Donald Trump needs psychiatric care and behavioral health counseling. He creates evil and Republicans must remove him from office!

Re: “Donald Trump talks like a genocidal maniac” — Sun Sentinel Editorial, April 8, 2026.

I hope Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine will find somebody to read this echo opinion letter to her, published in the Florida Sun Sentinel.

Thank you for your excellent editorial about Donald Trump’s un-fitness for office.

Trump revealed a murderous philosophy shared by other 20th century dictators: genocide. On social media he threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz and end hostilities (a war Trump himself unilaterally and illegally launched against Iran).

Trump's hideous statement was condemned around the world, and it should have shaken every American to their core.

Such an evil threat cannot be dismissed just because he failed to carry out his apocalyptic blackmail threat. 

Just the fact that he made such a dangerous declaration, and is capable of such thinking, is proof about his sociopathic mind.

As the former Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on tyranny and genocide, put it, “Whatever happens tonight, or any other night in this war, is now legally defined by Donald Trump's dangerous statement.”

Snyder says Trump practices “sado-populism,” using threats and cruelty to subdue his perceived opponents while sabotaging democracy by “destroying institutional trust.” Trump has spoken. 

We must repudiate Donald Trump. Americans must reject his tyranny. #ImpeachTrumpNOW  #25thAmendment

From — June S. Neal, in Delray Beach, Florida

Donald Trump and maga Republicans have not yet explained why the American military must be put in harm's way in Iraq

Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder have become reliable prophets in predicting how Donald Trump continues to pursue the dismantling of American democracy.  Cox Richardson compared Donald Trump's demonic intentions to the actions of Adolf Hitler, as she published in November 2024 in the Milwaukee Independent:  "Adolf Hitler’s, on January 30, 1933, took an oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and in three months he dismantled that constitution. By March, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it."

This echo opinion published in The New Yorker describes the evil result of that and other dire predictions about Donald Trump.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth

(Donald Trump has no idea what the five letter  one syllable word means.)

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation and then threatens freedom of the press back home. By David Remnick editor of The New Yorker magazine.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were soon over heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” 

(Hmmm, turns out the Rumsfeld decisions cost Americans 2,400 military lives in his failed Afghanistan war and another 4,400 were killed in the Iraq disaster. Donald Rumsfeld died on June 29, 2021 in Taos, New Mexico.) With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces. But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. 

Donald Trump's need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shit-posting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained? 

Donald Trump's cult advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, (aka "Whiskey Pete") who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too. Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” 

Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.” 

Carr’s saber rattling threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975, book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.” 

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all Donald Trump's cult of men followed his lead: they just blamed the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. 

Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦








Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must end Trumpzi reign of terror and end ICE gestapo tactics

The political logic of Trump’s violent lawlessness
He is using the border as a pretext to dismantle the rule of law

everywhere, normalize state terror, and replace constitutional government with personal rule.

Senator Susan Collins alert❗

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Timothy Snyder:

Timothy Snyder, the inaugural chair in Modern European History at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, is the author or editor of 20 books. © Project Syndicate, 2026.

The moral horror wrought by President Trump’s second administration is incontrovertible. The killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse and US citizen, by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis was recorded from all angles by brave observers and seen by people around the world.

Given this, the radical has become (strangely 😕 )the pragmatic. Trump, and everyone else responsible for these outrages, should be impeached and convicted. Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be disbanded, as should its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. And the people who have killed — both publicly and privately — should be investigated and hauled before judges and juries.

But the logic of the killings is as important as the killings themselves. While a truth in itself, the moral horror is also a sign of the administration’s lies and lawlessness, a political logic known from 20th-century Soviet and Nazi totalitarian regimes and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny.

In a constitutional republic like the United States, the law applies everywhere, at all times, to everyone. For that logic of law to be undone, the aspiring tyrant looks for cracks in the system that can be pried open.

One of these cracks is the border, where the country ends. Because the law ends there, too, an obvious move for the tyrant is to turn the whole country into a border, where no rules apply. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin did this in the 1930s, with border zones and deportations preceding the Great Terror. Adolf Hitler did it, too, in 1938 Germany, with immigration raids that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them to flee the country.

Trump, by his own admission and that of his Cabinet members, is following the same playbook. He is using ICE, nominally a border authority, to enforce his own whims on a US state of his choosing — a Democratic Party stronghold with deep-rooted civic idealism. It is not legal to attack a city over its politics, or to flood its streets with federal agents to gain information about a state’s voters in exchange for withdrawing ICE agents.

The border becomes the pretext to undo the law everywhere, at all times, and against anyone. It is the crack that can be opened. The wedge is constructed with lies, which begin as cliches and memes that the government pounds into our heads, and which the media repeat, mindlessly or with malice.

One of these cliches is “law enforcement,” which is uttered over and over like an incantation. “Law enforcement” is not a noun like “table” or “house”; it is not a fixed thing. It is an action, a process that Americans have a right to see and judge for themselves. People enforcing the law do not wear masks, nor do they trespass, assault, batter, and kill at will. Public killings carried out by Trump’s goons do a great disservice to the local, state, and federal authorities whose job is to police effectively, particularly when such state terror is defined as “law enforcement.”

It follows the public killing earlier this month of Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother and fellow US citizen, and an untold number of unseen deaths and disappearances in American detention centers like “Alligator 🐊Alcatraz.”

The lies continue as provocative inversions, or what I called “dangerous words” in my book “On Tyranny.” 

In this case, the Trump administration is using “terrorist” and “extremist” — terms long favored by tyrants — to defame those killed by their policies. Their “messaging” reflects what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil” — or, as Václav Havel put it, the evil of banality. Words turn into reality with the collaboration of those who hear them.

In this sense, those who actively lie are complicit in the killings in Minnesota and any more to come. But those in the media who choose to treat propaganda as the story, who begin from lies rather than from events, are also complicit. The border is the crack, the lies are the wedge, and the people who accept those lies are opening it wider.

Words matter, whether uttered first or repeated. They create an atmosphere, they normalize — or they do not. We must choose to see, to call things by their proper names, to condemn people who lie.

Behind the moral horror of these public killings is a political logic. Those who resist the Trump administration’s lawlessness and the lies understand this. In Minneapolis and many other places, they are doing right — and giving the endangered American republic its best chance of survival.🙏

Donald Trump created his "NAZI-like" SS squad by using Immigration and Customs (ICE) agents to terrorize immigrants

Ordinary Americans are fighting back against ICE: ‘We’re going to outlast them’

Echo report published in The Guardian:  “'Right now, every undocumented person is at risk,' said Maria, who is undocumented herself."

ICE Alert❗

As evil Donald Trump carries out his mass deportation operation, residents are banding together to block raids and distribute groceries

A year into his second term, Donald Trump’s pledge to stage the “largest deportation operation in American history” has already made an indelible mark on the nation. (Donald Trump broke his campaign promise. He said his deportations would be to remove the immigrants who were criminals. Instead, he has turned Immigration and Customs agents into a Nazi style SS squad where they terrorize immigrant groups separate families without regard for criminal history or due process.)

Tragically, nearly 300,000 people have been deported, and a record 65,000 people are being held in detention centers. Aggressive raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents, sometimes with the backing of federalized national guard units, have terrorized immigrant communities from Charlotte to Chicago, New Orleans to New York. Enabled by a supreme court ruling that “effectively legalized racial profiling”, immigration enforcement has separated families, forced targeted individuals to miss work, school and doctors appointments, and caused communities to cancel festivals and gatherings.

Despite the best efforts of the Trump administration to suppress dissent, however, Americans have responded to the aggressive assault on immigrant communities with defiance. 

In cities and communities across the US, residents disgusted by Trump’s attack on their neighbors are banding together in group chats on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to coordinate community defense. The Guardian spoke with several activists – some seasoned, some brand new – about what they are doing to help.

The real-estate appraiser chasing ICE agents on bicycle.

The Trump administration had launched “Operation Midway Blitz” in early September, sending hundreds of federal agents to Chicago to crack down on supposedly criminal immigrants and intimidate a largely Democratic-voting population; now they had been spotted in Rogers Park, the neighborhood where Jose had lived his entire life, harassing a well-known tamale vendor. (Jose, like many of the activists interviewed in this piece, asked to be identified by a pseudonym out of fear of being targeted by the government.)

Jose jumped on his bike and rode to the intersection in question, where he spoke to bystanders and workers in a nearby restaurant to find out what had happened. When he and a fellow responder spotted a Jeep that matched the description witnesses had given them, they chased it, catching up at a stop light. Jose pulled in front of the SUV and attempted to impede its way. The driver – possibly an ICE or CBP agent – started yelling and threatening arrest; at the urging of another activist, he decided to let the car go. 

Then, three days later, when ICE returned to the neighborhood, Jose and his fellow rapid responders had all begun wearing whistles. They followed the agents’ vehicles through the streets on their bikes, blowing their whistles to alert their neighbors to the raid.

A 49-year-old father who in the past dedicated his free time to performing in Gilbert and Sullivan productions with a local community theater, Jose had no experience in community organizing when he volunteered to join the core team of Protect Rogers Park, a group that had organized resistance activities during the first Trump administration.

“My job is real-estate appraiser of all things,” he told the Guardian. “I mean, what a double life.”

Over the spring and summer, he pitched in as the group organized neighborhood assemblies and trainings to prepare for ICE raids or direct actions. “This might seem cliche but the trainings do work,” he said. “We try to simulate what it’s like when ICE agents are in your face and yelling at you and grabbing. It’s like rehearsal, so you don’t have as much stage fright.” 

Also, there was a social component; the group set up a book club and everyone read Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny together. “It’s community building,” he said. “It’s getting to know the people you’re going to be with when the time comes to go up against ICE. Now, obviously, we’re in it.”

When Operation Midway Blitz began, Jose volunteered to do “rapid response”, but he wants others to know that confrontation is not the only way to help. “You don’t have to go chase after ICE agents,” he said. “If you can be a person behind the computer screen directing people or checking license plate numbers – that’s so helpful. Even just standing on a corner with a whistle around your neck provides incredible peace of mind to vulnerable people.”

For those who are up for chasing ICE around: “We have a few goals,” he said. “The first is you want to get more help if you’re alone. The next is you want to try to help the victim as much as possible. The last thing is slowing them down. I’m not going to be able to go up against armed ICE agents with just my bike, so I’ll just stop traffic. We want to make it so it’s just not worth their while.”

“We’re going to outlast them,” he added. “They can’t sustain this forever.”

The mannequins in the windows of Red Vault in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood tend to wear a selection of the shop’s fashion and fetish wares, from adult onesies to mesh tank tops and leather harnesses. Starting in October, however, store owner Mark Selner added a new accessory to the display: a cheap plastic whistle worn around the neck.

“I’ve been really angry because I was bullied when I was young, and these are bullies,” said Selner, 59, of the ICE and CBP agents who have flooded Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz. “I’m working in the store all the time so I can’t necessarily attend [protests], so what can I do? I saw people handing out whistles and I was like, let me use some of my white privilege for good.”

Sellner ordered a batch of whistles and put up a notice outside the shop that he was giving them away for free. He also posted a sign warning ICE and CBP agents that they cannot enter his business without a judicial warrant, and, on the advice of community organizers, posted a sign on his backroom that says: “Private Area, Authorized Employees Only”. Within a few weeks, he had distributed almost 400 whistles.

“I don’t want any of my customer base to be afraid to be in here,” he said. “I have the sign on the backroom so that, if need be, someone can go back there and [ICE] is not supposed to go back there legally.”

Customers have been supportive and appreciative, Sellner said.

“I had a customer ask me: ‘How much did you pay for the whistles?’ I said it was $22 and he goes: ‘Here’s $22.’ I said: ‘You don’t have to do that,’ but he was like, ‘No I want to. I’m glad you’re doing this.’

“So I used that to buy more whistles.”

When the Trump administration launched a series of aggressive immigration raids in Los Angeles in June, Miguel Montes quickly saw the impact on Boyle Heights, the heavily Latino neighborhood where he was born and raised. Montes is in his final year of studies for a degree in public health, and he also works full-time as a certified medical assistant at a public hospital.

“I noticed that people were not showing up to their appointments at my job,” he said. “People were not even going out to get food, because they were scared.”

Montes’s passion for providing public health resources to his community had seen him set up an organization, Raíces Con Voz, that ran educational events about hypertension, diabetes and the health effects of climate change in his community. Now, the needs were much more immediate. With a small group of close friends, Montes spread the word that he was organizing grocery delivery for families scared of being detained by ICE. The group circulated an online signup form for families in need of support and solicited donations of goods and cash.

Since June, Montes and his group have delivered groceries to about 1,500 families. They are hoping to expand their reach to the Inland Empire; they also want to figure out a way to connect more people with mental health resources. It’s a personal issue for Montes, whose mother was undocumented until recently. As a child, he had not realized how difficult her lack of legal status made things for her.

“Being a first generation Latino, I don’t know anybody who started their own non-profit,” Montes said. “Everything that I’ve done has been trial and error.”

When the Trump administration deployed the national guard and amped up immigration enforcement in and around Washington DC this summer, some parents at a predominantly Latino elementary school in Montgomery county, Maryland, proposed setting up “walking school buses” to accompany children to school. The only problem: not everyone wanted them to.

“The community was like, ‘Nah, we don’t need the white folks walking us to school,” recalled Sarah Hunter, 47. “There were folks saying this is necessary, and folks saying ‘I don’t want you here.’ Sometimes you just have to stand in the fray and be willing to mess up.”

Hunter and her co-parent, Jane Palmer, worked with fellow parents, organizers with the Montgomery County Immigrant Rights Collective and school administration figures to come up with a plan for something that would be actually helpful. The compromise plan they hit upon may still be unwanted for some, but they decided that having to work through any conflict was worth it. “That’s not the worst outcome,” Hunter said. “The worst outcome is that we’re not there and people are getting kidnapped.”

Now, they have a network of about 30 volunteers who are stationed at set locations around the school for a half hour each morning and afternoon during student arrival and dismissal. The volunteers initially identified themselves with a button, but after a parent had 1,000 made, the button spread to the entire school community.

Parent organizers are in touch with other groups that are organizing ICE watch and rapid response in the area, but their volunteers are focused exclusively on the school. “Whenever ICE has been in our school area, we’ve learned about it on Signal before we saw anything visually,” Palmer said.

“We’re really not trying to do surveillance,” Hunter said. “We are greeting families in our community and getting to know each other, saying ‘good morning’, developing friendships.”

“If this does nothing but build community across these populations, then we’ve succeeded,” said Palmer. On Halloween, she wore an inflatable costume of the school’s mascot during her shift outside the school and handed out stickers with the same design as the buttons.

“It was like I was Lady Gaga or something,” Palmer said. “Everyone was talking pictures with me. Some lady handed me her baby to take a picture with … It’s about ICE watch but it’s also about how we build community.”

A chilling scene keeps playing out in the halls of Manhattan’s federal office buildings. Asylum seekers attend hearings before immigration judges, receive a future hearing date, and go to leave, only to be surrounded by a crowd of masked ICE agents who arrest them and whisk them away to the bank of elevators.

The detention trap at New York’s immigration courts has attracted a cadre of dedicated court watch volunteers who bear witness to the daily abductions. Their efforts gained national attention in June, when city comptroller and then mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested as he attempted to accompany an asylum seeker from his hearing to the subway.

As Lander’s arrest showed, there is nothing the court watchers can do to prevent these detentions. Instead, they do their best to get individuals to fill out a form with their name, A-number and emergency contact. Those forms are then passed on to Mi Tlalli, a volunteer collective whose mission is both simple and expansive. “We provide ongoing care,” said Maria, a member of the collective.

What that care looks like depends on what people need, Maria said. The group has been in contact with 3,000 people and families since May, and has provided direct support to 300 detainees. For those who are being held in ICE detention centers, Mi Tlalli puts $50 in their commissary account weekly. A collective of mental health care providers meets with affected children and family members; the group also has a weekly mutual aid distribution for basic necessities.

“We maintain contact with people who have been deported,” Maria said. “It’s not like we can build them a house, but we can send some money for clothing, and give them some hope that someone cares.”

The knowledge that immigrants are cared for is crucial to Maria, who is a social worker in mental health. She recalled a recent case where an individual was detained on a Friday in New York and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana that Sunday. Mi Tlalli spoke to the individual’s family and contacted an activist group in Louisiana, which arranged to have someone visit the immigrant before they were deported.

“That was the last caring interaction that this person had,” Maria said. “That’s better than going to your court appearance and being put on a plane in chains without ever knowing that someone cared about you.”

“Right now, every undocumented person is at risk,” said Maria, who is undocumented herself. “We may not be able to save everyone, but is that going to keep us from helping anyone? As a person who has had relatives kidnapped, and is at risk of being kidnapped myself, I have to hold on to the idea that there is a way we can organize not just being resilient, not just saying ‘deal with it,’ but coming together to care for each other.”

Evilism Trumpziism Nazism and Fascism

What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?

By Timothy Snyder

This essay was written immediately after the sad results were known about the 2024, presidential election.

Trump takes the tools of dictators and adapts them for the Internet. We should expect him to try to cling to power until death, and create a cult of January 6th martyrs.

t was wrong to treat Donald Trump as a series of absences. The standard critique has always been that he lacks something that we imagine to be a prerequisite for high office: breeding, or grammar, or diplomacy, or business acumen, or love of country. And he does lack all those things, as well as pretty much any conventional bourgeois virtue you can name.

Trump’s skills and talents go unrecognized when we see him as a conventional candidate—a person who seeks to explain policies that might improve lives, or who works to create the appearance of empathy. 

Yet this is our shortcoming more than his. Trump has always been a presence, not an absence: the presence of fascism❗ What does this mean?

When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So, Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” 

This is a sadistic trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium.

Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. When a fascist calls a liberal a “fascist,” the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.

That is quite a fascist achievement. Faced with the complexity of history, liberals struggle with the overwhelming volume of questions to be asked, answers to be offered. 

Like communism, fascism is an answer to all questions, but a different kind of answer. Communism assures us that we can, thanks to science, find an underlying direction in all events, toward a better future. This is (or was) seductive. Fascism reduces the imbroglio of sensation to what the Leader says.

A liberal has to tell a hundred stories, or a thousand. A communist has one story, which might not turn out to be true. A fascist just has to be a storyteller. Because words do not attach to meanings, the stories don’t need to be consistent. They don’t need to accord with external reality. A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it. This can proceed through rehearsal, as with Hitler, or by way of trial and error, as with Trump.

That requires presence, which Trump has always had. His charisma need not resonate with you: probably, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s would not have reached you, either. But it is nevertheless a talent. To be a fascist and to call someone else a fascist requires a cunning that is natural to Trump. And in that naming of the enemy, absurd as it is, we see the second major element of fascism.

A Leader (“Duce” and “Führer” mean just that) initiates politics by choosing an enemy. As the Nazi legal thinker Carl Schmitt maintained, the choice is arbitrary. It has little or no basis in reality. It takes its force from the decisive will of the Leader. The people who watched Trump’s television ads during sporting events had not been harmed by a transgender person, or by an immigrant, or by a woman of color. The magic lies in the daring it takes to declare a weaker group to be part of an overwhelming conspiracy.

The one thing that is not arbitrary about the choice of an enemy is that it must exploit vulnerabilities. The Trump ads projected a fantasy of Kamala Harris allowing millions of sex-changed foreigners to take jobs from Americans. This touches, all at once, on gender, economic, and sexual vulnerability. We are unprotected and impoverished and will be replaced by something alien. And this is all orchestrated by a shadowy enemy in the background—in this case, a woman of color who knows how to laugh.

The “great replacement” theory is an example of an unoriginal fascist lie: conspirators will make you impotent and bring others to take your place in the world. The apparent complexity of the world resolves itself as a conspiracy, just as the attendant anxiety is resolved by hatred. This works with almost any combination of enemies. It can be a conspiracy of deep-state politicians to kidnap babies, or a conspiracy of Jews to corrupt women. Fascism wins when the enmity summoned begins to tell the story itself.

A fascist marries conspiracy and necessity. Not everyone can tell a spontaneous Big Lie, as Trump did, when he lost the 2020, election. And the Republicans around him did not challenge him. The Big Lie came to life when his followers stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Crucially, he paid no price for that. That made the Big Lie true, in a fascist sense. His de-facto impunity and then de-jure immunity also generated a sense of the untouchable, the heroic.

Trump’s presence has always been a co-creation: his and ours. From the moment when he first came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he was treated as a source of spectacle. Because he was good for television, he was accepted as a legitimate candidate. In the print media, he grew through the doctrine of both-sides-ism: no matter how awful his deeds, his opponent had to be presented as equally bad. This empowered him to be both wicked and normal. During every campaign’s final months, polling had a similar effect. 

By displacing policy differences and reducing politics to two faces or two colors, polls reinforce the notion that Trump belonged where he was, and that politics was just a matter of us or them.

What amplifies Trump’s presence more than any other medium is the Internet. He is a natural with its quirky rhythms. And its algorithms make the rest of us open to exactly his sort of talky fascism. 

On social media, we are drawn away from people of complexity and toward blunt stereotypes. We ourselves are categorized, and are then fed content that brings out, in Václav Havel’s term, our “most probable states.” The Internet does not just spread specific conspiracy theories; it primes our minds for them. This was already true before Elon Musk reshaped Twitter in Trump’s image.

Our engagement with the machine illuminates a difference between the fascists of the twenty-twenties and the fascists of the nineteen-twenties. Back then, the machine was seen as bold and beautiful, a brutal instrument that would return us to our nature by wrenching us from the hold of soft civilization. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had an epiphany after an automobile accident in 1908, which led him to Futurism and then to fascism. For Hitler, the internal-combustion engine hastened a “Blitzsieg,” a lightning victory. The superior race with the superior technology exterminates other races, takes other peoples’ land, and thrives.

We are still driving around using internal-combustion engines, as we were a century ago; what has changed more than our means of locomotion is our means of staying put. When the Nazis dreamed of a radio in every home or a newsreel before every film, they did not imagine Germans motionlessly staring at screens for most of the day, as we all do now. Fascists a hundred years ago liked the male body, physical fitness, and marching around outside. Fascism today involves a masculinity softened by screen time. In both eras of fascism, women were explicitly deemed inferior. If the old fascism depended on a fantasy of accelerated male prowess, today’s rests on the anxiety of mechanical inability.

The fascist fantasy traditionally involved a return to nature. The Leader’s voice guided us into a competition with other races for habitat. Hitler was obsessed with coming ecological catastrophe, and he argued, in “Mein Kampf,” that Germans had to seize land or starve. That was incorrect. But, a hundred years later, those internal-combustion engines and other archaic technologies actually have changed the climate to the point of causing droughts and storms, as we saw during this electoral season. When such disasters occur, today’s fascists react as Trump and J. D. Vance did: they blame the victims and the immigrants, and invent conspiracy theories. If the old fascism killed for the sake of a dream of uniting with nature, the new fascism will kill by a politics of catastrophe, a deliberate acceleration of global warming, and its exploitation in the service of the politics of us and them.

A century ago, socialists wanted to believe that fascism was just another sign of the decay of capitalism. And they were right, at least insofar as businessmen then didn’t understand that fascism would reshape all of politics and society, and not just suppress labor unions and undermine democracy. Today, though, the point would be much sharper. Trump does not actually have a lot of money, but he pretends to—getting away with that lie is part of his presence. And his close fascist allies, Musk and Putin, are probably the two wealthiest people in the world. The fascism of today is nestled between the digital oligarchy (Musk) and the hydrocarbon oligarchy (Putin). Trump has pledged himself to America’s own hydrocarbon oligarchs, thereby insuring climate disaster, suffering, immigration, and even more occasions for division.

The oligarchs bring to our fascism its libertarian entry point: they preach that government is the source of all evil. As we yield to that logic, the hydrocarbon oligarchs drill away at the earth and the digital oligarchs at our minds. A weakened government can control neither, nor can it promise sound infrastructure or the welfare state. In these conditions, freedom is viewed not only as a struggle against the government but also as a struggle against one’s own neighbors. The people who claim to want individual freedom are the same people who clamor for mass deportations. America’s hydrocarbon and digital oligarchs support this kind of libertarianism; it is social media that guides men (and it is usually men) away from the idea that they are solitary heroes to the conviction that other groups must be punished.

Fascism is now in the algorithms, the neural pathways, the social interactions. How did we fail to see all this? Part of it was our belief that history is over, that the great rivals to liberalism were dead or exhausted. Part of it was American exceptionalism: “it can’t happen here” and so on. But most of it was simple self-absorption: we wanted to see Trump in terms of his absences, so that our way of seeing the world would go unchallenged. So we failed to see his fascist presence. And, because we ignored the fascism, we were unable to make the easy predictions of what he would do next. 

Or, worse, we learned to thrill at our own mistakes, because he always did something more outrageous than we expected.

It was predictable that Trump would deny the results of the 2020, election. It was predictable that his Big Lie would change American politics. It is predictable, today, that he will give free rein to the oligarchs who, he knows, will continue to generate the social and digital bases of a politics of us and them. It is predictable that, in returning to power, he will seek to change the system so that he can remain in power until death. It is predictable that he will use deportations to divide us, to accustom us to violence, and to make accomplices of us. It is predictable that he will create a cult out of the martyrs of January 6th. It is predictable that he will coöperate with similarly minded rulers abroad.

When the historian Robert Paxton was asked about Trump and fascism a few weeks ago, he made an important point. Of course, Trump is a fascist, Paxton concluded. It was fine to compare him to Mussolini and Hitler, but there was a larger point. It took some luck for those two to come to power. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said, “which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”

Fascism is a phenomenon, not a person. Just as Trump was always a presence, so is the movement he has created. It is not just a matter of the actual fascists in his movement, who are scarcely hiding, nor of his own friendly references to Hitler or his use of Hitlerian language (“vermin,” “enemy within”). He bears responsibility for what comes next, as do his allies and supporters.

Yet some, and probably more, of the blame rests with our actions and analysis. Again and again, our major institutions, from the media to the judiciary, have amplified Trump’s presence; again and again, we have failed to name the consequences. Fascism can be defeated, but not when we are on its side. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 18, 2024, issue, with the headline “American Fascist.”

Tyranny tragically arrived in America even when prophets tried to warn us about evilism

Timothy David Snyder is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Check his substack blog here.

1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

2. Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about -- a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union -- and take its side.

3. Beware the one-party state. The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start. They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents. So support the multiple-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections. Vote in local and state elections while you can. Consider running for office.

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

5. Remember professional ethics. When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

6. Be wary of paramilitaries. When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

7. Be reflective if you must be armed. If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you. But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things. Be ready to say no.

8. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

9. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.
10. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. 

If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

11. Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you. Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad). Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

12. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society. It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

13. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

14. Establish a private life. Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around. Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis. Remember that email is skywriting. 

Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less. Have personal exchanges in person. For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble. Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

15. Contribute to good causes. Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life. Pick a charity or two and set up autopay. Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good.

16. Learn from peers in other countries. Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries. The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend. And no country is going to find a solution by itself. Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Listen for dangerous words. Be alert to use of the words "extremism" and "terrorism." Be alive to the fatal notions of "emergency" and "exception." Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

19. Be a patriot. Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come. They will need it.

20. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

These lessons are the openings of the twenty chapters of my little 2017, book On Tyranny, which has just been lightly edited since in successive printings to account for the Big Lie, the coup attempt, the war in Ukraine, and the risks we face in 2024. The lessons remain the same. On Tyranny has also been published in a beautiful graphic edition, illustrated by Nora Krug. For my positive ideas about liberty, see my new book, On Freedom.

Donald Trump is nominating disinformation diva to be head of the U.S. National Intelligence

Tulsi Gabbard Holds the Knife An Operation We Might Not Survive

Published by Timothy Snyder in the blog "Thinking about....."

You would never want either Gabbard or Putin to operate on your brain❗

Imagine that the day has come for your brain surgery. You are lying, immobilized and vulnerable, on the operating table. Something is wrong, but you hope that it can be repaired. As the anesthesia sets in, you reflect. To be sure, your brain hasn't always performed the way you wished it had. You have made some mistakes, and done some stupid things, regrettable things, wrong things. 

But still, it is the brain that allows for a reconsideration of all that, to adjust, to have some hope and some possibility of doing better next time. Your brain keeps you going, keeps you in touch with the world. Hopefully, yours can be repaired, and you can get back to thinking, being, becoming. You could get better. As darkness descends, you catch a glimpse of a person dressed as a surgeon, approaching your head with a knife and a smile. It's Tulsi Gabbard. Hope gives way to horror.

This dark fantasy suggests, on a very small scale, the national trauma that lies before us. Gabbard is Donald Trump's choice to operate American intelligence. In the intelligence system, a kind of national brain, the Director of National Intelligence oversees and coordinates the work of agencies charged with knowing the world, protecting the integrity of digital systems, anticipating and preventing terrorism, and evaluating national security threats. Gabbard is the opposite of qualified for such a role: she is a disinformer and as an apologist for the war crimes of dictatorships.

Gabbard appears on the world stage as a defender of a million violent deaths.

She is an apologist for two of the great atrocities of the century: the Russian-Syrian suppression of the Syrian opposition to the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which has taken about half a million lives, most of them civilians, some of them by chemical weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also taken about half a million lives, and has brought the destruction of whole cities, the kidnapping of children, mass torture, and the large-scale execution of civilians.

That is it. That is her profile. Disinformer and apologist. Beyond the United States, in the larger world that US intelligence agencies are tasked to understand, she is associated with her pro-Assad and pro-Putin positions. (In third place, I suppose, would be her propensity to provide the Chinese state media with useful sound bites).

Until 2014, Gabbard said nothing remarkable about foreign affairs. In 2015, just before Putin intervened to save Assad, she began her extraordinary journey of apology for atrocity. In September of that year, Putin sent Russian mercenaries, soldiers, and airmen to Syria to defend Assad. The great advantage Putin could bring to Assad was to multiply the regime's air strikes, which were turned against hospitals and other civilian targets. Hospitals were and remain a Russian specialty. One feature of disinformation is that it is factually incorrect: and so the very least (or most?) that can be said about Gabbard is that she consistently wrong on matters of the greatest moral and political significance. 

But, the other element of disinformation is that it is consciously and maliciously designed to confuse. These memes (biolabs!) are tested and perfected before they are released. Disinformation is the opposite of an innocent mistake: it is concocted to make rational reflection and sensible policy difficult. Disinformation, in other words, is a weapon that one regime tries to spread within another society or -- in the dream of a hostile spy chief -- within another society's intelligence service. That is part of what Gabbard offers America’s enemies, and it is bad enough, because it means that systems meant to protect Americans instead put them in danger. It goes without saying that American allies would be unable to cooperate with the United States, and that patriotic intelligence officers would resign in droves. Informers around the world would cease their work. The US government would be cut off from the world.

As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would do enormous harm, unwillingly or willingly. She is not just completely unqualified for this role -- she is anti-qualified. She is just the sort of person enemies of the American republic would want in this job. This is not a hypothetical -- Gabbard is the specific person that actual enemies of the United States do want in the job. The Russian media refers to Tulsi Gabbard as a "Russian agent" and as "girlfriend," with good reason.

Gabbard is worse than unfit. Her public record is as a disinformer and apologist for mass murderers. And there is nothing on the other side of the ledger. There are no positive qualifications. (Yes, she wrote a bestselling book. It became a bestseller because she scammed her followers into donating to a PAC which bought the book in bulk.)

Gabbard is just as qualified to operate on your brain as she is to operate the national intelligence services. Would you let her? She clearly wants to take up the knife. Whose idea, one wonders, was that?

Imagine, because it is true, that the day will soon come when we name the person who will operate the national intelligence services. To be sure, like our own minds, the intelligence services of the United States haven't always performed well. There have been mistakes, and manipulation, and downright evil. But there has also been learning, and some recent, impressive showings, as in the precise and public prediction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Intelligence services are a central part of government. Just as a brain might need surgery, American intelligence needs reform. But it does not need to be butchered for the pleasure of enemies.

Imagine that the day has come for your brain surgery. You are lying, immobilized and vulnerable, on the operating table. Something is wrong, but you hope that it can be repaired. As the anesthesia sets in, you reflect. To be sure, your brain hasn't always performed the way you wished it had. You have made some mistakes, and done some stupid things, regrettable things, wrong things. But still, it is the brain that allows for a reconsideration of all that, to adjust, to have some hope and some possibility of doing better next time. Your brain keeps you going, keeps you in touch with the world. Hopefully, yours can be repaired, and you can get back to thinking, being, becoming. You could get better. As darkness descends, you catch a glimpse of a person dressed as a surgeon, approaching your head with a knife and a smile. It's Tulsi Gabbard. Hope gives way to horror.

This dark fantasy suggests, on a very small scale, the national trauma that lies before us. Gabbard is Donald Trump's choice to operate American intelligence. In the intelligence system, a kind of national brain, the Director of National Intelligence oversees and coordinates the work of agencies charged with knowing the world, protecting the integrity of digital systems, anticipating and preventing terrorism, and evaluating national security threats. Gabbard is the opposite of qualified for such a role: she is a disinformer and as an apologist for the war crimes of dictatorships.

Gabbard appears on the world stage as a defender of a million violent deaths.

She is an apologist for two of the great atrocities of the century: the Russian-Syrian suppression of the Syrian opposition to the Bashar al-Assad dictatorship, which has taken about half a million lives, most of them civilians, some of them by chemical weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also taken about half a million lives, and has brought the destruction of whole cities, the kidnapping of children, mass torture, and the large-scale execution of civilians.

That is it. That is her profile. Disinformer and apologist. Beyond the United States, in the larger world that US intelligence agencies are tasked to understand, she is associated with her pro-Assad and pro-Putin positions. (In third place, I suppose, would be her propensity to provide the Chinese state media with useful sound bites).

Until 2014, Gabbard said nothing remarkable about foreign affairs. In 2015, just before Putin intervened to save Assad, she began her extraordinary journey of apology for atrocity. In September of that year, Putin sent Russian mercenaries, soldiers, and airmen to Syria to defend Assad. The great advantage Putin could bring to Assad was to multiply the regime's air strikes, which were turned against hospitals and other civilian targets. Hospitals were and remain a Russian specialty.

In June 2015, as a congresswoman from Hawai'i, Gabbard visited Syria. During her stay, she was introduced to girls who had been burned from head to toe by a regime air strike. Her reaction to the situation, according to her translator, was to try to persuade the girls that they had been injured not by Syrian forces, but by the resistance. But this was impossible. Only Syria (at the time of her visit) and Russia (beginning weeks later) were flying planes and dropping bombs.

Either Gabbard was catastrophically uninformed about the most basic elements of the theater of war she was visiting, or she was consciously spreading disinformation. Those are the two possibilities. The first is disqualifying; the second is worse.

And if she was spreading disinformation consciously, she was also doing so with a pathological ruthlessness. Anyone who would lie to the child victims of an air strike to their burned faces would lie to anyone about anything. In January 2017, she visited Syria again, this time to speak to Assad. She began thereafter to deny that his regime had used chemical weapons on its own people. That was a very big lie.

In Washington, in speeches in Congress, Gabbard showed an uncanny ability to turn almost any issue into a justification for defending the Assad regime. In 2016, concern for Christians in Syria was a pretext to defend the Assad regime. In 2017, she presented worries about terrorism as a reason to defend of the Assad regime. In 2018, the anniversary of 9/11 was her prompt for defending the Assad regime. In 2019, she found her way from the genocide of Armenians a century earlier to the need to defend the Assad regime. She even worked hard to segue from the lack of affordable housing in Hawai'i to the need to defend the Assad regime. Gabbard's support of Assad was so well known that her colleagues, Republican and Democratic alike, were worried that she would reveal the identity of a Syrian photographer brought to Congress to testify about Assad's atrocities.

For Russia, Syria was a testing ground for Ukraine. The atrocities perpetrated by Russians in Syria were repeated in Ukraine. In 2021, the largest donor to Gabbard’s PAC was an apologist for Putin. When the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of the following year, Gabbard, a consumer of Russian propaganda, was immediately ready as a channel for the Russian line, including obvious Russian disinformation. Again and again, over and over, her public statements were strikingly similar to Putin’s,

Amidst the farrago of lies that Russia used to justify its full-scale invasion invasion was the completely bogus claim that Ukraine was site of American biolabs that were testing which infections would be most harmful to Slavs (and thus Russians). This lie originates in Russia and was spread by Russian media, along with some Chinese and Syrian echo chambers, and with a set of western helpers -- one of whom was Tulsi Gabbard. She also urged, "in the spirit of Aloha," that Ukraine react to the invasion by surrendering its sovereignty to Russia. She later justified Russia's invasion of Ukraine by the notion, common in Moscow, that Russia was the victim of American attempts to overthrow Putin. She was specifically thanked by Russian state media for defending Russian war propaganda.

To be sure, the wars and the regions are complex. Even if Assad falls, as now looks increasingly likely, Syria will be a mess, with unsavory and dangerous people in power. There is, of course, room for disagreement about American foreign policy, including with respect to Assad and Putin and their twinned atrocities. 

That can all be taken for granted, and provides no excuse whatever for Gabbard's very unusual behavior. It is strange, to say the least, that Gabbard says nothing about these regimes that they have not first said about themselves, and that she uses her platform to spread their own very specific disinformation.

PS: Further sources: In Sketches from a Secret War I write about intelligence, counter-intelligence, disinformation, and active measures. In The Road to Unfreedom I write about the Russian intervention in Syria and the associated atrocities. On the early Russian bombings of hospitals in particular I cited these sources: Amnesty International: “Syria: Russia’s shameful failure to acknowledge civilian killings,” Amnesty International, 23 December 2015; Physicians for Human Rights: “Russian Warplanes Strike Medical Facilities in Syria,” Physicians for Human Rights, 7 October 2015. Russian hackers punished those who wrote about the bombings: "Pawn Storm APT Group Returns," SC Magazine, 23 October 2015.