YOU KNOW HOW ATROCIOUS IT’S GETTING WHEN…

 Never thought I would hear the words "Ann Coulter hit the nail on the head" come out of my mouth. But when a far-right ideologue calls out Trump for human rights violations, you know how bad the situation is getting.

From US Democratic Socialists:

Right-winger Ann Coulter nails Trump with a question that makes him squirm: Suppose Iran dispatched operatives to Mexico, where, from the Texas border, they fired a missile at an American base and, unintentionally but carelessly, demolished a nearby American school, killing 175 people.

Then, what if they then blew up fuel depots, showering a chemical rain on residents? Then struck homes, schools and clinics, as Iran's leader warned that death, fire and fury would so pulverize America that it could never be rebuilt?

In that case, President Trump and all of us would howl at outrageous attacks on innocent civilians. And we'd be right.

– Ann Coulter

Every MAGA supporter who hasn't burned their hat yet should reflect on this.

 

TRUMP’S WAR OF IMBECILITY

 

Last week, chickenhawk warlords Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth were using the word “war” every other sentence, repeating over and over their confession to launching an unlawful war on Iran.  Now Trump is referring to it as “a short excursion”.

Before the markets tanked and gas prices shot up (the only two things he had going for him in the economy), Trump was talking about an Iran war that would end only in “unconditional surrender”. It’s a term he must have heard in a movie, because it is clear he has no idea what it means. The last time the US demanded or accepted unconditional surrender was at the end of World War II, when both Germany and Japan were on their knees and had no choice but to accept the terms of surrender as written by the Allies, and then only after a devastating war that cost the world 60 million lives and unquantifiable treasure. Judging from his most recent acts, Trump seems keen on repeating that experience.

But Trump is really in no condition to be discussing any sort of surrender on Iran’s part. Even though the US and Israel can admittedly inflict devastating damage on an Iran that was still sitting at the negotiating table when it was treacherously attacked, as things stand right now, Iran has the upper hand. For one thing, for the past half century, Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil is shipped. Under new management since the first US-Israeli airstrikes in this phase of hostilities killed the reigning Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, Iran's new leadership has promised an "energy war", which, between that regime’s drone and missile strikes on the energy infrastructure of neighboring US Middle East allies, and its concentrated defense of Hormuz, has the potential to bring not only the US economy, but also economies worldwide to their knees.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that the overriding trait of the Trump regime, from the president down, is supreme and arrogant ignorance. In recent days Trump has boasted that “no other president had the guts to attack Iran.” In real-world terms, the fact is that no president before Trump was stupid enough to attack Iran directly. If Trump thought attacking Iran was going to be a weekend walkover like the performative invasion he carried out as a prelude in Venezuela, he has another think coming. The same is true if he committed the crass miscalculation of thinking that the Iranian theocracy would bow down, deal with him, and hand over the oil in order to stay in power the way the Maduro regime, minus Maduro, did in Venezuela. Iran is a whole other animal.

Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world in terms of both territory and population (92 million people). It is also home to one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, dating back to the seventh century BC. Throughout its long history, Iran has lived through every sort of invasion and revolution imaginable and has learned from every one of those experiences.

Beyond the Trump regime’s unsubstantiated claims that Iran had missiles that could reach the US, or that it was about five minutes from inventing a nuclear warhead, Trump has used regime change as an excuse for targeting that country, pretending concern for the severely repressed and harshly governed Iranian people. After the first devastating airstrike—in which one of the first US hits was on an elementary school, where nearly 170 people, mostly little girls ages seven to twelve  were slaughtered—Trump began calling on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their repressors. But in neither of his terms as president has Trump lifted a finger to help Iranians make that any sort of real possibility. And indeed, free-thinking Iranians have every incentive (though not the means) to want to break the chains of what is truly a murderous regime.

If the US—indeed, if Trump— had actually been interested in a humanitarian-based regime change, Washington would long ago have been providing intelligence, training, arms and funding to Iranian pro-democratic revolutionaries. Instead, Trump has started an impromptu war that promises to make the lives of Iranians even worse than before in every aspect, and on the sole say-so of his Middle East puppet-master, Bibi Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s goal: Middle East hegemony for Israel, even at the risk of starting a world war. Trump’s goal: Oil…and a major distraction from the persistent Epstein files, which have Trump worried about more than “just” being perceived as a pedophile. Those are the goals. And the people be damned. Indeed, the world be damned.

Heading up the post-ayatollah’s regime is Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba. The 56-year-old heir to the Khamenei regime isn’t an ayatollah, which is a religious rank he has never attained. He is, instead, an enforcer—by all accounts, the man behind the murders of thousands of Iranian protestors seeking a democratic opening in recent popular uprisings, which the Trump regime has basically ignored, except as a prop to justify the president’s own ends. Khamenei is inextricably linked to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. If we compare the IRGC to something more familiar historically, this would be like Hitler's SS—or perhaps, on a lesser, more pedestrian scale, Trump's ICE in the US.  As soon as Mojtaba Khamenei was named Iran’s new leader, the IRGC pledged allegiance to him. Iran-watchers say there is a dual message behind this: It means that the IRGC is loyal to Khamenei as long as he is loyal to them. In other words, as long as their interests are the same—maintaining the regime and opposing the United States—Mojtaba commands the IRGC and, conversely, the IRGC is where all of the new leader’s power lies. As I say, they are inextricably linked.

There is a theory among analysts that, had the US simply waited out the 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei until he died of natural causes, there might well have been a greater chance for a semi-democratic opening in Iran, with political moderates demanding greater autonomy after the ayatollah’s 36-year reign. Clearly, that was nothing that concerned Trump. With his foolhardy “excursion” into an illegal and illegitimate war of aggression, we’ll never know, because a huge wave of nationalist fervor has now coalesced in the face of foreign attack, and by submersing the country in war, Trump has not only not weakened the regime, but has strengthened it.

Now on a war footing, the all-powerful IRGC is bound to tighten its grip, and the ayatollah’s son, motivated by Islamist radicalism, raw nationalism, and now, a thirst for vengeance, will take a hardline stance both in terms of war strategy and on any eventual negotiations. In other words, Iran will very likely be unwilling to negotiate, unless it can do it from a position of strength and getting major concessions.

Trump stupidly and ill-advisedly thought that he could bend Iran’s will with an air-war and no boots on the ground. He didn’t even listen to the warnings of his sycophantic chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, when he reportedly tried to admonish the president that going to war with Iran was a losing proposition. Trump obtusely thought it was a military decision and that he was qualified to make it. It wasn’t and he wasn’t. It was always “about the economy, stupid.” And in the process, Trump has painted a terrorist target on the backs of every American living anywhere in the world, including the United States.

Perhaps that is why, after all the “unconditional surrender” bluster, Trump is now saying, “We’ve already won!” He is clearly realizing, at least at the back of his mind—despite his pernicious narcissism’s preventing him from admitting it—that he has made a terrible mistake, one that, at the very least, could cost him the midterms, and at worst, could get him impeached (again), while sweeping the US and the rest of the world into a global conflict. In Trumpspeak, “We’ve already won,” means, “I need an off-ramp quick.”

In watered-down assessments, on-the-fence politicians and Big Media commentators alike are choosing to use the euphemistic term “war of choice” to describe American military action taking place in Iran on the sole say-so of one man: de facto US dictator Donald J. Trump. Let’s be clear. It is not a “war of choice”. It is a war of aggression. Every bit as much so as Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but unjustifiable to an even greater degree, since Iran is not a neighbor of the US, nor was it seeking to join an alliance against the US. It was, then, not at all within the fast-fading US superpower’s immediate sphere of influence. Or in other words, though these lawless acts by both Putin and Trump are equally illegitimate, even as rank imperialism goes, Trump’s un-consulted, unauthorized and unhinged war of imperialistic aggression on Iran is even a greater stretch than Putin’s illegal war of aggression on Ukraine.

Although (or perhaps because) the Trump regime is a lawless centralized government that refuses to obey the law on principle—be it constitutional, federal, state or international law—it is still worthwhile noting what international norms dictate regarding wars of aggression, since these rules are the gold standard for international peace and justice set following World War II. And the fact is that international law unequivocally prohibits wars of aggression, deeming them the "supreme international crime."

More specifically, such wars contravene the UN Charter and are classified as a violation of international peace, as well as a crime against humanity. Under international law, those crimes trigger individual criminal responsibility and State accountability. That is to say, American critics accusing Trump of starting “a private war” (and I include myself here) are missing an important point. Namely, that if a despot like Trump starts wars of aggression, it’s not enough for Congress to shrug and say, “This is Trump’s war. He didn’t ask us, so he owns it.” Under international law, if the other branches of government permit Trump, by omission, to pursue wars of aggression, the US as a whole becomes accountable, and therefore subject to any international consequences that may occur. That is to say, everyone participating in this illegal war on Trump’s say-so is responding to unlawful orders.

Growing numbers of traditional European allies are warning the US that they are taking an entirely defensive stance with regard to the war. Some have made it clear that they will not allow the US to launch new attacks from their territories, even when there are American bases on their soil, while others are indicating that they will defend their own assets in the Middle East, but will not allow themselves to be dragged into a war that they weren’t even consulted about, and that is illegal from the get-go.

While European governments have so far shown their shock and displeasure, they have, nevertheless, tiptoed around the unhinged US authoritarian leader as best they can, while holding emergency meetings to talk more about a coordinated response to the new reality that caught them on their back foot, and left them scrambling. It is obviously not business as usual for our Western allies. Who among them would ever have thought that they would one day have to be having the kind of discussions about the US that they used to only apply to the Soviets and then to Putin? But in the Era of Trump, everything is, as the saying goes, ass over teakettle.

US allies in the Middle East, meanwhile, have been much more outspoken in their criticism. Countries in the Persian Gulf region that have shown restraint in their relations with Iran up to now, have become targets of Iranian attack through no fault of their own. They are angered by the fact that the US-Israeli joint attacks on Iran have made them targets by mere association. And they are complaining to Washington that they weren’t even warned in advance so that they could prepare for the veritable deluge of surprise drone and missile strikes being rained down on their territories without permitting them to mount an adequate response.

Gulf-state officials say that the US has also focused entirely on defending US and Israeli troops while leaving the sitting-duck neighboring countries to fend for themselves. At least one Gulf-state official said that in his country, the stock of interceptors is “rapidly depleting.” Gulf officials are stonewalling when questioned by the international media, but reports point to surprise and anger in government circles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which all feel betrayed by the Trump regime. Bottom of Form

While official reactions by the Gulf nations have been less than forthcoming, some public figures have made clear their view that Trump has allowed Israeli Premier Bibi Netanyahu to buffalo him into a needless Middle East war. The country most upset by this would appear to be Saudi Arabia, which is also one of the most anti-Israel nations in the region.

Saudi Prince and former intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal told CNN last week, “This is Netanyahu's war. He somehow convinced the president (Trump) to support his views.”

As such, in the world view, the US has become a rogue state that is unpredictable for allies and enemies alike. And both are hedging their bets. 

Perhaps that will be the epitaph for the Era of Trump when its history is written. The time when America went from being the leading nation in worldwide stability and security, to being a loose cannon bent on worldwide chaos and destruction.

 

A FEW LIKELY CONSEQUENCES OF TRUMP’S WAR OF SELF-CONVENIENCE

 

Americans learned through Donald Trump’s Truth Social propaganda network this past weekend that we are at war with Iran. That’s right. Both the president and his “Secretary of War” (that’s how they like to dub the US Department of Defense) are referring to it as such. And in doing so they are tacitly admitting to yet another overt violation of the Constitution by this regime.

The fact is that the current autocratic American head of  State has long since decided to dispense with the Constitution, the rule of law, international law, and the US justice system. Trump has also decided basically to do away with Congress, saying repeatedly that “he doesn’t need Congress.” Of course, if he weren’t acting as a de facto ruler, whether he thinks he needs Congress or not isn’t the issue, but rather that the Constitution dictates that he must work with Congress as a co-equal power. Shamefully, the skimpy GOP majority in the Senate and House are letting him get away with trampling the Constitution, their authority, and their duty to the American people.

And so, the GOP has become complicit by omission (among other blatant constitutional violations), in permitting this president to launch an unauthorized war, which is both domestically and internationally illegal. A war which promises to have truly seismic consequences both domestically and worldwide. It is—as much as any war launched to date by Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin—a war of aggression that, among other things, is as illegal as Putin’s Ukraine invasion, in terms of specific not only US laws, but also international laws and the Charter of the UN, of which the US is a founder, signatory and member of the Security Council.

These violations are made even more flagrant by the fact that the US was involved in direct peace-related negotiations with the Iranian theocracy when Trump’s regime launched the surprise attack. Indeed, there was optimism last Friday from Oman Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi who had been tapped by Washington to mediate in US talks with Iran. In Washington to meet with US Vice President JD Vance, Albusaidi told the CBS News program Face the Nation that,  "If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem through these negotiations by agreeing (on) a very important breakthrough that has never been achieved any time before. If we can capture that and build on it, I think a deal is within our reach." He estimated that a finalized accord could be reached within three months.

Clearly, then, the Trump regime duped Iran—much in the same way that Putin had pretended to negotiate with Ukraine while regrouping and planning a major new offensive—by lulling it into thinking negotiations were advancing well, while never seriously entertaining a peaceful solution. It should be recalled that these latest negotiations were just reaching a semblance of the Iran Nuclear Accords finalized in 2015, after intensive negotiations between Iran, the European Union and the Obama administration. That pact was hailed as a major achievement that promised to bring Iran back into the concert of nations. But during his first week in office in 2016, Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of those accords in a move that was a slap in the face not only to Iran but also to US allies in Europe. As a result, that agreement collapsed.

The US airstrikes were as much a surprise for Americans—including Congress—as for the Iranians and the rest of the world, since in Trump’s State of the Union address a week ago, Iran got barely a mention, while negotiations were continuing. But on Saturday, just four days later, the first devastating air attacks were launched. Now, more than a thousand people have already been killed in this war that Congress never authorized.

Perhaps the Americans most taken by surprise were the at least 500,000 (some estimates say as many as a million) US nationals who currently reside in the Middle East. They had no advanced warning whatsoever from the US government. There was no evacuation plan in place, and there still isn’t. Some 300,000 of those Americans reside in numerous countries currently under alert as a result of Trump and Netanyahu’s obviously unplanned and ill-prepared attack.

The US “strategy” for getting those US citizens out of harm’s way became clear this week when Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an advisory through consular offices urging Americans in the region to “get out now.” It was the kind of evacuation order issued for random weather phenomena—except with a lot less advanced notice. Basically, no advance warning. Nor was any suggestion made as to how hapless Americans at the mercy of their own government were supposed to accomplish that task. Consular advice to the stranded Americans is, basically, to get out however they can because they’re on their own.

Indeed, in most of the area where Americans reside, there is currently no air service, and the entire region presents a huge hole in the sky if you observe the map of international air routes. Advisories to maintain airspace closed are currently in effect for  Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Those are all areas where aviation advisories are warning operators not to fly until further notice due to the risk from missiles, air defense systems and interception activity.

Current validity for the advisory runs to March 6^th, but could easily expand as military operations develop. So this is the situation: Hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas have merely been left stranded,  and to their own devices by the US government, as autocrats Trump and Netanyahu wage their private war of convenience, with no knowledge of or concern for the probable results, which appear bleak indeed. This has the potential to make the much-maligned Afghanistan withdrawal—agreed to by Trump in his nefarious deal with the Taliban and inherited by President Joe Biden on whom the GOP would heap all the blame—look like a Saturday picnic in the park.

The ones who were quickest on their feet and the most savvy travelers probably figured out that the only alternative early on would be to head north any way they could and connect via Caucasia and  Afghanistan (an iffy choice at best), or to head south and grab an air link through Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But those routes are now under very heavy demand, and are also becoming vulnerable.  

So all of that rhetoric about Trump being the president who would “keep Americans safe”…well, not so much. And whether anyone realizes it or not, the Trump regime just put all Americans at greater risk at home and all around the world, as the potential for random attacks by Islamist sleeper-cell and lone-wolf extremists just burgeoned exponentially.

But these dire situations appear almost minor compared to the mind-bogglingly major potential consequences to the world order of this mindless and unauthorized act carried out by the Trump-Netanyahu “mutual admiration society”. First, it should be noted that while Iran was indeed at the center of the ever-ongoing power struggle among three Middle East superpowers—the other two being Israel and Saudi Arabia—it posed no imminent threat whatsoever to the United States.

Let me say that again. Despite Donald Trump’s recent bloviating about Iran’s possessing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and about how it was a minute away from having a nuclear weapon, there is absolutely no credible intelligence to suggest that either of these things was true. In fact, the “nuclear threat” argument flies in the face of what Trump told the nation just last June when the US, at the behest of Bibi Netanyahu, flew joint missions with Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities out of existence. It was Trump himself who assured Americans that, thanks to that devastating bombing mission, Iran’s nuclear enrichment and development capacity had been “totally obliterated.”

So does Trump now want us to believe that, after a scant eight months, Iran’s nuclear team went from being “totally obliterated” to getting back up and running and on the verge of boasting a home-grown nuke? Really? If so, the US should, perhaps, hire them instead of trying to bomb them out of existence because they would appear to be world-class miracle-workers.

This was, without a doubt, at least from the US point of view, a completely avoidable and, clearly, an inadvisable move on the part of Washington. And, as Washington was in the midst of negotiations with Iran—even if by its sham “diplomatic” team consisting of the president’s son-in-law and his old real estate buddy, neither of whom have any diplomatic credentials at all—Trump would also have been well-advised to tell Israel to stand down.

John Brennan, the highly-respected 25-year intelligence veteran, former CIA director, and former head of US counterterrorism under Barack Obama, says he believes the plan for these attacks on Iran “was all hatched by Netanyahu”. He indicates that, just as Netanyahu did last June, he managed to talk Trump into it.

Rubio appeared to confirm this theory, though he later denied it, when he told reporters that Israel was on the verge of attacking Iran and the Trump regime realized that, if that happened, Iran would strike back at not only Israel but also at US military targets in the region. As a result, Trump decided to preempt the Israeli attack, and that’s why the US is now at war.

What? In other words, what he was saying is that US foreign policy is a mere reaction to Israeli foreign policy? That is to say, Bibi Netanyahu is dictating US military actions abroad? If that’s the case, there is something very wrong with this picture.

But this isn’t just about that. This is also about both Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu trying by any means to stay out of court and out of prison. Trump, as usual, went off half-cocked and with no plan, no contingencies, and no regard for the consequences, simply because he needed yet another big diversion to take attention off of the bane on his regime—the Epstein files. It is not likely to be a coincidence that this military action—which has very real potential to spark a world war—comes just as revelations are emerging about a DOJ plot to cover up or completely destroy evidence of criminal behavior on Trump’s part linked to the Epstein Affair—including his alleged rape, assault and battery on a minor who was 14 at the time. 

As Trump’s defense team leader Pamela Bondi, who masquerades as attorney general, is coming under increasing pressure to comply with the law, and release the millions of still missing files, and as more and more obstruction allegations are accumulating against her, the president’s plausible deniability is on ever shakier ground. Among files that have seen the light of day, and which are being reported on by the independent media, this was all predicted by an unlikely observer: Jeffrey Epstein. In communications with far-right political idealogue Steve Bannon in December of 2018, Epstein held out the possibility that Trump would be fully capable of starting a war with Iran if threatened with revelations about his dark past. Specifically, Epstein speculated that if Trump felt cornered by political pressure, he would trigger a larger conflict, such as bombing Iran, to create a crisis and rally public support.

In separate exchanges with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and attorney Reid Weingarten, Epstein described Trump as “borderline insane.”

When Bannon seemed unconvinced that Trump would go so far, Epstein wrote back saying, “You guys need to understand that he is psychotic... if I go down, I'm taking everyone with me. Cornering a rat, never a good idea”.

From Bibi Netanyahu’s standpoint, the advantage is twofold. On the one hand, he was taking advantage of a passive moment in Iran as the government continued to negotiate. Strategically, he saw a chance to actively strengthen Israel’s position as a regional superpower while dealing a devastating blow to Iran’s regional power.

On the other hand, for Netanyahu as for Trump, this aggression and the initiation of a new conflict provides a great distraction at a time when the war on Gaza is losing momentum and when he is increasingly under pressure to negotiate an end to the hostilities. His personal vulnerability is the ghost of corruption charges that are still pending against him in the Israeli courts, in which he could end up not only losing his political power but also his freedom. It is a win-win short-term move for Netanyahu, and he very well knew that, given Trump’s situation, getting the US to go along was likely to be an easy lift. Turns out, he was right.

Meanwhile, the enormous collateral effects of this overnight initiation of a major conflict in the Middle East are not easy to summarize or predict, and I will be writing a great deal more about them as events develop. But here are some foreseeable consequences:

1.  The death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, marks a major geopolitical rupture. It promises to cause upheaval not only in Iran but throughout the Middle East. It will profoundly affect not only Iranian politics and geopolitics but will bring seismic effects in energy markets, global trade, shipping and Middle Eastern security as a whole, with the entire region suddenly becoming a potential war zone.

2.  Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are acting as if, with a few airstrikes, and the targeted executions of some key players in the theocracy and military, the US has freed the Iranian people from the cruel theocratic dictatorship that has ruled them up to now. If that was the plan, they obviously know nothing about Iran or that regime.

The theocracy has already reestablished its authority, choosing a new supreme leader, and is backed by the powerful and slavishly loyal IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), which is likely to be even more ruthless in crushing dissent, after killing thousands of people while Ali Khamenei was still alive. Underscoring this are reports that the new Ayatollah is  Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the US-slain leader. Mojtaba Khamenei is much more radical than his father, has close ties to the IRGC and is thought to have been in charge of much of the repression that the Iranian opposition has suffered in recent years.
US Middle East military experts like retired General Mark Hertling and security experts like Brennan are making it clear that no regime change will take place unless there are American boots on the ground. And then, only after major and prolonged fighting. Regime change, in other words, cannot be effected from the air and will likely involve the US in another forever-war in the Middle East.
Beyond all of this, the sad news for common everyday Iranians taking Trump at his word and hoping that this is the end of their theocratic nightmare, is that Trump has said publicly that he will be employing “the Venezuela template” in Iran. This is, of course, a contradiction in terms, since Iran and Venezuela are radically different countries and cultures. But on hearing the false hope that Trump is extending to them, Iranians need to look at what he did in Venezuela. He blasted strategic targets in the capital city of Caracas, snatched President Maduro and his wife and spirited them back to the US. Then, he blithely returned power directly to Maduro’s regime, in exchange for oil, while ignoring the winners of prior elections that Maduro had voided. Venezuela remained, and still remains, a dictatorship ruled by the same harsh de facto regime that was in charge before US intervention, with Maduro’s vice president simply moving to the presidential office.
Venezuelans were duped and Iranians will be duped as well. If Trump can strike a largely commercial (oil) compromise with Khamenei’s son—by making him an offer he can’t refuse—the regime will remain in power, and the Iranian people will be worse off than ever before.
Had the US really cared about the people of Iran rising up and shaking off the chains of the Islamic theocracy, it would long ago have been backing anti-regime guerrilla movements in that country with intelligence-sharing, training, money, arms and military advisors. Because without that kind of backing, no regime overthrow would ever be possible. But the US learned long ago to be careful what you wish for, since, short of setting up a US-backed puppet regime—something which history tells us never works in the long-run—there is no way to know what sort of government would follow this one, or whether it would align itself with the US which has a long history of unpopularity in Iran.

3.  Another contingency is that prolonged fighting could lead to a much weakened Iran that would slip into the sort of chaos some other Middle Eastern countries did following the Arab Spring. In that case, a power vacuum could form and government could become fragmented with the help of bad actors seeking to destabilize the area. That is the sort of action that might well be backed by far-right Israel, with Trump-backed Netanyahu taking advantage of a debilitated Iran to continue to bolster Israel’s military dominance in the region—the far-reaching consequences of which would be the further destabilization of the Middle Eastern region as a whole.

4.  A fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Hormuz Strait—a narrow neck of water that connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman. A significant share of liquefied natural gas (LNG) also moves through that strait. Iran, to a very large extent, currently controls that passage, and has, in the past, also used its Houthi allies in Yemen to aid it in that task. In the immediate term, disruptions to shipping traffic in the Hormuz Strait will cause oil and shipping, shipping insurance and container prices to spike. Experts indicate that sustained disruptions could fuel worldwide inflation and spark a corresponding worldwide recession, with the hardest-hit areas being Europe and Asia, but also with development progress in Southeast Asia and Africa being strangled.

5.  At least one expert in international law has described US worldwide actions under the Trump regime as “the great unraveling” of international law. Through his complete disregard for both international and domestic norms regarding the use of force, and with regard to the sovereignty and self-determination of nations—principles that have governed Western foreign policy since the end of World War II—Trump has basically instituted piracy as his regime’s foreign policy. In a US policy speech that Secretary Rubio made at a world security forum in Munich a few weeks ago, he faced off against criticism of the unprovoked US attack on Venezuela and on fishing boats in the Caribbean as actions unconstrained by law and “necessary leadership” in a fractured world order. This was huge, in that it signaled a US policy shift from the rules-based postwar order to one of might-makes-right, in which the US is simply doing what it does because it can, and because no one else can stop it.
Add to this a statement this week by the DOJ’s Hegseth, in which he said that the US would be applying “no stupid rules of engagement” in its unauthorized war on Iran, and America has just joined the Nazis in applying the same sort of Hitlerian policies that Germany pursued during World War II.
In other words, the Trump regime is bent on turning back the clock to a world where the most powerful regimes make up the rules as they go along and the rest of the nations are rendered vassal states.

Donald Trump was supposed to be “the president of peace”. At least that’s what he told us when he was trying to make Democrats out to be warmongers. But then again, if there is one thing that is consistent about Trump, it is his complete disconnection with truth and sincerity. Sometimes, it is hard not to see his attacks on Venezuela and Iran, his threats against Mexico, Canada and Greenland, and his verbal and economic aggression against our Western allies as anything but retribution against the world for not recognizing him as “a man of peace.” We know that, from his first day in office in 2016, he coveted every one of his predecessor Barack Obama’s virtues. What he couldn’t destroy with the stroke of a pen, he wanted to garner, without ever doing the hard work of earning the honors bestowed on others who did.

Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating. I saw with my own eyes, as did you, when he made a big deal out of accepting a made-up consolation “peace prize” created as a bespoke ego stroke by the FIFA world soccer entity. And when he whined about not getting this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, for all the made-up wars he’d “solved”, until winner, Venezuelan opposition political activist María Machado, offered him her medal to shut him up—and he became an even greater embarrassment than usual to the people of the United States by actually accepting it. And then, after his illegal invasion of her country, had the audacity to back the very regime that had repressed, cheated and jailed Machado.  

Could Donald Trump be that shallow and vindictive, you ask? Short answer: Yes. Definitely. The man has all the depth of a pancake griddle and the moral character of a wharf rat.

Many of the often salt-of-the-earth type people who bought Trump’s false promises and barefaced lies, and voted for him (twice), are the very same people whose families produce the military personnel who actually fight America’s wars. These relatives of military members voted for Trump in part because he promised to keep their sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters out of harm’s way.

It didn’t seem to matter to them that he had called America’s heroes “suckers and losers” or that Trump—a five-time draft-dodger from the Vietnam conscription era—had stood on the hallowed ground of Arlington Cemetery and asked, “What was in it for them? ” They simply bought his vow to be “the president of peace”, to bring the troops home, and end America’s forever-wars on Day One. They believed that he would use America’s Armed Forces for the purpose for which they were meant: to ensure US defense, not to go off to foreign lands to start forever-wars of aggression. They too have been duped.

In this latest action in Iran, after news of the first fatal American casualties was released, Trump confirmed that US service members have already died and that more will likely die or become casualties in the future, but added, “that’s what happens in war.” He said it as if he’d had nothing to do with it, when he had, in fact, personally and without Congressional authorization, lit the fuse for another forever-war that was completely avoidable. And in doing so, had painted targets on the backs of every US service member currently deployed in the Middle East. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shrugged the casualties off with yet another cliché, saying, “War is hell.”

“That’s what happens in war.” The subliminal message to MAGA supporters who voted for the “president of peace”? Soldiers get killed in wars. That’s a fact. Get over it.

 

 

FROM DAY ONE, YET ANOTHER US-ISRAELI WAR ON CHILDREN

 

As the US and Israel launched joint attacks on Iran this last day of February, children once again became the innocent victims who took the brunt of the mass violence. While the Trump administration celebrated the slaying of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the joint attacks, the news was overshadowed by a direct hit on a girls elementary school in which the death toll soared to 167, most of them young girls, ages 7 to 12, as well as other innocent civilians including school staff.

Iranian parents had just dropped their children off at Saturday morning classes when the airstrikes on multiple locations throughout the country began. A school in a suburb of Teheran was hit but not destroyed. Two children died there. But the school that suffered the direct hit was the  Shajareh Tayyebeh school for girls in the southern city of Minab. According to multiple news outlets quoting Iranian sources, the school, which was apparently near an Islamic Revolutionary Guard post, was devastated. 

Factnameh, a Persian factchecking service, cross-referenced a video released of the devastation with other photographs of the school site, and concluded that the video was authentic. Reuters international news agency said it had also verified the footage as being from the school.

The US and Israel are not commenting on the tragedy. In these days of weaponry with surgical accuracy, however, it is hard to write this incident off as “collateral damage”. It is either intentional state terrorism by the US and Israel, or it is a glaring admission that those operating the weaponry are grossly untrained and inexpert in its use. Either way, the mass murder of innocent civilians—especially when it is the result of strikes on soft targets like hospitals and schools—is a clear violation of international law, and, specifically of Article 52 of the Geneva Conventions, which states:  

1. Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2.

2. Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

3. In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.

This Iranian school strike could perhaps be considered a tragic error if we had not already witnessed repeated and multiple Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in the Palestinian Gaza Strip, leading to the mass murders of 2,000 innocent children in two-and-a-half years of war there. A cruel, genocidal war in which the far-right Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu has targeted schools, hospitals and private homes, as well as creating a humanitarian crisis by blocking food, water and medical supplies from reaching the civilian victims of its dirty war. All carried out with weaponry and support provided by the United States.

It is, then, hard to give the US and Israel the benefit of the doubt. I say all of this while leaving for another day the advisability, or not, of the US going to war with Iran, especially in the midst of supposed peace negotiations with that country, which now appear to have merely been a tactic to lull Iran into a false sense of confidence that the Trump regime was not yet contemplating renewed military action.

I will leave analysis of that situation for the future, because today, to my mind, priority should be given to the targeting of children in acts of war billed by Trump as “liberation of the Iranian people” from an admittedly repressive theocracy. Iranians should, perhaps, look at what happened in Venezuela if they are holding out hope that the true purpose of the Trump regime is to deliver them from evil.

NOTE 1: Casualty figures in this post were updated March 5th.
NOTE 2: March 7, 2026: In the interest of full transparency and disclosure: When I published the photo illustrating this post a week ago, I, along with editors in other media, took it as being a legitimate news photo. I have since learned that it is AI-generated. I am, however, allowing it to continue to illustrate this essay, without caption, for the same reason that it was originally posted. 
Snopes has tracked it back to a Pakistani Sihk journalist Harmeet Singh, who first posted it on X. Singh has since admitted that it was AI-generated, but added that he decided to post it to "symbolically reflect the scale of the tragedy" that it depicts--namely, the  mass murder of 167 people, mostly girls ages 7 to 12, in a double-tap rocket attack on an elementary school on the first day of Trump's cruel private war in Iran.
While I confess to having been taken in by what Facebook later flagged as "an altered" (as opposed to fake) image, I am taking this AI-enhanced picture to be "an illustration", a work of AI-generated photo-art, as if it were a painting or drawing, with a valid humanitarian message that forces even those who would rather not think about the consequences to innocent civilians of this ill-advised war of aggression to pause and reflect.
As for my referring to the girls and school staff killed in the attack as having been murdered, I will not be complicit in "sanitizing" their deaths as "collateral damage" or "a tragic mistake." If we think of the rockets used in the attack as "vehicles" any traffic court anywhere would deem this "error" to be vehicular homicide, as if some madman or drunk had driven his car into a crowd of innocent victims and succeeded in killing scores of them.

 

THIS IS GEORGE ORWELL SCARY—DYSTOPIA IN REAL TIME

 

Much of the corporate-dominated mainstream media conveniently “misses” news items that are all about your constitutional rights being violated daily under the Trump regime without your even being aware of it. But independent journalists are attuned to every nuance and are letting nothing slide.

There’s a reason that investigative journalist-bloggers, independent pro-democracy YouTube channels and citizen whistleblowers who would normally have only a handful of subscribers are suddenly becoming major players in the world of objective journalism. And it is that mass mainstream media is increasingly being usurped in often hostile takeovers by right-wing corporate conglomerates that are either watering down or completely denaturing their original philosophy.

The saddest and most blatant case of late is that of CBS, which has gone from having the most honest, objective and respected mass media news organization in history to being a corporate-censored mockery of its former self, with its bottom-line-oriented management playing on the losing side of Donald Trump’s game of intimidation and subjugation.

I make this prelude to the topic of this essay simply because, for those not tuning in to independent sources, it would have been easy to miss Defense Secretary (he calls himself “secretary of war”) Pete Hegseth’s attempt to bully a major AI firm into letting the Orwellian Trump regime use its advanced technology for the most nefarious of dystopian purposes. And, in the name of the Trump regime, he gave this private contractor until midnight tonight (February 27) to accept the government’s pretensions or to suffer the consequences.

Here's what I’m talking about. It seems this AI company,  Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, by former AI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, created some spectacular software whose original purpose was specifically to make AI safer and less apt to go rogue. Dubbed Claude, this AI assistant was designed to research, develop and deploy safer, more reliable artificial intelligence systems. In other words, not just an AI system but an AI creation tool. What’s important is that Claude introduced a series of guardrails, the purpose of which was to focus on AI safety, and what Anthropic calls “Constitutional AI”.

It is a trait of the Trump regime—and among others, of former Fox far-right propaganda talk-show host cum Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—that if there is a choice between what is morally and legally right and what is categorically wrong, they will pick the latter. So what Hegseth, obviously with a nod from his boss, has done is to called on Anthropic to remove those guardrails for the use being given to the software by the State (Trump’s deep state, in this case).

Specifically, the allegation is that Hegseth has two particularly nefarious uses in mind for Anthropic’s AI. One would be to use it basically as a sort of hunter-killer software, which could be programmed to carry out military strikes and extrajudicial executions anywhere in the world without human intervention. In other words, it appears the AI would make decisions according to its Trump Defense Department programming as to what or who constituted a “threat”, and launch its own strikes with no person being involved. Kind of, “Look Mom, no hands!”  That means, plausible deniability for the Executive and no need to go to the pesky Congress for approval in carrying out what are basically acts of war.

But it doesn’t end there. Hegseth (Trump) also wants to use Anthropic AI to create mass domestic surveillance software to monitor the activities of everyone in the United States. This would mean the regime could completely ignore constitutional guardrails that require probable cause, court orders and other checks and balances designed to protect your rights, my rights, and the rights of every other person in America.

It would also very likely provide the most paranoid government in US history with the potential ability to learn what individual Americans in every walk of life are thinking and saying by perusing in detail their social media accounts, emails and any other data it wished to hack, and to retaliate against “disloyalty” to the regime.

When Hegseth pitched his idea of removing the guardrails to Dario and Daniela Amodei, the couple gave him a flat “no”. Obviously and logically, because the sort of unconstitutional abuse that removing checks would potentially allow was precisely what their software was invented to block.

But we need to recall that Trump’s is not a normal administration. It is, instead a regime and a criminal enterprise. So Hegseth is using blackmail to get what he and his boss want. First, he has threatened to cancel the 200 million dollars in defense contracts that Anthropic now holds. But he has also doubled down and suggested that the firm could also be declared an enemy of the United States. And just in case that didn’t make the Amodeis quake in their boots, he has also suggested that the US might well just declare Claude essential to US intelligence operations and  invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act.

That outdated law would permit the Trump regime to essentially take over Anthropic and do as it pleased with the original software.

If any of this sounds familiar to average Americans, it may be because they recall a 2016 action thriller based on the character created by bestseller Robert Ludlum for his now world famous Bourne Trilogy. This was a continuation of the story—without the participation of Ludlum, who had been dead a decade and a half by this time—called simply Jason Bourne.  

We were already intimately familiar with Bourne—played brilliantly by Matt Damon—as an unlikely hero and patriot, a man whose mind was purposely broken by government trainers, a highly trained government assassin, one of a brainwashed killer elite under the control of the black ops group known as Treadstone. It is after Bourne becomes the victim of amnesia that his search for his former identity leads him to become a whistleblower and avenger.

Anyway, in Jason Bourne, it is already 12 years after his search began, and Bourne has become a major headache for the CIA, one who refuses to go away. He has already been responsible for the resignations of several directors and has flipped other top CIA operatives, while killing off most of his former assassin colleagues, who are now being used to hunt him.

The sinister CIA director is now Robert Dewey (Tommy Lee Jones). We learned that Dewey is pressuring a social media software genius, Aaron Kalloor, who has created the ultimate social media experience with his platform known as DeepDream. Kalloor—like Dario and Daniela Amodei—is the public face of corporate social responsibility in the Internet Age. His dirty little secret, however, is that Director Dewey’s office provided funding for Kalloor’s startup (much as the Amodeis’ young company depends on its 200 million dollars in government contracts).

Dewey (like Hegseth) has told Kalloor in no uncertain terms that he wants the guardrails removed from his platform so that US intelligence can surreptitiously employ it as a tool to spy on Americans nationwide. And he also wants the program to run parallel to the CIA Blackbriar black ops platform for targeted assassinations. Kalloor refuses, and Dewey orders Kalloor assassinated, while trying to kill two birds with one stone by also flushing out Bourne and having him killed as well.

In the fictional account, of course, Bourne saves the day, Kalloor lives, Dewey dies, and Bourne slips away into anonymity again, to fight another day for truth, justice and “the American way”.

When this fiction is compared to the facts about Hegseth and Anthropic, the common phrase, “You can’t make this shit up,” springs to mind. And it’s true, you can’t and I can’t. It takes a creator like Robert Ludlum and those who followed him in the Bourne franchise to come up with something this twisted.

But in the “real life” of the Trump era, there isn’t even some sinister leader of secret black ops pulling the strings behind the scenes. This is all right out there. And that is even scarier than any spy thriller ever written. If this is what faux Attorney General Pamela Bondi meant when she said Trump was “the most transparent president in history,” she’s not wrong. This is the Trump regime openly extorting a company to get it to violate the Constitution, the law and the rights of all Americans, while also trying to get that firm to help it commit remote crimes against humanity, and against international law.

We can only hope that Anthropic stands firm and sues the government to the full extent of the law, instead of knuckling under as so many much more major companies have in the face of Donald Trump’s threats and mafia boss tactics.         

 

THE STATE OF THE UNION BOYCOTT

 

When Donald Trump stands before Congress this evening to deliver his so-called State of the Union Address, it will be with some notable absences in the official audience. And it will also be with the haunting presence (unless the regime finds a way to bar them) of some of the survivors of the Epstein Affair, to which Trump’s name has been so intimately linked—some of the same survivors on whom his administration has literally turned its back and victimized even further.

The boycott includes no few high-profile Democrats, and is a reflection of not merely their frustration, but also of the ever deepening divide between MAGA World authoritarianism, and the erstwhile system of American democracy that has been severely undermined in the five years of the Era of Trump, and particularly in this past year of utter lawlessness under the regime. What it also implies is that the opposition is feeling the power to be gained from Trump’s faltering popularity—especially among independents suffering from buyer’s remorse. According to multiple polls, Trump’s approval is pretty much circumscribed to his most blindly loyal MAGA base. And the gap is widening as his behavior turns daily ever more insane.

This is important, because senators and representatives all too often forget that their power is not their own, but is derived from the people. And in the grueling events of this past year, if democracy has begun to claw back some of the power usurped by the Trump regime and his hijacked GOP, it has been reclaimed, not by senators and representatives, but by the people of the United States, through their grassroots action, their incredible courage, their ultimate sacrifices, and their resounding rejection of the Trump crime organization’s authoritarian designs.

The protest promises to hurt Trump in what he considers the worst way: by taking the focus off of him and what will certainly be, as usual, one of his lengthy, wild rants, which, by now, have become a tiresome, insulting noise to anyone but his cheerleaders, enablers and sycophants, and putting it on his opponents.

Among key lawmakers refusing to attend the speech are senators Adam Schiff, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Chris Murphy, Tina Smith and Chris Van Hollen. House members who will give it a pass are Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, Becca Balint of Vermont, Greg Casar and Veronica Escobar of Texas,  Pramila Jayapal of Washington State, Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey. All of these members of Congress are taking part in the boycott on general principles and in support of America’s ailing democracy.

Other lawmakers have also said that they will boycott Trump’s speech in support of specific causes. Maryland Representative Kweisi Mfume is protesting Trump’s record on both of the main issues he ran on—the economy and immigration enforcement.  Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley says she is boycotting the State of the Union to draw attention to the trauma affecting children abused by Trump’s violent immigration enforcement policy. And Maine Representative Chellie Pingree confirmed that she will be joining other Democrats at an anti-authoritarian rally instead of sitting through Donald Trump’s State of the Union rant.

Parallel to lawmakers’ individual protests, the MeidasTouch Network—a pro-democracy independent journalism medium that just surpassed six million followers and 9 billion views—is joining ranks with the MoveOn Civic Action group to organize a parallel event billed as the People’s State of the Union. The event is expected to be hosted by media personalities Joy Reid and Katie Phang. Many of the lawmakers skipping Trump’s event will be taking part as speakers in the People’s State of the Union, headed up by Senator Schiff. Pennsylvania Representative Summer Lee has said that her boycott is specifically linked to this event.

 Another parallel event is being called the “State of the Swamp”.  It is organized by DEFIANCE.org, the Portland Frog Brigade, and COURIER. Lawmakers taking part in that event will include Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, Dan Goldman of New York, Eric Swalwell of California and Eugene Vidman of Virginia.

This is being described as a “live rebuttal” of the Trump State of the Union Address, and speakers are also expected to feature civic leaders, journalists, and cultural figures, including Robert De Niro, Mark Ruffalo, Stacey Abrams, Jim Acosta, and Miles Taylor.

Other Democrats have said that they will boycott the State of the Union Address but without joining specific protests. These include Illinois Representatives Sean Casten and Eric Sorensen. Sorensen said, “While I will watch the State of the Union elsewhere, I will not attend in person.” He made his reason for not attending clear: “My respect for the office of the President of the United States cannot abide the disrespect that Donald Trump shows to that office every day.”

The corporate mainstream media has given the idea of the boycott mixed reviews. Fox Trump State Media, of course,  is defending attendance and playing protests as a “disruption” of what passes in their world for “democracy.”  CNN, which is now owned by Warner Brothers and to an ever greater extent expresses the stances of that firm’s shareholders rather than those of the professional journalists and commentators who work for the network, is tending toward a wishy-washy “let’s play nice” take. If there is one thing I have learned in half a century of journalism, it is that when objectivity is taken to mean impartiality rather than fact-based reporting, the essence of news as a vehicle of awakening people to reality is lost.  And CNN has increasingly lost its way as an honest news medium.

In general, some mainstream commentators and political pundits have criticized the boycott as inappropriate or counterproductive, arguing that lawmakers should attend and challenge Trump from within. Clearly, however, with the Trump-hijacked GOP heading up both chambers of Congress, challenging Trump from within frequently turns out to be a fool’s errand. And then there is the question of how you define “within”. The Trump authoritarianism problem is no exclusive to Congress. It is a threat to the American people as a whole. And more and more, we are seeing that people are waking up and taking action without waiting for Congress to decide to do something about it.

While some traditional media like The New York Times have limited themselves to describing the climate leading to the boycott, in which there is deep-seated polarization and plummeting popularity ratings for the performance of the Trump government, The Washington Post—which is being kept on a tight leash by owner Jeff Bezos, who now tells the editorial board what it can and can’t print and who just fired 300 journalists—stuck to analyzing polling information and pointing out that low approval and anti-authoritarian public sentiment are driving the protest context. USA Today indicates that heightened political stakes and protest strategies are surrounding the Trump speech boycott. 

Fox, as I said earlier, is framing this as must-do engagement, as opposed to a boycott strategy. They seem to be trying to make the point that members of Congress have a duty to attend. This coincides what many Republicans—both politicians and at a grassroots level—who are insisting on saying that, even if people oppose Donald Trump, they have “a patriotic duty” to “respect the office” of the president.

Okay, I’m game. Let’s talk about that. Let me just start by saying that when Donald Trump starts respecting the office of the president and all that it is supposed to stand for, so will I. But I don’t figure I should hold my breath. In Trump’s five years in office, and especially over the course of this past nightmare year, he has not once behaved in a way worthy of a president. He has defied the courts, trashed the rule of law, repeatedly violated the Bill of Rights, used the Justice Department to make good on his own personal vendettas, released hundreds and hundreds of felons into society while sending out his thugs to abduct people who have formed a useful part of society, sought to take away the right to birth-right citizenship, had his attorney general cover up a criminal pedophile ring, threatened and sued senators, representatives, journalists, political opponents, members of the judiciary, comedians, and just about anyone else you can think of, and has gotten away with running for and winning the presidency with the backing of a scant third of registered voters,  despite being a convicted 34-count felon, while vastly increasing his own wealth and that of family and friends.

Donald Trump has disrespected not only his office, but also the two other co-equal branches of government. He has wiped his feet on the Constitution and the law, violently infringed on states’ rights, trucked with dictators and shunned our closest democratic allies, committed unjustified acts of war completely bypassing Congress, and has lied repeatedly, consistently, yes, even constantly to the courts, to Congress and, above all, to the American people. He has basically turned the US government—as the New York Daily News so aptly put it— into, “the most powerful crime syndicate in history.”

So tell me again, why on earth I should “respect the office of the president” as long as it is being usurped by a vile authoritarian and the head of what is clearly a criminal organization, in that it acts consistently beyond the limits of the law, and under the assumption that the rules simply do not apply to him. A would-be despot with a raging Napoleon complex. A narcissist with well-documented psychopathic tendencies. As long as Donald Trump is president, the office of the president has, in my book, ceased to exist as such and has been replaced with something very much akin to what ensued in Germany when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933, and, by February 27, had swiftly dismantled the country’s democracy, burned the Reichstag (legislature), and used the fire as an excuse to declare a state of emergency and to push through a so-called Enabling Act that, as of March 1933, permitted him and his cabinet to dictate laws without parliamentary intervention.

Trump needed no fire in the Capitol—although he held his violent insurrection there of January 6, 2021, after legitimately losing the 2020 election. All he needed was a complicit and acquiescent majority in both houses of Congress that, up to now, has let him get away with every sort of lawlessness imaginable—let him, in fact, get away with murder.

Supporters of the boycott frame it as what it is: a principled stand against what we see as the normalization of rhetoric and behavior that we find not only misleading but also pernicious for the Republic and devastating for democracy. 

Many of those who are now suddenly taking the “they-go-low-we-go-high” attitude toward tonight’s State of the Union Address are, oddly enough, some of the same ones who have accused Democrats and Independents of sitting on their hands and letting Trump and the hijacked GOP carry the United States to hell in a handbasket. They are some of the very ones who have accused the opposition of inaction in the face of tyranny.

It is hypocritical, then, to now shake one’s head, cluck one’s tongue and claim that opposition politicians’ taking part in unprecedented grassroots activism—there have never before been parallel (shadow) events like the ones scheduled for tonight’s State of the Union—is somehow improper.

It appears to me that what is improper—and dangerous—is to continue to labor under the delusion that the Era of Trump is anything like “business as usual” or that it is “just another sunny day” in US democracy.  It is not. And we can’t continue to be passive spectators in the clear and present dismantling of two and a half centuries of American freedom, democracy and justice. This is where patriots are separated from hangers-on. It is where the rubber meets the road. This is where Americans—be they politicians or common everyday citizens and residents—must choose to be part of the solution or part of the problem. This is where we must choose to hold leaders accountable, or become the victims of their despotism. And if we choose freedom and democracy, then we must be willing, from each of our own little corners, to shine a light on the dark designs of a tyrannical regime and to oppose its war on democracy with every tool at our disposal.

Democracy can survive, but only if we are willing to get behind it and oppose its enemies. Democracy dies in darkness and making ourselves beacons in any way we can is the only way to uphold it. That is why this boycott—led, I am proud to say, by independent journalists and democratic activists—is so important. That is why it is so vital in unmasking the truth and drawing attention to abnormality. It is why this protest, and other events like it being organized around the country, are a matter of life and death for the Nation as we once knew it.