All,
Since my last posting on this site on March 12, 2026 I have deliberately paused and waited during these past two and a half weeks before making yet another critical assessment of the latest blizzard of far rightwing propaganda, ideological hubris, institutional cowardice, systemic chaos, vicious bigotry, and deadly ignorance that has clearly overtaken both the national state apparatus of the federal government and the larger civil society within the United States as well. The military assault on Iran so far illegally, unconstitutionally, and unilaterally ordered by the despotic and truly unhinged President of the flailing American Empire is only the latest evidence among many other bizarre actions and reactions by the GOP and MAGA as well as the Fascist Cult Leader in the White House that we remain in mortal and existential danger as long as this heinous regime remains even remotely intact and in control for at least the next extremely dangerous 19 months (!) leading into November, 2028. Stay tuned and stay vigilant because as horrendous as it’s been over the last decade we should know by now that we haven’t seen anything yet...
Kofi
'Iran and Gaza Are ONLY THE BEGINNING' (Chris Hedges at Princeton)
Since my last posting on this site on March 12, 2026 I have deliberately paused and waited during these past two and a half weeks before making yet another critical assessment of the latest blizzard of far rightwing propaganda, ideological hubris, institutional cowardice, systemic chaos, vicious bigotry, and deadly ignorance that has clearly overtaken both the national state apparatus of the federal government and the larger civil society within the United States as well. The military assault on Iran so far illegally, unconstitutionally, and unilaterally ordered by the despotic and truly unhinged President of the flailing American Empire is only the latest evidence among many other bizarre actions and reactions by the GOP and MAGA as well as the Fascist Cult Leader in the White House that we remain in mortal and existential danger as long as this heinous regime remains even remotely intact and in control for at least the next extremely dangerous 19 months (!) leading into November, 2028. Stay tuned and stay vigilant because as horrendous as it’s been over the last decade we should know by now that we haven’t seen anything yet...
Kofi
'Iran and Gaza Are ONLY THE BEGINNING' (Chris Hedges at Princeton)
Support my independent journalism at Substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/
Follow The Chris Hedges Report on social media: https://linktr.ee/chrishedges
Chris Hedges Q&A at Princeton University: Iran, Gaza and the Future of American Foreign Policy
Chris Hedges speaks to students at Princeton University.
Support my independent journalism at Substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/
Follow The Chris Hedges Report on social media: https://linktr.ee/chrishedges
The REAL history of Iran and their relationship to the West (i.e. the U.S. and U.K.) since 1953...PASS THE WORD:
https://youtube.com/shorts/eQ54eG4DjX0?si=9uLD-U8NgHM8bcvd
Support my independent journalism at Substack: https://chrishedges.substack.com/
Follow The Chris Hedges Report on social media: https://linktr.ee/chrishedges
The REAL history of Iran and their relationship to the West (i.e. the U.S. and U.K.) since 1953...PASS THE WORD:
https://youtube.com/shorts/eQ54eG4DjX0?si=9uLD-U8NgHM8bcvd
The BBC, the American Federal Government and the oppressive power of censorship...PASS THE WORD:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZHhbbyiVmBc?si=zwggyDpJ_xVF2Q6k
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZHhbbyiVmBc?si=zwggyDpJ_xVF2Q6k
“What’s Past is Prologue…"
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
--Malcolm X (1925-1965)
All,
All of human history teaches us definitively that where there is the structural, institutional, and systemic denial or sustained erosion of freedom, justice, equality, and self determination for everyone there can ultimately be no peace, justice, freedom and democracy for anyone. Authoritarians, demagogues, propagandists, and bullies masquerading as genuine "leaders and statesmen" can only lead to an ominous path of self destruction and the visceral oppression, exploitation, and mindless erasure of Others. No empire or individual nation state can or will escape the inevitable boundaries, lessons, delusions, and restraints of history and the United States and Israel --like all others who tried to do so in the past--are absolutely no exceptions. Stay tuned because we are about to witness and experience a cataclysmic affirmation and stark reality of that fundamental fact...
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/…/benjamin-netanyahu-israel-electio…
News Analysis
It’s Netanyahu’s Israel Now
by David M. Halbfinger
April 10, 2019
New York Times
VIDEO: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is caught up in a corruption scandal that had threatened his bid for reelection. But he survived the challenge and is now in a position to win a fourth consecutive term. We talked to voters to understand why they continued to support him. Credit: Dan Balilty for The New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem in October. Credit: Nathan Howard for The New York Times
JERUSALEM — Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent re-election as prime minister of Israel attests to a starkly conservative vision of the Jewish state and its people about where they are and where they are headed.
They prize stability, as well as the military and economic security that Mr. Netanyahu has delivered.
Though in many ways they have never been safer, they remain afraid — especially of Iran and its influence over their neighbors, against which Mr. Netanyahu has relentlessly crusaded. They are persuaded by his portrayal of those who challenge him, whether Arab citizens or the left, as enemies of the state. They take his resemblance to authoritarian leaders around the world as evidence that he was ahead of the curve.
They credit Mr. Netanyahu, whose strategic vision values power and fortitude above all, with piloting Israel to unprecedented diplomatic heights and believe still more is possible. And they are loath to let anyone less experienced take the controls.
“Let’s be honest with ourselves,” said Michael B. Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “Our economy is excellent, our foreign relations were never better, and we’re secure. We’ve got a guy in politics for 40 years: We know him, the world knows him — even our enemies know him.”
Now, with a new term and an expanded Likud party, he has the chance to form an even larger right-wing coalition of secular, ultra-Orthodox and even some extremist lawmakers — or, if he chooses, to try to forge a national unity government that brings in centrists.
PHOTO: Construction in the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit last year. Mr. Netanyahu said during the campaign that he would begin applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of the occupied West Bank.CreditMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
PHOTO: Construction in the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit last year. Mr. Netanyahu said during the campaign that he would begin applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of the occupied West Bank.CreditMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Whatever he decides, though, Mr. Netanyahu has been afforded the opportunity to lead Israel through a serious turning point in its history as both a Jewish and a democratic state, if his legal troubles do not topple him first.
An election that was all about personality and character — whether Mr. Netanyahu’s likely indictment on corruption charges made him unfit to continue in the job, or whether his main challenger, the former army chief Benny Gantz, was up to it — left little room for issues of policy.
Through it all, Mr. Netanyahu proved once again that his talents, stamina and willingness to do what it takes to win are all unmatched in Israeli politics.
But serious concerns for Israel that were essentially set aside in the campaign are fast approaching. As he surpasses David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, as its longest-serving prime minister this summer, Mr. Netanyahu will be unable to ignore any of them for long.
Peace with the Palestinians remains as unlikely as ever, despite the possible wild card of a long-awaited proposal from the Trump administration. Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing allies, to whom he may be even more beholden under his next coalition, are champing at the bit to pursue annexation of the occupied West Bank.
In desperation to rally the pro-settler base, Mr. Netanyahu said publicly three days before the election that he would begin applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank that the Palestinians demand for their future state. Opponents believe this would set off a new Palestinian uprising, bring to fruition the apartheid regime the Israeli left has long warned against, or both.
PHOTO: Mr. Netanyahu with President Trump and other officials in March, as the United States recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
PHOTO: Mr. Netanyahu with President Trump and other officials in March, as the United States recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
Even without annexation in the mix, Mr. Netanyahu’s settler- and ultra-Orthodox-dominated government, and his effusive embrace of President Trump, have rapidly alienated Israel from predominantly liberal and less-observant American Jews, the largest diaspora community and a pillar of Israel’s security since its founding.
Israel is becoming a partisan issue in the United States like never before, already forcing those seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 — including Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke — to distinguish their support for Israel from their disapproval of Mr. Netanyahu’s policies.
Finally, though it has received little notice outside Israel, a power struggle between the judiciary — one of the country’s last redoubts of assertive liberalism — and ascendant ethnonationalists has been building toward a showdown that could sharply alter the nature of Israeli democracy.
While conservatives have been working to curtail the Supreme Court’s power through legislation, the court itself has been laying the groundwork to assert judicial review over even the so-called basic laws that Parliament considers the building blocks of an eventual constitution, which Israel now lacks.
“Imagine the American Supreme Court judging the constitutionality of part of the Constitution itself,” said Gadi Taub, a historian and Hebrew University professor who opposes settlements and annexation but supports a rollback of judicial authority.
Mr. Netanyahu has not led the effort to rein in the Supreme Court, but he has railed against the legal system as a whole, over the long-running police corruption investigations that have led to his expected indictment on bribery and fraud charges.
Campaign posters in Rheovot, Israel. Mr. Netanyahu is on track to surpass David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, as its longest-serving prime minister.CreditDan Balilty for The New York Times
PHOTO: Campaign posters in Rheovot, Israel. Mr. Netanyahu is on track to surpass David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, as its longest-serving prime minister.CreditDan Balilty for The New York Times
That campaign, too, is expected to present a challenge for Israel’s democratic system: Mr. Netanyahu is now almost certain to try to extract a deal from his coalition partners to pass a law retroactively granting him immunity from prosecution.
Israelis have grown accustomed to Mr. Netanyahu’s bullish PowerPoint assessments of the country’s condition: 10 years of uninterrupted economic growth, its best-ever credit rating, and diplomatic openings and new trading partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America. During the campaign, they also got used to clips showing Mr. Trump granting recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, both coveted national goals.
Dorit Rabinyan, an author who calls herself left-wing, said Israelis feared Mr. Netanyahu’s exit as if they would be “orphaned.” And she confessed to having a tinge of the same feeling herself. “I’m anxious about it at the very same time that I’m hopeful about it,” she said.
Critics point to a yawning income gap between those prospering in Israel’s high-tech industry and those in the middle class or living outside the major cities. A housing crunch, overcrowded hospitals, clogged highways and a crushing cost of living are keeping many young adults in their parents’ homes and driving others to emigrate.
That gave Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents on the left and even the center-right ample ammunition.
“He’s provided short-term profits at a very high long-term price,” said Ari Shavit, a Jerusalem-born journalist who has followed Mr. Netanyahu throughout his career. “Netanyahu’s Israel is mortgaged. And we are going to pay dearly.”
Mr. Shavit said the same could be said for Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to use Israel’s position of strength and strategic comfort — “this golden moment” — to take on its single most existential issue, the Palestinian conflict; and for his exploitation of Mr. Trump’s largess at the cost of “endangering the relationship with Democratic America, younger America and the next administration in Washington.”
Palestinian protesters facing Israeli troops in the West Bank. Analysts believe the extension of Israeli sovereignty could touch off a Palestinian uprising.CreditAbbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
PHOTO: Palestinian protesters facing Israeli troops in the West Bank. Analysts believe the extension of Israeli sovereignty could touch off a Palestinian uprising.CreditAbbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Taub said he expected Mr. Netanyahu to continue his decade-long practice of slow-walking settlement expansion, as the right complains, and sabotaging peace talks, as the left complains.
“Gantz, with his high talk of values, optimism, change, sounded like Obama in 2008,” Mr. Taub said. “But no one in Israel thinks there’s really an option to annex the West Bank or make peace. So it will be the triumph of the status quo.”
But Mr. Oren said he believed that a Trump peace plan was forthcoming, and that Mr. Netanyahu was best suited to reach a deal, at last, no matter how much his coalition partners fought it.
“It’s the old adage: The left makes war, the right makes peace,” Mr. Oren said. “Netanyahu will be extremely loath to say no to Trump, which could prove to be the success of that program.”
On the West Bank, however, few share that view.
Ghassan Khatib, a professor at Bir Zeit University and former spokesman for the Palestinian government, said Mr. Netanyahu’s long tenure had already left behind two devastating casualties: any hope for a two-state solution and any support for moderate Palestinian leadership, whose investment in a diplomatic solution to the conflict Mr. Netanyahu has discredited.
Mr. Khatib said that Mr. Netanyahu, by politically empowering the extreme right wing in recent years, had contributed to a radicalization that has made Israelis averse to peacemaking. “The Israel that we talk about now is not the Israel we negotiated with 25 years ago,” he said. “I think that Netanyahu’s taking us into some kind of apartheid reality.”
Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017. Mr. Netanyahu’s government, and his effusive embrace of President Trump, have alienated many American Jews, the most important force in the diaspora.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times
PHOTO: Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017. Mr. Netanyahu’s government, and his effusive embrace of President Trump, have alienated many American Jews, the most important force in the diaspora.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times
It is precisely because Mr. Netanyahu has been so successful that some on the left argue that his leadership is undermining Israel’s seemingly irrepressible democracy.
Anshel Pfeffer, the author of “Bibi,” a critical biography of Mr. Netanyahu, said he believed that by campaigning as the “indispensable man,” Mr. Netanyahu had “created a narrative where it’s illegitimate or irresponsible to replace him.”
“There’s a certain justification for that,” Mr. Pfeffer said.
“The left wing always said, ‘Here’s the deal: If you don’t solve your issues with the Palestinians and end the occupation, and resolve your outstanding issues with Arab countries, you won’t realize your incredible potential,’ ” he said. “You’ll have a spartan lifestyle, you’ll have to go to war all the time, and the world may isolate you — the diplomatic tsunami. And it’s inarguable that in the last 10 years, Netanyahu has broken this paradigm.”
Yet, at the same time, Mr. Netanyahu has fueled and directed the right wing’s animosity at predominantly liberal institutions like the courts, the police, higher education and the news media. To the left, Israeli democracy is on the defensive. To the ethnonationalist right, which succeeded last year in enshrining Israel’s self-definition as the nation-state of the Jews in a basic law, it is in need of an adjustment.
“Somebody told me that Israel went really far on the democracy side, and now we have to rebalance it,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a liberal pollster and writer. “They see it as a corrective, that Israel has too healthy a democracy.”
Some, including Mr. Gantz, have warned that Mr. Netanyahu was headed down a path toward a regime like that of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Mr. Pfeffer said Israel was not there yet.
“Those other countries don’t have the institutions that can indict the prime minister,” he said. “It hasn’t happened here; the media and judiciary are still strong. But once you erode democracy, you make it much easier for the incumbent to win.”
Related Coverage:
Israeli Law Declares the Country the ‘Nation-State of the Jewish People’
July 19, 2018
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Israeli Law Declares the Country the ‘Nation-State of the Jewish People’
Netanyahu-Trump Partnership Is Stronger Than Ever. Are These Its Final Days?
March 10, 2019
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Netanyahu-Trump Partnership Is Stronger Than Ever. Are These Its Final Days?
As Netanyahu Seeks Re-election, the Future of the West Bank Is Now on the Ballot
April 7, 2019
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As Netanyahu Seeks Re-election, the Future of the West Bank Is Now on the Ballot
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Jerusalem in October. Credit: Nathan Howard for The New York Times
JERUSALEM — Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent re-election as prime minister of Israel attests to a starkly conservative vision of the Jewish state and its people about where they are and where they are headed.
They prize stability, as well as the military and economic security that Mr. Netanyahu has delivered.
Though in many ways they have never been safer, they remain afraid — especially of Iran and its influence over their neighbors, against which Mr. Netanyahu has relentlessly crusaded. They are persuaded by his portrayal of those who challenge him, whether Arab citizens or the left, as enemies of the state. They take his resemblance to authoritarian leaders around the world as evidence that he was ahead of the curve.
They credit Mr. Netanyahu, whose strategic vision values power and fortitude above all, with piloting Israel to unprecedented diplomatic heights and believe still more is possible. And they are loath to let anyone less experienced take the controls.
“Let’s be honest with ourselves,” said Michael B. Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington. “Our economy is excellent, our foreign relations were never better, and we’re secure. We’ve got a guy in politics for 40 years: We know him, the world knows him — even our enemies know him.”
Now, with a new term and an expanded Likud party, he has the chance to form an even larger right-wing coalition of secular, ultra-Orthodox and even some extremist lawmakers — or, if he chooses, to try to forge a national unity government that brings in centrists.
PHOTO: Construction in the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit last year. Mr. Netanyahu said during the campaign that he would begin applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of the occupied West Bank.CreditMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
PHOTO: Construction in the Israeli settlement of Beitar Illit last year. Mr. Netanyahu said during the campaign that he would begin applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of the occupied West Bank.CreditMenahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Whatever he decides, though, Mr. Netanyahu has been afforded the opportunity to lead Israel through a serious turning point in its history as both a Jewish and a democratic state, if his legal troubles do not topple him first.
An election that was all about personality and character — whether Mr. Netanyahu’s likely indictment on corruption charges made him unfit to continue in the job, or whether his main challenger, the former army chief Benny Gantz, was up to it — left little room for issues of policy.
Through it all, Mr. Netanyahu proved once again that his talents, stamina and willingness to do what it takes to win are all unmatched in Israeli politics.
But serious concerns for Israel that were essentially set aside in the campaign are fast approaching. As he surpasses David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, as its longest-serving prime minister this summer, Mr. Netanyahu will be unable to ignore any of them for long.
Peace with the Palestinians remains as unlikely as ever, despite the possible wild card of a long-awaited proposal from the Trump administration. Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing allies, to whom he may be even more beholden under his next coalition, are champing at the bit to pursue annexation of the occupied West Bank.
In desperation to rally the pro-settler base, Mr. Netanyahu said publicly three days before the election that he would begin applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of the West Bank that the Palestinians demand for their future state. Opponents believe this would set off a new Palestinian uprising, bring to fruition the apartheid regime the Israeli left has long warned against, or both.
PHOTO: Mr. Netanyahu with President Trump and other officials in March, as the United States recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
PHOTO: Mr. Netanyahu with President Trump and other officials in March, as the United States recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
Even without annexation in the mix, Mr. Netanyahu’s settler- and ultra-Orthodox-dominated government, and his effusive embrace of President Trump, have rapidly alienated Israel from predominantly liberal and less-observant American Jews, the largest diaspora community and a pillar of Israel’s security since its founding.
Israel is becoming a partisan issue in the United States like never before, already forcing those seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 — including Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke — to distinguish their support for Israel from their disapproval of Mr. Netanyahu’s policies.
Finally, though it has received little notice outside Israel, a power struggle between the judiciary — one of the country’s last redoubts of assertive liberalism — and ascendant ethnonationalists has been building toward a showdown that could sharply alter the nature of Israeli democracy.
While conservatives have been working to curtail the Supreme Court’s power through legislation, the court itself has been laying the groundwork to assert judicial review over even the so-called basic laws that Parliament considers the building blocks of an eventual constitution, which Israel now lacks.
“Imagine the American Supreme Court judging the constitutionality of part of the Constitution itself,” said Gadi Taub, a historian and Hebrew University professor who opposes settlements and annexation but supports a rollback of judicial authority.
Mr. Netanyahu has not led the effort to rein in the Supreme Court, but he has railed against the legal system as a whole, over the long-running police corruption investigations that have led to his expected indictment on bribery and fraud charges.
Campaign posters in Rheovot, Israel. Mr. Netanyahu is on track to surpass David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, as its longest-serving prime minister.CreditDan Balilty for The New York Times
PHOTO: Campaign posters in Rheovot, Israel. Mr. Netanyahu is on track to surpass David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, as its longest-serving prime minister.CreditDan Balilty for The New York Times
That campaign, too, is expected to present a challenge for Israel’s democratic system: Mr. Netanyahu is now almost certain to try to extract a deal from his coalition partners to pass a law retroactively granting him immunity from prosecution.
Israelis have grown accustomed to Mr. Netanyahu’s bullish PowerPoint assessments of the country’s condition: 10 years of uninterrupted economic growth, its best-ever credit rating, and diplomatic openings and new trading partners in Africa, Asia and Latin America. During the campaign, they also got used to clips showing Mr. Trump granting recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, both coveted national goals.
Dorit Rabinyan, an author who calls herself left-wing, said Israelis feared Mr. Netanyahu’s exit as if they would be “orphaned.” And she confessed to having a tinge of the same feeling herself. “I’m anxious about it at the very same time that I’m hopeful about it,” she said.
Critics point to a yawning income gap between those prospering in Israel’s high-tech industry and those in the middle class or living outside the major cities. A housing crunch, overcrowded hospitals, clogged highways and a crushing cost of living are keeping many young adults in their parents’ homes and driving others to emigrate.
That gave Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents on the left and even the center-right ample ammunition.
“He’s provided short-term profits at a very high long-term price,” said Ari Shavit, a Jerusalem-born journalist who has followed Mr. Netanyahu throughout his career. “Netanyahu’s Israel is mortgaged. And we are going to pay dearly.”
Mr. Shavit said the same could be said for Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to use Israel’s position of strength and strategic comfort — “this golden moment” — to take on its single most existential issue, the Palestinian conflict; and for his exploitation of Mr. Trump’s largess at the cost of “endangering the relationship with Democratic America, younger America and the next administration in Washington.”
Palestinian protesters facing Israeli troops in the West Bank. Analysts believe the extension of Israeli sovereignty could touch off a Palestinian uprising.CreditAbbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
PHOTO: Palestinian protesters facing Israeli troops in the West Bank. Analysts believe the extension of Israeli sovereignty could touch off a Palestinian uprising.CreditAbbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Taub said he expected Mr. Netanyahu to continue his decade-long practice of slow-walking settlement expansion, as the right complains, and sabotaging peace talks, as the left complains.
“Gantz, with his high talk of values, optimism, change, sounded like Obama in 2008,” Mr. Taub said. “But no one in Israel thinks there’s really an option to annex the West Bank or make peace. So it will be the triumph of the status quo.”
But Mr. Oren said he believed that a Trump peace plan was forthcoming, and that Mr. Netanyahu was best suited to reach a deal, at last, no matter how much his coalition partners fought it.
“It’s the old adage: The left makes war, the right makes peace,” Mr. Oren said. “Netanyahu will be extremely loath to say no to Trump, which could prove to be the success of that program.”
On the West Bank, however, few share that view.
Ghassan Khatib, a professor at Bir Zeit University and former spokesman for the Palestinian government, said Mr. Netanyahu’s long tenure had already left behind two devastating casualties: any hope for a two-state solution and any support for moderate Palestinian leadership, whose investment in a diplomatic solution to the conflict Mr. Netanyahu has discredited.
Mr. Khatib said that Mr. Netanyahu, by politically empowering the extreme right wing in recent years, had contributed to a radicalization that has made Israelis averse to peacemaking. “The Israel that we talk about now is not the Israel we negotiated with 25 years ago,” he said. “I think that Netanyahu’s taking us into some kind of apartheid reality.”
Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017. Mr. Netanyahu’s government, and his effusive embrace of President Trump, have alienated many American Jews, the most important force in the diaspora.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times
PHOTO: Jerusalem’s Old City in 2017. Mr. Netanyahu’s government, and his effusive embrace of President Trump, have alienated many American Jews, the most important force in the diaspora.CreditUriel Sinai for The New York Times
It is precisely because Mr. Netanyahu has been so successful that some on the left argue that his leadership is undermining Israel’s seemingly irrepressible democracy.
Anshel Pfeffer, the author of “Bibi,” a critical biography of Mr. Netanyahu, said he believed that by campaigning as the “indispensable man,” Mr. Netanyahu had “created a narrative where it’s illegitimate or irresponsible to replace him.”
“There’s a certain justification for that,” Mr. Pfeffer said.
“The left wing always said, ‘Here’s the deal: If you don’t solve your issues with the Palestinians and end the occupation, and resolve your outstanding issues with Arab countries, you won’t realize your incredible potential,’ ” he said. “You’ll have a spartan lifestyle, you’ll have to go to war all the time, and the world may isolate you — the diplomatic tsunami. And it’s inarguable that in the last 10 years, Netanyahu has broken this paradigm.”
Yet, at the same time, Mr. Netanyahu has fueled and directed the right wing’s animosity at predominantly liberal institutions like the courts, the police, higher education and the news media. To the left, Israeli democracy is on the defensive. To the ethnonationalist right, which succeeded last year in enshrining Israel’s self-definition as the nation-state of the Jews in a basic law, it is in need of an adjustment.
“Somebody told me that Israel went really far on the democracy side, and now we have to rebalance it,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a liberal pollster and writer. “They see it as a corrective, that Israel has too healthy a democracy.”
Some, including Mr. Gantz, have warned that Mr. Netanyahu was headed down a path toward a regime like that of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Mr. Pfeffer said Israel was not there yet.
“Those other countries don’t have the institutions that can indict the prime minister,” he said. “It hasn’t happened here; the media and judiciary are still strong. But once you erode democracy, you make it much easier for the incumbent to win.”
Related Coverage:
Israeli Law Declares the Country the ‘Nation-State of the Jewish People’
July 19, 2018
Image
Israeli Law Declares the Country the ‘Nation-State of the Jewish People’
Netanyahu-Trump Partnership Is Stronger Than Ever. Are These Its Final Days?
March 10, 2019
Image
Netanyahu-Trump Partnership Is Stronger Than Ever. Are These Its Final Days?
As Netanyahu Seeks Re-election, the Future of the West Bank Is Now on the Ballot
April 7, 2019
Image
As Netanyahu Seeks Re-election, the Future of the West Bank Is Now on the Ballot
All,
This is Dr. Heather Cox Richardson: Renowned American historian, scholar, critic, author, media producer, and broadcaster (via her extremely popular national podcast and substack column) on the horrific dimensions of American fascism today and why a massive political, social, economic, and moral reckoning is headed our way very soon as a direct result of the lawless and deadly Trump/MAGA regime and what we must do to actively engage, oppose, and defeat this 21st century fascist menace in every single area and sector of U.S. life, culture, and social reality. Please listen carefully and as usual PASS THE WORD…If you don’t already think, feel and know that that our very lives are at stake as a nation you will very soon find out directly and forcefully what this deeply malevolent force called fascism actually is and means...Stay tuned…This is a REALITY CHECK...U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran, Preliminary Inquiry Says
Outdated targeting data may have resulted in a mistaken missile strike, according to the ongoing military investigation, which undercuts President Trump’s assertion that Iran could be to blame.
Listen · 9:04 minutes
VIDEO:
VIDEO:
A video verified by The New York Times captures the screams of onlookers as people searched for survivors in the smoldering remains of Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, on Feb. 28 after a missile strike. Credit: IRIB TV, via Agence France-Presse
by Julian E. Barnes Eric Schmitt Tyler Pager Malachy Browne and Helene Cooper
The reporters have been covering the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
March 11, 2026
New York Times
An ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.
The Feb. 28 strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school building was the result of a targeting mistake by the U.S. military, which was conducting strikes on an adjacent Iranian base of which the school building was formerly a part, the preliminary investigation found. Officers at U.S. Central Command created the target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, people briefed on the investigation said.
Officials emphasized that the findings are preliminary and that there are important unanswered questions about why the outdated information had not been double checked.
Striking a school full of children is sure to be recorded as one of the most devastating single military errors in recent decades. Iranian officials have said the death toll was at least 175 people, most of them children.
While the overall finding was largely expected — the United States is the only country involved in the conflict that uses Tomahawk missiles — it has already cast a shadow on the U.S. military operation in Iran.
President Trump’s attempts to sidestep the blame for the strike have also already complicated the inquiry, leaving officials who have reviewed the findings showing U.S. culpability expressing unease. The people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitive nature of the ongoing investigation and Mr. Trump’s assertion at one point that Iran, not the United States, was responsible.
“As The New York Times acknowledges in its own reporting, the investigation is still ongoing,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.
People briefed on the investigation said many questions were yet to be answered around why outdated information was used and who failed to verify the data.
Still, the error has not surprised current and former officials.
PHOTO: Excavators and workmen dug nearly 100 graves at a cemetery in Minab before the funeral for children and teachers killed in an airstrike on a school on Feb. 28. Credit: Iran's Foreign Media Department, via Associated Press
The school, in the town of Minab, is on the same block as buildings used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy, a top target of the U.S. military strikes. The site of the school was originally part of the base. Officials briefed on the inquiry said the building was not always used as a school, though it is not clear precisely when the school opened on the site.
A visual investigation by The Times showed the building housing the school had been fenced off from the military base between 2013 and 2016.
Satellite imagery reviewed by The Times showed that watchtowers that once stood near the building had been removed, three public entrances were opened to the school, ground was cleared and play areas including a sports field were painted on asphalt, and walls were painted blue and pink.
The “target coding” provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military intelligence agency that helps develops targets, labeled the school building as a military target when it was passed to Central Command, the military headquarters overseeing the war, according to people briefed on the preliminary findings of the investigation.
Investigators do not yet fully understand how the outdated data was sent to Central Command or whether the Defense Intelligence Agency had updated information.
Military targeting is very complex and involves multiple agencies. Many officers would have been responsible for verifying that the data is correct, and officers at Central Command are responsible for checking the information they receive from the Defense Intelligence Agency or another intelligence agency. But in a fast-moving situation, like the opening days of a war, information is sometimes not verified.
In addition to the Defense Intelligence Agency and Central Command, investigators are examining the work of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, known as the N.G.A., which provides and examines satellite imagery of potential targets.
U.S. officials and others emphasized that the investigation was ongoing and there was more to learn, according to people briefed on the inquiry. Officials from Central Command declined to comment. Officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency referred questions to the Pentagon, which declined to comment, saying the incident was under investigation. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have dozens, even hundreds, of analysts at combatant commands who work with military operational planners and intelligence offices to develop targets.
When the Defense Intelligence Agency’s targeting data is older, intelligence officers are expected to use imagery or data from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to update and verify the target.
While Mr. Trump has made targeting Iran’s navy a top priority of the war to prevent it from interfering with global commerce in the region, historically it is not been a top priority of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has focused more on Iran’s missiles and other priorities like China and North Korea.
Officials conducting the investigation have examined whether any artificial intelligence models, data crunching programs or other technical intelligence gathering means were to blame for the mistaken targeting of the school, according to U.S. officials.
While Claude, the large language model created by Anthropic, does not directly create targets, it works with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System and other software to identify points of interest for military intelligence officers.
But officials said the error was unlikely to have been the result of new technology. Instead, they said, it likely reflected a common — but sometimes devastating — human error in wartime.
The top line finding of the internal military investigation mirrors a growing body of public evidence that clearly suggests U.S. responsibility.
Satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos assembled by The Times visual investigation team indicate that the school was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred around the same time as attacks on the naval base. A Times analysis showed that base was hit again within around two hours of the first strikes.
A video uploaded Sunday by Iran’s semiofficial Mehr News Agency and verified by The Times also shows a Tomahawk cruise missile striking the naval base beside the school in Minab on Feb. 28.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other administration officials have declined to comment on the strike, other than to say it is under investigation. Despite that, the president has tried at times to put the blame on Iran.
“In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Saturday, as Mr. Hegseth stood beside him, adding: “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
On Monday, a Times reporter asked Mr. Trump why he was the only official in his administration blaming Iran. “Because I just don’t know enough about it,” Mr. Trump answered, asserting incorrectly that Iran might also have Tomahawk missiles but adding that he would accept the results of the inquiry into what happened.
Although most presidents might refrain from commenting or couch their statements while an investigation is underway, Mr. Trump has not hesitated to weigh in, and has not fully backed down even as evidence has mounted of U.S. culpability.
During a news conference on Monday, President Trump suggested without evidence that Iran possessed Tomahawk missiles.
On Tuesday, Ms. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, reiterated that Mr. Trump would accept the findings of the investigation.
While the investigation into the school is not complete, the use of old data evoked the biggest misstep of the Kosovo war.
In 1999, old, outdated maps and poor tradecraft led the C.I.A. to provide erroneous targeting data to the military, resulting in an airstrike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade that killed three Chinese citizens. The C.I.A. wrongly assessed that the building was the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency.
“Database maintenance is one of the basic elements of our intelligence effort, but it is also one that has suffered in recent years as our work force has been spread thin,” George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director at the time, told a congressional committee in 1999.
Military planners assumed the intelligence agency had verified the site and ordered the strike.
On Tuesday, Ms. Leavitt, the White House press secretary, reiterated that Mr. Trump would accept the findings of the investigation.
While the investigation into the school is not complete, the use of old data evoked the biggest misstep of the Kosovo war.
In 1999, old, outdated maps and poor tradecraft led the C.I.A. to provide erroneous targeting data to the military, resulting in an airstrike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade that killed three Chinese citizens. The C.I.A. wrongly assessed that the building was the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency.
“Database maintenance is one of the basic elements of our intelligence effort, but it is also one that has suffered in recent years as our work force has been spread thin,” George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director at the time, told a congressional committee in 1999.
Military planners assumed the intelligence agency had verified the site and ordered the strike.
ABOUT THE JOURNALISTS:
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
https://jacobin.com/2026/03/pentagon-iran-funding-usaid-cpb
JACOBIN
March 20, 2026
United States
Politics
War and Imperialism
The US Is Spending Billions to Bomb Iran
by Veronica Riccobene
The Trump administration has spent around $24 billion in public funds on its war against Iran so far. Here’s what that money might have been used for instead.
JACOBIN
March 20, 2026
United States
Politics
War and Imperialism
The US Is Spending Billions to Bomb Iran
by Veronica Riccobene
The Trump administration has spent around $24 billion in public funds on its war against Iran so far. Here’s what that money might have been used for instead.
The $24 billion that the US has spent bombing Iran could have been spent on any number of useful programs instead, from public broadcasting to paid leave to making the child tax credit permanent. (Getty Images)
In the first six days of war on Iran, the Pentagon spent $11.3 billion in taxpayer funds. By its own estimates, it has burned through approximately $1 billion more every day since. That amounts to approximately $24 billion — or more than $41 million an hour, or roughly $11,000 per second.
To understand the scale of such spending, it’s worth looking at what else that money could have paid for. The US Agency for International Development — which led overseas humanitarian efforts until it shut down last year after the Trump administration gutted its programming — oversaw just $35 billion in appropriations in 2024 alone. One Harvard researcher estimates that recent aid lapses have already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad due to disease and malnutrition.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes more than $500 million in federal funds annually to 1,500 public media outlets, including the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), voted to dissolve in January following nearly sixty years in operation. That came after the Trump administration slashed $1.1 billion from its funding for 2026 and 2027 — roughly equivalent to a single day’s worth of fighting in Iran.
Meanwhile, now-abandoned Biden administration plans to institute federal family and medical leave were projected to cost roughly $22 billion a year to guarantee all private sector workers twelve weeks of paid parental, family, and sick leave in the next decade. After predictable pushback from corporate-backed former Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV), Congress whittled the proposal down to four weeks before ultimately striking it completely from the administration’s social and climate safety package in 2021.
The pandemic-era expansion of the child tax credit, which sent families monthly payments of up to $300 per child, reduced youth poverty in the United States to record lows. Making the expansion permanent would have cost the federal government an average of $160 billion a year — the equivalent of just under five months of fighting in Iran. This proposal was also personally derailed by Manchin in 2022, sending millions of children back below the poverty line.
Increasing the Department of Agriculture’s school lunch program to offer universal meals to all public school students, regardless of income, would cost about $11 billion a year, on top of $19 billion the department already spends on school lunches annually.
Federal health care spending, meanwhile, costs taxpayers more than $6 trillion annually — but the government could save roughly $450 billion a year, or 13 percent, by enacting Medicare for All.
This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.
In the first six days of war on Iran, the Pentagon spent $11.3 billion in taxpayer funds. By its own estimates, it has burned through approximately $1 billion more every day since. That amounts to approximately $24 billion — or more than $41 million an hour, or roughly $11,000 per second.
To understand the scale of such spending, it’s worth looking at what else that money could have paid for. The US Agency for International Development — which led overseas humanitarian efforts until it shut down last year after the Trump administration gutted its programming — oversaw just $35 billion in appropriations in 2024 alone. One Harvard researcher estimates that recent aid lapses have already caused hundreds of thousands of deaths abroad due to disease and malnutrition.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes more than $500 million in federal funds annually to 1,500 public media outlets, including the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), voted to dissolve in January following nearly sixty years in operation. That came after the Trump administration slashed $1.1 billion from its funding for 2026 and 2027 — roughly equivalent to a single day’s worth of fighting in Iran.
Meanwhile, now-abandoned Biden administration plans to institute federal family and medical leave were projected to cost roughly $22 billion a year to guarantee all private sector workers twelve weeks of paid parental, family, and sick leave in the next decade. After predictable pushback from corporate-backed former Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV), Congress whittled the proposal down to four weeks before ultimately striking it completely from the administration’s social and climate safety package in 2021.
The pandemic-era expansion of the child tax credit, which sent families monthly payments of up to $300 per child, reduced youth poverty in the United States to record lows. Making the expansion permanent would have cost the federal government an average of $160 billion a year — the equivalent of just under five months of fighting in Iran. This proposal was also personally derailed by Manchin in 2022, sending millions of children back below the poverty line.
Increasing the Department of Agriculture’s school lunch program to offer universal meals to all public school students, regardless of income, would cost about $11 billion a year, on top of $19 billion the department already spends on school lunches annually.
Federal health care spending, meanwhile, costs taxpayers more than $6 trillion annually — but the government could save roughly $450 billion a year, or 13 percent, by enacting Medicare for All.
This article was first published by the Lever, an award-winning independent investigative newsroom.
Contributor:
Veronica Riccobene is a reporter with the Lever based in Washington, DC. She has experience in live television, long form, and vertical video as well as reporting.
Filed Under:
United States
Politics
War and Imperialism
Health care
Journalism
USAID
US Military
War on Iran
Veronica Riccobene is a reporter with the Lever based in Washington, DC. She has experience in live television, long form, and vertical video as well as reporting.
Filed Under:
United States
Politics
War and Imperialism
Health care
Journalism
USAID
US Military
War on Iran
White Supremacy in Donald Trump’s White House
The administration’s crude vilification of anti-discrimination policies is meant to erase the radical promise of the Black freedom struggle.
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Hammer & Hope
Number 10
Spring, 2026
by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Hammer & Hope
Number 10
Spring, 2026
PHOTO: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
PHOTO: Donald Trump greets lawmakers after giving the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol, March 4, 2025. Photograph by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.
One year on, the Trump administration’s descent deeper into the gutter of racism no longer comes as a surprise. Trump’s second presidency has been devoted to demolishing anti-discrimination policies based on the absurd claim that they are unfair to white people, especially white men, who are now the real victims of racism. This is a departure for Republicans. Not that many years ago, most of them would try to co-opt the civil rights narrative as their own by claiming the U.S. had achieved the “colorblind” society that was supposedly Martin Luther King Jr.’s end goal. Thus, civil rights–era reforms were no longer necessary because the movement had succeeded.
Today, Trump and JD Vance have dropped the hollow tributes to King and replaced them with disgusting racist memes that blatantly appeal to white men to see themselves as victims of anti-discrimination policies. The point of this isn’t just to undermine the historic accomplishments of the civil rights movement. It is also to create a scapegoat for the poor and working-class whites who make up a growing section of the MAGA base to blame for declining living standards. Dismantling what remains of civil rights–era laws and policies is necessary to bury the radical legacy of the civil rights movement, which, at its core, was about more than representation in politics and business or even formal political and legal equality. It was about materially improving the lives of all Black people and ultimately of all the have-nots.
Trump’s second presidency began in January 2024 with a frenzy of executive orders, including ones attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Within months, this had led to purges of lawyers and federal employees charged with protecting civil rights. By December, Vance was bragging to a nearly all-white audience at a Turning Point USA conference, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” His statement was so uncontroversial for the Trump administration that it barely received news coverage. In an X (formerly Twitter) post shortly before that speech, Andrea Lucas, Trump’s chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asked, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” Trump himself weighed in during a January New York Times interview, in which he declared that “white people were very badly treated” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly causes whites who “deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job” to lose out. Trump’s white supremacy got cruder still at the start of Black History Month, when he posted a video on Truth Social in which Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces were pasted on the bodies of apes.
If the aim of this undisguised racism is to distract white working-class MAGA supporters from Trump’s abject failure to usher in a new golden age of prosperity for them, it is becoming less and less effective. In November 2024, Trump won half of all voters making $50,000 or less, according to exit polls; his approval rating among this group is now at 38 percent and dropping. Still, the relentless campaign to portray whites as the victims of Black people who got a leg up thanks to government bureaucrats and the Democratic Party has had an effect. An Associated Press–NORC poll in July 2025 found that nearly 40 percent of white adults believe diversity and equity initiatives increase discrimination against white people. A previous poll in 2022 showed that 30 percent of white Americans believe discrimination against them had increased “a lot more” in the past five years.
Many of the beliefs expressed in these polls are detached from reality. By almost any measure, working-class Black Americans continue to lag far behind their white peers. At $55,157, median Black household income in 2024 was over $30,000 less than white household income. The numbers are so skewed because Black workers earn less than white workers in nearly every major industry. Black unemployment is nearly double the rate of white unemployment. Only one in three Black families has a retirement account, compared with more than 60 percent of white families. And the value of those accounts for Blacks is lower because of racism in hiring and differences in wages and salaries over a working lifetime.
As for the favorite boogeyman of the White House, the actual record of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, even in their heyday following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, has never been as robust and impactful as either their boosters or detractors have claimed. Indeed, before the right began its crusade against DEI, many of the biggest critics of these initiatives were people on the left who pointed out that they produced more pledges to make companies diverse than actual jobs for Blacks.
Far from replacing qualified white workers with unqualified Black ones, as Vance and Trump insist is happening, DEI initiatives typically set aspirational goals that mean little beyond a vague commitment to do better. Consider the words of billionaire Larry Fink, CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, in an open letter issued a week into the 2020 protests: “As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organizations and not tolerate our shortcomings. We can only heal these wounds — building a more diverse and inclusive firm and contributing to a more just society — if we talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships.” BlackRock increased its fraction of Black employees from 5 percent in 2020 to 8 percent by 2025, a relatively minor change and hardly evidence of Black workers replacing white ones. The company has since dismantled its DEI initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders and legal threats against corporations that maintained such programs.
The surge of corporate initiatives spurred by the 2020 protests did cause a brief boom in the hiring of diversity specialists. Companies in the S&P 500 hired new heads of diversity at a rate of about 12 per month following George Floyd’s death — almost three times the rate of the previous 16 months. But within three years of the Floyd protests — even before the return of Trump — there was a sharp turn away from these types of hires. According to the employment website ZipRecuiter, job posts related to corporate diversity positions fell by 63 percent in 2023. Besides adding those specialists, diversity initiatives have had almost no impact on who sits in corporate boardrooms. One 2021 report found that only three Fortune 500 companies were led by a Black CEO, down from seven less than a decade previously; there have only ever been two Black women CEOs. As the report noted, “There are more CEOs named ‘John’ than female CEOs.”
Outside of employment, the record of corporate initiatives to address racism is no better. According to the McKinsey consulting firm, between May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, and October 2022, nearly 1,400 American corporations pledged $340 billion to address racism in America. Only a fraction of the money went to addressing the overpolicing of Black people that led to Floyd’s brutal death; just eight companies made donations to Black Lives Matter organizations. Instead, most of the pledges were for investment in housing and other ventures intended to stimulate greater participation from Black consumers. For example, JPMorgan Chase’s racial equity commitment included $8 billion for 40,000 new mortgages and $4 billion to cover 20,000 refinancing agreements over five years. This and similar initiatives were basically profit-making schemes, promoted as aid and assistance. Above all, they were merely promises made by private organizations with no public mechanism for determining if the promises were kept.
In the summer of 2020 and after, it was easier to emphasize antiracism and diversity with bromides about solidarity with Black Lives Matter than to deal with the implications of the other reckoning about race and class caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Shortly before corporate America decided to proclaim its concern about Black lives, plenty of corporations were in the news for reneging on promises to give hazard pay to the disproportionately Black and brown workers who had been designated as “essential.” The sharp turn to DEI initiatives had the added advantage of deflecting attention from the erupting class dynamics exposed in the opening months of the pandemic, when nearly 40 million people lost their jobs by some estimates, and debates raged over emergency supplemental unemployment and moratoriums on evictions. The corporate pivot to DEI emphasized vibes; pay increases, workplace safety, health care, and sick pay faded into the background.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Republican Party were honing a different narrative that would help them regain momentum after a humiliating electoral defeat in 2020: Diversity and equity initiatives were proof that the Democrats and their surrogates in corporate America were willing to put their thumbs on the scales to help Black people, even if it meant discriminating against whites.
The Republican Party’s base among poor and working-class whites has changed significantly in the past decade or so. The economic downturn in rural areas, combined with hospital closures and the growth of low-wage jobs without health insurance, has led to a much wider use of Medicaid in these areas. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to millions of people, including low-income white Republicans. This has complicated the right’s age-old strategy of demonizing those who rely on welfare-state programs. Previously, the right wing had mostly heaped blame on “welfare queens” living high off government handouts at the expense of hard-working, tax-paying white families. But now, needing to appeal to lower-income whites who were more likely than before to rely on government programs, the right made Black professionals in both the public and private sector the new enemies. The attacks on diversity initiatives in higher education and corporate America are aimed at middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Americans. The Trump administration is inviting whites, especially white men, to blame their stagnating or declining living standards on the supposedly rising fortunes of Black people.
This narrative was used to justify the Trump administration’s assault on the federal workforce. Last May, in a memo titled “Merit Hiring Plan,” a Trump official echoed right-wing conspiracy theories about the federal government using racial quotas to guide its hiring practices. The memo explained how “the overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats.” Not surprisingly, the Trump layoffs within federal agencies have hit Black civil servants, particularly women, the hardest. Black women lost 318,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and April of last year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during that period. According to The New York Times, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the workforce, such as the Department of Education and U.S. Agency for International Development, suffered some of the largest workforce reductions, if not complete elimination. After the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of employment attorneys alleged that the Trump layoffs “disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Trump administration took down the website allowing the public to track the race and gender of government employees.
The claim that civil rights protections and diversity initiatives have led to the displacement of white men from the workforce is another manifestation of the right wing’s great replacement conspiracy theory. This “theory” is mostly associated with Latinos and immigration, but it was also a motivating factor in the massacres of Black people in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Buffalo, in 2022. Of course, the idea that Blacks are taking over and supplanting the rightful place of whites is no less absurd than the immigrant variant. Yet it serves a purpose for the MAGA right in giving white working-class and poor people a scapegoat on which to blame their deteriorating living conditions, especially now that Trump and the Republicans have been in power for a year and have achieved nothing for the “ordinary” people they claim to stand for.
If racist scapegoating can get a hearing, it is because something has happened to white working-class people, along with the rest of American workers. The causes have been widely discussed: The decline in U.S. manufacturing and erosion of union strength over decades has led to sharp declines in earning power and material deprivations across the board. To manage this decline, Americans have taken on a record $18 trillion in household debt. Meanwhile, the affordability crisis grows worse and worse.
This is the context needed to understand the economic insecurity that pervades the lives of all working-class and poor people — Black, brown, and white. During the past decade, the media began to focus on one facet of this crisis of working-class life: “deaths of despair.” In the popular view, this referred specifically to working-class whites without college degrees aged 45 to 54 who died from opioid abuse, alcoholism, or suicide. But from 2015 to 2022, the rate of “deaths of despair” among Black Americans tripled, ultimately surpassing the rate among whites. Even beyond the statistics, though, the accusation that this tragic product of social malaise and economic marginalization was somehow caused by civil rights law or diversity initiatives makes a mockery of the profound levels of hardship afflicting all working people, which have led to a decline in overall life expectancy in the U.S., sharper than any other country in the developed world.
The right wing has had help in perpetuating the idea that civil rights laws have gone too far. In the case of the Democrats, it is their silence that speaks volumes. Worried about losing potential white swing voters, the party leadership said little after the U.S. Supreme Court, now packed with right-wingers, abolished affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. They have had even less to say about Republican attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as a justification for removing civil rights protections for Black workers and students. The Democrats’ appeal to Black voters is mostly focused on the threat to voting rights. But with their silence about other issues, they give credence to the Republican talking points that antiracist protections have come at a cost for white men.
By imagining that civil rights protections take something from white men, not only are the causes of white deprivation obscured, but the role of discrimination in Black economic subordination is also lost. The 20th century civil rights struggle for Black Americans was as much about opening the robust post–World War II economy to Black workers as it was about addressing the indignity of racial insults and stigma of inferiority. Or as Martin Luther King Jr. explained in 1963, “The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. … The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities.”
The eventual passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act removed formal legal barriers to the full participation of Black workers in the then-booming U.S. economy. But King and others recognized that more was needed to ensure equal Black participation in all aspects of the economy. They called on the federal government to be proactive in helping Black families out of the poverty imposed on them through decades of racial discrimination. As King observed:
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.
King understood that proposing such a program for Black workers would be untenable in a world where millions of white people were also living in poverty. So in the aftermath of the 1963 March on Washington, he called instead for a “special, compensatory measure” for all the financially marginalized. He compared the scale of such a program to the GI Bill promised to veterans when they returned to the U.S. after World War II. King recognized that “millions of white poor” would also benefit from this kind of social legislation. He described poor whites as “the derivative victims” of slavery: “They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education.” Discrimination, King continued, “has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.”
Some aspects of King’s insights are dated. Today, financial precarity and insecurity exist among a much wider layer of white workers, not just among those mired at the bottom. Also, King’s vision flowed from the existence of an expanding U.S. economy that created the modern white middle class. That economy no longer exists. Instead, millions of workers suffer declining living standards while historic levels of wealth are concentrated at the top of society. Racial attitudes have undoubtedly changed since 1963, though the pandering of Vance and Trump shows that racist scapegoating can still be effective. Perhaps an even bigger change is how Black American life has transformed in the past 60 years. The end of legal discrimination and federal enforcement of civil rights laws in the 1960s opened paths to upward mobility for some Black Americans. No one in King’s day would have imagined the number of Black millionaires and those making over $100,000 today. From the record number of Black Americans serving in Congress to the emergence of a small but significant Black elite, some aspects of Black life are unrecognizable compared with 60 years earlier.
But the shared reality of economic uncertainty and insecurity for millions of Black and white Americans alike — along with millions of others — provides the basis for the kind of political movement that King envisioned. Various individuals and social groups have long used race for their own objectives, whether in pursuit of reactionary or progressive goals. Today’s wealthy, Ivy League–educated white men blaming anti-discrimination policies for the declining living standards of ordinary white people is no different. Challenging this scapegoating and the destructive right-wing program it seeks to advance will require a mutual understanding of the grievances we share and a commitment to come together and fight to turn the tide against Trump.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a co-founder of Hammer & Hope and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and a Guggenheim fellowship.Hammer & Hope is free to read. Sign up for our mailing list, follow us on Instagram, and click here to download this article.
One year on, the Trump administration’s descent deeper into the gutter of racism no longer comes as a surprise. Trump’s second presidency has been devoted to demolishing anti-discrimination policies based on the absurd claim that they are unfair to white people, especially white men, who are now the real victims of racism. This is a departure for Republicans. Not that many years ago, most of them would try to co-opt the civil rights narrative as their own by claiming the U.S. had achieved the “colorblind” society that was supposedly Martin Luther King Jr.’s end goal. Thus, civil rights–era reforms were no longer necessary because the movement had succeeded.
Today, Trump and JD Vance have dropped the hollow tributes to King and replaced them with disgusting racist memes that blatantly appeal to white men to see themselves as victims of anti-discrimination policies. The point of this isn’t just to undermine the historic accomplishments of the civil rights movement. It is also to create a scapegoat for the poor and working-class whites who make up a growing section of the MAGA base to blame for declining living standards. Dismantling what remains of civil rights–era laws and policies is necessary to bury the radical legacy of the civil rights movement, which, at its core, was about more than representation in politics and business or even formal political and legal equality. It was about materially improving the lives of all Black people and ultimately of all the have-nots.
Trump’s second presidency began in January 2024 with a frenzy of executive orders, including ones attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Within months, this had led to purges of lawyers and federal employees charged with protecting civil rights. By December, Vance was bragging to a nearly all-white audience at a Turning Point USA conference, “In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.” His statement was so uncontroversial for the Trump administration that it barely received news coverage. In an X (formerly Twitter) post shortly before that speech, Andrea Lucas, Trump’s chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, asked, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” Trump himself weighed in during a January New York Times interview, in which he declared that “white people were very badly treated” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly causes whites who “deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job” to lose out. Trump’s white supremacy got cruder still at the start of Black History Month, when he posted a video on Truth Social in which Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces were pasted on the bodies of apes.
If the aim of this undisguised racism is to distract white working-class MAGA supporters from Trump’s abject failure to usher in a new golden age of prosperity for them, it is becoming less and less effective. In November 2024, Trump won half of all voters making $50,000 or less, according to exit polls; his approval rating among this group is now at 38 percent and dropping. Still, the relentless campaign to portray whites as the victims of Black people who got a leg up thanks to government bureaucrats and the Democratic Party has had an effect. An Associated Press–NORC poll in July 2025 found that nearly 40 percent of white adults believe diversity and equity initiatives increase discrimination against white people. A previous poll in 2022 showed that 30 percent of white Americans believe discrimination against them had increased “a lot more” in the past five years.
Many of the beliefs expressed in these polls are detached from reality. By almost any measure, working-class Black Americans continue to lag far behind their white peers. At $55,157, median Black household income in 2024 was over $30,000 less than white household income. The numbers are so skewed because Black workers earn less than white workers in nearly every major industry. Black unemployment is nearly double the rate of white unemployment. Only one in three Black families has a retirement account, compared with more than 60 percent of white families. And the value of those accounts for Blacks is lower because of racism in hiring and differences in wages and salaries over a working lifetime.
As for the favorite boogeyman of the White House, the actual record of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, even in their heyday following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, has never been as robust and impactful as either their boosters or detractors have claimed. Indeed, before the right began its crusade against DEI, many of the biggest critics of these initiatives were people on the left who pointed out that they produced more pledges to make companies diverse than actual jobs for Blacks.
Far from replacing qualified white workers with unqualified Black ones, as Vance and Trump insist is happening, DEI initiatives typically set aspirational goals that mean little beyond a vague commitment to do better. Consider the words of billionaire Larry Fink, CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, in an open letter issued a week into the 2020 protests: “As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organizations and not tolerate our shortcomings. We can only heal these wounds — building a more diverse and inclusive firm and contributing to a more just society — if we talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships.” BlackRock increased its fraction of Black employees from 5 percent in 2020 to 8 percent by 2025, a relatively minor change and hardly evidence of Black workers replacing white ones. The company has since dismantled its DEI initiatives in response to Trump’s executive orders and legal threats against corporations that maintained such programs.
The surge of corporate initiatives spurred by the 2020 protests did cause a brief boom in the hiring of diversity specialists. Companies in the S&P 500 hired new heads of diversity at a rate of about 12 per month following George Floyd’s death — almost three times the rate of the previous 16 months. But within three years of the Floyd protests — even before the return of Trump — there was a sharp turn away from these types of hires. According to the employment website ZipRecuiter, job posts related to corporate diversity positions fell by 63 percent in 2023. Besides adding those specialists, diversity initiatives have had almost no impact on who sits in corporate boardrooms. One 2021 report found that only three Fortune 500 companies were led by a Black CEO, down from seven less than a decade previously; there have only ever been two Black women CEOs. As the report noted, “There are more CEOs named ‘John’ than female CEOs.”
Outside of employment, the record of corporate initiatives to address racism is no better. According to the McKinsey consulting firm, between May 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, and October 2022, nearly 1,400 American corporations pledged $340 billion to address racism in America. Only a fraction of the money went to addressing the overpolicing of Black people that led to Floyd’s brutal death; just eight companies made donations to Black Lives Matter organizations. Instead, most of the pledges were for investment in housing and other ventures intended to stimulate greater participation from Black consumers. For example, JPMorgan Chase’s racial equity commitment included $8 billion for 40,000 new mortgages and $4 billion to cover 20,000 refinancing agreements over five years. This and similar initiatives were basically profit-making schemes, promoted as aid and assistance. Above all, they were merely promises made by private organizations with no public mechanism for determining if the promises were kept.
In the summer of 2020 and after, it was easier to emphasize antiracism and diversity with bromides about solidarity with Black Lives Matter than to deal with the implications of the other reckoning about race and class caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Shortly before corporate America decided to proclaim its concern about Black lives, plenty of corporations were in the news for reneging on promises to give hazard pay to the disproportionately Black and brown workers who had been designated as “essential.” The sharp turn to DEI initiatives had the added advantage of deflecting attention from the erupting class dynamics exposed in the opening months of the pandemic, when nearly 40 million people lost their jobs by some estimates, and debates raged over emergency supplemental unemployment and moratoriums on evictions. The corporate pivot to DEI emphasized vibes; pay increases, workplace safety, health care, and sick pay faded into the background.
Meanwhile, Trump and the Republican Party were honing a different narrative that would help them regain momentum after a humiliating electoral defeat in 2020: Diversity and equity initiatives were proof that the Democrats and their surrogates in corporate America were willing to put their thumbs on the scales to help Black people, even if it meant discriminating against whites.
The Republican Party’s base among poor and working-class whites has changed significantly in the past decade or so. The economic downturn in rural areas, combined with hospital closures and the growth of low-wage jobs without health insurance, has led to a much wider use of Medicaid in these areas. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid to millions of people, including low-income white Republicans. This has complicated the right’s age-old strategy of demonizing those who rely on welfare-state programs. Previously, the right wing had mostly heaped blame on “welfare queens” living high off government handouts at the expense of hard-working, tax-paying white families. But now, needing to appeal to lower-income whites who were more likely than before to rely on government programs, the right made Black professionals in both the public and private sector the new enemies. The attacks on diversity initiatives in higher education and corporate America are aimed at middle-class and upwardly mobile Black Americans. The Trump administration is inviting whites, especially white men, to blame their stagnating or declining living standards on the supposedly rising fortunes of Black people.
This narrative was used to justify the Trump administration’s assault on the federal workforce. Last May, in a memo titled “Merit Hiring Plan,” a Trump official echoed right-wing conspiracy theories about the federal government using racial quotas to guide its hiring practices. The memo explained how “the overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats.” Not surprisingly, the Trump layoffs within federal agencies have hit Black civil servants, particularly women, the hardest. Black women lost 318,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and April of last year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during that period. According to The New York Times, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the workforce, such as the Department of Education and U.S. Agency for International Development, suffered some of the largest workforce reductions, if not complete elimination. After the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of employment attorneys alleged that the Trump layoffs “disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white,” in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Trump administration took down the website allowing the public to track the race and gender of government employees.
The claim that civil rights protections and diversity initiatives have led to the displacement of white men from the workforce is another manifestation of the right wing’s great replacement conspiracy theory. This “theory” is mostly associated with Latinos and immigration, but it was also a motivating factor in the massacres of Black people in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and Buffalo, in 2022. Of course, the idea that Blacks are taking over and supplanting the rightful place of whites is no less absurd than the immigrant variant. Yet it serves a purpose for the MAGA right in giving white working-class and poor people a scapegoat on which to blame their deteriorating living conditions, especially now that Trump and the Republicans have been in power for a year and have achieved nothing for the “ordinary” people they claim to stand for.
If racist scapegoating can get a hearing, it is because something has happened to white working-class people, along with the rest of American workers. The causes have been widely discussed: The decline in U.S. manufacturing and erosion of union strength over decades has led to sharp declines in earning power and material deprivations across the board. To manage this decline, Americans have taken on a record $18 trillion in household debt. Meanwhile, the affordability crisis grows worse and worse.
This is the context needed to understand the economic insecurity that pervades the lives of all working-class and poor people — Black, brown, and white. During the past decade, the media began to focus on one facet of this crisis of working-class life: “deaths of despair.” In the popular view, this referred specifically to working-class whites without college degrees aged 45 to 54 who died from opioid abuse, alcoholism, or suicide. But from 2015 to 2022, the rate of “deaths of despair” among Black Americans tripled, ultimately surpassing the rate among whites. Even beyond the statistics, though, the accusation that this tragic product of social malaise and economic marginalization was somehow caused by civil rights law or diversity initiatives makes a mockery of the profound levels of hardship afflicting all working people, which have led to a decline in overall life expectancy in the U.S., sharper than any other country in the developed world.
The right wing has had help in perpetuating the idea that civil rights laws have gone too far. In the case of the Democrats, it is their silence that speaks volumes. Worried about losing potential white swing voters, the party leadership said little after the U.S. Supreme Court, now packed with right-wingers, abolished affirmative action in college admissions in 2023. They have had even less to say about Republican attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies as a justification for removing civil rights protections for Black workers and students. The Democrats’ appeal to Black voters is mostly focused on the threat to voting rights. But with their silence about other issues, they give credence to the Republican talking points that antiracist protections have come at a cost for white men.
By imagining that civil rights protections take something from white men, not only are the causes of white deprivation obscured, but the role of discrimination in Black economic subordination is also lost. The 20th century civil rights struggle for Black Americans was as much about opening the robust post–World War II economy to Black workers as it was about addressing the indignity of racial insults and stigma of inferiority. Or as Martin Luther King Jr. explained in 1963, “The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. … The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities.”
The eventual passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act removed formal legal barriers to the full participation of Black workers in the then-booming U.S. economy. But King and others recognized that more was needed to ensure equal Black participation in all aspects of the economy. They called on the federal government to be proactive in helping Black families out of the poverty imposed on them through decades of racial discrimination. As King observed:
No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.
King understood that proposing such a program for Black workers would be untenable in a world where millions of white people were also living in poverty. So in the aftermath of the 1963 March on Washington, he called instead for a “special, compensatory measure” for all the financially marginalized. He compared the scale of such a program to the GI Bill promised to veterans when they returned to the U.S. after World War II. King recognized that “millions of white poor” would also benefit from this kind of social legislation. He described poor whites as “the derivative victims” of slavery: “They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education.” Discrimination, King continued, “has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors.”
Some aspects of King’s insights are dated. Today, financial precarity and insecurity exist among a much wider layer of white workers, not just among those mired at the bottom. Also, King’s vision flowed from the existence of an expanding U.S. economy that created the modern white middle class. That economy no longer exists. Instead, millions of workers suffer declining living standards while historic levels of wealth are concentrated at the top of society. Racial attitudes have undoubtedly changed since 1963, though the pandering of Vance and Trump shows that racist scapegoating can still be effective. Perhaps an even bigger change is how Black American life has transformed in the past 60 years. The end of legal discrimination and federal enforcement of civil rights laws in the 1960s opened paths to upward mobility for some Black Americans. No one in King’s day would have imagined the number of Black millionaires and those making over $100,000 today. From the record number of Black Americans serving in Congress to the emergence of a small but significant Black elite, some aspects of Black life are unrecognizable compared with 60 years earlier.
But the shared reality of economic uncertainty and insecurity for millions of Black and white Americans alike — along with millions of others — provides the basis for the kind of political movement that King envisioned. Various individuals and social groups have long used race for their own objectives, whether in pursuit of reactionary or progressive goals. Today’s wealthy, Ivy League–educated white men blaming anti-discrimination policies for the declining living standards of ordinary white people is no different. Challenging this scapegoating and the destructive right-wing program it seeks to advance will require a mutual understanding of the grievances we share and a commitment to come together and fight to turn the tide against Trump.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a co-founder of Hammer & Hope and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and a Guggenheim fellowship.Hammer & Hope is free to read. Sign up for our mailing list, follow us on Instagram, and click here to download this article.
