suicide.
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain. Just consider all the mourners who showed up at Kirk’s memorial service in genuine grief. Perhaps what most unnerved the Trump administration, when comedian Jimmy Kimmel flashed that clip of the president redirecting a question about Kirk’s death to the subject of his new White House ballroom, was confronting how alone he was in his indifference.
After Charlie Kirk
Given all the hostile rhetoric of Trump and his party toward their political foes, I find it easy to blame him and his followers for the uptick of political violence in this country over the past decade. After all, the vast majority of domestic extremist attacks have been perpetrated by individuals professing right-wing ideologies. Yet, as Jia Lynn Yang of the New York Times points out, this year’s spate of violence against public figures did not map as clearly onto the political spectrum as in earlier eras. Today, the attacker tends to be a “lone individual, lost in a conversation with an online void.” After all, Charlie Kirk’s shooter didn’t even vote in the last election. In a text exchange, he referred to the engravings he had made on his bullets, which included words like “catch, fascist,” as “mostly a big meme.”
While it would be reductionist to blame violence on video games and other nihilistic online spaces, it’s worth considering that the current generation of young people do, of course, spend more time online than any previous generation. If popular war games form part of their immersive environments, we as a society would do well to look more closely not just at the political leanings of shooters, but the contexts within which political violence flourishes in contemporary America.
What makes a gun feel like the solution to any political disagreement for some individuals? And if people like Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson, don’t see it as a solution, then what does it mean to shoot someone? If political assassination is a crime of despair, what series of events leads a person to such a feeling and such an act? Psychology tells us that anger makes us feel more powerful because of the adrenaline that courses through our bodies prior to acting out. But what causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
A New American Way?
I’m at a loss. And I think many of us may be. But what we can do (and by we here, I mean those of us who write stuff) is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation. The people participating in the “We Are All DC” march that I mentioned earlier held homemade signs like “DC crime wave” (with a picture of President Trump waving from the White House), played music, and sang. Though arguably comparable in size to the DC Women’s March of 2017, this demonstration warranted exactly zero articles in the New York Times. Somehow, in the age of Donald Trump, such legacy media outfits tend to prefer to amplify angry male voices rather than those of resistance, which, I think, is a genuine problem, explain it as you will.
If you think that a focus on resistance, humor, and joy is a losing path, as Kamala Harris’ “joy-based campaign” turned out to be, maybe you should remember that being with others in person does materially change the chemistry of our bodies. When we laugh or cry, especially in community, our bodies can release dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals that support empathy, communication, and a sense of hope for the future.
You might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day.
Perhaps with a greater sense of community, we would also take in more of our disturbing world and not, for instance, forget the two Minnesota lawmakers another extremist shot and killed in June or the young Black student recently found hanging from a tree in Mississippi. They received remarkably less attention than Charlie Kirk.
Unfortunately, our field of vision remains narrow indeed and, like the road I stood on that day last November, it contains a disproportionate number of angry white men. And no less unfortunately, we’re speeding down it quickly with a maniac in the driver’s seat, and it lacks the guardrails of a law-abiding Supreme Court and a constitutionally aware secretary of defense.
Unless we start talking to one another, that road seems to be leading nowhere good. In the meantime, you might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend it.
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A Declaration of Independence From Fear
If we have any chance of saving our Republic, and I believe we do, that chance will have to come from the public itself. And it will take all of us.
Oct 08, 2025
Cruelty, including a lust for vengeance, largely defines President Donald Trump’s character. And with an enemies list that is nearly limitless, he will never lack for targets. Among his self-declared enemies is the entire Democratic Party. Democrats, according to Trump, are a radical, evil, and dangerous lot. Going a step further, he has also declared that Democrats “are the party of hate, evil, and Satan.” The same goes for the political left in general. To Trump’s mind, all these people, representing approximately half of the nation’s population based upon election results, are evil and deserve punishment. They are, as Trump tells us, the enemy within.
But it would be a mistake to assume vengeance is Trump’s ultimate goal. Yes, he is vindictive, and, yes, he enjoys hurting people who he feels crossed him; but he clearly also has grander dreams. His quite transparent goal, one he shares with other authoritarian leaders, is spreading fear: fear of arrest, fear of unjustified prosecution, fear of becoming the target of a federal investigation leading to ruinous legal fees, fear of losing one’s job, fear of being harassed online.
The ultimate point of this, of course, is to frighten his opponents to the point they will back down and remain silent.
Fear is a powerful weapon in the hands of an authoritarian, something Trump and MAGA are proving every day. In the age of Trump, fear can cause people to think twice before speaking out, avoid taking part in peaceful protests, and dropping out of political advocacy altogether. Locking their political doors, pulling down the shades, and hiding.
Donald Trump has made his position clear: Only Democrats and other Trump resisters need worry about federal prosecution.
You can almost smell the fear. It saturates the air around us. And it is working in just the way Trump and his flunkies intended. A politically engaged progressive woman I know recently told me that she had stopped posting political comments on Bluesky or otherwise making political statements. She was afraid that one day she would be punished, or even physically attacked, for speaking her mind.
A man I know slightly, let’s call him Ben, excitedly posted the news that he had accepted employment in a leadership position with a local progressive organization. Shortly after posting this message, Ben received an email from someone he didn’t know suggesting that he should rethink that decision. The man sending the email also said that he knew both Ben’s address and Ben’s daughter’s address. He then included the two addresses in the email to show he wasn’t bluffing. With his family threatened, Ben decided to pass on the job.
Trump has repeatedly said that his political opponents are evil and deserve to be prosecuted and jailed. On occasion he will even suggest they should be executed. On other occasions he says things that seem calculated to encourage his supporters to use violence against those who oppose him. A few examples: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise.”
Here is another oldie but goodie: “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
While there are, of course, other examples of Donald Trump suggesting that the use of violence against his opponents is justified, let’s end with one very recent comment: "It's gonna get worse, and ultimately it's gonna go back on them (the political left). Bad things happen when they play these games. I'll give you a little clue—the right is a lot tougher than the left."
Trump has also made it clear that his followers have little reason to worry about being prosecuted for crimes they commit, at least at the federal level. All that is needed is for the Trump sycophants embedded at the top of the Justice Department to quietly end the investigation or dismiss the charges, something they have been doing with troubling frequency. If that doesn’t happen, Trump can simply pardon the offenders as he has also done often, most notoriously pardoning everyone who took part in the riot at the capital on January 6, including those who viciously assaulted capital police officers.
Donald Trump has made his position clear: Only Democrats and other Trump resisters need worry about federal prosecution. Democratic politicians who have rubbed him the wrong way are to be prosecuted whether or not there is evidence to support the charges. Republican politicians and anyone else who supports Trump, on the other hand, are untouchable.
The message this sends to his most ardent supporters could not be clearer. If you engage in lawless, even violent, actions against his opponents, you need not worry. He has your back.
Given this state of play, it would be foolhardy for any Trump critic to not at least consider the possibility of blowback. I will admit that even with my exceedingly small footprint, making me an unlikely initial target, I have moments of fear thinking about what will happen to me if Trump succeeds in completing his apparent goal of establishing a totalitarian form of governance in America, with him in charge.
The truth is, Trump is already well along in consolidating power into his own hands. It only took a few months for Trump to destroy our vaunted Separation of Powers. So far, at least, neither the Republican-controlled Congress nor our current ultra-conservative Supreme Court have raised a finger to fight back in defense of democracy. Every day the darkness enveloping this nation seems to grow darker.
So, yes, I will confess to moments of fear which have led to thoughts of backing away from speaking out on political issues. I have enough problems already, I have told myself, do I really want to get involved with all this? But I always come back to the same thing. If we have any chance of saving our Republic, and I believe we do, that chance will have to come from the public itself. And it will take all of us.
This essay then is my personal Declaration of Independence from fear. A commitment I am making to myself to never allow fear to stop me from speaking out. Because on the day one too many Americans have given in to their fears and withdrawn from the defense of democracy, the cause is lost.
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Beyond Division: Choosing Compassion Without Losing Accountability
Compassionate dialogue is a framework that allows us to hold and navigate varied viewpoints without a communications breakdown.
Oct 05, 2025
How do we hold compassion for human loss while also confronting the harm of the beliefs they carried into the world? This tension came into sharp focus in the aftermath of the shooting of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. Social media quickly split between mourning and condemnation. Some offered condolences to his friends and family, while others condemned his legacy and criticized his supporters.
The clash revealed a deeper duality that many now feel: Grief for a human life lost alongside clarity about the damaging impact of certain viewpoints. If you find yourself torn between mourning a life and rejecting a legacy of harm, you are not alone. This is the conflict of our moment: how to honor our shared humanity without excusing the consequences of speech that undermines it.
The tension is understandable. We can hold compassion for a person who is harmed because of their viewpoints, while at the same time making clear that harmful speech cannot be dismissed as just another opinion. Violence is never the answer, but neither can we ignore the ways speech shapes lives and communities. Respect cannot coexist with speech that dehumanizes. Balancing compassion for human loss with accountability for words that dehumanize is the only way both truths can coexist—and the only way society can survive.
The path forward requires more than moral outrage; it demands frameworks for engagement. Compassionate engagement, the process of creating the conditions for compassion and accountability to exist side by side—offers one way to navigate this difficult terrain.
By starting with listening rather than persuasion, Sanders revealed that people who appear divided by ideology actually share common desires for dignity and opportunity.
Compassion is not absolution. To mourn a life is not to excuse the harm that that life’s words or actions set in motion. Compassion marks a refusal to celebrate violence, even as we continue to confront and resist the ideologies that wound communities. Accountability can—and must—stand alongside compassion.
For example, some argue that Kirk was respectful in person and that he simply had a viewpoint. Others note that he could be dismissive, using selective or misleading “facts” as counter-arguments and engaging in rhetoric that cast entire communities as less than fully human.
Compassionate dialogue can help build community across these different perspectives. It is a framework that allows us to hold and navigate varied viewpoints without a communications breakdown. Compassionate dialogue is not about agreement; it is about a way of engaging that opens conversations rather than shutting them down.
Compassionate dialogue begins with three practices: listening before responding, asking questions that invite reflection, and resisting the impulse to reduce others to their most polarizing positions. It asks us to slow down enough to see the person behind the viewpoint, even when we disagree. These practices don’t erase disagreement, but they keep it from collapsing into contempt.
Research backs up what compassionate dialogue shows in practice. Studies of intergroup contact consistently find that when people are brought together across differences in structured ways, trust grows and prejudice decreases. Evaluations of dialogue programs also show that approaches built on storytelling, perspective-taking, and listening can reduce polarization. Even large-scale studies of everyday conversations suggest that when people take turns fairly and truly listen, they come away feeling more connected. The lesson is clear: Dialogue done with care doesn’t erase disagreement, but it can soften division and build enough trust to imagine solutions together.
I have seen this in practice during dialogue sessions at the Yale School of Public Health. Participants who had built trust within their groups were able to express divergent perspectives openly and, at times, discover solutions by grounding themselves in shared values rather than clinging to distinct viewpoints. This approach allowed everyone to remain anchored in a “both-and” lens that centered their shared human experience.
There are glimpses of what this middle can look like. On a trip to West Virginia, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) spoke with Trump voters. Instead of beginning with a scripted pitch about his political agenda, he asked attendees to share their own perspectives on healthcare in their county. By starting with listening rather than persuasion, he opened a conversation that revealed shared concerns about dignity, affordability, and the future.
His question demonstrated a possible approach to cut past party divisions, inviting people to reflect on their lived experiences—what it feels like to try to afford healthcare, pay bills, or build a stable future. By starting with listening rather than persuasion, Sanders revealed that people who appear divided by ideology actually share common desires for dignity and opportunity.
This approach mirrors what compassionate dialogue calls us to practice: leading with questions, grounding in humanity, and finding connection without erasing difference.
Compassion and accountability are not soft ideals, but obligations born of relationship. Coexistence depends on meeting in the middle, where shared humanity becomes our compass. We can choose compassion without losing accountability and build a society that refuses to let either stand alone.
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Wake Up! Trump Is Moving Swiftly to Become the First American Dictator
Will American democracy survive this onslaught, straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook? To a large extent, that will depend on you, me, and our elected officials summoning the courage to resist and protest loudly. And our media to call it out for what it is.
Oct 01, 2025
Most jobs have a “playbook,” a sort of instruction manual or checklist for how to do the job right, whether it’s running an assembly line, piloting an aircraft, or redoing a house’s plumbing.
Although our media seems oblivious to it, dictators have a playbook, too.
It’s one that’s been carefully followed in recent times by Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, Duterte, Bolsonaro, and numerous initially-elected leaders of other smaller nations. In previous generations the Dictator’s Playbook was followed, step-by-step, by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Marcos, Pinochet, Stalin, and Tojo (among others).
And now it’s being followed by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who’re a bit more than halfway through the list. Trump’s speech yesterday before our assembled military generals and admirals — telling them they should use our American cities as “training grounds” for the military whose job is to “kill people and break things” — is getting us closer to the final steps.
“We are under invasion from within,” Trump said, “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways, because they don’t wear uniforms. … We’re under invasion from within.”
And who is this enemy that’s so bad, so evil, that Trump just declared war against? He was explicit that the “enemies” are his political opponents and average people who live in our big cities:
“The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats... what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
What’s most astonishing about the reporting on this meeting is that none of the media I follow have even once mentioned that militarizing the nation’s cities is one of the most significant steps in the Dictator’s Playbook.
Combine that with the demand for absolute loyalty to the Dear Leader — Trump told the generals “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room” — and he’s declared himself the absolute ruler of America wielding the most lethal military in the history of the world against our nation’s own citizens.
Rachel Maddow recently laid out five moves that dictators reliably make.
— First, they identify an internal enemy to blame for social ills; Trump has spent years turning immigrants, big cities, and universities into scapegoats. Now, like every dictator listed above has done, he’s claiming that the opposition political party, the Democrats, are an “enemy within.”
— Second, they turn security forces inward, exactly what Trump’s new call for turning our military against our cities represents. The moment a dictator turns military forces built to destroy foreign adversaries against his own people, the rest of the transformation becomes easier.
— Third, they criminalize dissent and protest, insisting that when people show up in the streets it is not constitutionally protected free speech and the right “peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances” but a security “threat” to be crushed rather than heard and responded to.
— Fourth, they intimidate or capture the press and punish truth-telling, as we’re seeing now with rightwing billionaires capturing virtually every major traditional and social media source in America.
— Fifth, they seize control of independent institutions like universities, law firms, or the civil service to eliminate any professional standards that interfere with Dear Leader’s will.
Overlay that list with the work of historians and political scientists like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jason Stanley, and M. Gessen. Their research on how democracies die all point to the same ingredients:
— Deny or rewrite election results to delegitimize democracy itself.
— Declare political opponents enemies of the state.
— Turn independent institutions like the Department of Justice, the civil service, and the military into personal tools.
— Flood the public square with lies so thoroughly (Steve Bannon proudly called it “flooding the zone with shit”) that reality itself becomes negotiable.
— Tolerate or celebrate political violence on behalf of the dictator, and demonize violence against his followers and mouthpieces as sedition and treason.
— Demand personal loyalty instead of constitutional duty.
— Invoke a mythic past and promise national rebirth if only the strongman is given total sovereignty.
— Use his office to rapidly enrich himself and his family while creating a patronage network of loyalists who owe their fortunes to him.
There is also the money. Autocrats rarely forget to convert state power into private wealth. Trump’s hotels, golf courses, and commercial properties brought in millions from foreign governments during his first time in office, as documented by House Oversight Committee findings.
His son-in-law Jared Kushner secured a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund almost immediately after leaving the White House. Ivanka Trump picked up fast-tracked Chinese trademarks while advising her father in government.
Kleptocracy is not a side effect of authoritarianism or fascism: it’s essential, particularly when some of that fortune is shared with those willing to break the law to support Dear Leader. So far, according to reporting, Trump and his family have made at least $5 billion from his 9-month-long presidency. It’s a core feature of the Dictator’s Playbook.
And when people protest the theft of the nation’s resources and the personal enrichment based on handing out favors, dictators go after them in the most brutal ways imaginable. It begins with investigations, but never ends there. Just look at what he’s doing to Jim Comey and Miles Taylor.
And now Trump has issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum that essentially says Democrats, atheists, Muslims, Jews, socialists, and queer people are terrorists. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of who they are or what they believe.
It directs the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces coordinated with police forces across the country to investigate anybody who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein reported:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States Government, extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
Do any of those sound like you? If Trump and Republicans continue down this road, get ready to have your life turned upside down as they tear apart your social media profiles, search your email and postal mail, surveil you, and one day bang on your door in the middle of the night.
And you don’t have to have actually done a thing. Trump’s order explicitly calls on the FBI and local police coordinating with them to “intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
To go after you before you do anything, based entirely on who you are, who you love, what you believe, and what you say.
That is not the America our Founders, or the men and women who’ve fought and died to keep us free for 249 years, envisioned. And, again, the mainstream media almost entirely missed it while rightwing media ignored it altogether. Even though one day it may be directed against them if they say or do anything to offend Donald Trump or his henchmen.
When Trump told the generals he would remove anyone who does not “agree with everything I say,” he also embraced the logic of tyrants who treat disagreement as insubordination.
Democracies rely on officers sworn to the Constitution, not to one man. Trump is trying to undo that distinction. He’s demanding personal loyalty backed by the threat of firing, demotion, or public shaming. Civilian control of the military that George Washington and James Madison insisted on becomes a hollow phrase when the civilian in charge demands the military serve his whims.
What once sounded like fringe rhetoric is now proclaimed loudly to the uniformed leadership of the United States. The generals who heard him are not hypothetical. They command forces, oversee operations, and embody the principle that the military does not exist to occupy American streets.
The notion that they should roll tanks into urban neighborhoods to harden troops for foreign war is not law enforcement: it’s preparation for ruling America by force, a force that may well be preparing for the November, 2026 elections.
This is the kind of moment historians point back to later with disbelief. The warnings have been clear for years, but now the mask is off.
Even though our media insists on ignoring it, the Dictator’s Playbook has always included using a nation’s biggest cities as the stage for demonstrating power. It’s always required replacing officers and officials who follow the laws and traditions of a nation with loyalists who obey without question. It’s always depended on turning people against one another so Dear Leader and his lickspittles can step in as the only source of safety or authority.
Nobody can say this is a surprise: Trump pretty much campaigned on exactly what he’s doing now, and people from former intelligence, military, and FBI leaders to scholars of fascism warned us this was coming if Republicans suppressed enough votes for him to win. (Without the GOP having prevented 4.2 million registered citizen voters from voting or having their votes counted, Kamala Harris would have won and the House and Senate would today be under Democratic control).
The question now is whether Americans will accept a president who treats their hometowns as battle simulations and sees disagreement by generals and agency leaders as an offense punishable by firing, imprisonment, or exile.
As I point out in my new book The Last American President, it’ll depend on whether we’ll stand up and speak out. Or whether, like our media and so many universities, law firms, media outlets, and giant corporations, we’ll cower in fear and submit to Trump’s demands.
That is not law and order, and it’s not democracy in a free republic. It’s the language of autocracy that yesterday was spoken out loud in front of the armed forces of the United States and is echoed every time Trump attacks a reporter, media outlet, or one of his many “enemies.”
Will American democracy survive this onslaught, straight out of the Dictator’s Playbook? To a large extent, that will depend on you, me, and our elected officials summoning the courage to resist and protest loudly. And our media to call it out for what it is.
The clock is ticking, and these guys are racing for the finish line.
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