Commentary

Nature and economics share some fascinating patterns, one of which explains why Donald Trump is about to become president and how the morbidly rich have appropriated over $50 trillion from working class people since the 1980s. Scientists use something called the Lorka-Volterra equations to explain how predators and prey interact in the wild.

These equations show us that animal populations rise and fall in predictable cycles — when there are lots of rabbits, fox populations grow, but as foxes eat more rabbits, the rabbit population shrinks, which then causes fox numbers to drop, allowing rabbits to multiply again.

Incredibly, this back-and-forth pattern mirrors what happens between the wealthy and working classes in our economy and political systems over the past 100 years.

Think about a forest ecosystem. When rabbits have plenty of grass to eat and safe places to hide, their numbers grow. As rabbit populations increase, foxes find it easier to catch prey, so they have more cubs and their numbers grow, too.

But eventually, the foxes become so numerous that they start catching too many rabbits. The rabbit population crashes, and soon after, fox numbers follow suit because there isn’t enough food to go around. This creates a natural cycle that repeats over and over, unless something comes along to change the rules of the game — like a new predator, a disease, or human intervention.

This same pattern plays out in our economy and political system, though we often don’t recognize it.

The working class, like the rabbits, create value through their labor and create demand — which drives economies — through their purchases of goods and services. They make products, provide services, consume both, and thus keep the economy running.

The wealthy class, like the foxes, extracts value through ownership, investment, and control of resources. When the system is balanced, both groups can thrive. But when it gets out of balance, trouble follows.

To see this pattern in action, look at a remarkable period in American history called the “Great Compression.” From 1900 to 1980 (with the brief exception of the Roaring Twenties), particularly after the New Deal, something unusual happened: the gap between rich and poor actually shrank for roughly 80 years. Working people saw their wages go up and their living standards improve.

This happened because new rules and institutions — including labor unions, Wall Street regulations, anti-monopoly laws, and higher progressive income taxes — kept economic “predators” (morbidly rich individuals and corporations) from taking too much from economic “prey” (working class and poor people).

Just like a healthy forest needs the rules of nature as expressed in the Lorka-Volterra equations to keep any one species from taking over, these progressive policies put into place by FDR created balance in the economy, and thus political harmony across the nation.

The specifics of those rules were comprehensive and carefully designed. The highest income tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was 90% in that era. Labor unions were protected by law and represented about one-third of all workers, meaning two-thirds of workers had the wage and benefits equivalent of a union job (union employers set local wage and benefit floors). Banks were strictly regulated and couldn’t engage in risky speculation with ordinary people’s savings.

Monopolies were broken up when they became too powerful; the Supreme Court blocked the merger of two shoe companies in the 1960s because the new combined company would control 5% of the shoe industry (today Nike has 19%).

Those rules didn’t prevent people from getting rich, but they did ensure that extreme wealth accumulation was harder and that workers received a fair share of the value they created.

The results were impressive. Between 1945 and 1980, when workers produced more, they earned more. A single breadwinner could support a family, own a home, buy a new car every few years, take a vacation, send kids to college, and retire with dignity and a pension.

Social mobility was high, meaning children regularly achieved higher living standards than their parents. The wealth created by the economy was shared more fairly than ever before.

The rich still got richer, but at a slower, more sustainable pace that allowed everyone else to prosper too.

But this balance didn’t last. In 1971, future (1972) Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote a memo that changed everything. He urged American businesses to fight against unions, environmental protections, and other rules that limited their power, crush the labor movement, and put corporations and rich people in charge of the commons.

This memo wasn’t just idle speculation; it became a blueprint for action. Business leaders and fossil-fuel billionaires created new think tanks, funded academic programs promoting so-called free-market ideology, and invested heavily in lobbying and political campaigns.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, he started dismantling the rules that had kept the morbidly rich economic predators and their companies in check. He turned loose the foxes on the rabbits.

This era, which we might call the “Great Predation,” saw a dramatic reversal of the trends that defined the Great Compression. From 1980 to 2024, the wealthiest Americans extracted over $50 trillion from the working class, according to studies such as the Rand Corporation’s 2020 report on income redistribution.

Productivity continued to rise, but wages stagnated, and wealth increasingly concentrated at the top. The predators were thriving, but the prey — working-class Americans — were being systematically drained.

Reagan dramatically cut taxes on the morbidly rich. He, Bush, and Trump stripped away business regulations and Republicans on the Supreme Court stopped enforcing antitrust law. Unions lost their power when companies — with the support of Republicans on the Court — were allowed to fight them more aggressively.

Even Social Security and Medicare faced pressure, though they largely survived (although Republicans have already half-privatized Medicare with the Medicare Advantage scam, and are now talking about doing the same with Social Security).

While workers kept producing more, their wages barely grew. Instead, nearly all the new wealth went to those at the top. The predators were thriving, but their prey — ordinary working Americans — were being squeezed dry.

The changes were dramatic and far-reaching. CEO pay skyrocketed from about 30 times the average worker’s salary in 1980 to over 300 times by 2020. In some industries it’s thousands of times more, and in the companies of some billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, their income is hundreds of thousands or millions of times greater than their workers.

As a result of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court giving the morbidly rich the absolute power to own politicians and put unlimited money into elections, the predation of the morbidly rich has gone into hyperdrive. The most obvious example of this recently was Elon Musk purchasing the White House for Trump with a bit more than a quarter-billion dollars, an amount that was basically pocket change for him.

More than half of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck, despite the country being richer than ever. Young people struggle to afford homes, start families, or save for retirement. Medical debt has become a leading cause of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, both the number of billionaires and their aggregate wealth have exploded, with some individuals accumulating more wealth than entire countries.

This pattern follows the same logic as those predator-prey equations. During the Great Compression, government rules acted like environmental protections, helping the middle class grow strong and creating a healthy consumer economy.

The wealthy still benefited, but couldn’t take too much. During the Great Predation, those protections disappeared. Without limits on economic predators, working people’s share of the pie began to shrink, just like rabbit populations fall when foxes have free rein.

But here’s the catch: just as foxes eventually run into trouble if they eat too many rabbits, extreme concentration of wealth creates problems for the wealthy too. When middle-class consumers struggle, the whole economy becomes unstable.

We see this today in several ways: young people can’t afford to buy homes or cars, leading to weak demand in key industries. Consumer debt has reached record levels as people try to maintain their standard of living. Social and political unrest grows as people lose faith in the system. We might be approaching a breaking point, and the 2024 election is a major warning.

The signs of strain are everywhere. Major retailers struggle as their customer base loses purchasing power. Tech companies lay off thousands despite record profits, trying to squeeze more value from fewer workers.

Young people increasingly reject capitalism altogether, correctly seeing Reagan’s version of it as a rigged game. Political polarization has reached dangerous levels as people search for someone to blame, resulting in the rise of demagogues like Trump, Vance, and Musk. And the steady stream of oligarchs rushing to Mar-a-Lago to kiss Trump’s a--.

The good news is that we can learn from nature about how to restore balance. In healthy ecosystems, predators and prey find a sustainable balance through natural mechanisms and occasional external interventions. In our economy, we know we can create this balance through smart policies because we already did it once for almost 80 years.

We need modern versions of the rules that worked during the Great Compression: Fair taxes, strong worker protections, and limits on corporate power. We also need new ideas, like universal basic income or profit-sharing, that can help distribute wealth more evenly.

Some specific solutions are already being tested around the world.

Worker representation on corporate boards, common in Germany, helps ensure companies consider employee interests. Public investment banks, like those in South Korea and Japan, can direct capital toward social needs rather than just private profits. Alaska’s Permanent Fund shows how natural resource wealth can be shared with all citizens. These examples prove that alternatives to pure billionaire predation are possible.

Just as predators play an important role in nature by keeping prey populations healthy and genetically fit, wealthy individuals and corporations can contribute positively to society through investment, innovation, and job creation.

The key is ensuring they do this in a way that strengthens the whole system rather than depleting it. This necessitates high taxes on extreme wealth, requirements to reinvest profits in workers and communities, and new forms of corporate ownership that share gains more broadly.

Looking ahead, our challenge is to move from predation to partnership like America did in the 1930s and Europe did in the 1950s. We must recognize that everyone’s prosperity — including that of the wealthy — depends on having a healthy middle class.

Creating this balance isn’t just morally right; it’s necessary for the economy and our political system to function well. By learning from both nature and history, we can build an economic and political system that works better for everyone, breaking free from the harsh cycles of boom and bust that have defined the past few decades.

The path forward requires both political will and innovative thinking. We must update our understanding of how modern economies work and be willing to experiment with new forms of regulation and wealth sharing.

The alternative — continuing down the path of unchecked billionaire predation — risks destroying the very system that creates wealth in the first place. Just as ecology teaches us that diverse, balanced ecosystems are the most resilient, economics shows us that broadly shared prosperity creates the strongest foundation for sustainable growth and political stability.

NOW READ: 2025 got off to the most predictable start ever — where violence is America's calling card

As the lights went out on 2024, we lost one of our longest-lasting beacons of peace, only to be replaced by the blood-red dawn of 2025, and the violence that has now become a hallmark of America.

It is both sad and incredible that 100-year-old Jimmy Carter’s death was actually more surprising than the hell that visited New Orleans but three days later.

You can always count on violence, and plenty of it, in the United States of America.

There was absolutely no reason to believe the terrible carnage that resulted in the deaths of 15 people in New Orleans, and wrecked the futures of countless others wouldn’t blast its way onto the scene of some American city or town, because violence has become the blaring background music of a nation under constant threat from its own.

I bet most of you didn't hear about the mass-shooting in a Jamaica, Queens, nightclub in New York City that wounded 10 people at approximately the same time New Orlean’s French Quarter was under siege.

Who can keep up with it all?

Nobody — not you, not me, not that precious child sitting at her desk — is safe in our country anymore, because rather than really deal with the underlying causes and gruesome effects of our extreme sickness, we’d rather point fingers at the faceless bogeymen who wait at our borders.

Look, there are more guns than people in America — 500 million, give or take — and the fact that I can type that so casually just to be read with a knowing shrug, should show us just how far our sickness has progressed.

But rather than dealing with all that unchecked weaponry, Republicans are telling us that immigration is to blame for most of our societal ills. It has gotten so bad, they say, that nameless immigrants are actually walking into our backyards and eating our pets while we sleep.

Meantime, in the real world, our children are being mowed down in schools by their fellow Americans.

The fact is this: We value guns more than children, and if you want to somehow try to dispute that, please get help immediately, because your lights are going out.

The monster who careened into New Orleans was no immigrant who had just crossed the border, because, again, it almost never is. No, this guy was very much an American citizen and an Army vet, who served our country in Afghanistan.

He is just another American who was radicalized by whatever aligned with what was eating him alive on the inside, and became afflicted with the same sickness that has overcome thousands of Americans before him in this carefully cured environment of extreme violence we’ve cooked up in this country.

Rather than get help for his disorder, he got weapons.

The American Way right there …

Of course this didn’t stop America’s most notorious homegrown terrorist leader, Donald J. Trump, from spewing his noxious gas on his social media channel Thursday morning, as the facts of what happened were only beginning to roll in:

"With the Biden 'Open Border’s Policy' I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism, and other forms of violent crime, will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined. Joe Biden is the WORST PRESIDENT IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA, A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER. What he and his group of Election Interfering 'thugs' have done to our Country will not soon be forgotten! MAGA"

And before moving on let’s take a look at that response from the soon-to-be leader of the free world. THIS is who millions of Americans decided had the temperament to lead us into the future.

Don’t go telling me the inmate isn’t running our asylum.

The brutal truth is that the America-attacking Trump loves this terror. It gives him air and life. You see, without the violence and carnage lowlifes like Trump couldn’t exist. It drives his sickening narrative that only he can stop the terror from growing that he himself so carefully nurtures.

He is the arsonist telling the burn victims that he’s the man to extinguish all those fires that he carefully douses with gasoline.

And say what you want about the America-attacker, please, but give him this: he knows full well what kind of homegrown bilge attacks America. Many happen to be the spit and dirt that combine to makeup the mud that helps form his rancid base.

They are the rudderless groupies who he orders “to stand back and stand by.”

Four years ago Monday, thousands of them descended on our Capitol at his request and exacted unspeakable violence during America’s once-sacred transfer of power.

His vice president was threatened with hanging, lawmakers ran for their lives, and overmatched law enforcement officers were beaten to a pulp.

All this during a day that used to proudly mark America’s place as the world’s most enduring democracy.

Are you reading this????

As of this writing, 1,561 Americans have been charged criminally in federal court for that terrible attack.

• Approximately 590 have beencharged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents or officers or obstructing those officers during a civil disorder, including approximately 169 defendants charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
• 174 defendants have been charged with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon.
• Eighteen more of these Americans have been charged with seditious conspiracy.

Take the case of just one of these monsters, David Dempsey. According to prosecutors:

"Though Dempsey has pled guilty only for his assaults on Detective Nguyen and Sergeant Mastony, his violent assault on other officers defending the Capitol was relentless: swinging pole-like weapons more than 20 times, spraying chemical agents at least three times, hurling objects at officers at least ten times, stomping on the heads of police officers as he perched above them five times, attempting to steal a riot shield and baton, and incessantly hurling threats and insults at police while rallying other rioters to join his onslaught."

This is one of the guys who the America-attacking Trump said “he loved” when he finally called off the attempted coup in which countless law enforcement officers were beaten and $2.8 million worth of damage was inflicted on OUR Capitol.

Trump himself skated free of course, which is the source of endless angst and frustration on this side of the keyboard, but the sane among us — hundreds of millions of people around the world — saw and heard it all play out on that gruesome day.

You don’t need people like me to tell people like you how dangerous things are in America right now, or to point out the jagged symmetry of a man of peace like Carter exiting the scene, while a man of violence like Trump enters it.

I do, however, believe people like us are needed to scream louder than ever before that.

NOW READ: Are you still wondering why workers voted for Trump?

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Trump says he’s going to imprison and then deport millions of brown-skinned immigrants. He’s going after the wrong people.

It seems that ever time a Republican goes on one of the national political TV shows, they make sure to get in the lie that “Joe Biden opened the southern border wide open,” or toss in a reference to “Biden’s open borders.”

It is, of course, a viscious lie — but one that’s almost never called out by the hosts because it’s peripheral or tangential to the topic being discussed. And, as is so often the case, this all started with Reagan (more on that in a moment).

While it’s true that two factors have driven a lot of migration over the past few decades (climate change wiping out farmland, and political dysfunction and gangs caused by the Reagan administration devastating the governments of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala) the latest main driver of would-be immigrants and refugees is the Republican Party itself.

Lacking any actual, substantive economic issues to run on, the GOP decided after Biden’s election in 2021 to fall back on a familiar ploy: scare white people that brown people are coming for them and/or their jobs. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, I remember well how the GOP pitch to white people was that Black people wanted “our” jobs; now it’s brown people from south of the border.

Trump did this in the most crude, vulgar and racist way possible from his first entrance into the Republican primary through the end of his presidency. It frightened enough white voters that it got him into office once, and the GOP repeated that trick last November.

In doing so, they’re playing with fire. Their daily lies about American policies for the past four years are causing people to put their lives in danger.

The truth is that Joe Biden never “opened” our southern border.

“Open borders” have never been his policy or the Democratic Party’s policy or, indeed, the policy of any elected Democrat or Democratic strategist in modern American history.

Everybody understands and agrees that for a country to function it must regulate immigration, and it’s borders must have a reasonable level of integrity.

Republicans are playing a very dangerous game here. By loudly proclaiming their lie that Biden had “opened” the southern border and was “welcoming” immigrants and refugees “with open arms,” they created the very problem they’re pointing to.

Republican lies like this don’t stay in the United States.

As they get repeated through our media, even when most Americans realize they’re simply wild exaggerations (at the most charitable), the media of other countries are happy to pick up the story and spread it across Mexico and Central America.

This, in turn, encourages the desperate, the poor, and the ambitious to head north or send their teenage children northward in hopes for a better life. Meanwhile, criminal cartels have jumped into the human trafficking business in a big way, exploiting and aggressively repeating the GOP rhetoric to recruit new “customers.”

I lived and worked in Germany for a year, and it took me months to get a work-permit from that government to do so. I worked in Australia, and the process of getting that work-permit took a couple of months.

In both cases, it was my employers who were most worried about my successfully getting the work permits and did most of the work to make it happen. There’s an important reason for that.

The way that most countries prevent undocumented immigrants from disrupting their economies and causing cheap labor competition with their citizens is by putting employers in jail when they hire people who don’t have the right to work in that country.

We used to do this in the United States.

In the 1920s, the US began regulating immigration and similarly put into place laws regulating who could legally work in this country and who couldn’t.

Because there was so much demand for low-wage immigrant labor in the food belt of California during harvest season, President Dwight Eisenhower experimented with a program in the 1950s that granted season-long passes to workers from Mexico. Millions took him up on it, but his Bracero program failed because employers controlled the permits, and far too many used that control to threaten people who objected to having their wages stolen or refused to tolerate physical or sexual abuse.

A similar dynamic is at work today. Employers and even neighbors extract free labor or other favors of all sorts from undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the threat of deportation and the violence of ICE as a cudgel. Undocumented immigrants working here end up afraid to call the police when they’re the victims of, or witnesses to crimes.

Everybody loses except the employers, who have a cheap, pliable, easily-threatened source of labor that is afraid to talk back or report abuses.

It got this way in 1986, when Ronald Reagan decided to stop enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring undocumented people, and directed the government’s enforcement activities instead toward the least powerful and able to defend themselves: brown-skinned immigrants.

The result has been a labor market in the US that’s been distorted by undocumented workers creating a black-market for low-wage labor that many of America’s largest corporations enthusiastically support.

For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream. They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement.

Reagan and his Republican allies, with healthy campaign donations from both industries, wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act to make it harder to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.

As Brad Plumer noted in The Washington Post:

“[T]he bill’s sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community, explains Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego. ‘The end result was that they essentially gutted the employer sanctions,’ he says.”

So Reagan stopped enforcing our labor and immigration laws with respect to wealthy white employers, and the next 20 years saw a collapse of American citizens working in both the meatpacking and construction industries, among others.

Forty-dollar-an-hour American-citizen unionized workers were replaced with seven-dollar-an-hour undocumented workers desperate for a chance at a life in America for themselves and their children.

From the Republican point of view, an added bonus was that levels of unionization in both industries utterly collapsed. Reagan succeeded in transforming the American workplace, and set up decades of potential anti-Latino hysteria that Republicans could use as a political wedge.

Without acknowledging that it was Reagan himself who set up the “crisis,” Republicans today hold serious-sounding conferences and press availabilities about how “illegals” are “trying to steal Americans jobs!” They’re all over rightwing hate radio and in the conservative media on a near-daily basis.

But it’s not poor people coming here in search of safety or a better life who are impacting our labor markets (and, frankly, it’s a small impact): it’s the companies that hire them.

And those same companies then funded Republican politicians who pushed under-the-radar social media ads at African Americans in 2016 and the last election saying that Democrats wanted Hispanic “illegals” to come in to take their jobs.

America, it turns out, doesn’t have an “illegal immigrant” problem: we have an “illegal employer” problem.

Nonetheless, to paraphrase Mitch McConnell, they persist. As the AP noted in a recent article:

“Black lawmakers accused Republicans on Tuesday of trying to ‘manufacture tension’ between African-Americans and immigrants as GOP House members argued in a hearing that more minorities would be working were it not for illegal immigration.”

Tossing even more gasoline on the flame they, themselves, lit, Republicans are now amplifying the warnings and “danger” of undocumented immigrants by pulling out the Bush/Cheney “terrorist” card along with Trump’s “diseased rapist criminals” and “they want to take your job” tropes.

Because the GOP has been playing these kinds of racist, xenophobic games with immigration since the Reagan era, our immigration and refugee systems are a total mess. Trump additionally did everything he could to take an axe to anything that wasn’t a jail or a cage…and turned those jail cells into sweet little profit centers for his private-prison donor corporations.

America needs comprehensive immigration reform and a rational immigration policy that’s grounded in both compassion and enlightened economic self-interest. We need an honest debate around it, stripped of the GOP’s racial dog-whistles. And our media needs to stop taking GOP lies about immigration and the southern border at face value.

Americans — and people who want to become Americans out of hope or desperation — deserve better. And throwing some of these rich white employers in jail instead of terrified immigrants would be a good start.

As we look at the upcoming year, the most urgent question facing us is whether the assault Putin, Orbán, Trump, Musk, and Vance have planned for our political system in 2025 will succeed.

In 1926 Ernest Hemmingway published his novel The Sun Also Rises, which has this extraordinary bit of dialogue about how change happens in most aspects of life — and how governments rise and fall.

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
”Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
”What brought it on?”
“Friends," said Mike. "I had a lot of friends. False friends.”

For some unfathomable reason, Democrats insist on calling their Republican colleagues their “friends.” They are not friends.

With few exceptions, they are systematically destroying American democracy with the clear objective of replacing it with strongman authoritarianism, a new and American version of what Benito Mussolini called fascism.

Right now they’re moving gradually:

— Infiltrating police departments and the enlisted ranks of the military
— Taking over school boards and local boards of elections
— Firing principals and teachers who defend multiracial, multicultural democracy while banning books that contain such “dangerous” ideas
— Demonizing queer people and outlawing drag shows
— Working with Tucker Carlson and Fox “News” to completely rewrite the history of January 6th
— Gerrymandering states so regardless of how people vote, Republicans control the levers of power
— Changing election laws so they can both make it harder for city-dwellers to vote and to ignore and then change the outcomes of elections they don’t like
— Building media structures that will support the authoritarian takeover when it happens
— Organizing armed paramilitary militias, with back-channel connections to local police
— Creating legal organizations to sanitize and rationalize ending messy democracy
— Radicalizing average Americans through social media and an ever-growing network of hard-right radio shows and podcasts
— Spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories about Democrats and Jews using the dog whistle of “George Soros”
— Firebombing Texas Democratic Party’s Austin headquarters and threatening them that if they don’t stop trying to get Democrats elected worse will come.

We’ve seen this movie before.

It was “the other 9/11”: Everything seemed normal until General Pinochet declared he was taking over the government of Chile on September 11, 1973.

The Chilean government had been run democratically since 1923, the longest in South America, but Pinochet (with help from the Nixon administration) had already infiltrated and gotten the loyalty of both the police, the army, and the civilian paramilitaries he’d spent the previous few years nurturing.

So when he rolled up to the presidential palace and declared he was taking over, nobody came to the defense of the elected president, Salvador Allende. The police were already loyal to Pinochet, including the police who defended that nation’s capitol.

Allende, along with around 30 supporters, held the palace for a few hours, gave a short national radio address, and then put a gun to his head and ended his presidency.

Gradually, then suddenly.

When Chileans poured into the streets, Pinochet swept them up and held them in the national stadium, where tens of thousands were tortured, murdered, or simply disappeared. One of the favorite tactics of his military was to throw “liberals” out of helicopters over the ocean to kill them, a practice celebrated by rightwing militia around the US today.

Pinochet’s democratic political opposition lost all its power and went underground; it would be seventeen years before anything resembling democracy would return to Chile, a process that is still pulling itself together.

If Mike Pence had gone along with Trump’s plan to imitate the election of 1876 and install the guy who lost both the popular and the electoral vote as president, America would be a very, very different country today.

Gradually, then suddenly.

Trump had previously proclaimed his desire to change the nation’s libel and slander laws so he could sue or imprison his political opponents and those in the media who opposed him; if he had succeeded on January 6th, that would have happened by now, and people like me (and maybe you) could be in jail.

Echoing one of Pinochet’s first 1973 laws, a Republican state legislator in Florida proposed legislation requiring bloggers and writers to register with the state if they intend to criticize any elected official; had Trump succeeded we’d all be living under similar laws today.

Trump has promised his violent partisans that he’ll pardon them and pick up their legal fees; soon we may see hundreds of Kyle Rittenhouse’s and Daniel Penny’s who claim to have “defended themselves” against “psycho” Black people, “Antifa,” and “commie liberals”without consequence.

Republicans in Congress are now discussing a constitutional convention like rightwing billionaires have been promoting and annually rehearsing in Washington, DC to rewrite our founding document. The right of all Americans to vote, separation of church and state, civil rights, protections of free speech and assembly, the right to due process and equal protection under the law, even the obscure Emoluments Clause will all be on the chopping block.

Trump-friendly corporations will be running political purges reminiscent of the Republican “Red Scare” and “Blacklist”1950s all across the country as social media accounts are examined for evidence of “leftist” leanings; Johnny McEntee began that process when he was “Deputy President” to Trump and was firing people in the executive branch for “liking” postings by “leftwing” entertainers like Taylor Swift.

The process Trump started in Portland and Seattle in the summer of 2020 of unmarked vans and stormtrooper-like federal police with no identifying patches kidnapping people off the streets will probably be expanded nationwide; tens of thousands will be in custody without charges.

Private prisons will expand to take in the hundreds of thousands of people arrested protesting in the streets or for speaking out on social media. For most Americans who voted Republican or were completely apolitical, though, life would go on as normal (just like in the early years of the takeovers of Chile, Russia, and Hungary — or Italy, Germany and Spain in the 1930s).

A handful of high-profile progressive politicians could be assassinated or survive assassination attempts; the police and the FBI, however, may well be as clueless about their killers (or complicit) as they were about 10,000 people planning to storm the Capitol and assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House on January 6th.

The Democratic Party might be labeled the aggressors and as subversives by rightwing media and the Trump administration as part of an emergency declaration; its ranks melting away as quickly as the union-aligned parties did in Italy and Germany in the 1930s or the Allende Socialists in Chile in 1973.

First abortion will be criminalized nationwide, then birth control, then women in business and politics will find themselves under constant attack in the media and the workplace. White male dominance will be close to reattaining the status it had in 1972 when women couldn’t legally get an abortion, sign a contract, or even get a credit card without the signature of a father or husband.

Newsrooms across the country will be purged of liberals and running editorials in support of the “new patriotism” proclaimed by the GOP; the hedge funds headed up by rightwing billionaires — who today own over half of all the nation’s newspapers — will be snapping up the rest of the nation’s media like Viktor Orbán’s oligarch buddies did in Hungary.

Every time these sorts of coups happen, the nation’s people are shocked and surprised. They had no idea how far things had gone. It even happened that way with the American Revolution and the Civil War.

Gradually, then suddenly.

Trump’s supporters are today openly calling for the end of democracy, for book banning, and for public executions of Democratic politicians. The leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to even reprimand Representative Paul Gosar for openly celebrating his fantasy murder of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A multimillionaire former head of The Carlyle Group with no political experience, running on a platform of auditing the 2020 election and not much else, won the governorship of Virginia by spreading the naked, racist lie that Democrats in that state were indoctrinating white children to feel ashamed of the color of their skin; not a single elected Republican and only a rare few in the media called him out.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt faced the fascist “America First” movement within the GOP, he went to political war with them and the Supreme Court that backed them.

“They hate me,” he thundered to cheers, “and I welcome their hatred!”

President Biden appeared to think he could negotiate with these people who want to remake America in Pinochet’s image (with the same type of Chicago School neoliberal advisors who helped Pinochet turn Chile into an autocratic nightmare).

He was wrong.

They spent the past 4 years building their power and their organizations; armed paramilitary groups are expanding across the country as the GOP has become so radicalized that they even proclaim Liz Cheney as their enemy.

Billionaire-owned media properties like Fox “News” and hate-talk radio push naked lies to their viewers and listeners — all to make a buck and consolidate their political power — with no loss of audience.

And they’re packing our courts with young, hardcore rightwing ideologues.

Republicans are openly preparing for a second Civil War, calling for a “national divorce.”

Reuters did a major and shocking report on how police forces, presumably sympathetic to local neofascist elements, refuse to even investigate death threats against elections officials and Democratic politicians.

In Michigan, a militia group nearly kidnapped and killed that state’s governor; they were stopped by an insider who turned states’ evidence. Another group was found planning to murder that state’s openly lesbian Attorney General.

Meanwhile, all across social media, the word is spreading: “The storm is upon us.”

January 6th was a rehearsal; they're now planning 2025. Coups build to an explosive tipping point, then suddenly appear as a fait accompli.

Unless we stop them in-process with massive resistance campaigns across state and federal governments and at the grass roots level, this may be our last chance.

Gradually, then suddenly.

ALSO READ: The terrifying reality of Trump's second term: Your job, savings and freedom are at risk

“Those who control the present, control the past; and those who

control the past control the future.” —George Orwell, 1984

From outlawing the polio vaccine to ignoring the scientific consensus on gender dysphoria to refusing to wear masks in hospitals to trying to strip evolution and science from our schools, stupid has become fashionable in today’s GOP.

When Republican politicians want to score points, they criticize their opponents as having had “elite” educations; the GOP’s war against Ivy League colleges was particularly evident during the student protests of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Congressional Republican inquisitors voices' dripped with scorn and contempt as they grilled university presidents.

It wasn’t always this way.

I remember when the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth. It was the fall of 1957, I was six years old, and my dad and I watched it arc over our house from our back yard one clear October night. My best friend’s father, a ham radio operator, let us listen on his shortwave radio to the “beep beep beep” it was emitting when it was over North America. I’d never seen my dad so rattled.

That dramatic technological achievement lit a major fire under the Eisenhower administration and Congress. In his January 27, 1958 State of the Union address, Republican President Eisenhower pointed to Sputnik and demanded Congress fund a dramatic transformation of America’s educational system:

“With this kind of all-inclusive campaign, I have no doubt that we can create the intellectual capital we need for the years ahead, invest it in the right places--and do all this, not as regimented pawns, but as free men and women!”

In less than a year Congress wrote and passed the National Defense Education Act that poured piles of money into our public schools and rolled out programs for gifted kids.

I was lucky enough to be enrolled in one of those in 1959: by the time I left elementary school I was functioning at high school and college levels in math, science, and English. I’d had two years of foreign language and two years of experimental music instruction. IQ tests were all the rage: mine was 141 and my best friend, Terry, was 142, something he never let me forget.

Most all of those programs died over the following decades as a result of Reagan’s war on public education, which began with his bringing private religious school moguls like Jerry Falwell and bigots like Bill Bennett into the White House.

Repudiating Eisenhower’s embrace of public education, Reagan put Bennett in charge of the Department of Education, which Reagan had campaigned on shutting down altogether. Bennett is probably best known for defending his proclamation that:

“If you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

Much like Bennett back in the day, the catch phrase among white supremacists and their fellow travelers today is that “Western Civilization” is either under attack or at risk because we teach history, tolerance, and critical thinking skills in our public schools, which are often racially integrated. The answer, Republicans will tell you, is to defund our public schools.

When Reagan was elected in 1980, the federal share of total education spending in America was 12 percent; when he left office in disgrace in 1989 amid “Iran/Contra” rumors he’d cut a deal with the Iranians to keep the American hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, that share had collapsed to a mere 6 percent. (It’s 3 percent today.)

Reagan also wanted to amend the Constitution to allow mandatory school prayer, and unsuccessfully proposed a national tax credit — a sort of tax-system-based national voucher system — that parents could use to send their kids to religious schools like Falwell’s.

Reagan made anti-intellectualism a political weapon, repeatedly criticizing colleges and professors throughout his political career. When asked why he’d taken a meat-axe to higher education and was pricing college out of the reach of most Americans, he said that college students were “too liberal” and America “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.”

Four days before the Kent State Massacre of May 5, 1970, Governor Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” adding, as The New York Timesnoted at the time, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”

Before Reagan became president, states paid 65 percent of the costs of colleges, and federal aid covered another 15 or so percent, leaving students to cover the remaining 20 percent with their tuition payments.

That’s how it works in many developed nations; in most northern European countries college is not only free, but the government pays students a stipend to cover books and rent.

Here in America, though, the numbers are pretty much reversed from pre-1980, with students now covering about 80 percent of the costs. Thus the need for student loans here in the USA.

Ever since Reagan’s presidency, the core of Republican positions on public education have been five-fold:

1. Let white students attend schools that are islands of white privilege where they don’t have to confront the true racial history of America,
2. Use public money to support private, for-profit, and religious schools that can accomplish this (and cycle some of that money back to Republican politicians),
3. Destroy public schools’ teachers’ unions,
4. End the teaching of science, critical thinking, evolution, and sex ed, and,
5. Bring fundamentalist Christianity into the classroom.

Earlier this year, Republican Senator Marco Rubio called America’s public school system a “cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.”

“Dangerous academic constructs like critical race theory and radical gender theory are being forced on elementary school children,” Rubio wrote for the American Conservative magazine, adding, “We need to ensure no federal funding is ever used to promote these radical ideas in schools.”

Instead, multiple Republican-controlled states are now actively gutting their public schools with statewide voucher programs, and instituting mandatory bible instruction or posting of the Ten Commandments. Book bans and panics around queer kids using bathrooms or playing sports are the new wedge issues.

There is no more powerful urge we humans can experience than to protect and defend our children. For most people it beats hunger, sex, and money. So if you’re a politician looking for an issue to motivate voters, just tell them their children are under attack. It’s cynical, but effective.

In an interview for Semafor, Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid it out:

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’ The most dangerous person in the world is [American Federation of Teachers President] Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

Just a few months ago, Donald Trump laid out his plan to deal with the “major problem” America is facing. That problem, he said, is:

“[W]e have ‘pink-haired communists teaching our kids.’”

Turning the Constitution upside down and arguing the Founders intended to protect teaching schoolchildren religion, Trump elaborated, arguing that mixing religion, politics, and education was the intention of that document:

“The Marxism being preached in our schools is also totally hostile to Judeo-Christian teachings, and in many ways it’s resembling an established new religion. We can’t let that happen. For this reason, my administration will aggressively pursue intentional violations to the establishment clause and the free exercise clause of the Constitution.”

As Jonathan Chait wrote for New York magazine:

“More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.”

George W. Bush followed the trend, bragging about his pathetic performance in college at Yale’s 2001 commencement:

“To those of you who received honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States!”

Similarly, JD Vance gave a speech in 2021 titled Universities Are The Enemy.

This isn’t the first time elected officials have used public education as a political weapon. In 1844, 25 people died and over 100 were severely injured in riots in Philadelphia over whether there should be daily Bible readings in that city’s schools. Two churches and several city blocks of homes were burned to the ground.

The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 didn’t provoke riots, but was a major event in the history of public education. Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was charged and convicted of the crime of teaching evolution. Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in passing laws making such instruction a crime that stood until the 1967 repeal of the Butler Act.

While Republicans across the country successfully rode a wave of white outrage about Critical Race Theory in November’s election, polls suggest the issue is really only meaningful to a fragment of the American electorate: an anti-science “Christian” subset of white Republican voters.

The annual PRRI American Values Surveyfound:

“Americans overwhelmingly favor teaching children history that includes both the good and bad aspects of our history so that they can learn from the past, versus refraining from teaching aspects of history that could make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about what their ancestors did in the past (92% vs. 5%).
“There are no substantial partisan differences, though Republicans favor excluding aspects of history slightly more (7%) than Democrats and Independents (both 4%). There are few differences across religious traditions or demographics. This consensus holds up across different levels of exposure to critical race theory: 92% of those who have heard a lot about critical race theory, 94% of those who have heard a little, and 93% of those who have heard nothing about it state that we should teach children the good and bad of history.”

Nonetheless, they note:

“[A] majority of Republicans (54%), compared with 27% of independents and only 7% of Democrats, believe that teachers and librarians are indoctrinating children.”

America spent $794.7 billion on primary education last year. For-profit private schools and megachurches that run schools look at that pile of money and drool. Republicans are committed to delivering as much of it to them as possible, regardless of the damage it does to our nation’s kids.

Their strategy for privatizing our public schools is pretty straightforward, and echoes the plan of action Republicans are using right now to replace real Medicare with the privatized Medicare Advantage scam.

First, they falsely claim that they’ll deliver a better product at a lower cost. In the education realm, we see this with Florida and several other Red states now offering vouchers that can be used at private or religious schools to every student in the state.

(Nearly 2,300 private schools in Florida accept vouchers, but “69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious, and nearly one-third are for-profit.”)

As more and more students use the vouchers to flee public schools, the public schools sink into deeper and deeper financial troubles. Those cut the quality of teaching and upkeep of the school buildings, causing even more students to use the vouchers.

Because the vouchers never cover the full cost of private school tuition (typically they pay for half to two-thirds), the truly poor can’t use them: the result is the public school system becomes ghettoized, leading to even more flight by middle- and upper-class (mostly white) people.

Once the public schools are dead and the state has transitioned entirely to private schools, the state will claim budget problems and begin to dial back the amounts available for vouchers. (The same will happen with Medicare Advantage once real Medicare is dead.)

This will widen the relationship between the educational and wealth divides; the racial and class cleavage will become so great that the state will have effectively gone back to a “separate but equal” educational system. Which, of course, is the GOP’s goal and has been since 1954.

Republicans are generally convinced — and surveys show they’re right — that when people have a good, well-rounded education they will vote for Democrats, who explicitly value science and egalitarian social values.

Thus, keeping our kids ignorant and destroying one of America’s largest unions, all while helping their education and religion industry friends get rich, is a complete win-win.

Much of this battle is playing out in state houses around the country, but there’s a huge and well-funded effort to take control of local school boards as well.

Driving this ethos with a constant flood of anti-intellectual, anti-science propaganda are an army of rightwing podcasters, YouTubers, hate radio hosts, and the billionaire-owned Fox “News” network (among others). They argue, essentially, that “stupid is the new smart.”

Barely coherent politicians like Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene are their heroes. Donald Trump, who still refuses to release his grades, is their avatar. Bob Kennedy is their avenging angel. And people with college educations — and teachers/professors — are their enemies.

Bottom line: the Republican war on public education and science is real, and if we want to stop it we must get involved. Show up for your local school board meetings and, if you have the time and ability, run for a position on the board.

Lobby your state legislators and support pro-science and pro-education politicians. It’s time to make smart cool again!

Our children’s and grandchildren’s futures are literally at stake.

NOW READ: Poor Trump supporters are about to get a rude awakening — but we shouldn't be celebrating

Columnist Sabrina Haake imagines the future in this satire piece.

It’s morning, New Years Day, 2030. After a night of revelry, Americans are waking up to a dancing hologram, by now familiar, floating over their beds. Trump’s three-dimensional image gyrates enthusiastically if irrhythmically to the dreaded YMCA song, tiny fists boxing the air as everyone grabs the covers. Swinging a flyswatter, throwing a shoe or spraying disinfectant at the specter does nothing; running is equally pointless as Trump’s hologram dances right along into the bathroom.

Like Chinese water torture, the music has sent more than fifty million people into therapy to date, seeking relief from an earbug and nonstop media presence that threatens their sanity. After the Village People sued for copyright infringement, JD Vance declared the song was gay anyway, and ordered all recordings interspliced with Lee Greenwood’s bible song, netting Trump Inc. $2.3b in annual royalties.

The dancing hologram has been beamed down from Starlink every morning since Trump went AWOL in 2026, the day he said at a Nuremberg-style rally that Elon Musk was foreign born and ineligible for President. Lucky for Musk America, ruling by hologram isn’t all that different from ruling by tweet.

Trump steals the Panama Canal

After Fox News declared that Trump’s 49% of the 2024 vote was a landslide, because winning by 1% equals mandate the likes of which no one has ever seen, Trump invaded a ten mile strip of the Panama canal. The move allowed Trump to indefinitely extend his presidency because, “We’re at war. If Franklin Roosevelt overstayed his welcome, so can I.”

Tearing up the Panama treaty like it was a Nancy Pelosi speech, Trump declared the increased fees for passage through the drought-stricken canal were a “complete rip-off.” Just ahead of the scheduled increase, set to cost GOP donors millions in transport fees, Trump demanded that Panama add a 50% surcharge for direct deposit to MAGA, Inc. When President José Raúl Mulino refused, Trump took the canal by imminent domain, planting a “Welcome to the United States Canal!” Space-X flag by the locks.

For fair market compensation, Trump promised Mulino that Panamanian caddies could retrieve and keep all golf balls that fall into the canal after its conversion to a water trap on his next 18 hole golf resort. It will be Panama’s most beautiful golf course, some say in the world, with waves from two different oceans gently lapping “sir, sir, sir” from both sides.

Trump continues to deduct $350 billion, the value of the golf balls, as a quarterly business expense against the resort’s $2.5 million in profit.

Goodbye, national debt!

During the second year of his second term, Trump nullified the national debt ceiling by Executive Order. After the checks cleared on his $6 trillion tax gift to wealthy donors, he nullified the nation’s debt as well.

When Trump defaulted, Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba and China’s Xi Jinpeng tried to foreclose on domestic assets like the Washington Mall, prompting Musk to beam Trump’s life-size hologram into their bedrooms, wearing his uniform red tie. Once parked at the foot of their beds, Trump stopped dancing and pointed at their stunned faces, commanding ominously, “Pull my finger.”

Fart and hilarity ensued as both men grasped at the air finger, Musk spasmodically laughing in the background. The Space Nazi then tweeted a video of the exchange to his 200 million pre-pubescent followers and promised that the Tesla fart feature unveiled in 2020 would be installed on all military tanks and aircraft of the future.

Meanwhile, with the mass-deportation kitty emptied, developers refused to build on credit. Half-built immigrant concentration camps were converted into paintball and crash-derby meccas, and Squid Game evil eyes modeled after Kash Patel’s popped up every fifth mile along the border.

Rape and debauchery: mandatory skills in Trump’s cabinet

Near the end of his second term, Trump’s reality-show cabinet used an abacus and eight ball to figure out that eliminating the federal government was actually the opposite of expanding it. Musk, Thiel, and friends are still trying to erase federal agencies (and their pesky regulations), while Johnson, Greene and SCOTUS Christo-nationalists have enabled an all-powerful Seal Team 6 because women’s monthly cycles won’t track and report themselves.

Unable to please one MAGA faction without pissing off the other, Trump suggested via tweet that Congressmen bring weapons to the capitol to resolve their differences the old fashioned way, when men were men. When AR-15s showed up on the dais, Democrats retracted their butter knives and ran for cover.

Meanwhile, Matt Gaetz raised $1.5 trillion off a House Ethics Committee report accusing him of statutory rape, prostitution and using illegal drugs, and other republicans wanted in on the action. A congressman from Kentucky went on Fox News to announce, “I’ve slept with underage girls, too you know.” “Oh yeah?,” said another on Fox and Friends, “I’ve slept with underage boys.” When a third House member from Alabama said he’d slept with his underage son in a monster truck while torturing puppies, $5 trillion poured in from the MAGA base. It remains an unshattered one-day record in political fundraising.

Trump’s hologram ended climate change

After Florida broke off like a cookie and floated down to Cuba in a massive hurricane, Trump rebranded and embraced climate change. “It’s not a hoax anymore. No. Really. That was all part of the weave.”

The Guardian then uncovered Trump, Musk and Putin’s ten year contract to accelerate the heating of the earth by insisting that donors drill, baby, drill whether they wanted to or not. Under the terms of the contract, they co-developed private, warm water shipping routes and beachfront resorts along melted glacier coasts of Canada and Greenland. After Hegseth reminded Denmark that we’d used nukes before and can easily (hiccup) do it again, Trump seized Greenland’s lithium and zirconium and the rest of its rare earth elements, prompting Musk to shave his head and run around with a pinky at the corner of his mouth.

For the remainder of January, Trump’s hologram will retreat to the warm, balmy shores of Siberia with his wife Melania, who, despite living in the US for 30 years with access to private tutors, still can’t speak fluent English. Her First Lady coffee table book, ‘Perks of dark side,’ sold 77,284,118 copies following the official ban of all competitive books including the bible; an alleged “Jewish carpenter” was either a loudmouth DEI hire or original nepo baby, depending, and the word breast hid in 27 passages. Melania is now co-authoring a children’s book with Supreme Court Justice Kim Kardashian about the First Amendment and why it’s illegal to criticize her husband, tentatively titled, “Be nice if know what best.”

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

For over a century, most states used biometrics to verify voter identity. Signatures done in front of a witness are nearly impossible to fake (unlike IDs, which can be easily faked). Polling place workers would compare the original registration signature with the signature of the person signing in to vote, and if they didn’t match, the worker would disqualify the voter.

When the Motor Voter Act was passed in 1993, not a single state required proof of citizenship to vote, and there was no national problem of voter fraud. The threat of a few years in jail is more than enough to discourage even the most ardent partisan from trying to double-vote or fraudulently vote.

If somebody wanted to travel internationally, he or she got a passport; the purpose of a driver’s license prior to 2006 was merely to make sure that incompetent people weren’t moving 3,000 pounds of steel at 60 miles per hour across the nation’s roads, and to be able to track down and hold to account people who abused the privilege.

With passage of Motor Voter in 1993, though, the “Illegals will now be registered to vote!” screech immediately came bubbling up from the throats of Republican consultants and politicians.

ALSO READ: It's New Year's Eve 2040 in the land of idiocracy

The Washington Post reflected the newspaper’s position in a 1995 editorial:

A group of Republican governors that includes California’s Pete Wilson, who has already sued to have the law overturned, objects . . . that it [the Motor Voter law] is also a ploy by Democrats to strengthen the party’s electoral chances, since many of those whom easier registration might add to the voter pool are groups inclined to vote against the GOP; and . . . that the law could facilitate voter fraud.

The editors of the Post added dryly, “As for fraud, registration at motor vehicle offices and by mail already works fine in many parts of the country, including in the District [of Columbia]. The governors ought to reconsider.”117

But the torch had been lit, and a quiet movement began within the GOP to sound the alarm, fueled by Motor Voter, that there could be millions upon millions of noncitizens who were or soon would be registered voters. And if those millions of “illegal aliens”—a perennial Republican boogeyman— were to turn out at the polls, particularly those brown people from south of the border, they’d flip the nation into the hands of the Democrats.

Bush and Cheney came into the White House shaken and widely viewed by the American electorate as having marginal legitimacy; they certainly couldn’t even claim a mandate to govern, after having lost the popular vote.

Karl Rove helped organize publicity about the “crisis” of “illegal voting” as a possible explanation for Bush’s losing the popular vote by a half-million, and Attorney General John Ashcroft launched the 2002 Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative in the Justice Department, requiring all 100 US federal prosecutors to “coordinate with local officials” to combat the scourge of illegal voting and bring to justice the millions of presumed malefactors who made the election so close.118

Over the next three years, at a cost of millions of dollars, and after examining tens of millions of voters and more than a billion votes, Ashcroft was able to document and successfully prosecute only 24 people nationwide for voting illegally—and none of them had committed in-person voter fraud of the kind that would be stopped by voter ID. (Most were people double voting, and the majority of those were wealthy white Republicans who had homes in two states and voted in person in one and mailed in a ballot to the other state; such folks got a fine, typically around $2,500. There were also a few felons who voted and didn’t know it was illegal.)

Karl Rove put on the pressure; they had to find a few people (ideally black or brown people with fake IDs) who could be made into national examples of the evils of in-person voter fraud, if they were ever to convince Americans that stronger ID laws were necessary to stop noncitizens from voting.

So the Bush White House demanded that all 100 of the nation’s federal prosecutors—all Bush appointees—move investigating voter fraud to the front of their agendas, sidelining other federal crimes. Eight of the prosecutors objected and were summarily fired.

In Washington state, prosecutor John McKay was fired because he refused to intervene in the 2004 election with fraud charges when Republican Dino Rossi lost that state’s governor’s race by a mere 129 votes. McKay told the Seattle Times that after a thorough investigation by his office, “there was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”119 That was a career ender.

In New Mexico, prosecutor David Iglesias resisted GOP pressure to create a show trial around two teenage boys who somehow got onto the voting rolls even though they were both under 18 and neither had voted. In a 2007 op-ed in the New York Times titled “Why I Was Fired,” he wrote, “What the critics, who don’t have any experience as prosecutors, have asserted is reprehensible—namely that I should have proceeded without having proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.”120

The firings were a major scandal in the Bush administration, although time has faded the public recollection of them. But the GOP was just getting started. By the end of 2004, 12 states had passed laws requiring ID to vote.

Coincidentally, a comprehensive study by the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University found that, overall, requiring ID to register to vote reduced the registered voting population in the states that did so by around 10 percent. In the 2004 election, “Hispanic voters were 10 percent less likely to vote in non-photo-identification states compared to states where voters only had to give their name.” Among African Americans, they found that the “probability of voting was 5.7 percent lower for Black respondents in states that required non-photo identification.”121 Requiring photo ID raised it into the 10 percent region.

Even the vote of Asian Americans, another group more inclined to vote Democratic than Republican, was suppressed by around 8.5 percent by the ID requirement.122

Again, none of these nonvoters were ever found to be noncitizens; it’s just that among these populations there were larger numbers of people who lived in cities where they didn’t need a driver’s license because they didn’t own a car, or were too poor to own a car, and thus lacked the picture ID required by the new state laws. Among white people, the effect was to suppress the vote of college students, the working poor, and retired people.

The story of how voter ID laws suppress minority and poor people’s votes hadn’t yet hit the news in a big way, but it was electrifying Republican politicians and consultants. And their billionaire donors.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a nationwide nonprofit that brings together Republican state legislators and lobbyists to consider mostly lobbyist-written legislation for the Republican state senators and representatives to take back home and introduce. (Democrat Mark Pocan, when he was a Wisconsin state representative, registered for an ALEC meeting in that state and attended it. He called in to my radio show as they were throwing him out of the place, once they’d figured out he wasn’t a Republican. “It was pretty bizarre,” he told me.)

Via the largely Koch-funded ALEC, the GOP distributed what ALEC refers to as “model legislation” (in fact, they’re prewritten laws that are often submitted by legislators verbatim) that would make it harder for minorities to vote, including requiring ID—and proof of citizenship—to register to vote, along with repeated requirements to show ID at the time of voting. Willing Republican state legislators added their own twists to the model legislation offered by ALEC by, for example, increasing penalties for voter fraud.

As reporter Ari Berman wrote for Rolling Stone in 2011,

In Texas, under emergency legislation passed by the GOP-dominated legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Perry, a concealed-weapon permit is considered an acceptable ID but a student ID is not. Republicans in Wisconsin, meanwhile, mandated that students can only vote if their IDs include a current address, birth date, signature and two-year expiration date—requirements that no college or university ID in the state currently meets. As a result, 242,000 students in Wisconsin may lack the documentation required to vote next year.123

State by state, Republicans were making it harder for young people, poor people, low-income working people, minorities, and retired people to vote. But the issue still hadn’t caught on nationally.

Then came Kris Kobach.

ALSO READ: Merrick Garland's last task and the explosive evidence that could save America

Columnist Sabrina Haake imagines the future in this satire piece.

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2040, in the land of Idiocracy. President Hulk Hogan, in his third term, is starting fresh negotiations with Mexico and Canada to set sea wall levels for the upcoming year. They have held this meeting every year since 2030, when monster hurricanes wiped out coastal populations and broke Florida off at Jacksonville. The rest of the state floated down to Haiti and now exports iguana, mosquitos and militant extremists back to the mainland.

The United States initiated the international seawall treaty in 2031 after former President Trump passed the ‘America Bans Science Under Republican Decree’ (acronym withheld). Trump pitched a seawall spanning the length of the Atlantic coast after the last living physicist convinced him that a partial wall in the ocean would do no good. Water is liquid, she explained to him slowly, loudly and with visual aids, it will just go around.

Panama was delighted with the seawall, as Trump had already stolen the canal in a Christmas Day rant and bankrupted it, but the Medellin drug cartels felt differently. Forced to stop testing fentanyl on homeless people after access to their US consumer base was blocked, they sued, and a Texas jury awarded them compensatory damages.

The global climate pivot

Around 2030, world leaders admitted that the Paris Treaty goals for reducing carbon emissions would never be met, causing developed nations to pivot away from climate change toward regional mitigation pacts instead.

After the US Army Corps of Engineers successfully erected the first 25-foot sea wall around Miami, political tensions started to rise. Real estate developers struggled to sell beach views that were only murals painted on steel, while obnoxious, virtue signaling NGOs fought for habitable land for the climate displaced.

Political jockeying between left and right continued for decades. President Hogan finally set aside interior swamp land for ten million climate refugees deported to Central America under Trump, provided they agreed to pick fruit and clean the houses of coastal elites for free on their return.

In 2035, the U.N. officially reneged on its commitment to compensate developing countries for climate damage they did not cause but are paying for. In 2039, Lachlan Koch, now running Fox News, bought the constantly-whining countries, sued their spokespeople for defamation, and deported them to work farms in a sealed plea agreement.

Trump’s paper bag immigration law

Pakistan, losing one-third of its land to flooding in 2022, sunk completely in 2030. Geographically unfortunate, it was bordered by Iran to the west and Afghanistan to the north, forcing Pakistani women swimming to safety to choose between the 5th Century or the 7th Century for relocation purposes.

Pakistanis were banned from the US when the architects of Project 2025 coaxed their paper-bag fever dreams into law. Today’s paper bag immigration law allows anyone with skin tone lighter than a paper bag to apply to immigrate to the US; those with darker skin must remain in their shit-hole countries. Niger, Somalia, Bangladesh, Chad, Haiti, Kenya, Malawi, and the Sudan soon followed Pakistan in becoming uninhabitable from median temperatures of 131 Fahrenheit; Republicans continued to outlaw birth control in those nations nonetheless.

After state-forced births caused populations to explode throughout Africa and the Sub-Sahara, Republican governors started marketing free factory apprenticeships to young immigrants otherwise blocked by the paper bag law. Today, African immigrants traveling solo between the ages of 5 and 12 are granted expedited entry to the US and free transportation to factory and field destinations, where they are guaranteed food, shelter, and doors-locked-from-the-outside security for the duration of their stay.

Russia, China champion climate change

Russia began stealing its next-door neighbors early in the 21st century. During Trump’s second term, NATO collapsed when Secretary of State DeSantis conditioned US membership on school prayer in all EU member states, allowing Russia to annex Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Poland, and Germany.

Climate change was a gift to Russia, motivating Putin’s pact with Trump to accelerate the earth’s warming. Putin and Trump’s calculus-that both would profit from warm water ports and resorts along newly balmy coasts- paid off. Their sun-drenched joint-ventures along the coast of Siberia now rival old world tourist destinations in Italy and France.

Today, China remains the only country in the world untouched by climate change. In the early 21st century, China amassed the world’s largest DNA database, and perfected facial recognition technologies to guarantee its ruleinto perpetuity. In 2030, Chinese authorities began implanting tracking devices into the right cheek of every newborn. The new surveillance allowed authorities to read patterns of electrical brain activity including emotional and cognitive responses, which were then electronically manipulated by Beijing. By 2035, no one in China remembered what pandas were, or that China’s 28,000 rivers used to have water in them.

Tired of all the libs crying about the right to clean air, in 2025, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. took chlorine out of the nation’s water supply and replaced it with Ketamine. “Fear,” psilocybin-enhanced Elon Musk bellowed from behind the curtain, was “a waste of energy.” On this New Year’s Eve, 2040, the US joins China’s success in eradicating all fear of climate change. No one remembers manatees, sequoias, or the Colorado River, and working women are finally home where they belong, their pink hats turned into aprons.

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Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

As we sit on the cusp of letting a year that was steeped with so many wonderful and heady possibilities go off and quietly die in some corner, I am here for a final request:

The Department of Justice, with the blessing of a president cloaked by our Supreme Court with obscene powers needs to immediately release everything it discovered during its belated investigation of the attack on the United States of America on or about January 6, 2021.

As we descend into the muck and mire of an administration headed by the revolting man who attacked us, we are owed at least that much as a nation.

And if you are scoffing, “Well, that will never happen …” Congratulations. You can add an attempted coup, and the worst attack on our Capitol in more than 200 years to the list of horrible things you have helped normalize the past eight years.

We are not a serious country if we are willing to casually sweep a violent attack on our Democracy witnessed by hundreds of millions of people around the world under the rug like this.

And before going further, I am going to admit I don’t much care how this information is released, or leaked, or served up cold on a platter, just as long as we see it. We paid for the damn thing, and have a right to see just how close we are to losing everything right now, because of the criminal incompetence of Attorney General Merrick Garland the past three-plus years, and the incomprehensible stupidity and recklessness of so many American voters just 52 short days ago.

Everybody who watched that heinous attack on our country has a right to know who and what was behind it. You don’t get to just quit, wash your hands of the whole damn thing, and go off into a comfortable retirement in the countryside made possible by taxpayer money, while the nation you roundly ignored slowly burns.

I cannot stop being angrier than hell about this, and for the life of me, can’t believe more people who profess to love this country aren’t, too.

We cannot just let this go, good people. Donald Trump is a traitor, who with help from members of his anti-American Republican Party tried to violently overthrow an election. Cops were stomped and beaten in our streets, lawmakers ran for their lives through the halls of our Capitol, a vice president was threatened with hanging, and the monster responsible for all of it, did nothing to stop it for hours.

Only when the attack seemed due to fail did Trump call off his thugs hours later — but not before telling him that he “loved them.”

Answer me this: If you still somehow think the repugnant Trump wasn't responsible for all this, then why did his thugs only retreat when he ordered them to?

And if you are still contending all this not to be true, well, then let’s just see the damn evidence that special Special Counsel Jack Smith has accrued, so we all can decide for ourselves.

To those legal scholars who have made handsome livings littering our airways the past eight years, and will lawyerly pronounce with pinkies out, that the evidence of the attack needs to be protected for future trials, or that this is not how the Justice Department comports itself, I will ask you to finally, and once and for all, slap some sense into yourselves.

We have to finally be done listening to people like you. You need to sit down, shut up, and listen to this: The real hard truth here is that we are a country where people with money enjoy their lives 30,000-feet above the law, and people without money are dragged along gravel runways toward our overflowing jails in record time.

Our legal system is a damn, corrupt mess.

The rich shop for judges, like the rest of us shop for groceries. The America-attacking Trump, and the orcs in his crooked orbit like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon have spent their lifetimes making a mockery of our “justice” system.

And if you still aren’t laughing yet, I’ll give you just two names: Bill Barr and the aforementioned Garland.

Barr faithfully served the America-attacking Trump in his first term as his attorney general, and most famously white-washed the Mueller Report that had so much dirt on the Trump-Putin Criminal Enterprise, a nuclear-powered firehose couldn’t have washed it all off.

Except as Trump’s consigliere, Barr was allowed to do just that.

Even when we finally got to see the “full report” three years later thanks to a Freedom of Information Act filing, it was so heavily redacted by Garland’s Justice Department in order to protect privacy and alleged ongoing investigations, it was almost unrecognizable.

“Alleged ongoing investigations …” Like I said, “a complete joke.”

As for Garland, well, regular readers will know my disdain for the do-nothing weakling has no limits. I admittedly operate at a simmer where my politics are concerned, but when that January 6 attack comes up, or Garland’s name appears literally anywhere, I go into full boil.

Here’s but a small portion of a piece I filed three months ago, getting into Garland’s malfeasance:

It literally took the guy well over a year to give us even the slightest hint he was at all interested in doing his job, by bringing Trump and his lieutenants to justice.
Finally, on November 18, 2022, nearly two years after the attack on America, Garland, the alleged grandmaster law-and-order expert carefully considered the board, and deftly put himself in check by pawning off his responsibility to somebody else.
There was never any damn reason for a special counsel. Trump running for office to avoid prosecution might have been the most predictable thing ever, yet Garland either somehow didn’t see it coming, or was pathetically blind to its hyper-predictable chances.
By waiting to act, Garland allowed the entire morally bankrupt Republican Party “leadership” to spin all this like some political persecution for the past three years. Many of these very same “leaders” of course came out hard against Trump in the days and weeks following the attack, figuring like we did, that Trump had gone too damn far.

Garland’s failure to act with alacrity, and bring the full weight of the law atop Trump’s fat head, will be among the most grievous things I have seen in my lifetime. He has lost all benefit of the doubt.

At best he is incompetent. At worst, he is completely corrupt. At the minimum, he owes us some damn accountability.

Right now, I have zero confidence that our justice system works on behalf of the people of this country, because when they had to step up and protect us they massively failed.

The most dangerous person in the world is about to walk into the most powerful job in the world. We are but weeks from losing it all. The son of a b---- who attacked us, is now primed to finish us off.

But before he digs in anew, we all need to know what he did four years ago in his criminal attempt to hold onto power. The families of the brave souls who were beaten to a pulp or lost their lives during the attack, are owed at least that much.

Lady Liberty is owed that much.

We need to see what Garland and his Justice Department have on the America-attacking Trump, and Joe Biden needs to use the enormous powers granted to him sadly and ironically by Trump’s Conservative United States Supreme Court, to ensure this happens.

It’s not the justice system most of us want or deserve, but it’s the only one we have, and for once, they owe us the damn truth.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Since the election, you have probably heard a lot about FAFO (“f--- around and find out”). It’s the idea that voting is a choice and voters must face the consequences of their choices. If you are, say, a poor person, you shouldn’t have voted for Donald Trump or any Republican, because in the end, they’re going to betray you. But if you did, well, f--- around and find out.

Low-income voters did indeed vote for Trump.

According to the Post, “50 percent of voters from families with an income of less than $50,000 a year cast their ballots for Trump, according to [exit polls], compared with 48 percent for Vice President Kamala Harris. Four years ago, President Joe Biden carried those voters by 11 percentage points; Hillary Clinton won them by 12 points in 2016 and former president Barack Obama by 22 points in 2012.”

They’re anxious now, the Postsaid.

Some believed his promise to put them first, but the Republicans around him keep talking about cutting spending and slashing services.

“Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – whom Trump has chosen to lead a new nongovernmental advisory panel, the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ – have said they want to trim $2 trillion from the government’s annual budget, a cut that some experts say could be accomplished only by slashing entitlement programs,” the Postsaid.

The Postcontinued: “Trump’s pick for White House budget director was a key architect of Project 2025, a plan drawn up by conservatives to guide his second term that calls for steep cuts to programs such as food stamps. And GOP leaders in Congress and Trump advisers are considering significant changes to Medicaid … and other federal aid.”

Low-income supporters want him to honor his promise.

The Post report isn’t alone. Since the election, I have seen many stories about Trump voters who are now concerned about what Trump is going to do – sick people who fear the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare); Latinos who fear their families being deported; and now poor people who survive on food stamps but fear them being cut.

These stories never fail to get the attention of the FAFO crowd, which is to say, of liberals and Democrats who are still smarting from defeat.

They take some comfort in the idea that Trump voters will feel the consequences of their actions. The more literate among them might even cite HL Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

But the FAFO crowd is giving Donald Trump too much credit.

They assume that the Trump administration’s policies and programs will affect everyone equally. They do not assume, as they should, that Trump will reward his friends and punish his enemies. If he ends up in the process looking like a hypocrite, or committing a crime, so be it.

The incoming administration is going to be fantastically corrupt. It’s going to take a large, serious and sustained counteroffensive to fight against it. But we might end up underestimating the enormity of the project by continuing to focus on FAFO, as if Trump would not spare supporters from facing consequences if doing so suited his interests.

He will try if it does.

Even if that means breaking the law.

Take immigration. Trump vowed to deport millions of “illegal” workers. If successful, he’d decimate the labor supply and hurt the big farming states like Nebraska and Kansas that cannot function without “illegal” workers to pick their crops. Knowing that they voted for him anyway, by huge margins, the FAFO crowd is expecting them to find out.

They probably won’t. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will almost certainly focus on “illegal” immigrants in states like New York and California, especially in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, because they voted against Trump. Meanwhile, “illegal” immigrants in Nebraska and Kansas will be overlooked, because it’s convenient to.

Take tariffs, too. Trump vowed to impose across-the-board levies on imported goods from China and elsewhere. The impact could, in effect, be as much as a 20 percent sales tax on everything from sneakers to video games. Knowing that poor people voted for Trump, because prices are too high, the FAFO crowd is expecting them to find out.

Again, they probably won’t. First, Trump’s tariffs will be unequal. They will depend on who’s willing to bribe him and for how much. Those who won’t or can’t will face a levy. Those who can and will won’t.

And if tariffs make things more expensive for Trump voters, and they will, because they’re inflationary, there’s nothing saying Trump can’t “offer” them a “tax rebate” to offset the increase. That such a thing would be illegal and unconstitutional and impossible to implement is beside the point. The point is that Trump will be fantastically corrupt.

Same thing with entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the rest. The FAFO crowd is expecting Trump supporters to suffer the consequences of their choices. If they didn’t want cuts to food stamps, for instance, they shouldn’t have voted for a Republican.

But they do want cuts, not for them but those who don’t “deserve” them, which is to say, people who are not like them. This is clear when you read the Post report carefully, especially quotes from the “longtime Democrat” who “struggled over whether to vote for Trump.” She “kept coming back to the conclusion that Trump would put Americans like her first and improve her economic prospects” (my italics).

“We helped get you in office; please take care of us,” she told the Post.

“Please don’t cut the things that help the most vulnerable.”

You’re not vulnerable if you’re not one of them.

Trump won’t help, because he never put you first.

The New Republic recently blasted an ex-GOP candidate and co-leader of that “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) outfit with the headline “Vivek Ramaswamy Dragged After Wild Rant On How American Workers Suck,” by Malcolm Ferguson. Ramaswamy is getting crushed by liberals and conservatives alike for his caustic comments.

While I think some of what Ramaswamy tweeted is right, I disagree with the notion that American workers suck. What Vivek needs to realize is that America is a little more pro-nerd than he thinks, and that some of our nerds do some of what he says we need less of.

This started when Ramaswamy took to Twitter to explain why he thinks tech companies prefer foreign-born workers over Americans. BTW, Elon Musk says we need more immigrant workers.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from ]Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote in a lengthy post on X,” as reported by Ferguson, as well as plenty of other outlets.

“More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of ‘Friends.’ More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’…..A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence,” he notes in Ferguson’s story (wonder what he means by alternative hiring practices).

Here’s where I agree with Ramaswamy. We should value math Olympiad champs, valedictorians, math tutoring, weekend science competition books, creating, extracurriculars, achievement, excellence, nerdiness, and hard work. We could also be a little more pro-teacher.

Here’s where I think Vivek could do better. We do value nerd culture. And it also doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value prom queens, jocks, cartoons, TV, and being chill sometimes.

In our political science program, we have Homecoming Queens and Kings, as well as jocks (male and female), who love crunching numbers. They work statistics into papers even when you don’t require it. One softball player got her engineering degree and then double-majored in political science. Our college gave the biggest science nerd I’ve ever taught in political science a top alumni award. She is currently in Antarctica installing a comm link, while working on her Ph.D. in aeronautical engineering. We have football-playing Ph.Ds in political science and math, as well as basketball players with public health degrees, with all races and genders included among them. These aren’t exceptions among those I teach. These are my students!

Ramaswamy’s pop culture examples seem to be frozen in the amber of the era of Jurassic Park (which came out in 1993). Even non-science nerds today are totally into “Big Bang Theory,” “Young Sheldon,” “Star Trek,” “Oppenheimer,” “Mythbusters,” “Doctor Who,” and their reruns. They know who Neil DeGrasse Tyson and “Bill Nye The Science Guy” are. Science is cool in the USA, and it’s been that way going back to the days of Benjamin Franklin.

As my mum always says, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Vivek could mend fences with the MAGA folks as well as liberals. He should realize that while he’s right that we can always use more nerds, some American nerds can do the cool kid things too. The U.S. shows more love to the wonderful science geeks than he realizes, especially when we respect the hard work our teachers do to make our students great. If he and other political elites who lecture Americans on education and parenting want more nerds, they need to learn that in the USA, you don’t have to force a kid to choose to be a nerd or be a non-nerd! Our students can do both.

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John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at [email protected]. His “X” account is JohnTures2.