Fundraiser for UNRWA

For my birthday month, I'm asking people to join me in donating to UNRWA. Established in response to the Nakba, it seeks to serve illegally displaced Palestinians until they can return to their original homes and lands. I’ve written and spoke a lot about this. This April, I’m putting my money where my mouth is in an addition to my monthly donation I started when the US pulled funding based on Israeli disinformation.

Redefining “resistance” as hate speech was an attempt to shut an oppressed group out of the public sphere. A group whose very existence is controversial in the eyes of their oppressors. So we must ask, whose joy is allowed? Is Black joy, LGBTQIA+ joy, female joy, permitted?

In an ironic, or maybe sad, twist, Palestinian Joy was, ultimately, resistance. Instead of the banned flag raising the organizers held an extremely successful and well attended celebration of Palestinian culture next to a bare flag pole. 

From “Man” to “Resistance," Oppressors Always Fear Words by me 10/2024

It is, has been, and always will be a genocide.
They are, have been, and always will be concentration camps.
We are, have been, and always will be terrorists in other countries across the globe and historically (and now again under Trump), in our own cities.

It’s really hard for me to fathom how flawed so many people’s reading of the political and moral situation we face is. To the quote above, it’s been 2 plus years of genocide, but people are still trying to police language and word choice.

Whose joy is allowed, while the world burns? While the genocide continues? While the ethnic cleansing spreads to Lebanon? While we bomb Iran? While we build concentration camps?

We are at an inflection point. No one has a plan. Anyone who tells you they have a plan is lying. The US is a rogue nation state, bombing other countries at random. Supplying weapons to multiple genocides occuring at once. Creating a new UN because the veto rights over the existing UN was based on an elected office, not a personal Chair for life seat. The President and Vice President are spending more time shit posting at the pope than explaining to the country why we continue to kill children throughout the world.

We can watch a live streamed genocide on our phones, as we see the live ship tracker prove the President is just doing market manipulation by claiming “the Strait is open” on our computer screen. We can clearly see what the wisdom of “the market” doesn’t. On tax day, the President is suing the IRS and then instructing them to settle by giving him $10B dollars. But we can’t 25th Amendment him because his sycophantic cabinet members can’t even tell him that he guessed their shoe size wrong.

We are not just off script, we are off galaxy. There is no plan. In the past few years we finally achieved the promise of the internet: Connecting the globe in a way that could unify humanity and let us truly see our planetary neighbors. The hope was that this would allow us to learn from each other and act in a way that finally could benefit the larger good.

Instead, we are investing billions of dollars, stolen from workers, extracted from communities, sheltered from taxes, in a “machine god” (their words not mine) that undermines all of that trust and good will by making us think we can trust nothing, believe in nothing. The exhaust of that system throws off CSAM on demand, and hyper personalized (and therefore successful) suicide coaching, while the literal exhaust accelerates our climate crisis.

How do we keep AI from destroying reality, or facilitating the laying off millions of workers, or driving electricity costs through the roof? We prevent the formation of billionaires. We prevent companies from hoarding cash, and paying their executives 7 figure bonuses, while paying their employees, the ones actually doing the work, poverty wages. It sounds impossible, it sounds like a fantasy world. But it sounded impossible that a candidate for President would lose an election over their refusal to condemn a universally recognized and unpopular genocide. It sounded like a fantasy that Republicans would pack the Supreme Court with the most corrupt and anti-law group of deviants you could dream up at a Federalist Society ayahuasca retreat.

I don’t have a plan either, sorry if you read this far thinking I’d have the one true way forward. But I have some first principles, that any serious 2028 Presidential Candidate MUST subscribe to:

• Abolish ICE and CBP - Not reform, not defund, not replace, A.B.O.L.I.S.H. Break up DHS back into their former various agencies. Establish a border enforcement department, if you must, but they cannot roam 100 miles from the border, they have no arrest rights for civil immigration violations, they are not a personal army for a fascist king. Every federal agency doesn’t need their own mini-army cosplay group.

• Cut the military budget - We have all the money we need to take care of everyone. But we spend half of our budget every year on our ability to kill brown people and/or destroy life on earth. We don’t need it, it doesn’t redound to our communities, it’s just pure waste at best, and incredibly immoral at best. So cut the fuck out of the military budget and invest it in climate jobs, public service jobs, hire 1 million IRS agents and lawyers to go after billionaires. Federally staff care jobs. Hire 1 million people at NLRB to unionize literally every worker in the country. Hire 10 constituent service positions for every Congressional office. Spare no expense, we have the money, we just light it on fire in a giant Pentagon bonfire year after year.

• Shrink the Presidency, permanently and irrevocably - We aren’t supposed to have a unitary executive. In fact we fought a whole war and founded our country on the idea that it was a bad idea. Any future President has to not only commit to refusing to act unilaterally, but to actively pursue court decisions that restrict the powers of the President, and attempt Constitutional Amendment to permanently restrict future Presidents. Free slogan idea: Make Congress and the Judiciary Co-equal Again.

  • This also has a nice side effect. By running explicitly on the platform of, “I can’t do anything, actually,” you force your supporters to work to elect an aligned House and Senate if they want any of the changes you’re proposing to succeed. Trump has had a unified government, but still rules by (often illegal) Executive Order because even as a want to be authoritarian who has a compliant House and Senate, it’s still too hard for him to get stuff done any other way. Our government doesn’t work.

  • If you’re successful, and get majorities you shed Executive power and the co-equal branches do the work for you.

  • If you’re not successful, you still can shed Executive power, in ways that are ultimately reversible, but are meaningful for however long they stay in place.

• Leave trans people the fuck alone - They’re just people. Stop obsessing about them. Stop worrying about if using someones pronouns will cost you an election. Stop allowing them to be centered and blamed, by just not participating in it. Republicans want to inspect children’s genitals. You don’t need a detailed well thought out careful statement or policy to counter that position. “Republicans want to inspect children’s genitals. That’s weird, I just can’t support that while supporting equal rights for everyone. Next question.”

• Expand the Supreme Court - Just as one person, elected for 4 or 8 years, shouldn’t be able to act without accountability, 9 individuals, appointed for life, and for sale to the highest bidder, cannot be allowed to shape our entire existence. Make it so big we can pull 9 judge panels at random. Make it a slot machine. Make companies and billionaires legit worry they’ll pull a panel so radical the Squad will look like the Tea Party.

• Medicare for All - We can’t have for profit healthcare. We’ve tried it, it’s had its chance, it just plainly doesn’t work. There are parts of our lives where there’s just no space for profit. Education, healthcare, and housing are 3 of them. Healthcare cannot be tied to employment. We can’t have people choosing living and going bankrupt or dying. It doesn’t have to be this way, the rest of the world understands this, we’re the only place where we refuse to fix this problem.

• Abolish billionaires - One time wealth taxes, tax rates that go to 100% beyond a few million dollars in income, closing tax loopholes that let companies pay in stock or deferred salary or Labubus or whatever the latest tax evasion trick is. No one needs one billion dollars, much less many billion. Cap individual net worth at 100 million. Want to get paid more than that by your AI CSAM Factory company? Sell a house or two and pay 80% federal taxes on the income until you free up the cap space.

• Ensure we will never again support genocide - End weapons support to Israel and the UAE. You don’t even have to pass a law to do this. We already have a law saying that we shouldn’t give aid to states that are committing war crimes. We just have to follow it! Which leads to…

• Prosecute the fuck out of everyone - Obviously all the Trump grifters, from Trump all the way down. Folks ignoring subpoenas. ICE/CBP leadership as well as the front line storm troopers that have kidnapped, beaten, and murdered people. But this isn’t a political enemies kinda thing. Biden is a war criminal and has violated US law. Blinkin, Jake Sullivan, anyone within the White House and State Department who signed off on military aid to Israel during the genocide. Everyone who acted to prevent the Leahy Law from being enforced. Everyone who’s signed off on illegal drone strikes (up-to-and-including Obama), surveillance, or helped companies evade accountability with the FCC, SEC, NLRB. I don’t care if they’re Ds, Rs, or purple fucking elephants. Walk and chew gum. We can do it. Do the have a proactive pardon? Find a way to charge them at the state level. Go to the new “everyone is a Supreme Court Justice” Court and have them invalidate proactive pardons. You’re the last unitary executive, go off, (not) Queen.

These positions aren’t radical. They poll with majority support across the country. This is the floor and I will support candidates who push even further.

Acting

Thank Cory Booker and Andy Kim for voting against weapons for Israel’s genocides

Yeah, you read that right, Cory Booker, Cory Fucking Booker, has reached the point where his AIPAC donations can’t soothe his conscience and allow him to continue to support multiple ongoing simultaneous genocides. Make sure you alter the message to point out that 1) this is a genocide and 2) offensive weapons are the starting point, not the end.

Reading

Second Contractor Steps Forward to Blow the Whistle on Israeli Attacks at Gaza Aid Site by Rhana Natour

On September 25, 2025, David McIntosh filed a report to his bosses at Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) detailing an account of Israeli soldiers gunning down a young Palestinian boy as he was getting food at a site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). “There’s no way he survived,” McIntosh told Drop Site News and Middle East Eye in his first interview since returning from Gaza five months ago. “He was murdered. He was straight up murdered.”

…

Like thousands of other Palestinians trying to survive an Israeli-imposed starvation campaign on Gaza, the boy—who looked about 12 years old—had come to the site that day looking for food. After he managed to get his hands on an aid parcel, he continued playing atop a sand berm at the site, according to McIntosh.

Members of GHF’s security firm UG Solutions threw a flash bang grenade to warn the boy to leave the area. Minutes later, Israeli snipers shot the boy in the shoulder near his chest. Severely wounded, he struggled to carry himself to a nearby bridge before collapsing.

…

McIntosh told Drop Site and MEE that such attacks on Palestinian aid seekers by Israeli soldiers were routine and provided documents and footage to back up his claims. GHF has claimed that the Israeli military has no presence inside its aid sites but the videos McIntosh provided shows the Israeli military positioned in close proximity, demonstrating just how intertwined their operations were.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-ghf-srs-aid-israeli-military-palestinians-security-contractor

Trump lost his war on Iran, bigly by Noah Berlatsky

You would think that after Vietnam and Iraq, America would have recognized the danger of giving the president a blank check for foreign adventurism. But somehow the bipartisan appeal of more money for more guns and for equating “security” with “belligerence” never seems to get old. As recently as last October, with Trump in power and his approval already sinking, 48 percent of Americans believed the GOP was the party that could best protect the US, compared to only 41 percent who preferred Democrats on national security.

Trump’s Iran mis-excursion could be a chance to argue not just that the US needs to avoid intervention and regime change, but that allowing a president to declare war unilaterally, without congressional oversight or involvement, puts America in danger and makes us less secure and less safe.

We just lost a war. If Trump and the GOP have their way, we will lose more.

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-loses-iran-war

Staff At Minnesota Deportation Hub Received ‘Obscene’ Trump-Themed Challenge Coins Adorned With Skulls by Hunter Walker

The challenge coin distributed at the Whipple Building seemingly revels in the violence that occurred in conjunction with Operation Metro Surge. On the flip side, the token showcases another helmeted skull with glowing eyes looming over officers in tactical gear carrying a U.S. flag amid an explosion, burning buildings, and a low flying military helicopter. The base of the coin features the text “METRO SURGE URBAN OPERATIONS.”

The only way this coin could be more on the nose would be if it was boomerang shaped. Yet another piece of evidence that ICE cannot be reformed and must be abolished.

Staff At Minnesota Deportation Hub Received ‘Obscene’ Trump-Themed Challenge Coins Adorned With Skulls

Federal employees involved in the massive operation that led to a surge...

President, Extremely Normal Brain-Wise: Pope Weak On Crime, Also I’m Dr. Jesus Christ by Albert Burneko

The article produces no evidence of an actual "debate," any more than there was a meaningful debate during all the years the legacy press spent treating anthropogenic climate change as a contested political wedge issue rather than a set of plainly observable scientific facts. It features quote after quote from public figures all over the political spectrum, including some who know Trump personally, saying things to the effect that the President pooped out his brain and accidentally stepped on it and it shot out from under his shoe and smashed into a wall and splattered all over the place and then he fell down a flight of stairs into a swimming pool and was underwater for 12 straight minutes and has not been the same ever since they hauled him out and drained the gallon of pool water from inside his skull. Representing the "The President has a brain, it is inside of his head, and it works actually" side of the discussion are a couple pro forma quotes from a Fox News ghoul and an actual White House spokesperson saying, in effect, "Nuh-uh."

President, Extremely Normal Brain-Wise: Pope Weak On Crime, Also I'm Dr. Jesus Christ | Defector

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, is a deranged old pervert whose brain, long since sodden and pitted from a lifetime of indulgence and Diet Coke, is foaming out of his ears. Over the weekend he wigged out and posted some floridly unhinged shit on his busted little playpen social-media site about how…

‘Everyone is Replaceable’: Death Rattles Oregon Amazon Facility by Ryan Haas

For more than an hour, several employees said, workers in the facility were instructed to continue fetching totes, picking items off shelves and loading them onto trucks for delivery as the man lay dead, and management figured out their next steps. News of the fatality quickly spread through the building, but workers say top managers did not call operations to an immediate halt. A week later, several workers said they still do not know what caused the man to die. Amazon said in a statement Tuesday that the man died from a “pre-existing medical condition.” Records indicate he was 46 years old.

Thomson Reuters Fired Worker For Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says by Joseph Cox

CLEAR is Thomson Reuters’ primary data broker product. It contains all sorts of personal data, including peoples’ names, addresses, car registration information, Social Security numbers, and details on someone’s ethnicity. 404 Media has repeatedly revealed links between CLEAR and specific ICE tools, including references to CLEAR in documentation for the Palantir tool ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid called ELITE, and a license plate reader app called Mobile Companion.

In early March, the Minnesota Star Tribune reported Thomson Reuters employees wrote the letter to leadership expressing their unease with the company’s ICE and DHS contracts. Later that month, The New York Times reported more than 200 employees had signed the letter.

After that coverage, Thomson Reuters launched an internal investigation targeting Little, and was fired nine days later for an unspecified code of conduct violation, according to the press release.

Thomson Reuters Fired Worker For Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says

“When I saw evidence that our products were being used to harm people and undermine the law, I did what anyone should do—I raised the alarm. Thomson Reuters’ response was to fire me.”

Woodbridge police officer charged for fatal May 2025 shooting by Nikita Biryukov

The charges are significant for their rarity.

In New Jersey, police use-of-force incidents are investigated by grand juries empaneled by the attorney general as a matter of law. The reviews are meant to bolster the independence of investigations that, criminal justice advocates say, could be tainted by the close relationships of police and prosecutors. Still, the reviews rarely lead to criminal charges.

“Every day, law enforcement bears the burden and responsibility of keeping the people of New Jersey safe,” Davenport said in a statement. “My office is fully committed to prosecuting this charge and ensuring that law enforcement only uses deadly force when lawful and necessary.”

This framing lets the Attorney General off the hook a bit much for my liking. There's a saying that a prosecutor could get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich. The deck is highly stacked in the state's favor, and it's a low bar, just that a crime may have been committed and a trial should occur to determine if someone is guilty. So the state's woeful performance at obtaining these indictments, despite aggressive, violent, police behavior, caught on camera, leading to deaths of civilians, seems to indicate they weren't really trying. If they had that track record of indicting civilians caught on camera murdering other civilians our communities would be storming the justice building in Trenton.

The world's worst dealmaker screws up the Iran negotiations by Paul Waldman

This war is a direct result of Trump’s failure as a dealmaker.

He came into office denouncing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear program negotiated by multiple countries including the United States. But what seldom gets mentioned is not just that he wanted to abandon it, but that he promised that with his superhuman negotiating skills, he’d get a better deal in short order.

…

All of Trump’s weaknesses as a negotiator are now on display: His refusal to comprehend the substance, his childish understanding of the nature of power, his inability to grasp the perspective of his opponents, and his belief that anything can be accomplished with sufficient threats and violence.

You’d have to be the world’s worst negotiator to think his approach will work. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Donald Trump is.

https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-failed-iran-negotiations