What you’re about to read is an interview with an active duty service member of the United States military. In this interview, they will give you a look inside a military organization getting ready for a potential war with Iran.

This person spoke to me on condition of complete anonymity. Their name, rank, unit, installation, branch, and area of responsibility have been deliberately withheld. Operational/classified details have been omitted. This isn’t vagueness for the sake of drama. But if the lack of details causes you to be skeptical about the information that follows, good. Be skeptical and think critically about everything you read. But there is nothing more I can give than what is to follow.

There are two people at legal risk in this exchange, and you should understand both.

For the source, speaking publicly about deployment preparations, internal morale, and changes to qualification standards could trigger an investigation under the UCMJ. Even though the source confirmed nothing they shared was classified or information they gained from a SCIF1, their career, benefits, and freedom are still on the line. And yet, they spoke anyway.

For me, as a veteran with a security clearance history, publishing certain categories of information also carries potential for consequences. Even information I didn’t originate. Even information that serves the public interest. The Espionage Act doesn’t distinguish between whistle-blowing and leaking, and the current administration has made it very clear that it values loyalty over freedom of speech. For this reason, I am not in a position to publish classified details, operational timelines, or unit identifiers. Not because I don’t think you deserve to know. But because the legal architecture of secrecy behind the cover of “national security” is designed to punish exactly this kind of reporting, and I’m not interested in finding out how far they will go.

So what you’ll get here is the shape of the thing. A firsthand account of what it looks like when the gears of war start spinning. What the people inside that machinery are thinking, saying to each other when leadership isn’t listening, and what’s being quietly gutted in the rush to fill the ranks.

None of this should have to be anonymous. The fact that it is tells you something about where we are.

What follows is the interview, edited for clarity and to remove identifying details.

Five Days

Left Face Report: Without identifying your unit, installation, or specific role, can you tell me your general career field and how long you’ve been in?

Source: I’ll say it’s a combat role. More than ten years.

Left Face Report: When did your unit first start receiving indicators that an Iran deployment was on the table? Was it before we started kinetic action against Iran? What did that look like?

Source: It was after. After everyone had already seen it on the news. We were aware that there was a naval operation going on. Most people didn’t think we would be tagged to go since up to that point we had been focusing on a completely different region. Then kind of out of left field, one of the teams was given the order to deploy with an extremely short notice to move out.

Left Face Report: What was the unit’s reaction?

Source: Significant items on the calendar were canceled. There were some pretty important events with lots of moving parts, and they all just got canceled. This became the priority overnight.

Left Face Report: Do you know if your chain of command had been briefed about this earlier? Had there been any lead-up to the order?

Source: Leadership was blindsided.

I let the silence sit there for a moment. In my experience, there’s always some sort of warning order before such action. For even the unit commanders to be blindsided is unprecedented in my experience.

Left Face Report: Walk me through what getting ready to deploy looks like right now. What’s changed for the rest of the unit?

Source: The rest of the unit is anticipating more deployments. Our focus is being ready to deploy for future taskings as part of this conflict. The whole unit is a support system for this. No one is doing anything but either helping this team go out or getting themselves ready to be next ones to relieve them.

A Very Sudden Mobilization

Left Face Report: Has the training shifted to anything Iran-specific, or is it still generic?

Source: It’s too early to see. We haven’t really seen it yet. Those kinds of programs take a while. They take time to develop. And this is... we’ve been training for other theaters up until five days ago.

I want to stop on that sentence. Five days ago this unit was focused on entirely different theaters. The source would later describe the constant pivoting throughout the year, how priorities have shifted erratically from one scenario to the next. As this service member was about to say what the next priority was, I asked, “Mexico?” To which the source said, “No. The United States.”

Just before this switch to focus on Iran, the member was receiving briefs on what their limitations were if tagged to deploy domestically. From domestic operations to Iran in a matter of days. Trump doesn’t seem to care how many directions the troops are pulled in.

Left Face Report: Are families being briefed? What are they being told?

Source: They had all the families come in and gave an unclassified intel briefing just to let the families know what’s going on and what to expect. Had all the logistical stuff, legal, wills, and life insurance. They’ve just been condensing the stuff that we normally would do to meet the timeline.

Left Face Report: How does this compare to previous deployments you’ve been part of or witnessed in your unit?

Source: Those deployments were part of ongoing conflicts where we were aware of the cycle and knew about the deployment months in advance. This was a very sudden mobilization by comparison. You’d have months to prepare. You’d have months to do your will and get out of your lease. It’s the number one priority. The whole unit is a support system for this.

The pace, according to the source, has been disorienting for everyone. Even the young people who are enthusiastic seem to be in a daze. The unit hasn’t had a single coherent focus. Priorities have shifted constantly and erratically throughout the year. The word the source used to describe it was “frantic.”

Lowered Training Standards

This is the section of the interview I want readers to pay the closest attention to.

Left Face Report: You told me before this interview that they’ve drastically reduced qualification requirements to get people out the door. Can you be specific about what’s changed?

Source: I obviously can’t get too specific, but I can say it wasn’t explicitly marketed like it was for the deployment. But the timing is pretty coincidental. They eliminated very important requirements that I’ve never seen waived before. [pause] Ever. There are important training requirements that are being either waived or eliminated from the curriculum to get people out of the door faster.

Left Face Report: When did those changes start? Was there a directive?

Source: Very soon after the alert. And yes, it was a directive.

Left Face Report: In your professional judgment, what are the operational risks of putting people through at this reduced standard?

Source: We’re sending people to combat with less training. I mean, that has its own inherent risks. People are going to be less prepared in the interest of expediently getting them out there.

Left Face Report: I’m going to be direct. Do you expect this to result in increased friendly fire incidents and civilian casualties?

Source: Maybe not for this first batch, because these are dudes that have experience. But give it a year... maybe six months... and you’ll have dudes that haven’t been trained properly going out there. Yeah. There will definitely be more civilian casualties and friendly fire incidents.

Left Face Report: Is this qualifications change framed as temporary? Emergency measures? Or is this the new normal?

Source: It’s indefinite as far as anyone knows right now.

“This Is Not What I Voted For”

I asked the source about the general mood around these changes. Whether NCOs or commissioned officers were pushing back or expressing negativity.

Source: For the most part, people are being real matter of fact about it. It is what it is. It’s not an environment where people… <pauses> people are definitely discouraged from sharing their opinion about these kinds of things. But at the same time, there’s some behind-closed-doors trepidation about the mission and the lack of preparation going into this.

Left Face Report: It’s no surprise that the military has many people who consider themselves “MAGA”. How are those folks reacting to this? Are they supportive of the move?

Source: I got a guy I work really closely with, and he’s a true believer. I mean, he was in the office trying to explain to me how the shooting of Alex Pretti was a justified use of force. So this guy is invested.

Left Face Report: So, a piece of shit.

Source: Yeah, a real piece of shit.

And by the way, dudes like that, they really are kind of a minority right now. Most people are just... not to say that they’re apolitical, but most people are like, I don’t care about politics. I’m just here to do my job.

But this dude is a true believer. And on Thursday, that dude said to me... he’s sitting next to me, and we were talking about Iran, and he goes, “Yeah, man. I voted for lower gas prices and no new foreign wars. This is not what I voted for.”

Left Face Report: Is there anyone defending the situation?

Source: I don’t see anyone running defense for this right now. I don’t see anybody doing it. There are some kids that didn’t think they were ever going to get to deploy that are excited to go do their job overseas and be in combat. But it’s not really a political position. It’s more like a dumb kid position.

Left Face Report: Have you seen any formal or informal pressure on people to keep their political opinions to themselves?

Source: Not recently. But a little while ago, back when Charlie Kirk was shot, there were definitely talks about keeping your political opinions private since so many people were upset about it.

Left Face Report: Has this deployment notice prompted anyone to start looking at ways out? Hardship packets, dropping retirement or ETS paperwork?

Source: No. Nothing like that.

Left Face Report: Any mention of Stop Loss?

Source: No mention of stop-loss. Thank fucking God.

Nobody Knows

Left Face Report: From where you sit, does this feel like a unit being prepared for a real operation, or does it feel like posturing?

Source: [exhales] It’s hard to tell. There’s a lot of tension, especially with the guys that are going. One of the guys that was slotted to go came by the office because he knows of my experience in Afghanistan and just wanted to ask me about it. About advice for being in combat. He was taking it real seriously. This guy’s an officer and he’s pretty nervous. He’s nerve-wracked about it.

And you asked a kind of binary question, ‘Is it real or saber rattling,’ and that’s what is concerning... nobody knows a thing. We don’t know if they’re going to sit in Kuwait for a year and come home, march on Tehran, or if they’re going to seize the Strait of Hormuz. No one has a clue.

This has the potential to be the worst war since World War 2 and everyone just has to wait not knowing anything about what we’re being asked to do over there.

Left Face Report: How does this compare to the mood when you came in? Iraq and Afghanistan were already running.

Source: When I came in, we had been in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. So it was just, like, your job. You go there and you do your job. In boot camp, you’re like, okay, I’m gonna get to my unit and then eventually I’ll deploy to one of these two places we’ve been at forever. And this is like... boom. It’s what I imagine Afghanistan and Iraq must have seemed like when that started.

“It Feels Catastrophic”

Near the end of the interview, the source began speaking in a way that felt less like answering questions and more like something he needed to get out. I stopped asking and let them speak.

Source: There’s definitely a feeling of recklessness to this that communicates itself through things like suddenly lowering training standards, suddenly tasking people to go. It does not feel like a deliberately planned out thing. It feels reckless; it’s like the people at the top haven’t thought of the ramifications or just don’t care. The President seems to think this is going to be quick and it’s over.

Left Face Report: History seems to be repeating itself. Remember George W. Bush?

Source: Oh yeah. I was in high school, but I remember that. “Mission Accomplished.”

Note: Soon after this interview, Donald Trump would say in a news conference, “Let me say, we’ve won. You never like to say too early you won: We won. We won the bet — in the first hour, it was over.”

Source: It feels like being led by the blind. And they don’t seem to care. We’re gonna cause so much damage both to ourselves and to the people who live there. This incredible, unfathomable sum of money that’s been allocated to this. Use these incredibly expensive munitions that we’re burning through. And destabilize the entire world. I mean, it’s not even just [SWANA]2 now. We’re destabilizing the whole world. We’re raising energy costs in a way that we may never recover from. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. We’re depleting our oil reserves. And someone has to pay for it and we’re gonna be paying for it for the next hundred years. It’s just... it really, to be honest, it feels catastrophic.

Why They Talked

Left Face Report: Knowing the risks, why did you decide to talk about this?

Source: I’m concerned. I’m damn near certain that this is going to be something that my children have to deal with. Maybe even their children.

This is, to me, one of the rhyming beats of history. We supply the Mujaheddin against the Soviet Union. And then ten years later, we’re fighting the Taliban. We replace the democratically elected leader of Iran and install the Shah. And now we’ve killed the Ayatollah. Any number of things where our interference creates generational conflict that never seems to end.

I’m concerned about this because I think that it demonstrates an incredible blindness to history. A willful blindness to history. And I think that people... myself, my comrades, my family. The American people at large and the people of Iran. I think that everyone’s going to pay the price. And it’s something that I think people should have an awareness of.

Complicit in Terror

Being someone who seems to understand the tragedy of war, I asked the source how they felt serving in the military of a country that repeatedly uses military force to make the world worse. What would he say to leftists who rightfully see anyone in uniform as complicit in executing the U.S.’s imperialist mission? (I do acknowledge, however, that I ask this from the retired comfort of not having to make those decisions anymore.)

Source: Even in the best, most leftist, most equitable, most peaceful version of the United States, the U.S. still has a military. I don’t think the country can survive without a military. So I don’t think that there’s an inherent wrong in being a part of the military, especially in an all-volunteer force where the fact that volunteers exist is why we don’t have compulsory service.

But the U.S. military has become an instrument for evil. So it’s kind of like the knife that’s stabbing me versus the knife that’s slicing my bread.

I do think good people should be in the military. Someone’s got to bear witness. Someone has to say no. If otherwise normal people didn’t join, you’d only ever have the Nazis willing to do any war crime asked of them. That’s the military Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are trying to cultivate now.

In the U.S. capitalist top-down economy... and this is probably by design... for people who don’t have a college degree, don’t have resources... you’re choosing between working minimum wage or at a very low wage and not having healthcare and not being able to go to college and basically struggling your entire life. Or you have these narrow opportunities like joining the military where you can actually have a life. And that’s me. I’m not sure what I’d be doing if I didn’t join. Maybe I’d still be working at Home Depot. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to provide for my family. Maybe I wouldn’t be finishing my degree right now.

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It Just Sucks

Left Face Report: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you think matters?

Source: I think we covered it. There’s a lot of uncertainty. A lot of people are waiting to see what happens in the midterms because there’s a very good chance that all of this changes again.

It just sucks. [pause] The people that are supposed to save you are incompetent.

Editor’s note:

This interview represents one person’s account from inside one unit. It is not the complete picture. The military is vast and no single source can speak for every service member in every branch facing this situation.

But one person with direct knowledge, speaking at personal risk, telling you that qualification standards are being gutted by directive, that morale is fracturing, that leadership was blindsided by their own orders, and that the people tasked with executing this potential operation don’t know if they’re sitting in Kuwait or seizing the Strait of Hormuz. That is not nothing.

The administration says the military is ready. This source says the military is being told to be ready. Those are different things. And the distance between them, over the next six months to a year, is where civilian casualties happen. Where friendly fire happens. Where the people who were rushed through a gutted training pipeline pay the price for decisions made by people who will never have to live with the consequences.

If you are a service member or veteran with information relevant to this reporting, you can reach me securely through the contact methods listed on the Left Face Report. Anonymity guaranteed.

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In November 2025, the citizens of Ecuador voted to reject a constitutional change that would have reopened the door to foreign military bases on Ecuadorian soil. This week, the United States military showed up anyway. If we don’t care about our own rule of law, why would we care about Ecuador’s?

The Pentagon announced on Twitter that American and Ecuadorian forces had launched joint operations against what it called “Designated Terrorist Organizations” in Ecuador. U.S. troops are embedded with Ecuadorian commandos, helping run raids, providing intelligence, and handling logistics.1 The administration wants the public to believe that this somehow stops short of direct war fighting. They just plan the missions, fly the helicopters, pick the targets, and expect everyone to pretend that means something different.

Ecuador’s own right-wing authoritarian, President Daniel Noboa, welcomed the deployment with open arms. Which makes sense when you remember that his family’s banana shipping empire, Noboa Trading, has been tied by OCCRP reporting to cocaine shipments hidden in company containers. Noboa has denied personal involvement, of course, but the conflict of interest is hard to miss. The man posing as an anti-narcotics crusader comes from a family business shadowed by narcotrafficking allegations, and now he is inviting U.S. troops in under the guise of fighting “narco-terrorism.”

All of this unfolded three days into a war with Iran. While the world watched Tehran burn, the United States quietly opened another front on another continent.

Peace, One War at a Time

The way Trump keeps invoking “peace” matters, because it tells you exactly how this administration wants all of this understood. Not as war. Not as escalation. Not as imperial expansion. It’s the ugly but necessary work of “saving” the world from chaos. Every dead child is unfortunate. Every bombing is inevitable. Every war crime is just one more price the strong are willing to pay on everyone else’s behalf. Si vis pacem, para bellum, right?

Trump’s “President of Peace” is a purpose-built apparatus meant to make unilateral, imperialist military force feel necessary. A Board of Peace.2 A FIFA Peace Prize.3 A borrowed Nobel medal that’s non-transferable.4 A whole stage set erected in front of expanding military operations across multiple continents, none of them authorized by Congress.

Since returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has ordered military strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iran.5 Alongside that, the United States has carried out a lethal maritime strike campaign across the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Ecuador adds something new to the list: boots on the ground in a country whose citizens had already rejected the return of foreign bases.

ACLED counted more than 500 American bombings globally in 2025 alone. That was before the Iran war began.

Every single one of these operations comes wrapped in some supposedly badass codename, the kind of branding that functions as troop motivation, public relations, and recruiting material for teenagers all at once. Operation Rough Rider in Yemen. Operation Midnight Hammer in Iran. Operation Southern Spear in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

That last one, the maritime interdiction campaign, has sunk more than 44 vessels and killed more than 150 people since September. Families in Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago say the dead were fishermen. The administration has not provided public evidence sufficient to settle whether those killed were traffickers, civilians, or both. But once the targets are framed as terrorists, the burden of proof seems to disappear.

From Caracas to Minab

Christmas Day 2025 brought the first-ever U.S. military strike in Nigeria. Days later, Trump confirmed strikes on a docking facility in Venezuela. Then, on January 3, 2026, Operation Absolute Resolve hit Caracas itself.

Airstrikes on the capital of a sovereign country. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro. 80 to 100 people killed by U.S. strikes. Maduro now sits in a New York detention center on narco-terrorism charges, while U.N. experts warn that the operation violated international law and set a destabilizing precedent. Trump called it “one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history”

One month later, he launched the biggest one yet.

Operation Epic Fury began on February 28, 2026. In the days before the attack, nuclear talks between the United States and Iran were still active. The IAEA director general said he had been directly involved in the two most recent rounds of negotiations in Geneva, providing technical guidance as the process continued. Oman’s foreign minister described an agreement as ‘within reach.’ Trump attacked anyway.6

The Pentagon says the United States and Israel struck more than 1,700 targets in the first 72 hours. Defense Secretary, alcoholic, and wife-beater Peter Hegseth claimed that Operation Epic Fury had delivered “twice the air power of shock and awe” in Iraq in 2003, a boast the Pentagon did not substantiate in the briefing. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was reportedly killed in the initial strikes, alongside top Iranian officials. Iran retaliated with ballistic missiles across the Gulf, hitting targets in Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq. The U.S. embassy in Kuwait was struck and closed indefinitely. Casualty counts vary depending on who is speaking, which is always how this works when states start trading missiles and lies at the same rate.

The Iranian Red Crescent has reported more than 1,300 people killed since the strikes began. A near-total internet blackout has made independent verification extremely difficult, which is convenient for everyone doing the bombing. Clearly a lesson learned from the way Palestinian martyrs shined a light on true nature of Israel to the world.

On the first morning of the strikes, a Saturday, which is a school day in Iran, the United States destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeh girl’s school in what appears to have been multiple precision kinetic strikes. Iranian authorities say up to 168 students and staff were killed. Most of the dead were girls between seven and twelve years old. NPR’s satellite analysis raised serious questions about the targeting, suggesting the strike may have relied on outdated data tied to a military base that had been closed for more than a decade. Nearby buildings included a medical clinic and a pharmacy.

Asked about the school, Hegseth said the Pentagon was “investigating.” Neither the United States nor Israel has claimed responsibility. Neither has denied it. Iran held a mass funeral soon after, with rows of small graves dug side by side.

The Marketing of Empire

Trump’s White House has a page titled “President Trump’s Peace Through Strength”, selling his foreign policy as a record of conflicts ended, threats dismantled, and order restored. He spent months angling for a Nobel. When Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, she handed Trump her medal at the White House, even though the Nobel Institute said the prize was not transferable (note: he still would not back her to replace Maduro). A few weeks earlier, FIFA handed him its inaugural Peace Prize at the 2026 World Cup draw in Washington. None of this is accidental. The point is to make opposition to Trump look like opposition to peace itself..

In January, Trump formally ratified the Charter of the Board of Peace in Davos and installed himself as its chairman. By February, the White House was publishing photos of him chairing a Board of Peace meeting in Washington at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, gavel in hand, with the whole thing staged like a summit on global reconciliation instead of a presidency already expanding military operations across multiple theaters.

That language matters because it helps launder the reality. Bombing gets recast as stability. Raids become responsibility. Civilian death gets folded into the usual story about regrettable necessities and serious men making hard choices. By the time the word peace shows up, the work it is doing is not descriptive. It is political. The point is to make escalation sound disciplined, reluctant, even humane. The point is to make the public hear “order” where it should hear “war.”

You and What Army?

The peace branding would not work by itself. It works because it sits on top of a system that keeps letting Trump do what he wants.

None of the operations mentioned received congressional authorization. This week, the Senate voted 53-47 to block a resolution that would have required authorization for hostilities against Iran. Reuters also noted that Republicans have already blocked earlier attempts to rein in Trump’s war powers. That tells you what the pattern is now. The administration escalates, Democrats object, and nothing actually stops it.

As the Center for International Policy put it, Washington is building a norm in which it claims the right to use lethal force anywhere, against anyone, on terms it sets for itself.

By this point, the legal argument barely matters. The administration just needs a label flimsy enough to pass around Washington and a Congress a Congress either too useless or too complicit to stop it. Counterterrorism. Counter-narcotics. Joint security. Pick your favorite euphemism. Ecuador already showed the formula: voters say no, the operation gets rebranded, and the troops show up anyway.

President of “Peace”

By now the record is ugly enough without any extra decoration. The United States struck seven countries in 2025. It expanded a lethal maritime campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. It bombed Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro. It then joined Israel in a war on Iran that the Pentagon says hit more than 1,700 targets in the first 72 hours. Ecuador is now another front, opened after voters had already rejected the return of foreign bases.

That is what the peace branding is for. It gives the administration a way to make permanent war sound responsible, disciplined, even humane. Hold the ceremonies, hand out the medals, then tell the public the bombs are unfortunate but necessary, the dead are the cost of order, and anyone objecting is too naive to understand how the world works.

Iran makes the scale impossible to ignore. Minab strips away the euphemisms. Ecuador shows how easily the same logic travels from SWANA to Latin America. By the time officials start talking about peace, they are not describing reality. They are telling the public how to hear the bombs.

Harm reduction only holds if you keep the harm-reduction standard. The moment you start calling principles 'purity testing,' you become a cheerleader with clown makeup.

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One headline summarized her posture in three words: ‘Absolutely yes.’

That’s the bluntest framing I’ve seen of Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s record on Israel. It’s also the one people keep trying to talk around.

In February 2026, Crockett sat down with theGrio to defend her record. She supports “defensive arms.” She says she cares about Palestinian civilians. She points to letters and statements. But she did not dispute the basic conclusion that her stance is pro-Israel.

Her record is what it is. So is the misogynoir. These two facts don’t cancel each other out. Principled politics means holding both.

Crockett is smart, charismatic, relentless, quick-witted, and positioned as one of the Democratic Party’s next-generation faces. She is also, by her own positioning, supportive of a state the International Court of Justice has ordered to comply with binding provisional measures under the Genocide Convention. Amnesty International has concluded Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Human Rights Watch has argued Israeli authorities committed the crime against humanity of extermination and “acts of genocide” through deliberate deprivation of water. The UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s “Anatomy of a Genocide” lays out the same core frame.1234

If genocide is your red line, you better look elsewhere.

Red Lines and What They’re Actually For

The U.S. electoral system is structurally hostile to anti-imperialist politics. Two-party dominance is deliberately produced by incentives and rules. The Democratic Party is donor-captured, ideologically incoherent, and very good at absorbing dissent without conceding power.

For many voters, pulling a Democrat lever has long functioned like picking which guard watches your cell. The Chomsky lesser-evil logic is familiar: in close races, vote to reduce expected harm, then organize where you can actually build leverage. The anti-electoral critique is also familiar, and not wrong: repeating that cycle can demobilize people, convert politics into spectatorship, and train voters to defend the party instead of pressuring it. It’s also what the left has been doing for the last fifty-eleven years.

Harm reduction only holds if you keep the harm-reduction standard. The moment you start explaining away what Democrats do in office, the moment you start calling principles “purity testing,” you stop being a harm reducer. You become a cheerleader with clown makeup.

That’s what red lines are. Not a moral status symbol, not a personality trait. The mechanism that keeps ‘harm reduction’ from turning into a blank check.

For a significant portion of the anti-imperialist left, that red line is genocide. Not because the word is trendy, but because the machinery is visible. The ICJ’s provisional measures. The UN Special Rapporteur’s reporting. Amnesty’s genocide conclusion. HRW’s extermination findings. U.S. weapons. U.S. diplomatic cover. U.S. appropriations. If a politician votes to sustain that pipeline, they are not “nuanced.” They are participating.

If genocide is your red line, you better look elsewhere.

What Crockett Actually Did

In August 2023, two months before the October 7th strike on Israel, Rep. Crockett traveled to Israel on a trip sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), AIPAC’s5 educational affiliate. The publicly filed itinerary includes a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a briefing with Lt. Col. (Res.) Jonathan Conricus, former international spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces.

After October 7, the votes followed.

On October 25, 2023, she voted yes on H. Res. 771, “Standing with Israel as it defends itself.”6

On November 1, 2023, she voted yes on H.R. 340, the Hamas and Other Palestinian Terrorist Groups International Financing Prevention Act.7

On November 2, 2023, she voted yes on H. Res. 798, a resolution condemning support for Hamas and Hezbollah at institutions of higher education. Whatever its stated intent, this genre of measure functions as a permission structure for campus repression and for smearing Palestinian solidarity as “material support.”8

On December 5, 2023, she voted Present on H. Res. 894, a resolution that included language asserting “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Present, not No. In a chamber where members did vote No, she chose the option designed to dodge accountability in both directions.9

In April 2024, she voted yes on H.R. 8034, the foreign aid supplemental that included Israel security assistance. The bundling alongside Ukraine and Taiwan was politically convenient for members who wanted to vote for weapons and then talk about Kyiv.10

Yes, she later signed a letter urging Biden to withhold offensive weapons ahead of Rafah. That’s worth noting. It is also structurally weaker than the vote that funded the weapons pipeline in the first place. A letter does not bind appropriations. A roll call vote does.

This isn’t “confusion.” Confusion is a member getting pulled by competing pressures and occasionally landing on the wrong side. What Crockett has is a consistent pattern: AIEF travel, solidarity resolutions, yes votes, and a Present vote where a No mattered. NewsOne didn’t pull “Absolutely, yes.” out of thin air. Crockett earned that headline.

Misogynoir

Misogynoir is the term scholar Moya Bailey coined for the specific collision of anti-Black racism and misogyny aimed at Black women, especially when they’re public-facing and constantly scrutinized. If you’re going to critique Jasmine Crockett honestly, you have to name that pattern first, because it shapes the kind of attacks she receives and the way “criticism” gets weaponized online. As Nina Turner — former Ohio state senator and former president of Our Revolution — has argued, when Black women are unapologetically Black in the public eye, it invites a certain type of criticism that goes beyond good-faith critique. That's not identity politics, she notes, “It's just the reality of America.”

Misogynoir describes a predictable social technology. Black women in public life face a specific set of attacks: tone-policing (“too loud,” “aggressive”) and competence erasure (“unserious,” “doesn’t belong”), and sexualized or fetishized attacks. The goal isn’t persuasion or accountability. It's contempt.

Inter-Parliamentary Union research on women parliamentarians documents this kind of harassment systematically, including threats, sexual harassment, and patterns that can intensify for women from marginalized backgrounds. Amnesty’s 2018 Twitter study found Black women faced significantly higher rates of abusive content than white women in comparable public roles.

This matters for how we talk about Crockett because the same online environment that produces legitimate accountability also produces pile-ons where ‘principle’ is a costume. Ms. Turner names the tell immediately: “Why is Representative Crockett the only candidate in the race being held accountable for this stance?” In her framing, the double standard isn’t subtle. It’s the point. People will tolerate the policy as long as they get to aim the outrage at a Black woman. They’ll even elevate a man saying prettier things while committing to the same outcome on paper.

That’s the cover. Rep. James Talarico (D-TX), who is running against Crockett and holds a rhetorically more sympathetic posture on Palestine, has benefited from exactly this dynamic. Turner describes the mechanism: the allure of anti-Blackness allows people to assume Talarico is a fighter for Palestinian liberation when the record doesn’t bear that out. ‘Solidarity’ becomes a socially acceptable costume for people who wanted a target anyway.

The distinction between principled critique and misogynoir isn’t hard to apply. Principled critique isn’t laced with dog whistles. It’s roll call numbers, bill titles, travel disclosures, and a clear argument about what those material actions mean. If you can’t express your criticism with at least one verifiable primary source, say so. If your version of accountability requires distorting her record, claiming votes she didn’t cast, money she didn’t take, positions she didn’t hold, you’re building a smear. Misogynoir looks like critique that requires her humiliation to feel complete. It fixates on how she speaks, what she looks like, what her “attitude” is, whether or not she’s intelligent enough for the job. It is contempt that found a cause to hide behind.

Holding the genocide red line seriously means refusing to let it become a vehicle for racialized contempt, not because it’s politically expedient, but because the same imperial system that funds Israeli military operations also depends on racial and gender hierarchy to function. “It’s anti-Black and the hypocrisy needs to stop.”

What the DNC Should Actually Learn

The Democratic Party’s standing strategy is to treat Black and Brown voters and young voters like a guaranteed turnout while conceding nothing substantive in return. Recent cycles have shown what happens when people stop accepting that bargain, especially on Gaza. Post-election reporting and polling tied backlash over U.S. policy to shifts among Arab and Muslim voters in places like Michigan, and to youth disillusionment more broadly.

This is where misogynoir and electoral accountability converge. When the left allows racialized contempt to drive the critique, it loses the moral coherence that makes accountability politics legible to anyone outside the existing coalition. When the party keeps elevating politicians who won’t break with genocide, it bleeds the constituencies it cannot win without. Both failures are real. They compound each other.

Crockett is talented. She is also, based on her record and her own defense of it, firmly pro-Israel. If your red line is genocide, that second fact is disqualifying. And if Democrats keep insisting there is no cost to that posture, they are lying. The cost is paid at the ballot box, and then again in policy when the right takes power and claims a mandate.

None of that analysis requires racism. It just requires honesty about what the votes say.

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What’s ahead:

1. The “race isn’t a big deal in Puerto Rico” line protects hierarchy, not harmony

2. Blanqueamiento (”whitening”) works by making Blackness unspeakable, then calling the silence unity

3. Colorism in Puerto Rico has measurable consequences, including health

4. The same script shows up across Latin America, with local variations and the same payoff

When people say, “I no Black, papi, I Puerto Rican,” they’re drawing a boundary: Puerto Rican on one side, Black on the other. No matter how proud my people are that we are of mixed heritage, that boundary doesn’t appear by accident. It’s been maintained for generations through family language, beauty standards, rejection of Black identity and institutional incentives that reward distance from that Blackness.

Black History Month is a good time to shine a light on what the “we don’t do race in Puerto Rico” crowd keeps trying to bury: anti-Black racism is present, and denial only helps it reproduce. The myth flatters the island. We’re mixed, we got along, we did it better than the U.S. Then it uses that flattery to muzzle Afro-Latiné when they try to speak their truth. “That’s from the U.S.; you’re obviously not from here.”

The Myth and Its Job

Godreau's Scripts of Blackness1 lays out the machinery: Puerto Rican racial discourse that presents slavery as benevolent or trivial, favors a Spanish colonial whiteness through Hispanophile narratives, and insists on harmonious mixture; often by contrasting Puerto Rico with the United States to claim moral superiority.

Blanqueamiento

Blanqueamiento is the management strategy. It shows up as “mejorar la raza.” As the not-so-quiet approval that arrives with a lighter partner, as the euphemisms that let someone circle Blackness without naming it. It also shows up as a demand: don’t say racism, don’t say anti-Blackness, don’t make it “about race”.

The collaborative work Arrancando Mitos de Raíz2 (Pulling-up Myths from the Root), which scholar Hilda Lloréns co-authored, provides a guide for anti-racist teaching about Puerto Rico’s African heritage. The title itself captures the work: uprooting myths that deny racism requires naming what blanqueamiento accomplishes. Making discrimination unspeakable while keeping it functional.

Admitting anti-Blackness exists threatens the national myth of racial harmony, so the myth must be defended…even if that defense costs Black Puerto Rican lives.

Colonial Roots: Building the System

Spanish colonialism didn’t just enslave Africans; it created legal hierarchies (sistema de castas) that ranked people by ancestry and phenotype. Lighter meant higher status, property rights, legal standing. Darker meant expendable labor.

Blanqueamiento became official policy: Puerto Rico, like other Spanish colonies, was instructed to “evolve” by shedding African blood through race-mixing that produced whiter generations.3

When slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873, the laws changed but the logic didn't. What had been legal mandate became cultural norm, embedded in family advice, beauty standards, and hiring decisions.

Colorism in the Present

Loíza is a reality check because you can’t describe it honestly without describing Blackness. The U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts estimates Loíza Municipio’s population as 34.2% “Black alone” and 12.1% “White alone” (Mind you, these are the boxes that people check. I’d bet a paycheck the number of Black residents is higher). That doesn’t capture every local meaning of Blackness, but it does undercut the claim that race is too “blurry” to matter.

Pulitzer Center reporting describes residents facing poverty, marginalization, and discrimination, including job discrimination tied to address—especially public housing. If someone insists Puerto Rico “doesn’t have race problems,” they’re asking you to treat that as either invisible or irrelevant.

The measurable consequences also show up in health. A study in the American Journal of Public Health reports that skin color can predict general health outcomes in Puerto Rico more strongly than standard racial categories and finds worse general health among darker-skinned Puerto Ricans compared with lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans.4

The Language Is the Evidence

People don’t develop a rich color vocabulary in a society where color carries no consequences. Research on Puerto Rican racial attitudes using skin-color scales notes salient categories—blanco, indio, trigueño, negro, and jabao—and treats these as socially meaningful distinctions.5

The everyday policing speaks louder: pelo malo versus pelo bueno (bad hair/good hair), mejorar la raza (improve the race), the little jokes that train kids to treat Afro-textured hair and darker skin as a problem to solve. The myth of harmony depends on that training.

↻ If this is naming something you’ve experienced or witnessed, hit the restack button—it helps this reach people who need it.

Brazil: Exporting the Racial Democracy Lie

Puerto Rico isn’t the only place that sells mixture as proof that racism ended. Brazil’s “racial democracy” myth did similar ideological work—exporting an image of harmony while racialized violence persists.

In 2023, police officers killed 6,393 people in Brazil, at an average rate of 18 deaths per day. Of these victims, 82.7 percent were identified as Black or Pardo Brazilian. This figure stands in stark contrast with Brazil’s demographics, where 53 percent of the population identifies with these ethnicities.

They exported this image globally while excluding actual Afro-Brazilian performers from mainstream productions. The myth persists even as scholars document what they call genocide. Abdias do Nascimento, a prominent Brazilian intellectual, spoke of the racism experienced by Black Brazilians as genocide, examining indexes of mortality, access to education, housing, and employment conditions that demonstrate the genocidal nature of structural racism in Brazil.67

Anti-Haitianismo: Rejecting Blackness as National Policy

The Dominican Republic shows another version: nationalism built against Blackness through anti-Haitianism. After Haiti occupied Santo Domingo from 1822 to 1844—liberating enslaved people and guaranteeing freedom—the Dominican Republic solidified its rejection of Blackness through antihaitianismo.

Scholars define antihaitianismo as an ideology that combines a legacy of racist Spanish colonial mentality, nineteenth-century racial theories, and twentieth-century cultural neoracism into a web of anti-Haitian attitudes, racial stereotypes, and historical distortions rooted in anti-Black prejudices that scapegoat Haitians as culturally and racially inferior.89

This culminated in the 1937 genocidal massacre under dictator Rafael Trujillo. Estimates of the death toll range from 9,000 to over 30,000, with scholarly consensus placing it between 12,000 and 20,000. And if that wasn’t enough, in 2013, the Dominican high court stripped citizenship from over 200,000 Black Dominicans of Haitian descent, rendering them stateless.10

Official identity cards categorize dark-skinned Dominicans as “indios“ or “morenos“ (anything but Black) reserving “Black” exclusively for Haitians.

The slur operates in daily life too. “Haitian” gets wielded against any Dominican considered “too dark,” often disguised as a joke. The humor is the weapon, it enforces the boundary while pretending not to mean it.

Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico: the scripts change but the function doesn’t. Understanding that matters for anyone trying to organize across Latino communities without reproducing the same erasures.

What This Changes About Organizing

Stop treating this as a culture-war argument about “identity.” Power decides who gets protected, who gets disbelieved, who gets to be unmarked. You are not stating some profound truth that elevates your Latin American nation above the United States, you’re reinforcing the exact sort of anti-Blackness you claim doesn’t exist in your homeland.

A non-erasing solidarity looks like:

Name anti-Black racism inside Latino communities, including diaspora spaces, without hiding behind “we’re all mixed”.

Treat colorism as material: it shapes health, work, housing, and safety.

Defend Black Puerto Rican self-definition, including the right to say “Black Puerto Rican/Afro-Boricua” without it being treated like a contradiction.

Follow Black local leadership and reporting, especially from places treated as disposable.

“Not hating Black people” is the bare minimum; you don’t get a cookie for that. The ruling class just needs you to accept the myth of racial democracy, take comfort in your relative proximity to whiteness, and never challenge the structure. Take Black History Month as your reminder to get educated and refuse the bribe.

What solidarity looks like in practice:

• Share this with someone who still repeats the myth

• Drop a comment: Where have you heard “I’m not Black, I’m ___” used as an escape hatch, and what did it protect?

• Subscribe if you want more writing from someone who knows anti-Blackness is part of the system.

HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE.

What’s ahead:

1. Gaiman’s response follows the DARVO pattern, a documented tactic that protects abusers.

2. Celebrity worship creates the infrastructure that makes these denials work.

3. Promoting a book while denying rape allegations reveals the impunity fame provides.

4. “Believe survivors” means refusing to let power imbalances determine whose story counts.

Disclaimer: If this is the first time you’ve heard that Neil Gaiman has been accused of sexual assault, please stop and go read the Vulture article on the topic or listen to the podcast series, Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman.

Content Warning/Trigger Warning: While I will avoid describing the actions Neil Gaiman is accused of, the subject of this essay is sexual assault and how predators operate.

On February 2, 2026, author Neil Gaiman broke his silence on sexual assault allegations from multiple women. His post was what you’d expect by now. He denied everything, attacked the journalism, claimed he was the victim of a "smear campaign"—and promoted his new book, which he calls "the biggest thing I've done since American Gods".

We are not going to litigate Gaiman's guilt here; the investigative journalism (linked above) did that work for us. What we will do is highlight how celebrity abusers weaponize their platforms and fanbases to evade accountability. And Gaiman's response is a perfect case study in evasion tactics so common they have a name: DARVO—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Understanding this pattern is strategic because it's how powerful men survive allegations that would destroy anyone without a fanbase to mobilize.

The DARVO Playbook

DARVO was coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd to describe how predators respond when confronted. The pattern is straightforward: deny the behavior happened, attack the credibility of those making accusations, then claim you're the real victim. Research published in 2023 found that DARVO works. When study participants were exposed to a perpetrator using DARVO, they rated the perpetrator as less abusive, less responsible for sexual assault, and more believable compared to participants who weren't exposed to DARVO. They also rated the victim as more abusive and less believable, and expressed less willingness to punish the perpetrator.

Gaiman’s post hits every element:

Deny: “The allegations against me are completely and simply untrue”.
Attack: These are “salacious” claims “spread and amplified by people who seemed a lot more interested in outrage and getting clicks on headlines rather than whether things had actually happened or not”.
Reverse Victim and Offender: He states he learned “firsthand how effective a smear campaign can be,” positioning himself as the target of coordinated harm rather than someone accused by eight women with detailed, corroborated accounts.

The “mountains of evidence” he claims “exist” (i.e. emails, text messages and video evidence that flatly contradict them) remain conveniently unproduced. What we do have is detailed investigative reporting from outlets like Vulture documenting patterns of coercion, manipulation, and abuse. We have testimony showing Gaiman pressured at least one victim to recant, used suicide threats to manipulate her, and convinced her to tell his therapist (whom he was paying) that everything was consensual. We have evidence that even Amanda Palmer, Gaiman’s ex-wife, knew enough about his behavior to warn victims beforehand.

The truth is irrelevant to DARVO. It just needs to be plausible and a large enough audience to accept it.

Celebrity Worship as Infrastructure

Celebrity culture protects powerful men accused of violence systematically. Gender studies scholar Karen Boyle argues that even when these men fall, “they fall spectacularly, with all eyes on them… their stories dominate”. The focus stays on the accused, not the victims. The narrative becomes about whether we should still love their art, whether they can be redeemed, whether the accusations are “really” credible enough to warrant consequences.​

This operates like what researcher Dr. Jamilla Rosdahl calls a “modern panopticon”—powerful men use gendered power and social status to trap victims within an invisible prison and extend control to entire communities. Fan loyalty becomes a weapon. Studies of sports fans found they excuse deviant behavior as long as their team's star is winning. The same dynamic plays out with celebrity authors. Fans have invested emotional energy, identity, and money into these figures. Admitting your hero is an abuser requires confronting your own complicity in elevating him.

Gaiman knows this. His work is embedded in people’s childhoods, their identities as readers, their sense of what good storytelling means. Didn’t you love Coraline? Wasn’t The Sandman so profound and ahead of its time? That emotional investment becomes his shield and sword all at once.

Weaponizing the Fanbase

Neil Gaiman’s post opens by thanking fans for "all your kind messages of support over the last year and a half". He's reminding his audience of their existing loyalty, activating the sunk cost. He pivots to his identity as creator…"when things get tough, make good art," as if continuing to write novels is evidence of innocence rather than the privilege of someone whose career hasn't been destroyed by credible allegations. He mentions being "a full-time Dad" (half of every month) because humanizing himself makes it harder for fans to reconcile the person they've imagined with the accusations.

Then he promotes an anonymous Substack called "TechnoPathology" that defends him. He claims he's "had no contact with TechnoPathology" but conveniently links to their work, driving his massive audience to consume a defense he cannot be held accountable for amplifying. The anonymous account describes itself as "the home of the Neil Gaiman Is Innocent Research Project". Whether he's coordinating with this account, exploiting a useful idiot, or running the page himself, the effect is the same: outsourcing/appearing to outsource his defense to someone who can make claims he can't without risking defamation liability.

Marketing a Book While Denying Rape Allegations

Gaiman then does a thing any normal person would do if accused of sexual assault, he teases a new book. He describes it as bigger than American Gods, already longer than The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a project so consuming and meaningful that readers should be excited despite everything. The subtext is clear: his creative output matters more than the women he's accused of harming. He's gambling that fan investment in his stories will outweigh their concern for his victims. And if Harry Potter fans have taught us anything about defending creators who are horrible human beings, he's probably right.

This is the move Harvey Weinstein made when he granted interviews touting his contributions to society and charity work while facing over 80 accusations of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. This is the move every celebrity accused of sexual violence makes when they pivot to their achievements, their humanity, their art. It works because celebrity culture is fundamentally patriarchal and will center men even when they're found to be perpetrators.1

What makes this especially grotesque is the timing. Gaiman stayed silent for a year and a half after allegations first emerged in July 2024. He waited until investigative journalism had already published, until the news cycle had moved on, until his most loyal fans had already decided whether they believed him. This post isn't for people on the fence, people looking for the truth. It's for the people who never doubted him, who need any crumb of excuse to justify their continued support. It's permission to keep buying books, keep defending him online, keep dismissing his accusers as liars chasing clicks.

Dark Horse Comics cut ties with Gaiman in January 2025, Amazon dropped him from adaptations of his work, Netflix excluded him from press for The Sandman, and Disney halted development of The Graveyard Book. His agent dropped him. Yet here he is, seventeen months later, still worth millions, thanking supporters and promoting his next project.

↻ If this analysis clarifies something you've been struggling to name, share the link and hit the restack button—it helps reach people who need this framework.

Why “Believe Survivors” Still Matters

The DARVO research reveals something critical: these tactics work specifically because the deck is already stacked. Most perpetrators of sexual violence never face consequences. When they’re confronted, they deploy DARVO because it’s effective at distorting narratives in their favor. A 2024 study found that among people who admitted using DARVO tactics, many genuinely believed they had done nothing wrong. They perceive their behavior as acceptable conduct, which makes them more likely to deny wrongdoing, attack accusers, and claim victimhood.

Gaiman has a platform with millions of followers. He has wealth, legal resources, and a fanbase emotionally invested in his art and his innocence. His accusers only have their testimony, the trauma of going public, and the knowledge that a significant portion of the public will never believe them no matter how much evidence exists. When he writes that journalism "dismissed or ignored" the evidence, he's banking on his audience never reading that journalism. When he frames allegations as a "smear campaign," he's counting on fans to accept his framing rather than confront the pattern of harm eight women describe. But hey, it worked for Donald Trump, why not Neil Gaiman?

"Believe survivors" is not about abandoning due process or presuming guilt without evidence. The evidence is already here. Besides, “due process” is for courts. Are you on jury duty? Be honest and realize that you constantly make judgements based on available evidence all the time in your life.

What 'believe survivors' means: refusing to let DARVO work. It means recognizing that powerful people accused of sexual violence have every structural advantage: money, platforms, fan loyalty, and the cultural mythology about false allegations. All survivors have is their word and the courage to use it.

I'll leave you with this: when someone responds to detailed allegations of rape by thanking their fans and promoting a book, that should be evidence enough.

What accountability looks like in practice:

• Stop promoting his work. Fandom is not apolitical. Your money and attention are material support.

• Share the investigative journalism, not his denials. The Vulture reporting, the podcast examining the allegations—those deserve circulation.

• Challenge friends who defend him. When someone says “we don’t know what really happened,” you can respond: “Eight women have testified with corroborating evidence. His response is a documented manipulation tactic.”

• Recognize this pattern when you see it again. Gaiman is not unique. This playbook gets used because it works.

The ruling class doesn’t need you to actively defend abusers. It needs you to stay uncertain, to prioritize the art over the harm, to accept that some people are too important to lose. Black History Month, Women’s History Month, every month is the moment to refuse that bargain.

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What solidarity looks like in practice:

• Share this with someone who needs to understand DARVO tactics

• Drop a comment: Have you ever seen DARVO play out successfully for someone who wasn’t a celebrity? How did it play out? Who was their audience?

• Subscribe for analysis that names the systems protecting powerful men

HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE.

1. White supremacy created capitalism, not the reverse

2. The “white race” was invented to divide workers after Bacon’s Rebellion

3. Every adaptation of US capitalism has required racial hierarchy to function

4. Any left movement that treats racism as secondary is strategically doomed

   ---

A British ship leaves a West African port bound for North America, its cargo enslaved Africans. In England, ledgers track costs and profits. Across the ocean, those same Africans break their backs on stolen land, building what will become the United States. This is capitalism’s foundation.

Have you heard someone dismiss racism as 'just a distraction from class issues'? Here's why that's not just wrong—it's strategically disastrous.

Class reductionists insist everything starts and ends with class. To these theorists, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are ugly byproducts of capitalism—mere symptoms of class warfare. Black History Month offers the perfect moment to correct the record: white supremacy, the belief that only people considered white at any given moment deserve anything while everyone else deserves nothing but exploitation, drove capitalism's rapid global expansion. Indentured servitude and chattel slavery evolved into the wage theft and prison industrial complex we see today.

We built an entire system of law, coercion, property rights, and state violence to make the white owning class as rich as possible. Capital could not have expanded globally without a racial order authorizing conquest and exploiting labor.

Some dismiss this as pedantic. Getting this wrong will devastate any movement calling for revolution. Getting this wrong means maintaining the forces that have driven the destruction of the global south for five centuries.

There Was No Capitalism Without Slavery

Modern capitalism did not emerge on neutral ground. It was born of conquest, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade. European expansion from the 15th century onward was never color-blind—it grew from existing hierarchies and turned mass theft of land, gold, and labor into industrial wealth's fuel.

Cedric Robinson explained that capitalism "evolved from [the old order] to produce a modern world system of 'racial capitalism' dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide". White settlers cast non-Europeans as subhuman to justify enslavement and land grabs. There was no capitalism without slavery—Manchester's mills and New York's banks were financed by cotton and sugar plantations in Mississippi and the Caribbean.

By the 18th century this pattern had become global. European philosophers spoke of liberty at home even as their empires imposed brutal racial orders abroad. Christian pastors would preach about loving thy neighbor while Thomas Bacon preached to enslaved Africans in Maryland, “[…] And that you are to serve your owners with chearfulness, respect, and humility, not grumbling, or giving any saucy answers, but doing your work with readiness, mildness, and good nature; because your sauciness and grumbling is not so much against your owners, as it is against GOD himself, who hath placed you in that service [...].”

The result was not a grudging accommodation of racism – it was the ideology that legitimized empire. Racism was turned into a profit strategy, a way to exploit the global south and split workers along arbitrary lines. As historian Walter Johnson puts it, under racial capitalism “racism became a technique for exploiting [Black people] and for fomenting the hostility of working-class whites toward [them], so as to enable white capitalists to extract value from everyone else”.

What this changes about organizing

If white supremacy is part of capitalism’s architecture, then anti-racism is not an optional moral add-on. It is the operating requirement for building power that lasts.

A non-reductionist strategy looks like this:

Universal demands designed to break racialized exclusion, not reproduce it. If a program can be administered through racist discretion, it will be.

A clear enemy story that names the institutions that profit from division: bosses, landlords, police, border regimes, courts, and the political class that manages them.

Discipline against scapegoating. No “crime” panic. No immigrant blame. No dog-whistle “deserving” worker talk. Those are wedges, not analysis.

Leadership and base-building rooted where exploitation is sharpened by race, including workplaces and neighborhoods that the ruling class has already written off.

Solidarity that is material, not symbolic: shared risk, shared protection, shared demands, and repair for harms that were not accidental.

This isn’t a purity test. The ruling class doesn’t need you to hate anyone. It needs you to accept the bribe of racial privilege, take comfort in not being at the bottom, and never look up at who’s actually extracting value from your labor.

↻ If this reframes something you've been thinking about or think this could help someone else, hit the restack button—it helps this reach people who need it.

The American Template

The United States exemplifies this dynamic from its founding. The U.S. was a settler-colonial project built on white supremacy, African slave labor, and Native genocide. Early colonists seized Native lands by fraud and fire, then legally redefined them as English property (not unlike the U.S. calling Venezuelan oil "ours"). Slavery began in 1619 in Virginia and soon became the engine of Southern wealth. By 1776, tobacco, rice, indigo, and sugar plantations—all worked by enslaved Africans—had made the colonies obscenely wealthy. These were capitalist enterprises funding banks and factories in the North and abroad. The young republic's wealth was soaked in blood, and the nation's class structure was shaped by this racial hierarchy from the start.

Inventing the White Race

Early elites codified race to divide workers. After Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676—when Black slaves and poor white indentured servants rose up together against the Virginia aristocracy—planters struck back by inventing the “white race”. They passed laws granting poor Europeans modest rights (land ownership, voting, legal standing) while imposing permanent chattel slavery on Africans.

Theodore Allen documents this as deliberate strategy: the ruling class “instituted a system of racial privileges” to define and maintain the “white race” and implement a system of racial oppression. This gave poor whites a psychological wage—a status bribe—in exchange for betraying solidarity with Black workers. The result was a permanent split inside the laboring class.

Even the poorest whites defended the hierarchy that kept them exploited, because at least they were “not Black.” The fact that roughly 90% of Confederate soldiers never personally owned slaves, yet went to die for the institution anyway, makes this evident.

Reconfiguration, Not Emancipation

Emancipation was forced by war and resistance, then contained by a rapid rebuilding of racial control to protect property and profits for the owning class whites. This was not the end of racial capitalism—it simply reconfigured. During Reconstruction, Southern elites and Northern capitalists faced a choice: true multiracial democracy or restored white supremacy to defend property. They chose the latter.

Jim Crow laws, debt peonage, and Black Codes turned former slaves into a coerced workforce. Segregated schools, disenfranchisement, and terror reinforced this order. Black people were corralled into poverty and political irrelevance while even the poorest whites retained a veneer of privilege. The plantation economy of the South may have formally ended, but the mechanics of racial exploitation shifted into sharecropping, convict leasing, and public violence.

In the 20th century these mechanisms adapted but did not disappear. New Deal and postwar programs created suburbs and home ownership for whites through racially discriminatory lending, insurance, and zoning. Jim Crow neighborhoods and race-based lending policies legally locked Black and Brown people out of these wealth-building tools.

Labor laws and Social Security initially excluded the most common Black jobs, suppressing Black wages. Policing, surveillance, and imprisonment expanded into a vast system of social control targeting communities of color and filling prisons with the Black and Brown bodies needed for the slavery still allowed through the 13th Amendment.

In each case, white supremacy determined who got security and who was forced into precarity, who would be saved and who was expendable—all to stabilize capitalist profits on a racially stratified base.

Class Reductionism Will Fail

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us that the "evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism" are bound together. You cannot dismantle one without confronting the others. Class-reductionists who treat racism as an optional accessory fall into a trap that has doomed movements before. The racial hierarchy in America is not incidental—it's baked into capitalism's architecture. It decides who owns land, who votes or sits on juries, and whose labor is valued. Fighting for economic justice without undoing these racial cages leaves the machine's core intact.

A left that refuses to name the racism at the heart of capitalism will never free the working class. We have to fight both evils at once. As Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton insisted, "We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both". This is not moral posturing—it's strategy. Treating white supremacy as a detachable problem is how the ruling class survives. Ending capitalism will never be possible without ending white supremacy, because the two were formed in the womb together. Liberation demands abolishing whiteness as a social and political regime and building solidarity across racial lines, grounded in truth, repair, and a shared commitment to collective freedom.

What solidarity looks like in practice:

• Share this with someone who needs to hear it

• Drop a comment: what’s one way you’ve seen racial division used to break working-class power?

• Subscribe for more analysis from a guy who knows what the other side is thinking all too well.

HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE.

Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino (Trump’s very own Kurt Daluege) put out a statement on the shooting of Alex Pretti. Bear with me and try not to lose your shit while reading this bald-faced lie:

“At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.

The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.

Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.

The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID-this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” source: ABC 7 Eyewitness News

It’s 2026. You’re not doing anything outside without somebody filming you. It took just a couple hours before the first videos hit Kendrick Lamar’s internet.

And yeah, the scene is chaotic, but one thing is consistent across the angles going around right now: Alex Pretti isn’t holding a weapon in his hands.

You’ve got 8 to 10 DHS agents who look like a group of airsoft players, mismatched tactical gear, civilian clothes, and a whole lot of confidence for people who supposedly feared for their lives. They swarm Pretti and start beating him. Then shots ring out. What sounds like ten rapid shots. Reports say Pretti was later pronounced dead at Hennepin County Medical Center. DHS says “pronounced dead at the scene.” Either way, the outcome is the same. He ends up dead, and the official story does not match what the public can see.

Because in the videos below, you don’t see Alex Pretti attack these agents. You don’t see him draw a gun. What you see is him trying to protect the woman next to him. You see him get pepper sprayed, try to walk away, get shoved and thrown to the ground, get dogpiled, and then the shots come.

That’s not all. Watch these next three videos and tell me what you see.

TRIGGER WARNING / CONTENT WARNING: apparent deceased body of Alex Pretti, gunshots, screaming.

Did you catch it? Probably not. Try a different angle.

See the man in grey? What is he running off with?

I can’t tell you what a court is going to say. I can tell you what this looks like on camera. It looks like the man in the grey coat disarms Pretti, takes off with the weapon, and then the agents fire anyway. If that is what happened, that’s not “defensive shots.” That’s an execution.

And that’s the part people need to understand. This doesn’t look like competent law enforcement. This looks like a bunch of insecure, state-sanctioned thugs who’ve been given carte blanche by the President of the United States to act however they want. Every single person in DHS’s chain of command will look straight into the camera and lie, because they know three things: SCOTUS has no army, Congress has no army, and their base is in a cult and will believe whatever they’re told.

They know one other thing too.

Most people do not want to die.

This isn’t only about Alex Pretti. If this is how they operate, it’s a warning to the rest of us: comply, or we’ll kill you... and no one will stop us.

UPDATE: UPDATE: CNN’s video analysis indicates a federal officer appears to remove Alex Pretti’s gun moments before he is fatally shot. This edit highlights the same sequence.

Watch closely: while Pretti is pinned, an officer in a gray coat appears to pull a handgun from his waistband. During this, the agent in jeans and a green extra-small thermal waits then fires the shots white Alex Pretti is still on the ground. This was an execution.

As if backing a genocide in Gaza weren’t enough, Donald J. Trump has now reminded the world that “international law” is like Elf on a Shelf for genocidal imperialist world leaders: a prop you move around for show, but really, it’s all just make-believe.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, around 2 a.m. Caracas time, U.S. forces entered Venezuelan airspace, struck multiple targets in and around the capital (including the major military complex at Fuerte Tiuna) killing more than 40 according to an anonymous source, and then kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. Venezuelan officials say helicopters fired on residential areas; the government has declared a state of “external commotion” and demanded international condemnation.

Trump, of course, is bragging. According to his own Justice Department, Maduro and Flores are now on a U.S. warship headed toward New York to face an indictment that throws every magic word at them: “narco-terrorism conspiracy,” “cocaine importation conspiracy,” “possession of machineguns and destructive devices,” and more. I mean, at least they’re not talking about “WMDs” again?

And yes, I said what I said. This is a kidnapping dressed up as a cop show.

And before I forget, if you’re one of those clowns crying “this isn’t who we are” … gtfo. This is exactly who we are. This is in our DNA.

George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Barack Obama bypassed Congress to bomb Libya, shred the state, and leave behind open-air slave markets, all under the banner of “protecting civilians.” Joe Biden kept the economic strangulation of Venezuela in place, calling it “pressure,” while UN rapporteurs documented how sanctions were wrecking public health and deepening poverty. UN special rapporteur Alena Douhan went to Venezuela in 2021 and described the impact in plain language: sanctions, she said, had a “devastating effect” on people’s lives, worsening malnutrition, pushing hospitals to the brink, and hitting children, the elderly, and people with chronic conditions the hardest. In other words, before a single bomb fell this week, the United States had already been waging a slow-motion war on Venezuela’s ability to keep people alive.

But Trump doesn’t bother smoothing it over. He does the same thing with orange spray tan and a camera crew.

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The bipartisan imperial project

If you only look at red vs. blue, you miss the real continuity: when it comes to Latin America, there is one party in Washington, and its name is Empire. If Kamala Harris had won, it would have just been some other country. And the libs wouldn’t care because they don’t have principles, they have teams.

The U.S. has been meddling in Venezuela for well over a century. In 1908, the U.S. Navy helped Juan Vicente Gómez seize power, ushering in a dictatorship so brutal that political prisoners were hanged from meat hooks, but Gómez was generous to Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell, so Washington treated him like a partner, not a monster.

In the 1950s, the U.S. backed Marcos Pérez Jiménez, another torturer who filled Venezuela’s prisons and mass graves while winning a U.S. Legion of Merit for being friendly to foreign capital.

When Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998 and started redirecting oil revenues to social programs — cutting poverty and illiteracy and building out what became the Bolivarian Revolution — DC backed a coup against him in 2002. Two of the top coup officers were graduates of the School of the Americas, the U.S. training center for Latin American repression. 1

Obama later declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to U.S. national security (fun fact: Venezuela has never once in its history started a war) while the U.S. was actively bombing multiple countries and bankrolling Colombia’s paramilitary death squads.

Trump then recognized Juan Guaidó, a guy most Venezuelans had never heard of, as “interim president,” appointed Elliott Abrams as regime-change point man, and openly threatened invasion.

They do not hate dictators. They hate disobedient governments that sit on oil.

That’s the context for Marco Rubio being confirmed as Secretary of State with Democratic votes and for Democrats now pretending this is all a shocking surprise. You don’t get a U.S. commando raid on a foreign capital in a vacuum. You get it after decades of sanctions, coup attempts, and a political class that treats the Monroe Doctrine like scripture.

The “narcoterrorism” gaslight

The sales pitch this time is “narcoterrorism.” Trump’s Attorney General Pamela Bondi is out here thanking him for the “courage” to arrest “two alleged international narco traffickers” and promising they will face “the full wrath of American justice” in U.S. courts.

There are two problems with that story.

First: drugs. Trump’s own DEA has acknowledged that Venezuela plays an extremely minor role in the flow of drugs into the United States, a finding backed up by UN and EU reports that do not treat Venezuela as a major node in global narcotics supply chains.

The big corridors are still Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and the routes through Central America and Mexico.

So why turn Venezuela — specifically Maduro’s government — into a “narco-terrorist organization”?

Because once you rebrand a sovereign government as a criminal gang, you can stop pretending this is war in any formal sense. The DSA calls this the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the Western Hemisphere becomes a U.S. “defense perimeter,” and anything from sanctions to airstrikes to kidnapping a head of state can be sold as a police action in a permanent “non-international armed conflict” with cartels.

That framing isn’t coming out of nowhere. According to detailed reporting and leaks, a secret Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo argues that:

• The U.S. is in an armed conflict with “narco-terrorist organizations,”

• Designating a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization helps turn it into a lawful military target,

• And the president can order strikes under Article II commander-in-chief powers, without treating them as “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution — because U.S. personnel are supposedly never at risk.

It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure where everything leads to the same page: the president can do what he wants, where he wants, to whomever he labels a cartel.

“International law” says something different. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter flatly prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State.” Legal analysts have also pointed out that sitting heads of state normally enjoy personal immunity from arrest by foreign governments under customary international law and the Vienna Convention. Calling Maduro a “narco-terrorist” doesn’t magically erase that; it just signals that Washington thinks it can unilaterally decide which leaders still count as leaders and which ones can be treated like fugitives. And instead of extradition through courts, this was an old-school “transboundary abduction” – the same playbook the U.S. used with Manuel Noriega in Panama, now updated with smart bombs and drone footage.

In other words: this isn’t law enforcement going long. It’s piracy.

This was never about drugs

Strip away the “narco-terror” branding and you’re left with the same old motives.

Venezuela has the largest proven petroleum reserves on the planet. And they were further defying the U.S. by selling the oil to Cuba.

Its government has tried, however imperfectly, to keep a chunk of that wealth under public control and to build a regional project (read: the Bolivarian Revolution) that redistributes resources downward and promotes sovereignty across Latin America.

And for the last twenty-plus years, Washington’s answer to that has been:
sanctions, economic strangulation, support for coups, and now open war.

The administration says this is about “justice” and “the rule of law.” But you don’t restore the rule of law by bombing a capital city, abducting elected leaders, and holding them on a warship while your lawyers retrofit a legal theory to match what you already did. You don’t defend human rights by collapsing a country’s economy and then using the resulting crisis as evidence that the government must be removed.

You especially don’t get to call anyone else a “rogue state” when you’re carrying out the exact behavior you claim gives you the right to invade.

As American as it gets

So no, this isn’t a glitch. Everything is working just as designed. And we are the bad guys, as usual.

It’s the Monroe Doctrine; now streaming in 4K. It’s Iraq with Spanish subtitles. It’s Libya with Caracas in the crosshairs instead of Tripoli.

And it’s happening in the same political moment that the U.S. is arming and shielding a live-streamed massacre in Gaza. The message to the rest of the world is not subtle: borders and sovereignty exist when they protect U.S. allies and profits. They dissolve when they get in the way.

This was never about drugs. It was never about “spreading democracy.” It’s about oil, about crushing a government that refuses to hand the keys to Chevron and Exxon and about reminding every country in the hemisphere what happens when you stop obeying.

You are supposed to feel shocked that Trump went this far. You’re not supposed to notice how much of the machinery was built by people with better grammar and a Peace Prize.

Don’t let them launder this as “justice” or “accountability.” Call it what it is:

A war crime. A kidnapping. A naked imperial smash-and-grab in a region the U.S. has treated as its back yard for 200 years.

And until we dismantle the bipartisan machinery that makes this possible — the sanctions, the bases, the OLC memos, the Monroe Doctrine mindset — every administration will keep a version of this option on the table.

This isn’t an aberration. It’s U.S. foreign policy in action.

Imperialism aside, using that kind of force against a criminal gang, rather than a state actor, blurs the line between law enforcement and war. It is precisely in this gray area where questions of ‘legality’ start to rise. But Donald Trump doesn’t let little things like legality stop him; he is selling the strike as a new, necessary escalation in his “war on drugs.”

The press asked standard questions the U.S. government should have been able to answer easily. How did you know who was on that boat? How did you know there were drugs on that boat? Who authorized the strike?

While it would be unreasonable to expect the Department of Defense (the constitutionally legal name) to release classified details that would indicate what our military intelligence capabilities are, surely, they have something more than, “Trust me, bro.”

Nope.

Then other details started hitting the headlines, the kind of headlines that make official narratives begin to crack.

As the strikes continued, the Associated Press tracked down identities of the extrajudicially killed and spoke with families and residents in the coastal towns the dead came from. The picture that emerged wasn’t a fleet of cartel ‘narco-terrorists.’ According to reporting, the dead were often disposable labor. It looked more like people struggling in a region built on poverty and exploitation than a formidable opponent worthy of a Ford-class carrier. These were fishermen, laborers, petty criminals, even a former cadet. People risking their lives in a place where making a few hundred extra dollars a month can be the difference between eating and starving.

By early December, reporting indicated more than 20 boats had been destroyed and more than 80 people dead. Are we really meant to believe everyone on every boat was a ‘narco-terrorist’? A direct threat to the security of the world’s wealthiest nation?

And while independent reporting seems to confirm at least some of these boats were moving drugs between Venezuela, Trinidad, and other islands, that doesn’t answer the ultimate question the U.S. wants to dodge. Since when is the penalty for drug trafficking death by missile?

The collateral blowback is already crossing borders. The family of Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza has filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over the Sept. 15 strike off Colombia’s coast. Colombian President Gustavo Petro has publicly stated that the hit vessel was Colombian with Colombian citizens inside. The White House denies it.

Trump’s administration insists these strikes are lawful acts within an ‘armed conflict’ with narco-terror groups (remember this). Critics keep asking how a war was declared, who gets counted as a combatant, and why the military, not law enforcement, is now the lead instrument of drug enforcement.

The legal war over the strikes

The administration’s story is blunt: these boats are part of a cartel war, and the cartels are effectively enemy armed groups.

But legal experts are not buying it. Their challenge is two-pronged.

First is international law. UN experts have called the strikes grave violations of the right to life and the law of the sea, urging investigations into what they describe as extrajudicial killings. They also explicitly warn against repeating the pattern of U.S. intervention in Latin America.

Second is domestic constitutional law. Senators and representatives have argued the strikes constitute hostilities that require congressional authorization and have introduced a War Powers resolution directing the removal of U.S. forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that Congress did not approve.

The administration’s defense is the modern U.S. classic: a mix of legal categorization, executive theory, and strategic opacity. Reporting indicates the Office of Legal Counsel drafted a classified opinion reframing drug smugglers en route to the U.S. as terrorist threats and arguing the same rules used in the global war on terror apply here. In a detail that should set off every alarm bell, that legal opinion was reportedly signed after the initial strike, and key military lawyers did not receive access until weeks later.

You can’t read that as a good-faith system trying to restrain violence. You read it as what it is: law being written to catch up to policy, not policy being restrained by law.

Why you should not expect meaningful refusal

So, there you go! If these strikes are illegal, servicemembers are protected if they refuse to carry them out, right?

Wrong.

Here’s what many people, including former CIA agents and retired fighter pilots, need to come to terms with. Disobeying unlawful orders is not something you should ever expect the U.S. military to do in any meaningful, systemic way.

An imperial apparatus would never give its soldiers a real veto over empire. The same state that wants the violence is the state that defines the legality, controls the courts, controls promotions, controls pay, and controls pensions. The “duty to refuse” is reserved for the cartoonish edge cases, the ones that let the institution present morality theater without disrupting the mission. Everything else gets presumed lawful, and anyone who tries to make personal conscience a second chain of command gets punished and replaced.

And while the administration celebrates this strike as a victory for its new aggressive posture, critics argue this ‘shoot first’ mentality will inevitably lead to soldiers receiving orders that cross the line. That fear is exactly what prompted a group of veteran lawmakers to speak up this week. Below is a video posted on Senator Elisa Slotkin’s Threads account:

Technically, they’re correct. The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) technically limits obedience to lawful orders. Article 92 punishes failure to obey lawful orders, which is the legal skeleton behind the entire culture of compliance.

However, as stated before, this ignores the fact that the military justice system and international law, for that matter, recognize an extremely narrow duty to refuse manifestly unlawful orders, the cartoonish stuff that any ordinary person would recognize as a crime, wartime or otherwise. Think an order to shoot civilians for sport.

The doctrine is real. The threshold is just intentionally brutal.

In practice, the space between “manifestly unlawful” and “politically useful violence the state can lawyer into legitimacy” is where almost everything important lives.

A servicemember can distrust the mission, fear the consequences, or believe a war is illegal and still get thrown into the woodchipper.

Don’t believe me? Check out these OEF/OIF-era cases:

• Camilo Mejía refused to return to Iraq, citing moral outrage and concerns about the war’s legality and U.S. conduct toward civilians. In 2004, he was convicted of desertion and sentenced to one year of confinement, reduced from Staff Sergeant (E-6) to Private (E-1), and given a Bad Conduct Discharge. He was released after nine months for good behavior. Amnesty recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. Note: A Bad Conduct Discharge (BCD) is a serious punitive discharge that often results in the loss of most veteran benefits; it remains part of your permanent record and can significantly limit future employment.

• Ehren Watada was the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to Iraq. He argued the war was illegal and that participation could make him complicit in war crimes. He was charged with “missing movement” and “conduct unbecoming an officer”. His 2007 court-martial ended in a mistrial, and the Army allowed him to resign with an Other Than Honorable discharge in 2009. Amnesty and other advocates criticized the fact that U.S. rules do not recognize selective conscientious objection to a particular war, which helps explain why Watada’s refusal was treated as a discipline problem rather than a genuine legal reckoning.1234

• Bowe Bergdahl was a U.S. Army Soldier who left his post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured by the Taliban. Bergdahl stated he was trying to get the attention of higher command to address what he viewed as serious problems in his unit’s leadership. He sincerely believed his Battalion commander was sending his units on “suicide missions” and was not being held accountable for misconduct. According to testimony from the investigating officer, Bergdahl said he hoped his disappearance would trigger enough urgency that a general officer would finally hear his concerns. At sentencing years later, he again claimed he left to report misconduct in his unit, not to abandon the mission for its own sake. The Article 32 officer later noted there was “almost unanimous agreement” that Bergdahl left with good, though misguided motives. On July 25, 2023, a federal judge vacated the conviction due to an appearance-of-bias issue involving the military judge, and the Justice Department appealed in 2024. As of the date of this writing, the appeal is still ongoing.

These cases underline the pattern you’re supposed to ignore. When servicemembers break with command for perceived moral or legal reasons, the institution does not treat that as principled resistance. It treats it as a threat to authority and moves to discipline.

The architecture that makes refusal a fantasy

The truth is orders are, by design, presumed lawful. The chain of command controls performance reviews, assignments, promotions, and who gets frozen out. The military justice system moves fast, and a refusal can cost pay, rank, benefits, and career before any outside court or public debate ever gets near the facts. That is not a bug. That is how discipline is manufactured.

Even the legal advisors inside the machine face incentives to rationalize, not rebel. A recent law review analysis argues that judge advocates are embedded within command culture and pressured to provide justifying legal cover under imperfect information, with real career risk for saying no.

Now zoom back out to the Venezuela strikes.

If the Pentagon is willing to construct a classified framework after the fact, and if Congress has to fight for the basic documents explaining who authorized what, then the fantasy that some colonel, captain or private is going to heroically refuse on principle becomes what it always was: a comforting movie scene where you can’t handle the truth.

Snap Back to Reality

An imperial state does not outsource moral veto power to the people holding rifles. It centralizes authority, then manufactures legality around its own needs.

So when Trump’s defenders say the strikes are legal because the administration says they are, that is not just circular logic. It is a confession of how the system works. The same government that wants the violence is the government that staffs the lawyers who bless it. (See: Israel)

If opponents are right, and these strikes violate the law of war and the law of the sea, we are not watching an accidental slide into illegality. We are watching a familiar imperial move: create a new category of enemy, expand executive war powers, and dare anyone to stop you.

If your desperation has you clinging on the hope that “the military will restrain Trump,” you are betting on the wrong institution. The U.S. military is the product of thousands of years of lessons learned. They will (and have!) kill even U.S. citizens if ordered. What makes you think they won’t kill Venezuelans?

The narrow rule is true: a soldier must refuse an obviously criminal order.
The broader reality is also true: the system threatens, isolates, and replaces anyone who tries to treat personal legal judgment as equal to command authority.

The architecture serves to ensure obedience, then to launder that obedience into legitimacy.

So no, the military will not save us from Trump.
Not in Venezuela.
Not at home.
Not anywhere an imperial project needs violence to stay coherent.

The myth of “unlawful orders” is a sedative.
And empire loves a sedated public.

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Last month, a gunman ambushed two National Guard soldiers near the White House. Within hours, the alleged shooter was identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national. The next moves were brutally predictable.

“This heinous assault was an act of evil, an act of hatred, and an act of terror. It was a crime against our entire nation. It was a crime against humanity.” –Donald Trump

Almost immediately, the Trump administration froze Afghan-related immigration requests, halted visa processing for Afghan passport holders, and even paused asylum decisions across the board “pending review.” The State Department and immigration agencies announced new checks on Afghans already in the country.

One man pulled a trigger. Millions of Afghans suddenly found their lives and status under suspicion.

Now compare that to what happened just a month and a half earlier, when conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a university speaking event. The alleged shooter in that case is a young white American man. The political right exploded with rhetoric about “leftist violence” and a “war on conservatives,” and Trump blamed “radical left lunatics” and “woke extremists” for poisoning young minds.

But notice what did not happen. No one in power suggested that young white men as a group are a security threat. No one called for a national registry of white males. No one proposed a pause on immigration from Europe. The blame landed on the shooter’s supposed ideology, not on his race or ancestry.

This is the American double standard in one short line: When a member of the majority commits political violence, we scrutinize their beliefs. When a member of a racialized minority does, we scrutinize their entire community.

The Mechanism of Blame: The Privilege of Individuality

To see how this works, you have to look not just at what people condemn, but how they condemn it.

Conservatives can point to the Kirk assassination and say: “Look, the shooter was denounced. People blamed leftist networks and campus culture. White men do get blamed.”

But that confuses two very different things: ideological blame and identity blame.

When a white, American-born shooter commits an atrocity, the story is almost always framed as personal perversion or ideological extremism. In the Kirk case, commentators went after the shooter’s beliefs. They said he was driven by anti-conservative hatred or some “woke brainwashing.” He was denounced as a violent leftist yet still treated as fundamentally an individual who made an evil choice.

So, the proposed solutions stay narrow and institutional. Crack down on “Antifa.” Investigate campus professors. Audit university diversity programs. Fund more mental health services. In that story, his whiteness, his ancestry, and his religion are background noise.

Now change the perpetrator’s identity.

When a Muslim or immigrant suspect commits violence, the narrative shifts from what he believes to what he is. The act is no longer “one man’s crime.” It becomes a data point in a supposed civilizational threat. Violence is painted as something baked into “their” culture, “their” religion, “their” homeland.

The proposed solutions scale up accordingly. Surveillance of mosques. Travel bans and refugee freezes. Loyalty tests. Extra vetting for entire nationalities. The suspicion jumps from the individual to millions of people who did nothing.

That split creates a kind of unspoken social power most white Americans never have to name: the privilege of individuality.

As Dalia Mogahed of ISPU puts it, “White people don’t face collective criminalization when ‘one of them’ behaves badly.” When a white man commits a monstrous act, other white people do not wake up the next morning wondering if they will be asked to condemn him on TV, prove their patriotism, or have their citizenship re-examined.

White violence is treated as a glitch in the system. Minority violence is treated as a virus in the blood.

One is framed as a problem of persons. The other is framed as a problem of people.

The Media’s Linguistic Gymnastics

This is not just vibes. It is measurable.

A landmark study of 136 terrorist attacks in the United States between 2006 and 2015 found that attacks committed by Muslims received about 4½ times more coverage—roughly 357 percent more—than those by non-Muslims, even when the number of victims was similar. Muslims carried out about one-eighth of the attacks in that period. They dominated the headlines.

In other words, when the perpetrator is Muslim, the story is far more likely to become a national spectacle. When the perpetrator is not, the story is far more likely to stay local or fade faster. The bias is not just in volume. It shows up in vocabulary.

Researchers comparing media coverage of the 2015 Charleston church massacre by Dylann Roof and the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting by Omar Mateen found a stark pattern. Roof, who murdered nine Black worshippers in a historic Black church, was more often framed in terms of mental health, personal troubles, or loneliness. Mateen, who killed 49 mostly queer and Latinx clubgoers, was far more likely to be described with words like “terrorism” and “terrorist.”

Same mass murder. Same country. Different labels, depending on the perpetrator.

The language moves in other ways too:

• Passive voice. When white attackers kill, headlines often blur agency: “Tragedy at a church,” “Officer-involved shooting,” “Clash turns deadly.” The violence seems to descend from nowhere.

• The troubled loner story. Reporters dig into the white perpetrator’s childhood, family issues, job loss, or psychiatric history. The violence becomes a personal breakdown more than a political act.

• The T-word as a trigger. When corporate media and officials use the word “terrorism,” it unlocks the full national security toolkit: surveillance authorities, special prosecutions, terrorism watchlists, immigration crackdowns. When they avoid the word, those tools tend to stay in their holster.

Same dead bodies. Different labels. Completely different consequences.

A Short History of the “Lone Wolf” Pass

For more than two decades, the deadliest extremist violence on U.S. soil has not come from foreign jihadists. It has come from homegrown white supremacists and far-right extremists. Yet again and again, the official story has been that these are “lone wolves” or “disturbed individuals,” not part of a larger terror movement.

A few examples:

Charleston (2015). Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, walked into Mother Emanuel AME Church and murdered nine Black worshippers during Bible study. He published a racist manifesto, posed with Confederate and apartheid flags, and said he wanted to start a race war. If a Muslim man citing ISIS propaganda had done the same thing, there is no serious doubt that “terrorism” would have led every headline. Instead, the FBI Director at the time described it as a hate crime, not domestic terrorism.

Overland Park (2014). A 73-year-old former KKK leader attacked Jewish community sites in Kansas, killing three people and shouting “Heil Hitler.” By any plain language definition, this was terrorism: political violence against civilians to advance a racist ideology. Yet media coverage tended to call it a “shooting rampage,” and prosecutors used murder and hate crime charges, not any terror-related statute.

Charlottesville (2017). At the Unite the Right rally, neo-Nazi James Alex Fields used his car as a weapon, plowing into anti-racist protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens. Vehicle ramming is the exact tactic that ISIS encouraged its supporters to use in Western cities. When Muslims did it, those attacks were universally branded terrorism. Fields was condemned and eventually convicted on hate crime and murder charges, but there was no federal domestic terrorism charge to file. Trump responded by claiming there were “very fine people on both sides,” softening the perception of the rally and its participants.

Pittsburgh (2018). At the Tree of Life synagogue, a white supremacist murdered 11 Jewish worshippers during Shabbat services. He had ranted online about Jews “bringing invaders” into the country, echoing the “Great Replacement” and “invasion” rhetoric heard in mainstream politics. The attack had every hallmark of terrorism: civilian targets, ideological motive, intent to terrorize a community. Federal prosecutors sought the death penalty under hate crime and civil rights statutes, but not under any specific domestic terror law.

Taken together, the pattern is hard to ignore:

• When the perpetrator is white and American, even open ideological violence is treated as a one-off tragedy or “hate crime case.”

• The number of people killed does not fundamentally change that framing.

• The ideology behind the killing does not automatically trigger a national security response.

What does change the response is the identity of the shooter. If he is coded as one of “us,” the system tries to contain and compartmentalize the event. If he is coded as “them,” the system generalizes and mobilizes.

This “lone wolf” pass has persisted even as white supremacist and far-right violence has become the most lethal extremist threat in the United States in the post-9/11 era, according to both government and independent research. Remember: this isn’t the system broken, it’s the system acting as designed.

The “Legal Gap” Is Not an Alibi

When you point this out, some defenders of the status quo (cough-libs-cough) reach for a technical argument:

“We don’t call white shooters ‘terrorists’ because there is no domestic terrorism law. Our hands are tied.”

There is a grain of truth here. Federal law defines “domestic terrorism” in 18 U.S.C. § 2331(5), and agencies like the FBI and DHS use that definition for investigations and reporting. But there is no general federal crime simply called “domestic terrorism.” Prosecutors usually rely on hate crime laws, civil rights statutes, weapons offenses, and murder charges.

By contrast, when there is a foreign or jihadist connection, the government has an entire specialized toolbox. There are “material support” charges for aiding designated foreign terrorist organizations, immigration bars and deportation tools tied to terrorism, foreign intelligence authorities, and terrorism enhancements at sentencing.

So yes, there is a legal gap. But we have to ask a basic question: who designed this gap, and who does it serve?

DHS and the FBI have been warning for years that white supremacist and anti-government extremists pose the most persistent and lethal domestic terror threat. Think tanks like CSIS have documented the same trend, and legal scholars have drafted model domestic terror statutes to close the charging gap.

Congress has still not passed a comprehensive domestic terrorism law.

That is not a natural disaster. It is a political choice. Lawmakers worry that a broad domestic terror statute could be turned on their own base or used against protesters and social movements. Rather than admit that, they hide behind the “no statute” excuse.

And even without a specific charge, nothing prevents officials or media from using plain language. The FBI has internally categorized several white supremacist attacks as domestic terrorism. Prosecutors have described defendants like Coast Guard officer Christopher Hasson, who stockpiled weapons and drafted hit lists of politicians, as “domestic terrorists” in court filings even when they charged other crimes.

If Charleston, Pittsburgh, El Paso, and Buffalo had involved Muslim perpetrators, nobody would hesitate to call them terrorism. The reluctance to use that same word consistently for white supremacist violence is not required by law. It is produced by politics.

The law does not erase the double standard. In many ways, the law is the double standard, written down.

El Paso and Buffalo: Naming Terror Without Consequences

By the late 2010s, some white supremacist attacks had become too big and too clearly ideological to shove under the “lone wolf” rug. El Paso and Buffalo forced the word “terrorism” into public statements.

El Paso (2019). A 21-year-old white man drove to a Walmart in El Paso and opened fire, killing 23 people and wounding dozens more. He posted a manifesto about a “Hispanic invasion,” echoing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Federal authorities quickly said they were treating the massacre as both a hate crime and an act of domestic terrorism.

Yet when the indictment came down, it was built from familiar pieces: hate crimes and firearms charges, not some overarching domestic terrorism statute, because no such charge exists. He ultimately faced multiple life sentences, but the case was prosecuted as a particularly horrific crime, not as a blueprint for a broader war on white nationalist terror.

Buffalo (2022). In a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, an 18-year-old white supremacist live-streamed himself murdering ten Black people at a Tops supermarket. He left a manifesto steeped in Great Replacement rhetoric. New York State charged him with first-degree murder and with a new offense: “domestic act of terrorism motivated by hate.” Federally, he faced hate crime and weapons charges.

President Biden flew to Buffalo and explicitly called the attack “domestic terrorism” driven by white supremacy. DHS reports and intelligence assessments now openly list racially motivated violent extremism, especially white supremacy, as a top threat.

On the surface, this looked like progress. Finally, white supremacist massacres were being named as terrorism.

But look at what did not follow. After El Paso, nobody argued that young white men should be profiled at gun stores or on social media. After Buffalo, there were no calls to pause visas from majority-white countries. White Americans as a demographic were not discussed as a suspect class.

Instead, the focus went to online platforms and fringe forums. That matters, and those systems should be scrutinized. But even in those discussions, there is a tendency to frame white shooters as somewhat tragic figures: isolated, vulnerable, groomed by algorithms, poisoned by extremist communities. That psychological nuance is almost never extended to 19-year-old jihadis.

So yes, the word “terrorism” has finally appeared more often when white supremacists massacre Black or Brown communities. That is a rhetorical step forward.

Yet for white perpetrators, “terrorism” often functions as a symbolic label. It helps acknowledge the horror without dragging along the full machinery of group suspicion and structural overhaul. For Muslims, Arabs, Afghans, and other racialized groups, the terrorism label still tends to come bundled with bans, registries, and collective punishment.

El Paso and Buffalo forced America to whisper the truth: white supremacist violence is terrorism. Liberals are quick to parrot this truth, but where is the legislation that addresses it?

“Terrorism”: The Language of the Oppressor

Here is the part this country keeps dodging:

“Terrorism” is not a neutral word waiting to be applied fairly. It was built inside empire and white supremacy. In practice it has never meant “anyone who uses violence against civilians for political ends.” It has meant their violence, as opposed to ours.

The same act can be “counterinsurgency,” “national defense,” or “a regrettable tragedy” when we do it, and “terrorism” when they do it. The label doesn’t just describe a tactic. It assigns legitimacy. It says: their violence is barbaric and irrational; ours is unfortunate but necessary. Their dead are a security problem; our dead are a national wound.

So the answer is not simply to stuff more people into the terrorism box. Expanding the label without questioning it just enlarges a category that was designed from the start to police certain bodies and spare others. The real work is to expose who the word has always been for and whose violence it has always excused.

Right now, “national security” in practice often means “protecting us from them.” “Them” is almost always imagined as foreign, Brown, Muslim, immigrant. While we pour resources into surveilling refugee families and scrutinizing names that sound Muslim, we risk missing the growing threat in our own backyard.

That does not make us safer. It is political theater that plays on fear of the Other.

Real security would mean:

1. Placing white supremacist and far-right violence at the center of the ‘terrorism’ category, not at the margins, if we insist on using the term.

2. Refusing to scapegoat any group, whether Muslims, Afghans, immigrants, white people, or Christians, for crimes they did not commit.

3. Building laws and institutions that treat conduct as the trigger for serious scrutiny, not race or passport.

Real justice means refusing the premise that any community is born suspect. It means treating violence as something people do, not something they are. It means dismantling the systems that let white gunmen keep the privilege of individuality while Muslims, migrants, and Black and Brown communities live under permanent group suspicion.

It also means being honest about the word we’ve built so much of this around. “Terrorism” is not a neutral description waiting to be applied fairly. It’s a political tool, shaped by empire and white supremacy, used to criminalize some people’s violence and rationalize other people’s. The problem isn’t that it occasionally fails to keep us safe. It was never designed for safety. It was designed to sort the world into people whose lives are expendable and people whose fear can be weaponized.

As long as Black and Brown people have to hold their breath after every headline and quietly hope the shooter is white, we haven’t fixed anything. We’ve just updated the branding on the same old hierarchy.

The task isn’t to reform the “war on terror.” It’s to end the idea that security requires a permanent enemy class.

“I don’t know anything about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it.” -Donald J. Trump lying to the public July 2024.

Trump’s new student loan plan does not say “Black women” anywhere in the text, but it doesn’t have to. The targeting is in the design. It draws a bright red line between the elite, historically white professions it protects and the care-heavy, public-facing fields it downgrades in federal loan policy, precisely where Black and Brown women are gaining the most ground.

As a retired combat vet whose own education was covered by federal benefits, I pay close attention to which futures this country is willing to bankroll. In this article, I map that rigged design: how the law is structured, which degrees it shields, and how it weaponizes debt against the very fields – like social work, nursing, and education – where Black and Brown women and femmes have finally begun to gain ground. This isn’t an accident; it is a core feature of the new right’s agenda.

Trump’s “big, beautiful” student loan overhaul is not just a budget tweak. It is a targeted redesign that strips affordable access from care and service degrees while reinforcing elite white-collar professions behind higher federal loan caps. It’s a blueprint for preserving privilege and retrenching racial and gender inequality inside higher education just as the door to the middle class finally begins to crack open. It fits neatly inside the white Christian nationalist project that wants to decide whose education counts. And whose does not.

What Trump’s “Big, Beautiful” Student Loan Law Actually Does

In July 2025, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – which was anything but “beautiful.” It was a massive tax and spending package that quietly rewired the entire federal student loan system. For the purposes of this essay, we can focus on three key changes the law makes to student loans:

• Ends Grad PLUS loans. This program used to let graduate and professional students borrow up to the full cost of attendance.

• Replaces a patchwork of income-driven repayment plans with a new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) that stretches payments out to 30 years and bases them on adjusted gross income with far less low-income protection than the previous SAVE plan offered.

• Caps how much students can borrow from the federal government at two levels: a lower cap for “regular” graduate degrees and a much higher cap for “professional” degrees.

On paper, that might sound like simple belt-tightening. In reality, those caps are the knife’s edge of the policy.

If your degree is on the “professional” list, you can still borrow up to around $200,000 for graduate school. If it is not, you get stuck at a lower cap (around $100,000) and are told to figure out the rest. In other words, Washington is no longer just asking whether a program is accredited or legitimate. It’s asking whether it is elite enough to deserve a bigger line of credit.

The Official Story: Credential Inflation and the Bennett Hypothesis

Defenders of this student loan overhaul point to “credential inflation” and something called the Bennett Hypothesis. The story goes like this:

• Grad PLUS loans let students borrow nearly unlimited amounts.

• Colleges saw that as free money and jacked up tuition.

• Taxpayers picked up the tab when borrowers could not repay.

So, the Trump administration claims, cutting Grad PLUS and capping borrowing is about reining in runaway costs. They gesture at research on the Bennett Hypothesis, which argues that generous federal aid leads to higher tuition, not lower barriers.

There are small slivers of truth here. Many for-profit and high-priced programs absolutely have abused access to federal loans. But if this were purely about pricing discipline, you would expect regulations that rein in all sectors equally.

Instead, the law gives a higher borrowing cap to a very specific set of programs.

Why “Professional Degree” Status Suddenly Matters So Much

Under the new rules, the Department of Education divides graduate degrees into two broad categories:

• Professional programs - which can access the higher borrowing cap (around $200,000).

• Non-professional graduate programs - stuck with a lower cap (around $100,000).

Early guidance and advocacy summaries show that “professional” is defined in a narrow way, based largely on old regulatory language. Degrees like MD, DO, DDS, DMD, DVM, JD, pharmacy, optometry, podiatry, chiropractic, and theology are clearly in the protected club.

Anything not in that bucket is at risk of being treated like a “regular” grad program, even if the degree is required for licensure and carries six-figure price tags.

That line between “professional” and “not quite professional enough” is where the racial and gender politics show up.

Who Still Counts as “Professional”: Medicine, Law, and Theology

Look at the fields that the Department and lobbyists have rallied to defend as “professional”:

• Medicine and osteopathic medicine

• Dentistry and veterinary medicine

• Pharmacy and optometry

• Law (JD)

• Theology and some religious degrees1

• A handful of other traditional prestige doctorates

Other than theology, these are the classic high-status professions long gatekept by race, class, and legacy admissions. Even after some progress, Black and Hispanic people are still deeply underrepresented among physicians relative to their share of the U.S. population, while white and Asian doctors are overrepresented

Law school looks similar: recent data show that only about 8% of law students are Black, far below Black representation in the population.

These elite fields get to keep full access to federal credit up to the new ~$200,000 cap. If you want to become a corporate attorney or an orthopedic surgeon and your family has little wealth, the federal government will still backstop a huge chunk of that cost.

If you want a career centered on healing trauma, stabilizing families, or keeping elders alive at home, that is where the axe falls.

Who Got Pushed Out of the “Professional” Club

Now look at the degrees that did not make it onto the clearly protected professional list:

• Master of Social Work (MSW)

• Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) and many advanced nursing degrees

• Education doctorates (EdD)

• A range of counseling, public health, and community-based practice programs

These are not “optional” degrees for most paths in the field. They are often the minimum credential for licensure, clinical authority, or higher pay. They routinely cost well over $100,000 once you factor in tuition, fees, and living expenses.

But under Trump’s student loan plan, these degrees are either:

• Treated as “non-professional” and forced under the lower borrowing cap, or

• Left in regulatory limbo, where schools and borrowers cannot be sure how much federal credit will actually be available.

Either way, the result is the same. If you want to be a social worker, nurse practitioner, school psychologist, or education leader, you will hit a federal credit ceiling faster and be pushed toward private lenders to finish your degree.

That is not a neutral budgeting choice. It is a choice about whose work is considered worth investing in.

The Racial and Gender Math Is Not Subtle

Here is where the numbers matter.

Social work and nursing are two of the most heavily feminized – and increasingly Black – professions in the country:

• Social work: New social workers are about 90 percent women, with more than 22 percent Black and 14 percent Hispanic. The overall social work workforce is overwhelmingly female, and new MSW cohorts are becoming more racially diverse over time.

• Nursing: Nursing remains dominated by women (roughly 89% of registered nurses are female, with growing shares of Black, Latina, and immigrant nurses – especially in lower-paid, high-burnout care specialties.

These are the fields that get hit by the lower federal loan cap. So when Trump’s Department of Education draws a bright line between “professional” doctors and lawyers and “non-professional” social workers and advanced nurses, the impact is not random. It’s a policy that makes it harder for women of color, especially Black women, to access the degrees that let them move into the middle class while serving their communities.

Black Women Are Borrowing Into a Wealth Desert

To understand the violence of this policy, you have to put it inside the wealth numbers.

Single white men under 35 have a median wealth of around $22,000, while for single Black women under 35 it is only about $100. Not a typo: one hundred dollars. In fact, nearly half of single Black women have no net wealth or owe more than they own when debts are counted. When Republicans talk about “personal responsibility,” these are the numbers they don’t want you to think about.

When we talk about Black and Brown women and femmes in social work and nursing, we are talking about people who often:

• Come from families without much intergenerational wealth

• Already earn less than white men in comparable roles

• Are more likely to be supporting extended family

Of course they borrow more. Loans are not a luxury for them; student debt is the only way many women of color can get the credentials that white students still often fund with home equity, family savings, or “small loans of a million dollars” from Dad.

As someone who’s had the state happily pay to train me for war, I know exactly what it looks like when the government decides your path does deserve a blank check. This policy is about deciding whose path does not.

From Federal Aid to Modern Redlining

The administration will say, “We’re not stopping anyone from going to school. We’re just limiting how much the federal government will lend.” That is technically true – and practically meaningless.

Here is what actually happens when you:

• Eliminate Grad PLUS

• Lower caps for “non-professional” degrees

• Keep tuition high because public funding cuts have shifted costs to students over decades

Students who hit the cap and still have a gap to cover turn to private student loans and other forms of credit. Unlike federal loans, private lenders:

• Underwrite based on credit scores and wealth

• Can require co-signers with assets

• Offer fewer protections, no income-driven repayment, and much harsher default consequences

In other words, the policy moves the gate from the Department of Education to the credit bureau. It says, “The federal government will not help you finish this degree. Go ask a bank and see if your family’s credit history qualifies you.”

If you grew up in a Black family that was shut out of homeownership, targeted by subprime loans, or has already been crushed by medical debt, that is not a neutral shift. That is a 2020s version of redlining for higher education.

The Triple Penalty: Race, Gender, and New Repayment Rules

The loan caps are only one layer. Trump’s law also restructures how repayment works.

The new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) will:

• Replace most existing income-driven repayment plans for future borrowers

• Require payments for up to 30 years before any forgiveness

• Base payments on adjusted gross income, with far less protection for low-income borrowers than the Biden-era SAVE plan provided

At the same time:

• The Biden-era SAVE plan has been frozen, put into legal limbo, and slated for elimination for new borrowers.

• Parent PLUS loans are now capped at lower levels, closing off one of the few tools Black parents (who borrow for their children’s education at nearly twice the rate of White parents) used to help their kids through school, even if it meant taking on painful debt.

Put that together and you get what your draft already calls the Triple Penalty:

1. Race: Black and Brown borrowers start with less family wealth and face labor market discrimination.

2. Gender: Women and femmes of color – especially Black women and femmes - earn less and carry more unpaid care responsibilities.

3. Policy: A loan system redesigned to cut off federal credit to the degrees they actually pursue and trap them in longer, harsher repayment.

You do not need a leaked memo or Signal chat that says “target Black women” to see what is happening. If you feed racist and sexist inequalities into a neutral-sounding formula, you get racist and sexist outcomes.

Gatekeeping the Middle Class Through Degree Design

For decades, higher education has sold itself as the ticket to the middle class. That ticket was always stamped by race and class, but it was at least theoretically available.

Trump’s student loan plan rewrites that deal.

The message is:

• If you want to join already elite professions like law and medicine, the state will still back you with six-figure loans.

• If you want to do the emotional, relational, and community care work that holds society together, the state will starve those degrees of federal credit and push you into private debt peonage.

The result is a higher education system where:

• Elite professions stay disproportionately white and shielded.

• “Caring professions” become accessible only to people who already have money or family backing.

• Black women and other women of color are punished for choosing work that is essential rather than work that is lucrative.

That is not “fixing” any market. That is segregating the middle class by wealth.

Project 2025 and the Broader War on Diversity

None of this arrives in a vacuum.

Right-wing think tanks spent years publishing blueprints like Project 2025, which call for:

• Gutting the Department of Education

• Rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives

• Steering public money away from institutions that serve students of color

At the same time, Trump’s administration has supported or cheered on attacks on race-based scholarships, DEI offices, and affirmative action. In medicine alone, new anti-DEI policies have threatened millions of dollars in scholarships that Black doctors created to support Black medical students.

Seen in that context, Trump’s student loan plan isn’t a glitch – it’s part of a coherent project: reduce the number of Black and Brown professionals who can wield credentials, income, and institutional power.

You cannot defend that by yelling “fiscal responsibility.” That is a political choice about whose education is worth subsidizing.

12. Answering the “Fiscal Responsibility” Gaslighting

You will hear familiar lines:

• “We cannot keep writing blank checks with taxpayer money.”

• “Students should think twice before taking on so much debt.”

• “If these degrees do not pay, people should not borrow for them.”

Here is how to answer that without ceding the frame.

1. The debt exists because of decades of public disinvestment.
   Tuition exploded when states and the federal government cut direct support to public colleges and shifted costs onto students, forcing tuition to skyrocket. If you are serious about “fiscal responsibility,” you fund schools up front so students do not need to borrow as much.

2. Trump’s bill doesn’t actually reduce the need for borrowing.
   It caps how much the federal government will lend while leaving high tuition intact. That does not lower costs. It just forces poorer students into riskier private credit.

3. The cuts are not neutral across fields.
   If this were truly about ROI, the administration would be willing to confront overpriced law schools and low-value elite MBAs. Instead, it protects those programs and targets social work, nursing, and education where salaries are modest but the social return is massive.

4. Black women are not borrowing for vanity degrees.
   They are overrepresented in fields that handle trauma, addiction, violence, child welfare, and end-of-life care. These jobs keep communities alive – they simply pay less because capitalism devalues care work and racism devalues Black labor.

If You Are in Social Work, Nursing, or Education, What Does This Mean?

If you are already in or planning to enter these fields, you do not need another lecture about “being realistic.” You need clarity about the landscape.

Under Trump’s student loan plan:

• You are more likely to hit the federal borrowing cap before finishing your degree.

• You may be pushed toward private student loans with higher interest rates and fewer protections.

• If you borrow after July 1, 2026, your only income-based option may be RAP, with a 30-year horizon and weaker safeguards than SAVE.

That does not mean “do not go.” It means:

• Scrutinize program costs, especially private schools that charge elite prices for non-elite outcomes.

• Demand transparent data on debt and earnings from the programs recruiting you.

• Organize with classmates and professional associations to push back on tuition hikes and predatory lending.

I’m not qualified to give individual financial advice. But I can tell you this: the problem isn’t that you dreamed too big. The problem is that a racist, sexist policy architecture is trying to punish you for dreaming at all.

How We Fight Back

Policy choices got us here. Different policy choices can get us out.

Some obvious fronts for resistance:

• State-level funding and scholarships. Push states to restore public funding for social work, nursing, and education programs – and to create race-conscious or race-aware scholarships where possible under current law. Write your congressperson, rally outside their office – demand to be heard.

• Union and professional association pressure. Social work, nursing, and teacher unions can bargain for tuition assistance, loan repayment support, and employer-based scholarship pipelines.

• Targeted debt relief for caring professions. Organize around immediate wins while we fight for full cancellation. Support campaigns that demand loan forgiveness for people in child welfare, community mental health, public schools, and safety-net clinics. Show up at hearings, flood your reps’ phones, amplify the workers already fighting for this relief.

• Broad student debt cancellation. Plug into groups already organizing for full cancellation (Debt Collective, DSA, etc.), back strike actions and refusals, and make this a non-negotiable demand in elections and union politics. Make any politician who wants your vote answer why they won’t erase this debt.

None of that will happen because people politely ask. It happens when students, borrowers, and communities make it politically expensive to keep attacking caring professions.

Defending Caring Professions Is Racial Justice Work

Sometimes student loan debates get framed as a “millennial problem” or an “upper middle-class problem.” That framing erases the core of what is happening here.

Defending social work, nursing, and education funding is:

• About whether Black and Brown women can safely enter the middle class without being chained to predatory debt.

• About whether Black and Brown communities will have therapists, caseworkers, nurses, and teachers who look like them and share their experiences.

• About whether trauma, poverty, and violence will be treated as social crises or just private failures to be managed quietly.

Trump’s student loan plan picks a side in that fight. It sides with elite professions that already have power and against the people who keep communities alive.

Name It for What It Is

So let us strip away the talking points.

This is not just “reforming student loans.” It is a targeted reclassification of which degrees count as “professional,” coupled with new repayment rules that trap the most vulnerable borrowers in decades of payments.

In practice, Trump’s education policy:

• Protects law, medicine, and other historically white, elite professions with higher federal loan caps.

• Starves social work, nursing, and education of affordable credit precisely as Black women and other women of color flood into these fields.

• Pushes those students toward private lenders who can gatekeep based on wealth and credit – reproducing a modern version of redlining in higher education.

I spent 23 years in uniform. I’ve watched this country write blank checks for war while asking if we can really “afford” housing, health care, or education. Now the same political project is quietly deciding which students get a credit line and which ones get a lecture about responsibility.

You can call that “fiscal responsibility” if you want. I call it what it is:

Systemic racism and misogyny, wrapped in budgeting bullshit designed to keep Black and Brown women/femmes out of the professional middle class.

If you are not angry, you are not paying attention.

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FAQs

Q1. What is Trump’s student loan plan and how does it change graduate borrowing?
Trump’s student loan plan, passed in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ends Grad PLUS loans, caps graduate borrowing at different levels for “professional” and “non-professional” degrees, and replaces most income-driven plans with the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP). Professional programs like medicine and law keep access to higher federal loan caps, while fields such as social work, nursing, and education face tighter limits and more reliance on private loans.

Q2. Which degrees count as “professional” under the new student loan rules?
The professional category clearly includes medicine, osteopathic medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, pharmacy, optometry, podiatry, chiropractic, law, and certain theology degrees. These programs can access higher federal loan caps – often up to around $200,000 – while other graduate programs are subject to lower limits. Social work, many nursing doctorates, and education doctorates are not clearly protected under this list.

Q3. Why are Black women hit hardest by these changes?
Black women are disproportionately represented in social work, nursing, and other caring professions that now face tighter federal loan caps. New social workers are about 90 percent women and more than 22 percent Black[1], while Black women overall have extremely low median wealth (around $100 for single women under 35)[12]. That means Black women are more likely to rely on student loans to enter these fields – and more vulnerable when the system cuts off affordable federal credit and pushes them toward private loans.

Q4. How does the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) differ from the SAVE plan?
RAP replaces most existing income-driven plans for future borrowers and requires payments for up to 30 years before forgiveness. It calculates payments as a percentage of adjusted gross income with far less protection for low-income borrowers than SAVE (which shielded a larger share of income and offered more generous interest and forgiveness terms). SAVE is being phased out for new borrowers under Trump’s law, leaving RAP as the main option for those who borrow after July 1, 2026.

Q5. Is this student loan overhaul really about fiscal responsibility?
The administration frames the changes as an effort to control costs and reduce “credential inflation,” but the design of the policy tells a different story. It protects elite professional degrees while cutting access for caring professions that are disproportionately staffed by women of color. It doesn’t actually reduce tuition or address decades of public disinvestment in higher education – it just shifts more risk onto the borrowers who have the least wealth. If your idea of “responsibility” is tightening the screws on Black women in caring professions while law schools keep printing six-figure debt, the problem isn’t math. It’s who you think deserves a future. This is just more Project 2025 in action.

Bibliography

Council on Social Work Education & NASW – The Social Work Profession: Findings from Three Years of Surveys of New Social Workers (Press Release, Dec. 11, 2020). [Key social work demographics: ~90% of new MSWs are women; 22% Black, 14% Hispanic]

American Association of Colleges of Nursing – Nursing Workforce Fact Sheet (2022). [Registered nurse population ~89% female]

Rebecca Pifer – “Black women disproportionately concentrated in low-wage, hazardous healthcare jobs, study finds.” Healthcare Dive, Feb. 8, 2022. [Black women’s overrepresentation in low-paid health care roles]

Andis Robeznieks – “How diversity’s power can help overcome the physician shortage.” AMA News, May 18, 2022. [AAMC data: Black people ~13% of U.S. population but ~5% of physicians; Hispanic ~18.5% pop. but ~5.8% of physicians]

Latoya Hill et al. – Physician Workforce Diversity by Race and Ethnicity. KFF Issue Brief, July 22, 2025. [Black and Hispanic people are underrepresented among physicians relative to population; White and Asian physicians are overrepresented]

American Bar Association – ABA 2023 Law School Enrollment Data (reported Dec. 2024). [Black students ~8% of U.S. law school enrollment, vs ~13% of population]

Emmanuel Felton – “Trump DEI policies threaten millions in scholarships raised by Black doctors.” The Washington Post, May 13, 2025. [Anti-DEI measures imperil ~$4 million in Black medical student scholarships]

Becca Stanek – “What to expect for student loan repayment under Trump’s budget bill.” The Week, July 28, 2025. [Summary of Trump’s loan changes; new RAP plan requires 30-year payments]

Eliza Haverstock – “8 Major Student Loan Changes From Trump’s Budget Bill: Next Steps for Borrowers.” NerdWallet, 2025. [Details on Grad/Parent PLUS caps and new repayment rules]

Adam Looney et al. – “Capping the wrong problem: Why Parent PLUS loan limits may miss the mark.” Brookings Institution, 2024. [Black parents borrow Parent PLUS loans at nearly twice the rate of white parents]

The Leadership Conference Education Fund – Project 2025: What’s At Stake for Education, Aug. 2024. [Heritage Foundation blueprint calls to abolish Dept. of Ed, eliminate DEI efforts, etc.]

Jalil Bishop – How Black Women Experience Student Debt. The Education Trust, April 2022. [Analysis of 2019 data: median net worth of single Black women under 35 is ~$100; nearly half have zero or negative wealth]

Michael Mitchell & Michael Leachman – State Higher Education Funding Cuts Have Pushed Costs to Students. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Oct. 24, 2019. [State funding down ~28% per student since 2008; tuition up to compensate]

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