Dana White likes to say he sells “holy sh*t moments for a living.”

Tonight, he may sell the biggest one yet.

The UFC is reportedly spending more than $60 million to produce tonight’s event. Dana White has described it as “a huge brand play”—an investment that may lose money on paper while generating something far more valuable: attention.

A cage fight on the grounds of the White House.

The People’s House.

Which raises an obvious question:

What kind of political theater does a republic choose to celebrate?

Today, on Flag Day, we celebrate a symbol.

The true test is not whether we honor the flag, but what vision of America we see reflected in it.

And with the nation preparing to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding, we are invited to ask what our symbols represent.

Anniversaries invite reflection. They ask us not only where we came from, but what values we choose to honor.

Every Democracy Has Its Spectacles

The Roman Empire perfected the art.

The Colosseum did not bring down Rome. It revealed what Rome chose to honor—a political culture increasingly reliant on performance.

The question isn’t whether America is Rome.

The question is what America chooses to honor.

As Americans gather around a cage on the South Lawn, a war in the Middle East continues, inflation is eroding family budgets, and many young Americans wonder what artificial intelligence will mean for their futures.

Every spectacle is also a choice about what we notice—and what we ignore.

UFC heavyweight Derrick Lewis may have put it most plainly. Asked about the event, he said: “The country needs something like this. We can distract the American people from all that’s going on.”

Whether he meant it as a defense or simply an observation, it captures an enduring truth about spectacle.

America Had Its Own Political Theater

Two hundred and fifty years ago, another master of political theater understood the power of symbols.

His name was Samuel Adams.

But the theater he practiced was designed to create citizens, not spectators.

The Sons of Liberty gathered beneath Boston’s Liberty Tree. They organized protests, staged demonstrations, and turned resistance into public drama.

But the Liberty Tree was theater in service of citizenship.

Its purpose was not to create an audience.

It was to create a public.

Under the Liberty Tree, ordinary people discovered their collective power. The early American experiment began with a radical act: the deliberate, collaborative creation of “one people” committed to self-government.

Those words come directly from the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which describes the moment when it becomes necessary for “one people” to dissolve the political bonds connecting them to another.

The founders understood that Americans were not born a people.

They had to become one.

And that required participation.

The arena, by contrast, invites spectatorship.

In the arena, people gather to watch power perform itself.

The Liberty Tree needed no production budget.

Its power came entirely from the people who gathered beneath it.

George Washington later warned future generations to “guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.”

Patriotism can be practiced.

It can also be performed.

The challenge for every generation is learning the difference.

Two Visions of America

The debate over a UFC event at the White House is not really about mixed martial arts. Millions of Americans enjoy the sport. Nor is it about Dana White’s success as a promoter.

The question is what happens when the symbolic center of American self-government becomes a stage for selling “holy sh*t moments.”

Because the Liberty Tree tradition didn’t die in Boston.

It simply went underground, moving from the history books to the streets where everyday Americans still gather.

Two and a half weeks ago, I stood in a crowd in Washington, D.C., listening to Bruce Springsteen introduce a song called Streets of Minneapolis.

“The power and solidarity of the people of Minnesota was an inspiration to the entire country,” he said.

“They stood shoulder to shoulder for their neighbors.”

Whatever you think of Springsteen’s politics, notice who occupies the center of that story.

Not a celebrity.

Not a politician.

Not a billionaire.

Citizens.

Neighbors.

People who showed up for one another.

Not domination, but solidarity.

Not spectatorship, but participation.

In a January Substack, I asked whether the Liberty Tree had moved to Minneapolis.

The argument was simple: democracy has always depended on places where ordinary people discover their capacity to act together.

The people Springsteen described belong to that tradition.

Liberty Tree or Cage?

America has always understood the power of public symbols.

The question has never been whether we will have political theater, but rather what that theater celebrates.

Dana White’s genius is creating unforgettable moments.

Samuel Adams’s genius was creating citizens.

One sells an experience.

The other built a movement.

A Different Way to Celebrate

Today—Flag Day, and one of the first major public spectacles of America’s 250th year—we are offered two traditions.

A cage on the South Lawn.

And, across the country, people gathering in parks, churches, libraries, community centers, and public squares.

Some will protest.

Some will sing together.

Some will simply spend time with neighbors and friends.

Tonight, thousands of Americans will also gather online and in watch parties for Rise Up, Sing Out: A Concert for the First Amendment⁠—a reminder that one of the oldest American traditions is citizens raising their voices together. More than 250 years ago, the Sons of Liberty sang The Liberty Song, which invited Americans to “join hand in hand” in the cause of liberty.

All of them participating in something larger than themselves.

My suggestion is simple.

Find a song that enlarges your sense of “We the People.”

Then, tonight:

Play it.

Sing it.

Share it.

For me, it will be Bruce Springsteen’s Streets of Minneapolis, recorded in Washington, D.C., on May 27, 2026, as he paid tribute to Americans who stood shoulder to shoulder for their neighbors and invited the crowd to “let them hear us at the White House.”

Democracy is not something we watch.

It is something we practice.

Gift Photo

Yogi Berra’s line is redundant on purpose. Déjà vu means you’ve seen it before. “All over again” means you’re seeing it again.

It may be the unofficial motto of Trump-era elections.

This week, Donald Trump used a Sunday interview on NBC’s Meet the Press to once again insist that the 2020 election was stolen. Nearly six years later, he is still relitigating an election that dozens of courts, state officials, and his own administration found no evidence had been stolen.

In the same interview, Trump turned to California’s primary election, declaring it rigged before all the votes had even been counted. “They’re cheating on the election,” he told Kristen Welker, offering no evidence. He later took to Truth Social and joined a chorus of allies and influencers attacking California’s election system.

By now, Americans know the script.

Trump declared, “Rigged Elections!” He accused California Democrats of trying to “steal” elections. Vice President JD Vance described the primary as looking “pretty shady.”

Speaker Mike Johnson split the difference. “I’m not saying it’s rigged,” he said. “I’m saying it stinks to high heaven.”

Pressed for evidence, Johnson argued that the schemes were “so diabolical and so far upstream” that proof was impossible—but that people could somehow sense that something was wrong.

Fraud that cannot be proven.

Detectable only by intuition.

In other words: trust the accusation, not the evidence.

And then the votes were counted.

The election result undercut the panic. Republican Steve Hilton advanced to the November runoff against former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

Hilton is Trump’s candidate. The president endorsed him on Truth Social in April with a “COMPLETE & TOTAL ENDORSEMENT.” The supposedly rigged election delivered exactly the outcome Trump wanted.

Yet even Hilton wouldn’t co-sign the script, telling CNN he had “seen nothing” to justify intervention.

The accusations came anyway.

Different election. Different target. Same script.

That is the real déjà vu.

Three Ways to Block a Punch is free to read. But it grows because readers choose to invest in it. Just $6 a month keeps this work going—and reaching further.

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An Unexpected Concession

What strikes me is not the accusations. Those are familiar. It is the contrast between the people making them and the political leader they have spent years admiring.

For more than a decade, much of the American nationalist right has treated Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a model.

Trump called himself a “big fan.” JD Vance called Orbán’s legacy “transformational.” CPAC turned Budapest into a stage for the movement’s self-image.

They admired the immigration policies. They admired the culture-war politics—especially the attacks on LGBTQ Hungarians, including censorship laws and bans on Pride marches. They admired the willingness to confront liberal institutions. Some admired his ability to dominate Hungarian politics for more than a decade.

Then something unexpected happened.

Orbán lost.

After sixteen years in power, Hungary’s longtime prime minister suffered defeat at the hands of Péter Magyar and the opposition Tisza Party.

If anyone had reason to contest an election result, it was Orbán. He had spent sixteen years building a political movement, reshaping institutions, and defining an era of Hungarian politics. Yet within hours of the results becoming clear, he addressed the nation and conceded defeat.

And he did something that seems increasingly rare in American politics.

He conceded.

He did not claim the election had been stolen. He did not accuse election officials of cheating. He did not spend weeks alleging fraud. He did not tell supporters that victory had been taken from them.

He lost, and he acknowledged that he had lost.

Think about that for a moment.

The American politicians who spent years praising Orbán’s strength seem unwilling to imitate the most important thing he did when his time came: accept defeat.

What they wanted to copy were the policies they liked. What they did not want to copy was the democratic norm that makes self-government possible.

Democracy requires many things, but one of the most important is the willingness to lose—and to accept the result.

Not every election.

Just an election.

The test of democratic commitment is not how leaders behave when they win. It is how they behave when they lose.

Or appear to be losing.

That last distinction matters because California was not over when the accusations began. Votes were still being counted. The process was still unfolding. The eventual outcome had not yet been determined.

Yet the allegations arrived right on schedule.

Which brings us to another famous Yogi Berra observation:

“It ain’t over till it’s over.”

California wasn’t over.

And neither is the story heading into November.

If Democrats ride economic anxiety, backlash politics, demographic trends, or simple midterm gravity to a strong election night in 2026, will Americans once again hear claims of stolen elections before the counting is complete? Will election officials, local clerks, and vote tabulators once again become targets because the results do not match partisan expectations?

We’ve seen this movie before. We know the script.

In a democracy, elections are not decided by who is ahead at 9:00 p.m. They are not decided by the loudest post on social media. They are not decided by who declares victory first.

They are decided when every eligible vote is counted.

That is how self-government works.

As Yogi Berra put it:

It ain’t over till it’s over.

If November brings a blue wave, expect the accusations to arrive before the counting is complete.

Election-fraud déjà vu all over again.

P.S. — The election-fraud script always targets the people who count the votes. The best answer is to become one of them. Sign up to be a poll worker through the U.S. Election Assistance Commission—its lookup tool connects you directly to your local election office, with requirements, hours, training, and pay. Or volunteer with your local or state League of Women Voters.

(Gift photo)

Kirsten, the founder of Motus Theater, gave what she described not as a commencement speech, but as a “commencing” speech to the Naropa University graduates.

The distinction matters. Most commencement speeches celebrate an ending. Kirsten’s was about beginnings. It was about the lifelong work of learning, loving, creating, and helping build a more compassionate, multiracial democracy. It was about understanding that education is not something we complete, but something we carry forward.

What do we carry forward?

Commencing

From her opening moments, Kirsten made clear that she wasn’t interested in commencement as a noun.

“Verbs are where the action is at,” she told the graduates.

She wasn’t there to celebrate a credential or a title. She was there to honor the effort it took for each student to keep moving from orientation to graduation.

“Of reminding each other and ourselves that we do know how to commence,” she said. “To begin again. Again and again … because we know who we are. At the source, at the root.”

She reminded the audience that these students come from a long line of generations who endured and kept commencing despite blood, batons, attack dogs, lynchings, reservations, internment, criminalization, hunger, and union-busting.

And still, they commenced. Still, they did the difficult, messy work of building democracy in this country.

It was a fierce reminder that commencing is not a graduation-day metaphor. It is a survival practice. An ongoing act of collective will handed down to us at great cost—and one we are responsible for carrying forward.

Hope Is Something We Do

Later in the speech, Kirsten turned to a framework developed by researchers at Tufts Medical Center called HOPE—Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences.

The research suggests that resilience is shaped by positive experiences and relationships that help people flourish despite adversity. The insight that struck me most was her observation that we are no longer simply lamenting adversity. We are challenged to create the positive experiences that build resilience, and to become part of someone else’s story.

As she put it:

“We are all suddenly empowered to be each other’s positive experiences, to be the hope.”

That line lifted me up. It transforms hope from a feeling into a practice—not something we wait for, but something we do.

A verb.

The more I reflected on it, the more I realized that the framework offers more than a roadmap for childhood flourishing. It offers a blueprint for rebuilding the connective tissue that allows self-government to work. The fundamental act of a democracy is the ongoing creation of “one people” committed to looking out for one another; when we choose to become each other’s positive experiences, we are actively building that people.

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The Geese

“Interbeing is actuality,” Kirsten told the graduates. “We never truly do hard things alone.”

To illustrate the point, she described why geese travel in a V-formation. Scientists discovered that a flock can travel roughly 70 percent farther than a single bird because the geese at the front create currents of air that help lift the birds behind them.

When one goose grows tired, another takes its place. Those who have been leading fall back to rest. As Kirsten put it: “Catch your breath, catch a wave.” Then, those who have rested move forward to lead.

Then came the line that brought the entire room together:

“Like that, everyone can make it.”

No goose reaches the horizon alone. Neither do we. Every graduate carries the investments of parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, mentors, coaches, neighbors, ancestors, and countless others who helped create lift when it was needed most.

Which led Kirsten to one of the deepest truths in the speech:

“We are all communal projects of personal relational love as well as community love, and public policy love.”

The geese, the HOPE framework, and the act of commencing all point toward the same idea: We become who we are together.

Kirsten later quoted Cornel West—“who I don’t always agree with,” she added, “but I won’t give up on.” His observation was simple:

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

The people who built movements—who flew at the front of the V through batons, attack dogs, and every other obstacle placed in their path—were practicing that kind of public love. As Kirsten reminded the graduates, they are part of our flight, too.

None of us reaches the horizon alone.

Democracy doesn’t either.

Watch the speech. Then tell me in the comments:

For whom will you create lift?

And what are you carrying forward?

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(Gift photo)

I have spent the last half century in the orbit of a man who was built to that exact scale.

To read the Washington Post headline this week — “Rafe Pomerance, who helped sound the alarm on climate change, dies at 79” — feels like a logical impossibility. How do you compress a relentless force of nature into a column of newsprint? How do you say goodbye to a friend you have witnessed over five decades refusing to let the world look away from its own future?

Year of the Coast

I first met Rafe in January 1980.

I had just arrived in Washington as an intern for the Coast Alliance, the organization coordinating the “Year of the Coast,” a national effort to draw attention to America’s shorelines and oceans. I was twenty-two years old, fresh out of college, carrying more idealism than experience, and trying to figure out how I might contribute to the long, unfinished project of perfecting our union.

Rafe was president of Friends of the Earth and chair of the Coast Alliance. At my first board meeting, I heard about climate change for the first time.

“We have something more important than the coast to talk about today,” he said. “Rising greenhouse gases.”

At the time, few environmentalists — let alone most Americans — had ever heard the phrase “greenhouse gases.” Rafe had stumbled across a warning buried in a late‑1970s EPA coal report, a brief reference suggesting that continued fossil fuel combustion could fundamentally alter the atmosphere. In August 2018, journalist Nathaniel Rich documented that entire decade of early climate awareness and political failure in a landmark New York Times Magazine piece, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” Rafe was at the center of that story.

Little did I know that morning that it would begin forty‑six years of collaboration and friendship. Or that Rafe Pomerance would become one of the defining figures of my life.

Rafe was gregarious, loud, funny, relentless, and endlessly energetic. When he got an idea, he went all in. His enthusiasm was not only infectious — it was joyous. He loved turning a phrase into a weapon, a rallying cry, or occasionally a punchline. What I came to call “Pomerisms.”

A year later, I became the field director of the National Clean Air Coalition — the same job Rafe himself had once held during the fights to pass and defend the Clean Air Act.

My office was directly across the hall from his.

Which meant no day was ever quiet.

One week it was organizing around acid rain. Another it was the Watt Petition drive against Interior Secretary James Watt, whom Rafe famously described as “the visible operator of the Reagan environmental wrecking ball.” Rafe helped drive the massive “Dump Watt” petition campaign that ultimately delivered more than a million signatures to Congress.

And his leadership came with his humanity.

One summer afternoon in 1981, when I was clearly having a rough day, Rafe walked by my desk, took one look at me, and said, “Let’s go get ice cream.”

So we walked up Pennsylvania Avenue eating cones and talking.

At some point, he paused, looked at me seriously, and said, “You know what you need? You need kids.”

I think he was projecting a little. At twenty‑three, children were nowhere on my radar. But his own children — Benjamin, Lilah, and Ethan — were clearly the emotional center of his life. Beneath the whirlwind energy and political combativeness, they grounded him.

For five decades, versions of that conversation took place whenever one of us was tilting at a new political windmill, or just needed a compassionate voice on the other end of the phone.

Wakes for Dead Lakes

In 1982, having just finished working on two campaigns — Toby Moffett for Senate and Bill Curry for Congress — in Connecticut for the Friends of the Earth PAC, Rafe called and I heard three words: “Wakes for Dead Lakes.”

He was already thinking ahead to the 1984 New Hampshire presidential primary, looking for a dramatic way to engage the would‑be presidents on solving the problem of acid rain.

So I headed north to New Hampshire.

It took Marcy Lyman, my favorite environmental leader in New Hampshire, about ten seconds to reject the idea.

“No way,” she said.

Instead, Marcy and I planned a different tactic: passing resolutions calling for a 50 percent reduction in the pollution causing acid rain through New Hampshire town meetings.

Rafe saw the wisdom of it immediately and assigned Friends of the Earth staff to make it happen. Other environmental organizations joined in. Together, we organized a statewide campaign urging local town meetings to pass resolutions demanding federal action on acid rain. Four months later, more than 190 New Hampshire towns had passed citizen‑led resolutions calling for major reductions in sulfur dioxide emissions.

The momentum carried into January 1984, when the “Acid Rain ’84” conference — the National Citizens’ Conference to Stop Acid Rain — convened in Manchester. Planned for 200 people, it drew more than 500 conservationists, citizens, and major political figures, held deliberately just weeks before the state’s first‑in‑the‑nation presidential primary. Six of the eight Democratic candidates showed up in person — Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, John Glenn, Jesse Jackson, Alan Cranston, and Fritz Hollings — each trying to outdo the others on emission controls and sulfur reduction targets. The forum had become an environmental litmus test for the entire Democratic field.

Ordinary citizens. Small towns. Local democracy. And then presidential politics.

Rafe understood something many people in Washington never fully grasped: changing government environmental policy was never only about science. It was about organizing. About democracy. About building enough public will to force institutions to act before the damage became irreversible.

Over the decades, the warnings Rafe first raised in that Coast Alliance boardroom stopped being abstract projections and became lived reality.

The atmosphere warmed.

The seas rose.

The Greenland ice sheet began losing mass at accelerating speed.

Storms intensified. Fires spread. Entire ecosystems destabilized.

We were no longer reading the report; we were living inside it.

The Fate of Miami

In 2012, the phone rang again: “The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami.”

I said, “What?”

Sea‑level rise in Florida — that was how we would get people to understand the risk and urgency of action.

He spent the last decade trying to help Americans to understand that climate change was not abstract. It was physics. Insurance. Mortgages. Infrastructure. Salt water moving block by block into the financial and civic heart of the country.

That vision grew into the Upper Limit Campaign — a demand to define the maximum sea‑level rise we can tolerate and act before coastal loss becomes irreversible.

That was classic Rafe: taking something planetary and making it local, tangible, economic, and morally unavoidable.

The Last Time

Last summer, I was at Kramerbooks in Washington when Rafe unexpectedly walked in. He asked what I was doing the next morning and whether I would come by the house. A Brazilian television crew was interviewing him, and he said he’d feel better if I were there.

He assumed the questions would focus on the upcoming COP30 meeting in Brazil. Instead, the reporter wanted to know: from Rafe’s perspective, what caused the United States to lose momentum after the early breakthroughs and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992?

He still had game. His answer was two words: “John Sununu.”

Sununu, as White House chief of staff, had shown how organized doubt could become political strategy. Sununu’s argument was simple: we don’t have enough scientific proof yet to act. Fossil fuel interests took note — and realized they did not need to disprove the science. They only needed to delay action. It was a lesson the industry absorbed with devastating effectiveness to this day.

It was the last time we saw each other. But not the last time he spoke about climate change.

Last October, he spoke at the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy’s annual Fall Review — a weekend gathering of advocates, students, and community leaders held in the heart of Appalachia, with hikes across Dolly Sods and panel discussions on climate, policy, and organizing. He knew something wasn’t right with his health. The cancer diagnosis was still weeks away. But he showed up anyway.

On Saturday morning, he delivered what amounted to a lifetime’s worth of hard‑won perspective: a history of the climate movement from its earliest stirrings to the present moment. The room was full of exactly the kind of people Rafe had always believed in — grassroots organizers, local advocates, young people who had driven hours to be there.

When someone asked about the seemingly unstoppable spread of data centers and their enormous energy demands, Rafe didn’t hesitate.

He quoted Joe Hill.

“Don’t mourn,” he said. “Organize.”

The same words labor organizer Joe Hill wrote before his execution in 1915. The same words that had animated union halls, picket lines, and civil rights campaigns for more than a century. Rafe had borrowed them for the climate fight — and standing in those West Virginia highlands, not yet knowing what was already growing inside him, he meant every syllable.

The Game is Over

Last Wednesday, Lilah let us know that things were shifting to hospice. I was planning to be in D.C. next week, so Thursday morning I texted him to see about one last visit — and about an hour later, Ethan posted the message none of us wanted to read:

“At 8:44 this morning, May 21st, our dear Dad and Rafe passed peacefully. Lenore was by his side as he took his last breath in the comfort of his hospice room. We have been with him continuously for the last 48 hours sharing tender moments together. He remarked, ‘The game is over,’ and with that we knew that he was at peace with his life.”

I first thought back to that ice cream cone — and how his three kids sustained him then, and how they had been there with him every day since the cancer diagnosis. Then I thought about his final words.

“The game is over.”

At first, I simply mourned my friend. But the more I sat with those words, the more I heard them differently than many others might.

Because Rafe loved hockey.

And in hockey, players do not stay on the ice forever. They skate hard. They exhaust themselves. Then they head to the bench.

And the next line jumps over the boards.

Maybe that is what Rafe was really telling us. Not that the struggle was over. That his shift was over. And now it is our turn to hit the ice.

To pick up the Pomerance Puck — my best attempt at a Pomerism. To dig it out of the corner if we have to. To fight through the battle on the boards and finally drive it across the climate goal line.

I will always miss my friend, and the tears in my eyes right now will come and go. But his memory, his legacy, his vision will live in my heart and feed my work.

Maybe it’s best summed up by the small sign old activist friends - Bett and Julie - have hanging in their house:

Wake up. Kick ass. Repeat.

Which, now that I think about it, was Rafe’s organizing strategy all along.

( Gift photo of Mark Bettinger and Julie Rodgers’ sign)

As I wrote in “What the Caterpillar Knows”—last year was about horizon. This year is about soil. Less wandering. More belonging. As I turned the car counterclockwise this spring, I went searching to understand the connective tissue that holds a person—and a people—together.

Montgomery began to answer that question. Selma sharpened it into something that will always sit with me.

The Legacy Museum does not ease you in.

Bryan Stevenson’s institution opens with a narrow corridor lined floor to ceiling with jars of soil—each one collected from a site where a Black American was lynched. Thousands of jars. Thousands of sites. Ordinary earth holding extraordinary witness.

What follows traces the unbroken line: from the millions enslaved and trafficked along the Alabama River, to the architecture of Jim Crow, to the machinery of mass incarceration. It is not presented as ancient history. It is presented as a system—designed, maintained, and repeatedly reconstructed whenever it appeared to collapse.

The Black poet Langston Hughes understood this nearly a century ago: America never was America to me.

Standing inside that museum, surrounded by testimony, you feel the full weight of that line. Not as accusation. As fact.

Outside, the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park stretches along the river where enslaved people were once bought and sold. The sculptures are large and quiet. They do not ask for pity. They ask for attention.

Truth-telling, I kept thinking, is not the same as action. But it is where action begins. You cannot cross toward something you have refused to see.

The “Soup Phase” & The Inheritance

Earlier in this journey, I wrote that America feels caught in the soup phase—that moment inside the chrysalis when the old structures have dissolved and the new ones are not yet formed. Reconstruction. Jim Crow. Civil Rights. Now again.

Stevenson’s spaces feel designed for transmission. The names of the lynched. The faces of the enslaved. The testimony of the terrorized.

Not nostalgia. Not performance. A civic inheritance carried forward by those who refused erasure.

The imaginal cells recognizing each other again.

The Bridge & Laketa M. Smith

Selma is forty-five minutes west on Route 80.

The same highway where, in 1965, voting-rights marchers walked fifty-four miles to Montgomery under military protection—carrying the weight of democracy on blistered feet.

I arrived at the Edmund Pettus Bridge before the march began. The bridge rises out of downtown, a rusted green arch over the Alabama River, ordinary until you remember what it asked of people sixty years ago—and what it is still asking.

That is where I saw her.

A woman standing near the bridge approach, holding a hand-painted sign. Her name was Laketa M. Smith—a daughter of New Orleans.

Her shirt answered a theological question: Do Justice. Love Mercy.

Her sign asked the civic one: What side of the bridge are you on?

Not what you believe, or what you would have done in 1965.

But: What side are you on now?

The Perfectors & The Court

Again and again, Black Americans have been asked to carry democracy farther than the country was willing to carry itself—repeatedly rescuing it in the moments it faltered most. As Nikole Hannah-Jones and others have argued, they have long been among the country’s truest perfectors.

That is what I was witnessing at the bridge. Not protest as an exception, but the continuation of America’s deepest civic tradition.

The protests were not commemorative alone. They were a response to something ongoing—a decades-long unraveling of the voting-rights protections won on this very ground, accelerated by a Roberts Supreme Court that has spent years dismantling core provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

The machinery that produced Bloody Sunday has never fully stopped running. It just wears different robes.

But the bridge remembers.

The ancestors remember.

And every generation that returns here inherits the unfinished assignment.

The Journey Back

Leaving the bridge, I drove back along Route 80, arriving in Montgomery just as thousands were assembling in front of the Alabama state capitol.

The same building where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy. The same city where Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat.

The gathering was not nostalgic. It was urgent. Specific. Alive.

Standing in that crowd, Laketa’s question stayed with me.

I did not go to Selma and Montgomery to learn that democracy requires work. I already knew that.

I went to show up.

The Question & The Union

The bridge does not ask for ideology. It asks something older than ideology, older than party, older than the particular cruelties of this particular moment:

Will you cross toward one another? Or retreat into fear, hierarchy, grievance, and permanent division?

The Founders did not write “a more perfect grievance.” They wrote “a more perfect Union.”

The bridge is that direction made physical.

Joy & Awe

What stayed with me most was that Laketa M. Smith was smiling.

A real smile—the kind that comes from somewhere deep and settled, from a person who has decided something and made peace with the decision.

I have been carrying a line from Andrea Gibson through much of this journey:

“I stopped waiting for awe to find me. Now I find it.”

In Montgomery, awe arrived as testimony. In the sculpture park, awe arrived as silence. On the bridge, awe arrived smiling—holding a hand-painted sign in the middle of a living civic test, unafraid.

Gibson writes about joy not as an escape from suffering but as evidence of continued aliveness. Not denial. Refusal. The refusal to let suffering have the last word.

Laketa’s smile felt like that kind of joy.

Not sentimental.

Not naïve.

Sworn.

Fierce Geometry of Hope

That is what I brought home from Alabama.

Democracy is not inherited through monuments. It survives through relationship. Through showing up. Through attention. Through people willing to keep choosing one another in moments specifically designed to pull us apart.

The imaginal cells keep recognizing each other.

In a museum built beside a river where human beings were sold. On a bridge where citizens were beaten for demanding the right to vote. In crowds of people who still gather, still march, still refuse surrender.

Hughes understood this fierce geometry of hope: America will be.

That tension—loving a country while refusing to lie about it—is not a contradiction. It is the whole assignment.

The bridge still asks the question.

I crossed it.

I am still crossing it.

(Gift photo.)

I want to ask you to do something simple: visit MNOMINATE.org and send a message to the Norwegian Nobel Committee supporting The Nation’s nomination of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize. It takes two minutes, and everything you need is there.

Here’s why it matters.

While we are enjoying the return of spring, cast your mind back to the bitter cold of January, when a surge of ICE and Border Patrol officers occupied Minneapolis–Saint Paul during an operation that left behind wrongful detentions, family separations, children transferred to out-of-state facilities, and the deaths of two U.S. citizens — Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

In response, fifty thousand people marched through Minneapolis in ten-below-zero weather.

Not for a candidate.
Not for a party.
For their neighbors.

[Watch — Don’t Mess with Winter People in the Winter]

For weeks before and afterward, ordinary people across the Twin Cities delivered food to frightened families, escorted children to school, documented abuses, and showed up—peacefully, persistently—to protect one another.

In a recent Atlantic article, Adam Serwer gave this ethic a name: “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.

That word is what this campaign is about.

In January, The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine, formally nominated Minneapolis for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum named the people of the Twin Cities recipients of the 2026 Profile in Courage Award.

The world is already paying attention.

MNOMINATE.org is how we as ordinary Americans can join that recognition—and remind the Nobel Committee that citizens are watching too.

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that Americans had a unique genius for forming voluntary associations to solve problems together—the “science of association,” which he saw as the foundation of democratic life.

When people join around a shared purpose, he wrote, they become “a power seen from afar.”

In Minnesota, they call it showing up for your neighbors.

That is why my colleague Deb Callahan and I created MNOMINATE.org. We first met 45 years ago at the National Clean Air Coalition, both of us working as grassroots organizers.

A belief that has never left us: democracy works best when energy moves from the bottom up, when people organize and show up for one another.

MNOMINATE is one small act in service of that larger idea.

We may have created the campaign, but it belongs to anyone who believes neighbors still matter and democracy still depends on people showing up for one another.

Share it.
Make it your own.

That is how democratic movements grow.

Under the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will, the Peace Prize honors those who have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind in the field of peace.”

What emerged in Minneapolis reflects that principle: nonviolent civic action to protect vulnerable people and uphold community in the face of fear.

This is what peaceful resistance looks like.
This is what democratic courage looks like.
And it deserves to be recognized.

So here is what we are asking.

Visit MNOMINATE.org. Send a message to the Norwegian Nobel Committee in support of the Nation’s nomination. The site includes a pre-loaded email, along with sample language for those who want to write their own letter or postcard.

This is something parents and children can do together. A classroom. A congregation. A scout troop, civic club, or neighborhood association.

A small but meaningful act of democratic participation.

Then share MNOMINATE with your friends, family, and community.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 9th.

But democracy is not something we watch.
It is something we practice.

MNominate Minneapolis.
And vote.

Democracy survives when ordinary people decide to practice it.

Neighbor to neighbor.
Generation to generation.
Toward a more perfect Union.

(Gift photo) - the end of the Window Trail in Big Bend National Park

Last year, I drove 7,815 miles over 52 days, tracing a wide clockwise arc—Utah, Nevada, California, the Pacific Northwest, into Canada, and back again. It was distance. Motion. Discovery—seeing how much ground I could cover.

This year, I’m going the other way.

Counterclockwise—through New Mexico, Texas, along the Gulf Coast, up through the Carolinas, across the Eastern Shore to Washington, D.C., then into West Virginia and Pennsylvania, ending at my family cabin—Bear Creek.

If last year was about the horizon, this year is about the soil. Less wandering; more belonging. I’m looking for the connective tissue that holds a person—and a people—together.

I’ve made three visits already: a hike in the West Elk Wilderness with a childhood friend, an exploration of the Tsankawi ruins with a nomadic friend, and lunch with an elder environmental warrior—drawing on hard-won lessons to plot what comes next.

And then last night, I sat with my friend Chip Conley at Rising Circle Ranch—the Modern Elder Academy campus near Santa Fe. Chip has spent years thinking and acting about what it means to be useful in the second half of life. He founded MEA as the world’s first wisdom school, built to help people navigate midlife transitions and reframe aging not as decline, but as renewed purpose, growth, and connection. I spent a week at the Baja campus in 2023. It was transformational.

“The messy middle is that brutal, beautiful space between who you were and who you’re becoming. It’s where the magic happens—and where most people quit.” — Chip Conley

The artist Alixa García offers a poetic biological lens for this:

“…the caterpillar enters a suspended death. It is here, amidst the complete cellular breakdown, where something miraculous starts to happen: imaginal cells are born. Imaginal cells have the information code for the butterfly. While no single imaginal cell has all the information, collectively, out of apparent death, they bring forth the majestic creature. How poetic that scientists knew to call them imaginal, for indeed they are keepers of imagination.”

I wrote to my fellow MEA travelers recently:

That is us. No single one of us held the whole code—but together, out of whatever we had each let dissolve, something flew. I carry each of you at the cellular level.

I am grateful for every imaginal cell you loaned me.

But this isn’t just a metaphor for midlife. It is the metaphor for where America is right now. We are in the soup phase. The old structures are dissolving, and the breakdown feels like a suspended death. Yet in the midst of this cellular breakdown, the imaginal cells—the people who still hold the code for what we can become—are finding one another.

The question that keeps finding me, mile after mile:

What can I still do?
What does it mean, now, to fight as hard as I did when I started in 1980—to keep faith with the unfinished promise of a more perfect Union?

Not louder.
Not angrier.

But longer.
Stronger.
Truer.

We live in a moment designed to wear us down.

Attention fragmented into monetized slivers.
Outrage engineered and delivered in real time.
Politics flattened into performance—an endless loop of provocation and reaction.

A tired people is easier to divide.
A distracted people is easier to manipulate.

We are nudged toward a posture of permanent reaction.

Always on.
Always angry.

That isn’t strategy.

It’s surrender in disguise.

There is another way.

Solidarity is not an ideology. It is a recognition that we belong to one another, that power is accountable to people, and that truth does not require permission.

It grows from attention.
From presence.
From taking care—of ourselves, and of each other.

The road keeps teaching me something I want to bring back to this country.

Out here, the lessons are quieter. A long stretch of road with no signal. A conversation that doesn’t need to end. A morning where the only urgency is the light moving across the mountain bike trail.

You begin to notice things again. How rare it is to sit fully in the present without reaching for the next thing.

Out here, I’m trying to earn Andrea Gibson’s line:

“When you stop living in the future or the past, everyone becomes new to you. In the present moment they are wild mysteries.”

I thought of that yesterday—stopped on the road from Truchas to Chimayó, standing at a monument in the Los Llanitos Cemetery, not knowing whose life it marked, but feeling the weight of it anyway. Wild mystery. Right there.

And slowly, something shifts.

You remember that the country you’re fighting for isn’t an idea—it’s people you already love.

Movements are not built by moments of flash-fry outrage, but by years of relationship.
The strength required to face what’s coming will not come from adrenaline, but from connection.

Alone, we recover.
Together, we rebuild.

Andrea Gibson calls it a wellness check:

Is my attention on loving,
or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?

It’s a personal question. Out here, it becomes a civic one.

Because a democracy of permanent grievance—cataloguing every betrayal, every cruelty, every failure—is not resistance. It is a slow drain on the only resource we cannot replenish: our capacity to act from love rather than wound.

The Founders didn’t write “a more perfect grievance.” They wrote “a more perfect Union.”

So here is my own democracy wellness check, for whatever miles remain:

Is my attention on loving this country and its people—or is my attention on the fractures created by hate?

The answer to that question is the republic—if we choose to keep it.

Tsankawi Ruins

Below that level, movements express. Near that level, they accumulate. Beyond it, they transform.

In the United States today, that threshold is approximately 12 million people. The No Kings protests have already mobilized an estimated 8.5 million Americans—roughly 2.46% of the country. We are 3.7 million people short.

Ken Martin, Chair of the Democratic National Committee—you and the national leadership have five months before the November elections to close that gap.

This past Sunday was the 251st anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord—the opening shots of the American Revolution. Ralph Waldo Emerson immortalized them in 1837 as “the shot heard round the world.”

It took sixty years for that morning’s chaos to harden into national myth. This time we have less than six months.

April 19, 1775

The people of Massachusetts didn’t wake up expecting a revolution. A decade earlier, they saw themselves as loyal members of the British Empire. But the relationship changed. Taxes without representation. Trials without juries. Soldiers stationed not for protection, but for enforcement.

The question became unavoidable: Could power act without the consent of the people?

At dawn on Lexington Green, British regulars fired into a group of local militiamen. Eight colonists died in the grass. By the time the soldiers reached Concord, the countryside was awake. Bells rang. Messengers rode. Neighbors gathered.

The Revolution didn’t begin as an ideology; it began as a reaction. Power acted on its own people, and the people answered.

April 19, 1975

I wasn’t in Concord for the Bicentennial, but my friend Bill Walczak was.

Two hundred years after Lexington, President Ford came to Concord to speak of unity and reconciliation. The country was reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, and he sought to reclaim the Revolution as a shared national story.

But Bill told me something I’ve never forgotten: Ford arrived at the North Bridge to a podium set up on the “British” side of the river.

Across the water, on the “Patriot” side, stood between 15,000 and 20,000 protesters camped on the hillside near the Old North Bridge, demonstrating through the night and into the morning.

People’s Bicentennial Commission protest, April 1975, (photographer unknown).

They showed up not just to witness history, but to contest its meaning. On one side of the river: the official ceremony. On the other: a counterforce, visible and impossible to ignore.

The Revolution is safe in a museum. It’s less welcome in the streets.

In 1975, even a crowd of 20,000 at Concord amounted to just a fraction of a percent of the country. Today’s protests are more than a hundred times larger as a share of the nation. What once looked massive is now measurable as a movement.

January 2026 — Minneapolis

Ken Martin knows Minneapolis—it’s his home state.

And now, like Concord before it, it has become something more than a place on a map.

In January, during federal immigration operations, two American citizens—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—were killed, and children were grabbed and detained.

What the country saw wasn’t a policy debate.

It was power—acting on a body in public space.

We have seen this in Minneapolis before. From the corner where George Floyd was murdered to the streets where Good and Pretti fell, the city is becoming something else—a place people return to, again and again.

Because place makes dissent durable. When memory attaches to geography, it stops fading. It accumulates. It repeats. It spreads.

When citizens die or children are taken by the state on their own streets, the question is no longer abstract: Is force legitimacy? Or must legitimacy be earned?

Across 250 years, the rhythm holds:

1775: Power uses force → The people resist

1975: Power stages authority → The people disrupt

2026: People mobilize at scale → The outcome is not yet written

The Gap: Alarm and Muster

In 1775, they had a system: lanterns in a steeple, riders on horseback, bells, and drums. It was a network designed to turn awareness into action.

They called it alarm and muster.

Today, we carry more communication power in our pockets than any movement in history.

But we lack the structure to use it.

That is the gap.

Not motivation.

Not numbers.

Structure.

The Minute Brigade

Too many Americans are asking the same question: What are the Democrats doing?

The engaged organize through Indivisible, No Kings, and dozens of grassroots networks. The exhausted have pulled back for their own sanity.

Between them sits the DNC—the connective tissue—largely invisible to both.

Here’s a simple idea to change that.

Call it the Minute Brigade—a modern nod to the resisters of 1776, timed for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.

One platform.

One nightly action.

One shared habit.

Each night at 8 p.m. Eastern, one collective action is posted for the next day:

• Send an email

• Share a message

• Record a short video and post it

Once a week, every participant invites five new people. That’s not a suggestion — it’s the engine.

A progress update. A thank-you. No fundraising asks. No gimmicks. Just participation—at scale.

Simple by design.

Low barrier.

High frequency.

Collective momentum.

This is how you close a 3.7 million gap in five months.

Not with a single rally.

With a million small fires.

The people at Lexington didn’t know they were starting a revolution. They just knew they had to show up.

Chairman Martin—the alarm has sounded. The people have shown up.

Now comes the muster.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

They refused.

To go back.

To accept the terms handed down to them.

To pretend that power alone was legitimacy.

What began as a strike became Solidarity—a movement of workers, citizens, and believers who chose to stand together in public and without fear. Behind them stood Pope John Paul II. The Soviet Union understood what that meant. Not as theology, but as a threat.

When Power Recognizes a Threat

From the moment a Polish pope stepped onto the balcony in 1978, Soviet leaders saw danger. Not because he commanded armies, but because he offered something more destabilizing than force: moral authority that could not be controlled.

When he returned to Poland in 1979, millions gathered. They saw each other. And once people see each other—once they recognize that they are not alone—power begins to lose its monopoly.

That recognition helped create the conditions for Solidarity. That solidarity became pressure. And that pressure became, eventually, part of the unraveling of an empire. Years later, Mikhail Gorbachev would say plainly that the collapse of communism would not have been possible without that pope:

“I think that the changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union would not have been possible without the presence of this Pope.”

The Witnesses

History doesn’t repeat. But it does return in structure.

On a winter morning in Minneapolis, neighbors gathered outside a church while federal agents worked nearby. They were not there as paid organizers or campaign staff. They came to be present, to be visible, to make sure no one disappeared without witnesses.

Steam rising from paper cups into the cold air.

That is what Solidarity looked like in Gdańsk. That is what it looks like now. It isn’t coordinated by a central committee or led from above; it is built from the ground—neighbor by neighbor, block by block.

Power can dominate institutions. It can flood the zone. It can control the narrative. But it cannot easily defeat people who recognize one another and refuse to disperse. That is the beginning of every democratic turning point.

The Pope Who Would Not Bend

In 1979, the world needed a Polish pope who understood both the people and the system that sought to control them. Today, we have an American pope who understands the same tension—power and the limits of its legitimacy.

On Saturday evening, at a peace vigil at St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo XIV issued a warning. He spoke of a “delusion of omnipotence” that is “becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive.”

By Sunday night, the President of the United States had responded on Truth Social. Pope Leo was “weak,” a “politician,” and “terrible” for foreign policy. Then came the claim that revealed everything:

“He wasn’t on any list to be Pope… If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

A president claiming credit for choosing a pope. A president posting an image of himself as Jesus hours after attacking the head of the Catholic Church. The delusion of omnipotence, illustrated.

On Monday, from Africa, Pope Leo was asked about the attacks. His answer was four words: “I have no fear.” He added that he would continue speaking out “loudly against war”—proving that a voice that cannot be frightened is a voice that cannot be contained.

It echoes something heard before in the shipyards of Gdańsk. It is dangerous because fear is contagious, but so is its absence. If the Pope isn’t afraid of the President, and the neighbor in Minneapolis isn’t afraid of the federal agent, then the fear that holds the halls of power together begins to dissolve. Even those who have stood in silent obedience find that the spell has broken.

Hungary Breaks the Spell

There is something else that happened this week that belongs in this story. Viktor Orbán lost.

For years, Orbán represented something authoritarian movements needed to believe: that illiberal democracy, once established, could not be dislodged. That the consolidation of courts, media, and institutions was permanent.

Yesterday, Hungarian voters said otherwise. The myth of inevitability has a way of surviving until it doesn’t. When it collapses, it collapses fast. And if it can happen there, the illusion breaks everywhere.

It doesn’t stay in the streets. It moves—from protest, from “No Kings,” to recognition to power.

Why Solidarity Is the Real Threat

Authoritarian systems depend on a simple premise: that “real people” are already on their side, and dissent is fringe. Solidarity destroys that premise. It shows that the people power claims to represent are capable of organizing without it.

This is why the Soviet Union feared John Paul II, and why attacks on Pope Leo are escalating now. When a moral voice aligns with a movement of people on the ground, isolation breaks. And once isolation breaks, the fear transfers from the people to the powerful.

The Oldest Democratic Act

Is force enough? Or does legitimacy still require consent?

In Gdańsk, workers answered. In Budapest, voters answered. In Minneapolis, neighbors are answering. And in Africa, a pope answered with four words.

Solidarity is not an ideology. It is a recognition that we belong to one another, that power is accountable to people, and that truth does not require permission. The Soviet Union could not contain it. Viktor Orbán could not contain it. And a president who assumes that moral authority can be granted or rescinded by the state will not contain it either.

America’s semiquincentennial—our 250th year—will be marked on July 4th. But it will be celebrated on November 3rd—Election Day. That is the day the people show up to be counted.

In every precinct—protected by the quiet defiance of the secret ballot—people who recognize one another will walk in, cast off fear, and make their answer known. That is the oldest democratic act.

In 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what the framers had created.

“A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.”

Only history will know what role Pope Leo played in keeping it. But we will know the role we played

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Gift Photo

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The Governor and the Frigate

In 1851, the United States government took the extraordinary step of sending a Navy steam frigate, the USS Mississippi, to collect Kossuth from exile. He arrived not as a mere refugee, but as a “Governor”—the title Americans insisted on using to recognize his legitimate leadership of a free Hungary.

Americans greeted him with a fervor rarely seen for a foreigner. He was the first person since the Marquis de Lafayette to address a joint session of Congress. In New York, 200,000 people lined the streets. A fashion craze swept the country: the Kossuth hat—black felt, wide brim, feather—became a viral symbol of democratic solidarity.

Kossuth was on a mission. He came to raise funds and rally support against Russia’s role in crushing Hungarian independence. He saw America as the only power capable of standing against what he called the “Cossack” reach of Russian autocracy, which had propped up the Austrian Empire and strangled the Hungarian revolution.

When he arrived in Cleveland, the city fired a 21-gun salute. Standing before the Ohio Legislature in Columbus in February 1852, he gave voice to a shared creed:

“The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people and all by the people. Nothing about the people, without the people.”

For Kossuth, Russia was the ultimate enforcer of autocracy—and he warned that if self-government failed abroad, absolutism would eventually reach our own shores.

America didn’t just listen.

It remembered.

Monuments rose in New York, Cleveland, and Washington. His name spread across the map—Kossuth County, Iowa; Kossuth Street in Columbus; Kossuth Avenue in Haledon, New Jersey.

Not just what Americans believed—but what they wanted the world to see in them.

April 7, 2026

Two stories collided.

In Washington, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published a deeply sourced New York Times account of how Donald Trump moved toward war with Iran. One figure stood apart: JD Vance, portrayed as the leading internal skeptic—warning of costs, chaos, and the risks of another Middle East conflict.

At that same moment in Budapest, Vance stood beside Viktor Orbán, campaigning for him just days before a national election.

In Washington, he appeared as the voice of restraint.

In Budapest, he played a very different role.

The Story That Makes Vance the Hero

The Times account is gripping—shaped by Benjamin Netanyahu’s pitch, intelligence disputes, internal debate, and President Trump’s “gut.” It presents a clear image: Vance as the internal check on American overreach.

Which raises a question—not about the reporting itself, but about its sourcing.

As Marcy Wheeler has argued, the piece leans heavily into that portrayal. Yet the record it presents complicates the frame. Vance backed intervention earlier in the year, equivocated as events unfolded, and ultimately concluded:

“You know I think this is a bad idea, but if you want to do it, I’ll support you.”

That line deserves to sit a moment. It isn’t the language of conviction. It’s the language of deference dressed as restraint.

And then there is this: when the final decision came, Vance wasn’t in the room.

Trump was at Mar-a-Lago, dining on the patio with Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, and White House counsel David Warrington.

Not Vance.

What Trump said about him that night removes any ambiguity about who holds the power:

“J.D. really doesn’t like this. But when the decision is made, it’s a decision, right?”

That isn’t influence.

That’s a man being managed from a distance—acknowledged, noted, and set aside.

The voice of restraint was back in Washington while the decision was made without him.

And Yet: Budapest

While Washington read about Vance the “skeptic,” he was somewhere else entirely.

He was in Hungary.

Standing beside Orbán. Campaigning for him—openly—just days before a national election he was losing. Orbán, sixteen years in power, was trailing his challenger Péter Magyar in the polls. The Vice President of the United States flew in to bolster him.

Not observing. Not engaging diplomatically. Bolstering.

He called Trump on his cell phone and put him on speakerphone for the crowd. Then, at the close of his speech, he dropped any remaining pretense:

“Will you stand for sovereignty… for truth and for the God of our forefathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls this weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán, because he stands for you.”

Earlier in the day he had said simply: “I love Viktor.”

He described the visit as part of a broader alignment—the defense of “Western civilization,” grounded in “Christian values.”

“The bureaucrats in Brussels,” he said, “have done everything that they can to hold down the people of Hungary.”

His broader message made the underlying vision unmistakable.

“Some of them call themselves feminists, pretending they care about women. They reject mothers and motherhood… They condemn children to mutilation and sterilization…”

This is what the Putin caucus actually believes. Not less intervention. Different intervention. Not the universalism Kossuth carried to Ohio. A competing universalism—one that runs through identity, hierarchy, and belonging rather than through the consent of the governed.

Democracy, in this telling, is not neutral ground.

It is a battlefield with chosen sides.

Projection as Policy

There is one more detail that completes the picture.

Standing in that same Budapest soccer stadium, actively campaigning for a foreign leader, Vance accused Ukrainian intelligence services—without offering evidence—of interfering in Hungarian elections.

“We’re certainly aware that there are elements within the Ukrainian intelligence services that try to put their thumb on the scale of American elections, on Hungarian elections… This is just what they do.”

He said this while doing it. That is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense—a gap between word and deed that embarrasses its author. This is projection as doctrine.

Name your own conduct, assign it to your adversary, and inoculate the audience against the obvious charge. It is a technique. And it was on full display in Budapest.

Selective Intervention

Vance has built his political identity in part on skepticism toward foreign entanglements.

The Times story reinforces that image.

Budapest demolishes it.

This is not non-intervention. It is selective intervention.

Not troops. But politics.

Not war. But power.

He registered doubts about a conflict in Iran — doubts acknowledged and set aside at a dinner he did not attend.

At the same time, he flew to Europe to campaign for a leader systematically dismantling his country’s democratic institutions — while accusing others of the interference he was committing in real time.

That is not restraint. It is a different theory of engagement entirely — one that reserves skepticism for adversaries and solidarity for strongmen.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Two Ohios

The contrast is not abstract. It is geographic.

In 1851, Ohio celebrated a Hungarian who came to America pleading for help against Russian-backed tyranny. The country sent a frigate. It built monuments. It named streets and counties after the man who carried democracy’s banner against autocratic reach.

In 2026, a Vice President from that same state flew to Hungary to campaign for a leader building the opposite — and accused Ukraine of doing what he himself was doing.

In 1852, Ohio believed institutions belonged to the people. In 2026, a different message is being exported from the same state. Not democracy as shared inheritance.

But power as a prize.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Final Inversion

America’s first great encounter with a Hungarian statesman was with a man who came to expand democracy.

He was celebrated. Elevated. Remembered.

Nearly two centuries later, the Vice President of the United States flies to Hungary to campaign for a leader whose project moves in the opposite direction—and accuses his critics of doing what he came to do.

And when he’s done, he comes home.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Bronze and the Upright

Péter Magyar answered Vance in a video statement from Budapest:

“Hungarian history is not written in Washington, not in Brussels, not in Kyiv, not in Moscow… We are not an experimental zone. We are not a geopolitical playground.”

He was describing Hungary. He could have been describing what America once promised not to do.

Kossuth believed in that promise. We embedded it in our streets, our monuments, our memory.

He is still there — on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, bronze and upright, one arm raised.

He still has something to say.

Gift Photo:

I was 24 years old when the phone rang in my office.

“Hello, can I speak to Tom Cosgrove? This is Senator Domenici’s scheduler. The Senator would like to meet with you in his office today.”

Now—here’s the backstory.

A couple of weeks earlier, in a markup session of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Pete Domenici—a Republican from New Mexico—opened by saying:

“Chairman Stafford, before we begin today, I have something I want to say. I don’t know who Tom Cosgrove is—I just know he works for them,” he said, pointing at the lobbyists for the National Clean Air Coalition, “and hours after we met the other day, he was all over the radio in my state accusing me of being willing to increase air pollution in our national parks.”

I wasn’t worried. Because he had.

As Field Director, I had built a strong grassroots coalition in New Mexico. Domenici’s reaction proved it was working.

Then Colorado’s Senator, Gary Hart—our champion on the committee—leaned in.

“I know how you feel, Senator. I too have been mau‑maued by those people.”

And just like that, I wasn’t just under attack from the opposition—I was getting kicked by our friends.

That creates a different kind of anger.

So I did what young organizers do when they think they’re right—I started making calls. I asked activists in Colorado to call Hart’s office and put some heat on him. Was he going to waver?

Then I called one of my favorites: Jim Morris, founder of Jim Morris Environmental T‑Shirt Designs—still going strong, still giving back in 2026.

Jim didn’t match my energy. He slowed it down.

“Take a breath,” he said. “I want to read you something.”

And then he read from Edward Abbey’s essay Do Not Burn Yourself Out:

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am—a reluctant enthusiast… a part‑time crusader, a half‑hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure…

I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies… You will outlive the bastards.”

And just like that, I calmed down.

I didn’t stop fighting. I just stopped letting the fight consume me.

A few weeks later, a Xeroxed copy of the essay arrived in the mail. I had an artist friend put that passage into calligraphy. Over the years, I’ve shared it dozens of times with activists on the edge of burnout—people who needed permission to keep going without losing themselves.

There is a copy for you at the end of this essay.

The Parable of the Prank

Back to April 1st, 1982.

After I hung up, I immediately started calling David Gardiner at the Sierra Club.

I thought I was being summoned to a real showdown with Domenici, and I wanted David to know. In those days, we talked strategy constantly.

Just as David answered, the new organizer at the coalition, Jennifer Vasiloff—only a few months on the job—started laughing.

“April Fool’s,” she said. She had set the whole thing up. And she got me. Completely.

For 44 years, I’ve considered “revenge.” But maybe this is better—telling the story and sharing the lesson.

If someone gets you on April Fool’s Day, laugh. Especially at yourself. Because the best pranks remind us we’re still here—and still capable of delight.

The Age of Grift

We live in an age of grift.

The dominant technologies of our moment aren’t built to connect us to reality. They’re built to pull us away from it. Crypto. Sports gambling. Prediction markets. AI‑generated images and voices so convincing you can’t trust your own eyes and ears.

Each one optimized not for connection but for extraction. Not for the real but for the monetization of unreality. It’s a con—and it’s everywhere.

Abbey knew the antidote. Not argument. Not outrage. Something older and simpler:

“Breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive.”

That’s what the grift is stealing from us. Not our money. Not our politics. Our presence—our capacity to sit still and feel something real.

In that environment, it’s easy to feel like you have to be “all in” all the time—angry, vigilant, reacting. The grift wants that too. Outrage is just another engagement metric. But that way leads somewhere Abbey understood clearly: burnout.

And burnout doesn’t defeat the bastards. It feeds them.

The Strategy of Staying Human

Abbey’s insight wasn’t just poetic—it was strategic. If you want to outlast systems of power that are relentless, extractive, and dehumanizing, you don’t beat them by becoming just as consumed as they are.

You beat them by staying human—by building friendships, finding joy, stepping outside, finding awe, remembering what the fight is actually for.

The real danger isn’t just who holds power. It’s the way that mindset pulls all of us in—toward constant outrage, constant reaction, constant exhaustion—a life lived at the level of the feed. The age of grift is that abstraction—scaled, marketed, and made to feel like culture.

So here’s the lesson Jennifer accidentally handed me on April Fool’s Day, 1982:

Don’t lose yourself in the fight.

Don’t let anger become your only fuel.

Don’t forget to live in the world you’re trying to save.

Laugh at yourself when the moment calls for it.

Stay connected to people who can pull you back.

And trust this: if you stay grounded and human, Abbey was right.

In the end, we will outlive the bastards.

Edward Abbey, Do Not Burn Yourself Out — calligraphy by Jill Holtzman

By Friday, what begins as celebration ends in state-sanctioned killing.

At the center stands Pontius Pilate. As governor, he held the authority to decide life or death. The Gospels describe a man who hesitated, questioned, resisted — and then yielded to pressure.

After sentencing Jesus, he washed his hands — not because he lacked power, but because he chose to outsource his conscience to the system.

The crucifixion that followed was brutal. It was also legal.

Today, we are watching a modern version of Pilate’s basin being filled.

But with a critical, existential difference.

The Peacemakers and the Algorithms

Today, to mark Palm Sunday in the middle of a war, Donald Trump shared on social media a letter Franklin Graham sent him last October, praising him as a peacemaker: “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Speaker Mike Johnson shared it.

Peacemaker? Let’s look at that.

But in St. Peter’s Square this morning, Pope Leo XIV offered a starkly different warning:

God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war… your hands are full of blood.”

And now, we are building systems that can carry out that violence at machine speed—powered by artificial intelligence.

The doctrine guiding this shift has a name: All Lawful Use.

The fight over AI weapons is not technical. It is philosophical.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Pentagon officials have reportedly clashed with Dario Amodei the CEO of Anthropic, who has argued for guardrails on autonomous lethal force.

The doctrine is simple: if the law permits it, the machine must be allowed to do it.

But legality is not the same as judgment.

To the Pentagon, hesitation - like Pilate’s - looks like inefficiency.

To engineers and ethicists, hesitation is the last safeguard of human responsibility.

Remove the guardrails, and you don’t just make war faster.

You make it unaccountable.

The Safety Catch

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, has spent decades studying what happens when humans are asked to kill. His conclusion: most people possess a deep resistance to taking another life.

In World War II, many soldiers did not fire directly at the enemy. The insight endures — something inside us hesitates.

Not from weakness, but from a built-in safety catch.

For decades, military training has worked to override that instinct. We have spent years conditioning humans to act more like machines.

Now we are proposing to create machines that bypass humans.

What took generations of psychological conditioning to override in humans, we are now engineering out of existence entirely.

The Machine Without Hesitation

An AI does not hesitate. It does not feel fear, doubt, or restraint. It executes.

Pope Leo XIV warned that algorithms reward speed and penalize reflection. He was writing about communication. But the same architecture is now being embedded in weapons.

Remove hesitation, and war does not just become more efficient.

It becomes unbounded by the only check that has ever reliably existed — the human conscience.

The Digital Pilate

When Pete Hegseth speaks of “no mercy” and “any lawful use,” he is describing a world where restraint is no longer a judgment, but a setting.

Like a digital Pilate, this system can process death while keeping its hands clean. It is built to remove friction from lethal decisions — to execute without pause, doubt, or hesitation.

But democracy depends on accountability — a who behind the what. An algorithm has no who. Under the old rules, a soldier who refuses an unlawful order is a hero. A machine that refuses is a malfunction to be fixed.

Lavender: The Warning

We no longer have to imagine this future.

Investigative reporting by the Israeli online magazine +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew‑language news site later covered by outlets such as The Guardian, revealed Israel’s AI‑assisted targeting system, Lavender.

According to sources, Lavender flagged tens of thousands of targets in Gaza at speeds no human could verify. Israeli military officers reportedly spent seconds reviewing each case — a brief nod of approval before the strike was executed.

A companion system, ‘Where’s Daddy?’, tracked targets to their homes — designed to strike when they were most likely to be at home, often with their families.

Officials argue these operations meet legal standards of proportionality. The law is satisfied. But something deeper is not.

What emerges is a new category: a legal atrocity — where each strike may be lawful, but the system itself produces mass civilian death without meaningful human judgment. For those killed, there is no appeal—only the algorithmic finality of the strike.

The Hand That Must Remain

Pope Leo XIV warned that the challenge of AI is not technological but human — that “safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves.”

He cautioned that machines can erode our capacity to think, feel, and choose — turning people into passive executors of decisions they did not make.

That warning lands differently when set against what Pentagon negotiators revealed when they dismissed moral limits as a “God-complex” — meaning conscience itself was the flaw.

The question before us is not whether these systems are lawful. It is whether human judgment still governs them.

Will there still be a human hand on the trigger?

Not because humans are infallible, but because we are accountable.

Pilate had hands he could wash while the machinery of the state did its work. A machine does not.

If Congress fails to set limits on AI warfare, we do not just surrender control — we surrender responsibility.

And when there are no hands left to choose, there will be no hands left to wash.

(Gift photo)

Today, we have a President and allies in the Senate who insist that the most important legislation needed in America is the SAVE Act—a bill that purports to address a ‘voter fraud’ problem that barely exists.

What did Lyndon B. Johnson understand about the vote that today’s leaders in the Senate seem determined to ignore?

As Raphael Warnock recently warned on the Senate floor: “This is all a pretext to stop Americans from voting… when you put up unnecessary barriers, you undermine the basic understanding that the franchise is not a privilege, it is a right.”

While millions are facing hours-long security lines at the airport, the administration’s priority is not paying TSA agents, but introducing new, manual hurdles to the ballot box to cast doubt on elections.

For more than two centuries, the Constitution has been amended to expand the meaning of “We the People.”

At the founding, voting was largely restricted to white male property owners. Even though the phrase itself—“We the People”—was written by Gouverneur Morris, the principal drafter of the Constitution’s Preamble and an outspoken opponent of slavery, the reality at the founding excluded vast portions of the people it claimed to represent.

And yet, over time, “We the People” have repeatedly amended the Constitution to expand who counts—and who votes.

The 13th and 14th Amendments established who counts as a person and a citizen. The 15th prohibited denying the vote based on race. The 19th extended the franchise to women. The 26th lowered the voting age to 18.

Step back, and the pattern is clear. For more than two centuries, when America has amended its Constitution on questions of democracy, it has moved in one direction: toward a broader, more inclusive definition of “We the People.”

The SAVE Act moves in the opposite direction.

It would require Americans to show documentary proof of citizenship—typically a passport or birth certificate—in person to register or update their registration. That single requirement would effectively dismantle online registration, mail registration, and most voter registration drives.

It introduces friction. And in a democracy, friction is not neutral. It falls hardest on people with fewer resources, less access, and less flexibility.

And once you see it, the historical lineage becomes clear. It echoes the Jim Crow era, when poll taxes, literacy tests, and procedural barriers made voting harder without banning it outright.

As Frederick Douglass warned, freedom without the ballot leaves citizens at the mercy of power.

Supporters say the SAVE Act is about preventing noncitizens from voting. The facts tell a different story.

Across U.S. elections from 2016 through 2020, confirmed voter-fraud convictions totaled fewer than 500 nationwide—roughly 100 per year, according to analyses of data from the conservative Heritage Foundation and independent reviews. In California, a state casting tens of millions of ballots, investigations found just six cases across the 2020–2024 cycles.

Existing systems already verify citizenship at registration. Decades of audits have found no evidence of coordinated noncitizen voting at scale. Meanwhile, the bill would fall hardest on citizens who have done nothing wrong. Millions lack ready access to required documents.

The scale of the remedy bears no relationship to the problem.

And that is where this debate connects to something deeper. The Achilles’ heel of democracy is not conflict. It is the slow erosion of the belief that your vote matters.

Around the world, that trust is eroding. As Martin Wolf has argued in the Financial Times, the deeper danger is not just bad policies, but a slow loss of trust in the system itself.

This is what democratic erosion looks like. Not just fewer democracies. Not just more autocracies. But a growing loss of confidence in the idea itself.

The SAVE Act operates in that space. It introduces new barriers—and, more importantly, reinforces the belief that the system cannot be trusted.

But look at the numbers from the conservative news site The Daily Caller. More than 7,300 likes for the idea that 150 million Americans—your neighbors, your nurses, your veterans—should be stripped of their franchise based on their tax bracket or marital status.

That should give us pause.

These ideas remain fringe. But they are not random. In some corners of American politics, there are now open arguments that not all citizens should participate equally in democracy—including calls to roll back the 19th Amendment.

The SAVE Act is not that. But it moves in the same direction. It makes participation harder. It narrows access.

And it does so in ways that fall heaviest on those with the least time, flexibility, and access—including millions of married women who would be forced to assemble a paper trail just to prove their birth certificate belongs to them. Roughly half of voting-age women with access to their birth certificates do not have documents that reflect their current legal name—turning a simple requirement into a barrier for millions.

Lisa Murkowski the Republican Senator from Alaska warned about the SAVE Act last week:

“While disenfranchisement may not be the intent… I fully expect it to be an outcome of this.”

In Alaska, most voter registration happens online or automatically. The bill would upend that. With few election offices across a vast state, some voters could be forced to fly just to register—over a problem that shows up in the single digits each year.

For more than 150 years, America’s constitutional tradition has moved toward inclusion. Expanding who counts. Expanding who can vote. The SAVE Act moves in the opposite direction. As Martin Wolf puts it:

“The real danger… is that people believe there is no truth… nobody is to be trusted.”

When that belief takes hold, democracy doesn’t collapse overnight. It erodes.

For generations, the United States has aspired to be for the world what Ronald Reagan called a “shining city on a hill.”

That promise begins with something simple and fundamental: the right to vote.

Not harder. Not narrower. Not conditional.

If democracy is to stand the test of time, it must continue to shine brightest—here in America.

Gift Photo

When he was eleven, he wanted a pony. His mother agreed—but only if he promised never to drink. He gave his word.

A few months later, she was killed by a drunk driver. He kept that promise for the rest of his life.

In three months, I will reach the exact age he was when he died. That realization has been sitting with me, and it brings to mind a line from the late poet Andrea Gibson: “Wasn’t it death that taught me to stop measuring my lifespan by length, but by width?”

My father lived a wide life. Not because of what he accumulated—but because of how he showed up for those he loved: family, friends, and community.

If I were writing only for those who knew him, I would tell stories about his friendships and his relentless teasing and practical jokes. Today, I want to share a lesson he gave me when I was thirteen—one that has guided me ever since.

My father was a union pipefitter who never missed The New York Times Week in Review on Sunday. He subscribed to Time magazine; his best friend Bobby Carpenter to Newsweek. Midweek, they swapped.

He watched Walter Cronkite every night. Dinner might come before or after the broadcast, but Cronkite was never missed. I sat there quietly, watching with him.

One night in 1971, Cronkite reported on the court-martial of William Calley for the My Lai massacre. At the supper table, I was ready.

My social studies teacher—a former Green Beret—had been talking about the case. I repeated his argument almost word for word: that Calley was being railroaded, a scapegoat for a messy war.

My father didn’t look up. He just said, flatly: “The man is a murderer.”

Then he asked me a question I wasn’t prepared for: “Why do you believe what you just said?”

I told him it was what my teacher had said. He didn’t hesitate. “You’d better learn to think for yourself.”

I was mortified. I had wanted to sound informed, maybe even impressive. Instead, I had exposed something else entirely: I had handed my judgment over to someone else and called it my own.

It was one of the most important lessons he ever gave me. Not about Vietnam. Not about politics. About responsibility.

The danger isn’t that people in authority have opinions. It’s that they expect you to borrow and repeat them.

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Just three years earlier, when Walter Cronkite called the Vietnam War a stalemate, President Lyndon B. Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Back then, the story was powerful enough to move a president. Today, the narrative is something the state tries to manufacture.

This week, I watched a story about a teacher in a small Russian town named Pavel Talankin.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, his school was turned into a staging ground for propaganda—children in uniforms, military drills, and lessons designed to make war feel normal.

Talankin was supposed to document it for the state. Instead, he documented the truth. Quietly. At risk. He refused to lie to himself.

His footage became the Oscar-winning documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

At thirteen, I echoed a story a teacher handed me. Decades later, half a world away, another teacher refused to echo his government.

The question has never changed. Only the source of the story has.

This weekend, I could imagine watching the news with my father again, and how he would have reacted to the signals coming from our government institutions.

At the Pentagon podium, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attacked coverage of the war with Iran, calling it “fake news” and suggesting headlines should reflect how well things are going. Within hours, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr warned broadcasters that licenses could be at risk if they failed to “correct their course.”

The signal is not subtle. It is not just about what is said; it is about who decides what the story is.

Hegseth didn’t just criticize CNN. He welcomed the idea of it being taken over by David Ellison—a deal that still requires approval from the administration he serves. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” he said.

Last fall, when the Ellison family’s media deal to purchase CBS was first announced, Donald Trump praised it as “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time” for the free press.

There is a quiet irony in that. Lyndon B. Johnson feared losing the man on the screen. Today’s leaders don’t fear the man on the screen. They choose the man behind the curtain.

For a generation, Walter Cronkite wasn’t just a broadcaster on CBS. He was the standard of truth. A generation later, CBS was no longer the standard of truth. It has become an enemy of it.

We didn’t just lose trust. We changed the meaning of truth itself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

We stopped asking, “Why do I believe this?” and started asking, “Who told me to believe it?”

That’s the kind of signal Pavel Talankin would recognize in Putin’s Russia. But in our country?

Accepting the Oscar for Mr. Nobody Against Putin, director David Borenstein put it plainly: “You lose your country through countless small acts of complicity… even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”

Think for yourself. It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t.

The line between independence and obedience is where a citizen is made. It is the boundary between a life spent as a mouthpiece for others and a life lived on one’s own terms.

It is how you live a wide life.

It is how my father, a pipefitter born on St. Patrick’s Day, kept his word to a ghost and his mind to himself. And it is how all of us “nobodies” keep a country.

Gift photo

Mistakes happen in war. But the consequences do not end when the rubble is cleared. Because the dead are not the only casualties of war.

War kills the body. Moral injury wounds the soul.

In Washington this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised the enemy “no quarter, no mercy.”

For cable television audiences, that language signals strength. For the soldiers ordered to fight, it signals something else entirely.

For decades, discussions of war’s psychological toll focused on post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD grows from fear — the body’s response to life-threatening danger.

But clinicians working with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan began identifying another wound: moral injury.

The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay defined it as “the betrayal of what’s morally right by someone in legitimate authority in a high-stakes situation.”

Unlike PTSD, moral injury is not driven by fear. It is driven by guilt — the belief that one has done something morally wrong, or failed to stop something morally wrong.

In modern warfare, that realization often comes after the strike. Targeting decisions pass through multiple layers of intelligence review and legal checks designed to prevent civilian harm. But when investigators later discover that something was missed — when a “clean” target turns out not to have been clean — the moral weight can arrive all at once.

Research on U.S. veterans shows that the most psychologically corrosive experiences are often not firefights or near-death encounters. They are events involving civilian harm.

Distance does not eliminate that burden. It only delays the moment when the moral weight arrives.

The same pattern is appearing elsewhere. Israeli psychologists report rising trauma among soldiers and pilots involved in the destruction of Gaza, where combat has unfolded amid dense civilian populations. Israel’s defense ministry reports rising PTSD cases among troops, and clinicians warn of increasing suicide risk among returning soldiers, with civilian casualties emerging as a central source of moral distress.

Civilian deaths do not remain on the battlefield. They travel home in memory. For generations the professional ethic of the U.S. military has tried to limit those wounds.

Rules of engagement exist for three reasons: law, morality, and strategy. Soldiers must distinguish military targets from civilians. Killing civilians corrodes the legitimacy of the mission. And civilian casualties fuel insurgency, turning grief and rage into recruitment for the enemy.

Across the military — officers, NCOs, and junior enlisted alike — troops understand that these rules are not political restraints. They are the framework that empowers soldiers to act decisively while knowing the mission remains within legal and moral boundaries.

After devastating civilian casualty incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal captured that ethic in a single sentence:

Protect the people.

McChrystal understood that every mistaken strike created new enemies. Local populations that lost civilians to American operations often turned to insurgent groups not out of ideology but out of grief.

Special operations units even changed tactics — shifting from night raids that traumatized families to “call-outs,” surrounding houses and asking suspects to emerge — because commanders recognized that the way force was applied could either reduce or multiply future violence.

Restraint was not weakness. It was discipline. It was also a way of protecting the conscience of the soldiers ordered to fight.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has made contempt for that ethic central to his public rhetoric. In the opening days of the Iran war he mocked what he called the “politically correct wars of the past,” a phrase many veterans hear as a dismissal of the discipline and sacrifice that defined those campaigns.

This week he went further, declaring that American forces would continue the campaign with “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”

In ordinary political speech that may sound like bluster. In the law of war it carries a precise meaning. Declaring that no quarter will be given — refusing to spare surrendering enemies — has long been prohibited under international humanitarian law and conflicts with the Uniform Code of Military Justice governing American troops.

It is not a gray area. Professional officers know this.

What once was doctrine — restraint as discipline — risks being replaced by spectacle: war as content for an audience that never bears its cost.

Recent social media messaging from the White House makes that audience unmistakable. Official videos splice real missile strikes with imagery and taglines borrowed from video games and Hollywood films, turning combat footage into something that looks like a highlight reel. One montage ends with a familiar gaming phrase:

“Flawless victory.”

Flawless victory for the viewer; a lifelong burden for the operator.

But soldiers are not a television audience. They are the ones who must aim the weapons, execute the strikes, and carry home whatever follows.

The men and women who serve in the American military swear an oath not to a leader but to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution does not authorize war as television spectacle. Military doctrine can change overnight. The human conscience cannot.

Even in war, moral traditions older than modern states insist that violence must have limits.

Pope Leo XIV recently put it simply:

“War is never holy. Only peace is holy, because it is willed by God.”

Those limits exist for a reason. They are civilization’s attempt to prevent war from consuming the human soul.

Somewhere in the American military system — in a targeting cell, an intelligence office, or a chain of command — someone now understands that a terrible mistake was made.

They saw what they saw. The soldiers don’t get to change the channel. Killing civilians does not only take innocent lives — it leaves a scar on the conscience of the nation that sent them. But the deepest wound will fall on someone the public will never see.

A soldier who will remember the day he learned what the missile had hit.

And who will spend the rest of his life trying to live with it.

(Gift photo)

Founded in 1975, India Today—a major English-language news magazine often described by media analysts as right-leaning—published a striking analysis of the Iran war this week. It didn’t reach for the dry language of realpolitik. Instead, it reached for a character from South Asian storytelling: Tees Maar Khan, the “slayer of thirty.”

The legend tells of a humble weaver who, after accidentally swatting thirty flies with one blow, convinces himself—and eventually his king—that he is a master warrior. The India Today piece uses this story as a lens for President Trump’s recent military and economic actions. Its most biting observation appears in the prologue:

“He simply acts, with total conviction, on an understanding of reality built entirely from the image he has constructed of himself. The tragedy, and the danger, is that by the time the world realises he is Tees Maar Khan only because he squished thirty flies, it is too late.”

The point of the article wasn’t just mockery. It was an observation that folklore often explains political behavior more clearly than policy analysis can. That insight is worth taking seriously.

The Universal Braggart

Every culture has a version of this character. In European folklore, it is Baron Munchausen, the nobleman who claims he pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair. In West African lore, the role belongs to Anansi the Spider, the trickster who bungles elaborate schemes yet boasts afterward that he outwitted the gods themselves. In American culture, it echoes through the tall-tale tradition, where exploits grow so large that the story itself becomes the landscape.

These stories endure because they capture an eternal human flaw: the tendency to mistake performance for competence. But folklore rarely treats these characters as harmless. They are warnings. They describe a familiar pattern: a lucky guess or coincidence is claimed as proof of brilliance. Eventually the character begins believing his own mythology, reaching the dangerous moment when he can no longer distinguish between the story he tells and the reality everyone else must live in.

Character, Not Systems

Political analysis tends to focus on systems—institutions, incentives, economic pressures. Folklore examines something more primitive: character. Long before political science had language for hubris or performative power, storytellers understood that a certain kind of leader could create chaos simply by believing too strongly in his own legend.

This archetype thrives in the current moment because modern politics rewards spectacle. Digital feeds amplify dramatic gestures far more effectively than careful strategy. A bold declaration travels farther than a complicated plan. In this environment, a leader who acts first and explains later appears decisive—but folklore warns that such spectacle often masks something simpler: the total absence of a strategy.

The Audience Question

The most revealing element in these stories isn’t the hero. It’s the audience. Every tale eventually reaches a moment when the community must decide whether to believe the legend. Sometimes the villagers laugh and expose the trick. Other times they repeat the story until it becomes truth.

Hans Christian Andersen understood this well. The power of The Emperor’s New Clothes was never the foolish emperor—kings have always had egos. The power of the story was the silence of the court: the willingness of an entire society to repeat a fiction until someone, a child, finally broke the spell. The emperor was inevitable; the silence was a choice.

What Folklore Knows

Folklore survives because every generation eventually meets the characters it was trying to warn us about. The legends endure not as entertainment, but as instruction.

What Tees Maar Khan, Baron Munchausen, and the silent court all share is not just individual vanity, but collective failure. The weaver could not have become a legend without a king willing to believe him. The emperor could not have walked naked through the streets without courtiers praising the invisible cloth.

The danger is not just the man who mistakes thirty flies for a battlefield. It is the modern court that turns spectacle into truth—the feeds, the followers, and the endless applause of the algorithm.

“Not living. Surviving.” That was how one young voter described the American economy in a recent focus group conducted by pollster John Della Volpe. Those three words—Not living. Surviving.—capture how millions of Americans feel right now. They are working hard and playing by the rules, yet the quiet promise that life would steadily improve—the core of the American Dream—now feels entirely out of reach. For generations, Americans believed they were climbing a ladder toward a better life. Not everyone reached the top, but most fundamentally believed the ladder existed. Today, that has changed. People see billionaire’s rocket ships leaving the atmosphere, but they no longer see a ladder they can climb here on Earth.

Texas State Representative James Talarico captured this profound shift in a single sentence: “The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom.” That is increasingly how Americans see the world. At the top sits a small group of billionaires and corporate power centers able to bend markets, politics, and technology to their advantage. At the bottom sits everyone else—teachers, nurses, construction workers, small-business owners—people doing everything they were told would lead to stability and still struggling to get ahead. They see corporate profits soar while rents explode; they see student debt linger for decades.

No figure better symbolizes this moment than Elon Musk, who is not just the richest man in the world, but the literal architect of the “rocket ship economy”—a seductive worldview where greatness comes from a handful of extraordinary individuals blasting upward faster than everyone else. But most Americans do not live in rocket ships. They live in communities where housing prices rise faster than wages, childcare rivals a second mortgage, and a single medical bill can erase years of savings. While rocket ships may inspire us, ladders are what allow societies to rise together.

This shift marks the end of an era. In the mid-1990s, working with pollster Stan Greenberg, we discovered the “ladder” was a universal metaphor for the American Dream. People believed the rungs existed, and that if you provided the effort, you could climb higher on the ladder of economic security. When I repeated that exercise with working students at MSU Denver in 2022, that belief had vanished. Students saw themselves standing at the bottom, and the climb to the “top rung”—basic milestones like homeownership—felt like a pure fantasy. The data backs them up: thirty years ago, about one in four Americans under 30 owned a home. Today, it is closer to one in five.

That decline reveals the real gap our leaders must now close — the widening space between surviving and thriving. Instead of managing the scramble, candidates should make a simple promise: rebuild the economic security ladder that allows people to climb.

Because people living in survival mode do not experience freedom as possibility. They experience it as a permanent scramble.This psychological reality was first identified by Abraham Maslow in 1943, who described a “hierarchy of needs” that shapes human behavior. At the base are the fundamentals of survival and safety—food, shelter, stability. Above that come belonging and dignity—community, connection, the ability to stand on your own feet. Only when those foundations are secure do people find the freedom to pursue their full potential. Maslow argued that “metamotivation”—the drive to innovate, create, and pursue purpose—only emerges when those basic rungs are secure. You cannot self-actualize if you cannot pay rent, nor can you innovate while drowning in credit card debt.

This insight points to the task in front of us. In 2026, we need MetaMobility—an economic framework built around a simple truth: You unlock a citizen’s full potential by securing the rungs beneath them. The ladder is not an abstraction. It is built from policies that create stability and allow people to move forward. MetaMobility is what it looks like when a society decides the economy should lift the many, not launch the few. It is mobility by design, and it starts with the basic rungs that allow people to move forward:

Rocket ships will always exist. Innovation will always create extraordinary fortunes.

But democracy has a different responsibility.

Its job is not to launch a few people into orbit.

Its job is to ensure that millions of citizens can climb.

Let the billionaires chase escape velocity.

Democracy’s job is to build the economic security ladder.

In 2026, Democrats must stop scrambling and start building.

If they do, voters will climb with them.

(Gift Photo)

Oil hit $90 a barrel Friday—up 38% in a single week. While that crude won’t reach your local station for a month, the ‘war premium’ has already arrived: gasoline prices are up 27 cents a gallon across the United States.

That may sound logical. It isn’t.

Most of the gas at your local station was refined from oil purchased weeks ago, when crude traded in the mid-$60s. Yet domestic producers repriced that inventory instantly because global markets allow them to. Oil purchased today must still move through refineries, pipelines, and storage terminals before it reaches the pump.

Consider the geography: roughly 90 percent of the oil Americans consume is produced domestically or in North America. The crude being pulled from the Permian Basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and the oil fields of North Dakota this week has nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz; it was produced thousands of miles from the nearest Iranian missile.

Iran supplies only 2 percent of the world’s oil, yet American consumers are being forced to pay a “global panic premium” for fuel that never left our shores. Gas prices are the first economic shock of this war—and they will not be the last.

A spike at the pump rarely stays there. It cascades through the entire economy. When energy costs rise, transportation costs rise with them—pushing up the price of food, airline tickets, shipping, and retail goods.

Economists estimate that if crude oil reaches $100 per barrel, it could add on the order of 0.6 to 0.7 percentage points to global inflation, according to recent analyses of oil-price pass‑through.

Congress has the power to stop future gas price spikes before they spread through the economy.

The Emergency Fuel Price Stabilization Act

Before Congress approves the rumored $50 billion supplemental war appropriation, it must first shield American households from the economic shockwaves that conflict sends through fuel prices.

Legislators should establish an Emergency Fuel Price Stabilization Act to sever the link between global volatility and domestic inflation during national crises. Under this framework, when a war, natural disaster, or major supply disruption hits global energy markets, retail gasoline prices would be frozen for 90 days.

Rather than forcing households to absorb the shock, the oil industry—leveraging its enormous profits and robust balance sheets—would temporarily act as the buffer, absorbing the difference between wholesale costs and frozen retail prices. This ensures that the global “panic premium” stays on the ledgers of multibillion-dollar corporations rather than being extracted from the pockets of American consumers.

Should a crisis extend beyond three months, prices would not be permitted to spike; instead, increases would be capped at 5 percent per month. This approach ensures that energy costs remain predictable—perhaps not painless, but certainly survivable.

In times of crisis, families do not require perfect prices. They require stability.

The Oil Industry’s Century of Profits

Energy companies often defend price spikes by arguing that oil markets are inherently risky.

But the industry’s financial history tells a different story. Even in the modern era, losses are an anomaly. The pandemic shutdown of 2020—when global travel collapsed—produced ExxonMobil’s first annual loss since its 1999 merger.

The following year, ExxonMobil flipped to $23 billion in profit. By 2022, that figure had surged to $55.7 billion, the largest in the company’s history.

Even after oil prices cooled, Exxon reported $33.7 billion in earnings in 2024 and $28.8 billion in 2025.

Meanwhile ExxonMobil’s stock price is up roughly 24 percent since January 1, 2026 —a gain that has held firm even after a modest decline during the first week of this war.

This is not an industry struggling to survive.

It is one of the most profitable industries in modern economic history.

If companies with a century-long record of profitability cannot absorb ninety days of volatility during a geopolitical crisis, then American families certainly cannot.

Seven Oil Shocks Since 2000

The Iran war is not the first time Americans have faced a gasoline price shock. Over the past quarter century, households have been forced to absorb seven major surges triggered by geopolitical conflict, cyberattacks, and natural disasters.

While the causes vary, the result is consistent: a rapid “panic premium” that hits household budgets long before the more expensive crude ever reaches the local pump.

The oil industry has long used global disruptions to justify price hikes, but a historical comparison shows that the current 2026 crisis is unfolding with unprecedented speed:

Every crisis follows the same script:

• Markets panic.

• Oil prices surge.

• Families pay.

For affluent households, gasoline represents about 2 percent of spending. For rural and working-class Americans, it can consume 5 to 10 percent of household budgets.

A sudden spike is not an inconvenience—it is a financial shock.

Why Congress Has Never Fixed This

The more honest answer to why Congress hasn’t acted across seven previous shocks is not complexity—it’s money.

In the 2024 election cycle alone, the oil and gas industry poured $237 million into federal politics. About $162 million of that flowed through outside spending groups, high-octane “dark money” vehicles made possible by Citizens United.

It is a protection racket—one that has successfully kept price stabilization off the legislative agenda through every one of those seven shocks.

As Congress prepares to debate tens of billions of dollars to fund the war in Iran, it should also protect American families from fallout at the gas pump.

For ninety days, the shock should stop at the balance sheets of the most profitable industry in modern history—not in the bank accounts of American families.

(Gift Photo)

On the evening of September 10, 2001, Pete Peterson — former POW and America’s first ambassador to Hanoi — stood in a Boston ballroom to honor John McCain and John Kerry for an act of radical political courage: reconciling the United States with Vietnam.

To describe their work, Peterson invoked the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, where Union and Confederate veterans met not with bayonets, but with embraces.

“The story of war,” Peterson said that night, “doesn’t end when the guns go silent. It ends at the moment of reconciliation.”

The next morning, the world changed.

In the twenty-five years since, we have repeated the same mistake: going to war without knowing how we will reconcile with those we defeat. We mobilize overwhelming force while leaving the morning after undefined.

The War Now Underway

President Trump chose to strike Iran, claiming “imminent threats” while urging Iranians to “take back your country.” He did so without seeking the constitutional authorization vested in Congress and without presenting evidence of an imminent attack.

The Saturday morning assault followed CIA intelligence describing a “window of opportunity” to strike Iran’s senior leadership. The calculation was surgical: strike while they were most vulnerable. On that front, the mission succeeded. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening salvo, along with a dozen members of his inner circle.

Saturday is the first day of the school week in Iran. While missiles were being guided toward the Pasteur district in Tehran, families across the country were walking their daughters to class, unaware of the coming danger.

In Minab, the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school sat 600 meters from an IRGC naval base — the “military objective.” When the base was struck, the school was not spared. The New York Times is now reporting that 115 schoolgirls were killed in the strike.

Escalation does not wait for politics to catch up. It does not wait for Day-Two plans or humanitarian corridors. The moral failure of this war is not found in the decision to target a dictator. It is found in the decision to launch a war of choice without a defined political end, knowing that missiles travel in minutes while political settlements take years — and children live in that gap.

We have seen the cost of this gap before. In Gaza, more than 64,000 children have been killed or maimed over two years of fighting that lacked a commitment to reconciliation. Now, we are exporting that same model to a nation of 90 million people. Escalation is immediate. Reconciliation is deferred. In that gap, the innocent die.

The Pattern We Keep Repeating

We have seen this before. The second Iraq War began with overwhelming force and no credible postwar architecture. Afghanistan lasted twenty years and ended where it began. In Gaza, there is no Day Two. In each case, force was mobilized while the political settlement was deferred — and the absence of an end became its own form of permanence.

The war is already underway, and without a defined political end, force merely prolongs conflict while leaving destroyed societies in turmoil. The question is not whether force will be applied — it is whether the United States has any plan to rebuild what it destroys.

A 2 a.m. video message telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand” is not a plan. It is a wish.

The Real Question Before Congress

The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war so that no single person can launch the nation into open-ended conflict alone. As Lincoln warned during the Mexican-American War, giving one man the power to decide when “necessity” justifies war is the very power the Founders designed Congress to prevent.

This week, if Congress authorizes continued military action, it must do so on defined political terms. Authorization is leverage. Without conditions, Congress forfeits it.

Call it the Peterson Test. Any authorization should require:

• A defined political destination: Not “regime change,” but a concrete description of the security and governance conditions that constitute mission completion.

• A transition framework: Specifying who governs on Day Two; which international actors participate; and how power vacuums are prevented.

• A diplomatic pathway: Identifying channels and conditions — however indirect — for de-escalation or negotiated settlement.

• Humanitarian benchmarks: Measurable commitments to restore infrastructure and essential services tied to the termination of hostilities.

The Question That Cannot Be Deferred

On the last quiet evening before 9/11, Pete Peterson reminded his audience that war does not end when the shooting stops. It ends at reconciliation.

For a generation, the United States has voted for force without demanding that definition first. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gaza have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

If the story of war only ends at the moment of reconciliation, then launching one without a path toward it ensures the story never ends at all.

It is too late to save the children of Minab from the first salvo.

It is not yet too late for Congress to demand an answer to the only question that matters:

How does this end?

(Gift Photo

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Mark Twain once observed that “figures often beguile,” particularly when arranged to persuade rather than to illuminate. His famous warning about “lies, damned lies, and statistics” was never an indictment of mathematics, but of the human talent for bending numbers into narrative.

Few subjects in modern American politics illustrate Twain’s insight more clearly than the rhetoric surrounding voter fraud.

Across all U.S. elections from 2016 through 2020, confirmed voter-fraud convictions totaled just 306 cases nationwide. Even more revealing is the character of those cases. Of the 151 convictions tied to presidential or congressional contests, nearly every instance involved a single vote.

This is not the reality envisioned by many “stolen election” claims. Instead of coordinated schemes, conviction records overwhelmingly document isolated incidents — most involving solitary ballots cast fraudulently.

During the State of the Union address, President Trump cited Heritage Foundation election-fraud data as proof of “rampant cheating” requiring urgent federal intervention. What, then, does their database actually show?

A Brookings Institution analysis of Heritage Foundation election-fraud entries across multiple recent general elections found an average of roughly 134 cases per year nationwide - roughly one every three days.

State-level patterns reinforce the same conclusion. In California — a state casting tens of millions of ballots — the Heritage database lists just six cases across the combined 2020–2024 election cycles.

In statistical terms, voter fraud resembles noise within a vast electoral system; in political rhetoric, it is treated as signal.

The persistence of these claims despite their statistical rarity raises an obvious question: what function does the narrative serve? Describing election “cheating” as “rampant” does not merely exaggerate misconduct — it reframes elections themselves, feeding doubt about legitimacy where little basis for doubt exists.

Instant-response - dial test - research during the State of the Union address illustrates this dynamic vividly.

When President Trump discussed the SAVE America Act, audience reactions split sharply along partisan lines — energizing his base while leaving much of the broader electorate unmoved. The divergence is revealing: rare phenomena framed as systemic threats aren’t processed as neutral facts. They’re filtered through existing beliefs.

A Question of Proportionality

By contrast, identity theft is neither rare nor interpretive. According to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, consumer fraud losses reached $12.5 billion in America, with identity theft comprising roughly 1.15 million reported cases affecting financial accounts, tax filings, government benefits, and credit records.

• One identity-theft victim emerges every two minutes.

• One confirmed voter-fraud conviction emerges approximately every three days-4,320 minutes.

If fraud prevention were truly the priority, presidential urgency would be directed toward bipartisan measures like the Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act of 2026 — legislation crafted to combat AI-driven identity crimes but still stalled in committee.

Meanwhile, the SAVE America Act advances as a remedy for what conviction records suggest is, at scale, a statistical ghost.

The Practical Consequences

Understanding the mechanics of this bill is essential. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the SAVE Act would override state registration frameworks to require documentary proof of citizenship — documentation that standard driver’s licenses often fail to satisfy.

For the roughly 7 percent of U.S. citizens lacking ready access to these papers, the procedural barrier becomes significant and, for many, prohibitive. Millions of younger voters, elderly citizens, and naturalized Americans would confront requirements they have never been asked to meet.

Of particular note: analysts estimate that roughly 69 million married women lack a birth certificate reflecting their current legal name — meaning that for this group alone, compliance would require assembling a linked chain of documents that most voters have never been asked to produce.

The system is not broken.

It is being redesigned to exclude them.

The Actual Effect

American elections consistently produce vanishingly small fraud rates, confirmed by prosecutions, audits, and decades of investigation. When irregularities occur, existing safeguards catch them.

The SAVE Act does not eliminate a rampant threat. It imposes a real-world hurdle on participation itself — one that would be borne not statistically, but by millions of living, breathing voters.

Americans are exponentially more likely to suffer identity theft than to encounter voter fraud. If fraud prevention is genuinely the objective, Congress should reject the SAVE Act and pass the Stop Identity Fraud and Identity Theft Act of 2026.

Author’s Note

If you are looking for a concrete way to protect democracy this fall, remember that your local election system depends on ordinary citizens — poll workers, ballot counters, and authorized observers. Contact your election board or your city or county clerk to learn how to take part.

(Gift photo)