US military airlifts small reactor as Trump pushes to quickly deploy nuclear power

Skeptics warn that nuclear energy poses risks and say microreactors may not be safe or feasible and have not proved they can meet demand for a reasonable price.

MATTHEW DALY
Sat, February 21, 2026 
AP


Energy Secretary Chris Wright, center, and Under Secretary of Defense Michael Duffey, left, listen as Isaiah Taylor, CEO of Valar Atomics, discusses a microreactor developed by Valar to generate nuclear power for the military and commercial customers, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026, in-flight, on board a C-17. (AP Photo/Matthew Daly)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Energy Secretary Chris Wright speaks at a news conference at March Air Reserve Base, Calif., Sunday Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthew Daly)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

A Valar Atomics microreactor is seen on a C-17 aircraft, without nuclear fuel, at March Air Reserve Base, Calif., Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. The reactor was transported from March Air Reserve Base to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. (AP Photo/Matthew Daly)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Isaiah Taylor, CEO of Valar Atomics, left, speaks as Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, center, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, listen, at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, Sunday, Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthew Daly)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, center, tours a C-17 military aircraft as a microreactor was transported from March Air Reserve Base, Calif., to Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Sunday ,Feb. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Matthew Daly)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, right, speaks as Utah Gov. Spencer Cox listens, following a news conference at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. Wright and other officials were onboard as a Valar Atomics microreactor, without nuclear fuel, was transported from March Air Reserve Base in California to Hill Air Force Base. Cox met the plane in Utah. (AP Photo/Matthew Daly)(ASSOCIATED PRESS)

HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah (AP) — The Pentagon and the Energy Department for the first time airlifted a small nuclear reactor from California to Utah, demonstrating what they say is the U.S. potential to quickly deploy nuclear power for military and civilian use.

The nearly 700-mile flight last weekend — which transported a 5-megawatt microreactor without nuclear fuel — highlights the Trump administration’s drive to promote nuclear energy to help meet skyrocketing demand for power from artificial intelligence and data centers, as well as for use by the military.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Undersecretary of Defense Michael Duffey, who traveled with the privately built reactor, hailed the Feb. 15 trip on a C-17 military aircraft as a breakthrough for U.S. efforts to fast-track commercial licensing for the microreactors, part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reshape the country's energy landscape.
A new emphasis on nuclear energy

President Donald Trump supports nuclear power — a carbon-free source of electricity — as a reliable energy source, even as he has been broadly hostile to renewable energy and prioritizes coal and other fossil fuels to produce electricity.

Skeptics warn that nuclear energy poses risks and say microreactors may not be safe or feasible and have not proved they can meet demand for a reasonable price.

Wright brushed those concerns aside as he touted progress on Trump’s push for a quick escalation of nuclear power. Trump signed a series of executive orders last year that allow Wright to approve some advanced reactor designs and projects, taking authority away from the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has regulated the U.S. nuclear industry for five decades.

“Today is history. A multi-megawatt, next-generation nuclear power plant is loaded in the C-17 behind us,” Wright said before the two-hour flight from March Air Reserve Base in California to Hill Air Force Base in Utah.

The minivan-sized reactor transported by the military is one of at least three that will reach “criticality” — when a nuclear reaction can sustain an ongoing series of reactions — by July 4, as Trump has promised, Wright said.

“That’s speed, that’s innovation, that’s the start of a nuclear renaissance,” he said.
Microreactors would be for civilian and military use

Currently, there are 94 operable nuclear reactors in the U.S. that generate about 19% of the country’s electricity, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That's down from 104 reactors in 2013 and includes two new commercial reactors in Georgia that were the nation's first large reactors built from scratch in a generation.

Recognizing delays inherent to deployment of new, full-scale reactors, the industry and government have focused in recent years on more efficient designs, including a small modular reactor proposed by the nation’s largest public power company, the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Microreactors, designed to be portable, can “accelerate the delivery of resilient power to where it’s needed,” Duffey said. Eventually, the mobile reactors could provide energy security on a military base without the civilian grid, he and other officials said.


The demonstration flight “gets us closer to deploy nuclear power when and where it is needed to give our nation’s warfighters the tools to win in battle,” Duffey said.

The reactor transported to Utah will be able to generate up to 5 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 5,000 homes, said Isaiah Taylor, CEO of Valar Atomics, the California startup that produced the reactor. The company hopes to start selling power on a test basis next year and become fully commercial in 2028.
Some safety concerns haven't been addressed, experts say

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the transport flight — which included a throng of reporters, photographers and TV news crews — was little more than “a dog-and-pony show” that merely demonstrated the Pentagon's ability to ship a piece of heavy equipment.

The flight “doesn't answer any questions about whether the project is feasible, economic, workable or safe — for the military and the public,” Lyman said in an interview.

The Trump administration “hasn't made the safety case” for how microreactors, once loaded with nuclear fuel, can be transported securely to data centers or military bases, Lyman said.

Officials also have not resolved how nuclear waste will be disposed of, although Wright said the Energy Department is in talks with Utah and other states to host sites that could reprocess fuel or handle permanent disposal.

The microreactor flown to Utah will be sent to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab for testing and evaluation, Wright said. Fuel will be provided by the Nevada National Security site, Taylor said.

“The answer to energy is always more,” Wright said. After four years of restrictions on fossil fuels and other polluting energy under the Biden administration, he said, “Now we’re trying to set everything free. And nuclear will be flying soon.”

Opinion

John Paulk disavowed conversion therapy. Will his new podcast finally dismantle the ‘ex-gay’ myth?

(RNS) — Paulk was the poster child of the movement that promised to 'cure' people of homosexuality. His re-emergence is likely to trigger victims of the debunked practice.

John Paulk, left, and Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez. 

(Photo courtesy of Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez)

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez
February 20, 2026
RNS

(RNS) — When I was 19, I found myself abandoned at a Super 8 motel near the Portland, Oregon, airport, where I had been dropped by the youth pastor at the church where I had been working. Nine months into my internship at the church, the youth pastor had looked at my internet history and discovered that I had been spending time in gay online chatrooms.

There was “no place for people like me” in the church, he had said before depositing me at the motel. Five days later a family member came from Illinois to fetch me.

Desperate, I spent the five days before a family member could come to bring me back to Illinois reading “Growth into Manhood,” a book that promised to “fix” my sexuality. It began my eight-year journey through the grueling world of conversion therapy — the roundly debunked practice of attempting to deter homosexuality by psychological means.


In January, I was back in Portland to speak at the Q Christian Conference, one of the largest gatherings of queer-identified people of faith. They had invited me to talk about the harms of the “pray the gay away” movement, the subject of my forthcoming memoir, “Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging.”

RELATED: In new letter, Orthodox rabbis say Jewish law forbids ‘conversion therapy’

Being in the city where I once bought the book that tried to erase me, only to return years later with a book of my own, felt like the ultimate reclamation. But the most significant moment of my trip occurred at a quiet breakfast spot as I sat across from the man who was once the face of the movement that nearly cost me my life: John Paulk.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Paulk was the “poster child” of the conversion therapy movement. An “ex-gay” man who married Anne, a former lesbian, he was held up by many in the conversion therapy world as living proof that homosexuality could be overcome through faith in God, adherence to its practices and heterosexual marriage.

While working for Dr. James Dobson at Focus on the Family, Paulk founded the Love Won Out conferences, which were held across the United States and abroad, regularly drawing thousands to hear testimonies from people who claimed to have “left the gay lifestyle.” The events presented a pseudopsychology that framed same-sex attraction as a preventable, treatable and, most of all, spiritual condition. Pastors, Christian counselors, concerned parents, church leaders and LGBTQ+ people struggling with their sexuality all came — and I did too, having devoured Paulk’s books, desperate for answers.

Paulk later became chairman of the board of Exodus International, the umbrella organization for more than 400 conversion therapy ministries in 17 countries. He and Anne appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Jerry Springer” and “60 Minutes” and made the cover of Newsweek, presenting their marriage and three children as the ultimate proof that change was possible.

After photos of Paulk leaving a gay bar in Washington, D.C., shattered his public image, the conversion movement simply reframed the story as a cautionary tale. It reminded all of us that even a “healed” man had to remain on guard against temptation.

But the public performance became unsustainable. Paulk left Focus on the Family in 2003 and moved to Portland with his family to make a fresh start.

In April 2013, Paulk issued a formal apology, dismantling the very foundation of the “ex-gay” testimony he once popularized. “I truly believed that it would happen,” he wrote of the promise of change. “And while many things in my life did change as a Christian, my sexual orientation did not… I do not believe that reparative therapy changes sexual orientation; in fact, it does great harm to many people.”

Following this bombshell, Paulk’s marriage dissolved, and he faded from the spotlight. He spent the next decade establishing himself in Portland’s culinary scene, mostly distant from his “ex-gay” past and far from the church pulpits and national talk shows he once frequented.

But while Exodus International closed and Love Won Out has withered away, conversion therapy is not a thing of the past. In the last year alone, according to research by The Trevor Project, the number of LGBTQ+ youth threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy doubled in a short period, rising from 11% to 22% between September 2023 and March 2025.

And Paulk’s own movement continues under familiar leadership. Although Love Won Out is gone, Anne, his ex-wife, serves as the executive director of the Restored Hope Network, a group of more than 30 ministries that continue to promote conversion therapy across the country. While John has spent a decade in the slow, difficult work of rebuilding his life, the organization his ex-wife leads has simply rebranded the same ideologies he now seeks to dismantle.

So even as the public view of LGBTQ+ issues has shifted, Paulk seemed to realize his hard-won private peace couldn’t outweigh his public responsibility. His first public reappearance in nearly two decades came in the 2021 Netflix documentary “Pray Away,” where he admitted: “My role was to get the message out that homosexuality was changeable, but I ached to love and be loved by a man.”

Now, John is taking part in a new six-part narrative podcast series, “Atonement: The John Paulk Story.” “I agreed to do this because silence doesn’t undo harm,” Paulk told me. “I want to pull back the curtain and show how these ministries operate and their goals, their ambitions and how far they stretch. For many years, I perpetuated an idea that hurt people. This is my attempt to tell the truth plainly.”

Paulk isn’t the only voice on the podcast. He’s joined by conversion therapy survivors, therapists, one of Paulk’s sons and even gay activist Wayne Besen, who had released the photo that outed Paulk. They echo what the American Psychiatric Association and other mental health organizations have said for decades: that any effort to change one’s sexuality is harmful.

The stakes of this truth-telling are personal and painful.

For conversion therapy survivors, encountering a former leader like Paulk can be triggering. We’ve seen too many perpetrators publicize their “redemption arcs,” prioritizing their healing over justice for victims. Victims’ stories shine a light on the damage caused by conversion therapy; focusing on a former leader, even if he is repeating his admission of the lie, undermines the anti-conversion movement. It validates our truth from the inside out.

Paulk seems to understand that atonement isn’t a plea for absolution. “I’m not returning to public life to recast myself as a victim or a hero,” Paulk said to me. “I’m here to tell the truth, to call out tactics that still exist and to support the broader work of protecting LGBTQ+ people.”

Our conversation felt particularly urgent given the current legal climate. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which a Colorado therapist argues that her state’s 2019 ban against practicing conversion therapy on minors violates her First Amendment rights. Paulk warns that if the court decides in the therapist’s favor, it will award conversion therapy a “veneer of legitimacy.”

“Once something is labeled ‘therapy,’ it sounds safe and credible—especially to fearful parents,” he said. “That legitimacy creates a pipeline into shame-based interventions that teach young people to distrust themselves. These practices rarely look overtly abusive. They are framed as love.”



Paulk had once used “theological hooks,” as he called them, to achieve the same erasure of the self. “The lie I most regret perpetuating,” he admitted, “is that abandoning your homosexuality was the only way to be acceptable to God.”

Paulk, who no longer attends church, didn’t mince words when I asked what message he would preach to churches today. “The church should judge its teaching by its fruit. If it produces despair, shame and harm, it is not the gospel,” he said.

Paulk and I are not the people we were two decades ago. I am no longer the scared kid in the Super 8 parking lot, and he is no longer the man on the cover of Newsweek. We are both survivors of a machinery that demanded we trade our truth for a highly conditional belonging.

RELATED: Dr. James Dobson’s death ends a life, but not a legacy of lies and harm

“I live today with a deep respect for the people who were harmed, a clear-eyed understanding of my role in that harm and a quiet hope that honesty — however delayed — can still help prevent it from being repeated,” Paulk told me. “If there is any grace in telling this story now, it is found not in being seen, but in helping others live without shame, fear or conditions placed on who they are allowed to be.”

While we cannot erase the past, we can dismantle the systems that try to repeat it. If there is grace to be found in the ruins of the ex-gay movement, it is in the quiet, rigorous work of telling the truth, no matter how long it takes to surface.

Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez is a writer and LGBTQ+ advocate whose work explores the intersection of faith, sexuality and belonging. His forthcoming memoir, “Conversion Therapy Dropout: A Queer Story of Faith and Belonging,” tells the story of his eight years in conversion therapy and his journey to healing.

The UN says al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families

DAMASCUS (AP) — The statement did not say how residents had left the camp or how many remain. Many families are believed to have escaped either during the chaos when government forces captured the camp from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month or afterward.

Associated Press
February 17, 2026

DAMASCUS (AP) — The U.N. refugee agency said Sunday that a large number of residents of a camp housing family members of suspected Islamic State group militants have left and the Syrian government plans to relocate those who remain.

Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, said in a statement that the agency “has observed a significant decrease in the number of residents in Al-Hol camp in recent weeks.”

“Syrian authorities have informed UNHCR of their plan to relocate the remaining families to Akhtarin camp in Aleppo Governorate (province) and have requested UNHCR’s support to assist the population in the new camp, which we stand ready to provide,” he said.

He added that UNHCR “will continue to support the return and reintegration of Syrians who have departed Al-Hol, as well as those who remain.”

The statement did not say how residents had left the camp or how many remain. Many families are believed to have escaped either during the chaos when government forces captured the camp from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month or afterward.

There was no immediate statement from the Syrian government and a government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

At its peak after the defeat of IS in Syria in 2019, around 73,000 people were living at al-Hol. Since then, the number has declined with some countries repatriating their citizens. The camp’s residents are mostly children and women, including many wives or widows of IS members.

The camp’s residents are not technically prisoners and most have not been accused of crimes, but they have been held in de facto detention at the heavily guarded facility.

Forces of Syria’s central government captured the al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade. A ceasefire deal has since ended the fighting.

Separately, thousands of accused IS militants who were held in detention centers in northeastern Syria have been transferred to Iraq to stand trial under an agreement with the U.S.

The U.S. military said Friday that it had completed the transfer of more than 5,700 adult male IS suspects from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody.

Iraq’s National Center for International Judicial Cooperation said a total of 5,704 suspects from 61 countries who were affiliated with IS — most of them Syrian and Iraqi — were transferred from prisons in Syria. They are now being interrogated in Iraq.

The grim satisfaction of AI doomsaying

 Opinion

The grim satisfaction of AI doomsaying

(Sightings) — Like depictions of the horrors of war may ennoble it, dire warnings about the AI future only make the technology seem inevitable.

(Photo by Simon Hurry/Unsplash/Creative Commons)

Russell P. Johnson

February 20, 2026

(Sightings) — In the early 1960s, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke published a short story in Playboy titled “Dial F for Frankenstein.” In the story, set in the not-too-distant future of 1975, an automated global network gets complex enough that individual phones start to act like neurons in a brain, and the system achieves consciousness.

One researcher asks, “‘What would this supermind actually do? Would it be friendly — hostile — indifferent?” Another replies “with a certain grim satisfaction” that like a newborn baby, the artificial intelligence will break things. This prediction quickly comes true as planes crash, pipes explode, and missiles are launched. The story ends with the extinction of the human race.

Years later, Tim Berners-Lee credited “Dial F for Frankenstein” for inspiring him to create the internet.

That may seem strange, but the Venn diagram of people who are worried that smarter technology will destroy us all and people who are developing smarter technology has more overlap than you might expect.

In their new book “The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want,” Emily Bender and Alex Hanna discuss the trend of researchers worrying publicly about AI causing human extinction. “Strangely enough,” they write, “despite these visions, nearly all AI Doomers think that AI development is a net good. Many of them have built their careers off the theorization, testing, development, and deployment of AI systems.”

Looking at the signatures on public statements about AI risk, Bender and Hanna note that some signatories are genuinely concerned, but “for some of them, it’s not really about trying to save humanity, but rather a running of the con: the supposed danger of the systems is a splashy way to hype their power, with the goal of scoring big investments in their own AI ventures (like [Elon] Musk and [Sam] Altman) or funding for their own research centers (like [Malo] Bourgon).” The people most vocal about the dangers of AI research tend to be the ones most interested in pursuing that research, or as Bender and Hanna put it, “Scratch a Doomer and find a Booster.”

(Photo by Lucas Andrade/Pexels/Creative Commons)

Adam Becker makes a similar point in a recent article in The Atlantic. “Those who predict that superintelligence will destroy humanity serve the same interests as those who believe that it will solve all of our problems,” writes Becker. Technology experts who invoke apocalyptic AI scenarios like “WarGames” (1983), “Terminator” (1984), or “The Matrix” (1999) are usually “grifters,” but even those who are sincere ironically feed into the same pro-AI sentiment they are trying to challenge.

A book titled “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” may seem like an unambiguous warning against developing Artificial General Intelligence, but for Becker the book plays into the same “fantasy of oversimplified technological salvation” that tech CEOs are preaching. That book’s co-author may be a “prophet of doom,” but like the biblical prophet Jonah, predicting people’s destruction only makes them more devoted.

A recent Super Bowl commercial continues this unsettling trend. In it, actor Chris Hemsworth expresses a worry that his Alexa+ AI technology will murder him. Viewers then see Alexa+ killing Hemsworth in a variety of ways, before being reminded in the closing seconds that this is a commercial for Alexa+. The producers of this technology think you’ll be more inclined to purchase it after you watch it kill Thor four times.

We hear an echo of François Truffaut’s remark that anti-war movies ironically glorify war. Depictions of the horrors of war may be intended as cautionary tales, but they ennoble war and wrap it in tragic necessity. Likewise, visions of AI apocalypses make the technology seem powerful and inevitable. Rather than convincing people to avoid developing “superhuman” AI, some people are driven to ensure this technology ends up in the right hands (their own).

Like Becker, who invokes the prophetic tradition, Bender and Hanna use religious language to describe AI predictions. They explain that some techno-optimists “deify AI” and that extinction scenarios make AI seem “godlike.”

This curious phenomenon of pro-AI doomsaying shares similarities with religious predictions of the end times. For some believers, speculating about the end of the world is actually reassuring, because it testifies to God’s power in the here and now. Rather than making people feel powerless, people feel empowered because they are on the side of the one who is capable of such destruction.

As the philosopher Jerry L. Walls has written, some Christian dispensationalists respond “with a certain grim satisfaction” to indications that their apocalyptic predictions are coming true. Coincidentally, perhaps, Clarke used the exact same phrase in “Dial F for Frankenstein.”

In both religious apocalypticism and AI doomsaying, there tends to be an “if” clause — at least some of us will be spared if we are faithful, or if we align AI with human values. Those who prophesy destruction encourage others to repent, while those who speculate about AI apocalypse encourage developers to factor the “alignment problem” into their software. Fears of human extinction don’t really seem to make AI “Boosters” reticent to develop Artificial General Intelligence; rather, these fears convince them that even more money and effort should be expended to make sure the AGI we will inevitably create will not turn us all into paperclips.

The term “apocalypse” derives from Greek words that mean “uncovering.” In many religious contexts, sci-fi stories, and technological prognostications, what sounds like a prediction of the future is actually an attempt to express something true but hidden about the present. For some, the prospect of an AI causing human extinction uncovers the truth that the desire for profit and discovery are often alienated from considerations of the well-being of humanity. But for the AI “Boosters” and those who buy into the hype, these apocalyptic scenarios uncover the truth that AI technology is powerful and worth investing in. To paraphrase Job 13 — though it slays us, we will trust in it.

What, then, can be done?

Bender and Hanna recommend that we pay no attention either to utopian visions of AI future or dystopian visions of AI apocalypse. Rather, we should pay attention to real distributions of power in the present. The AI technology we already have is affecting the environment, employment, and (mis)information; we ought to focus on that rather than prognosticating about what could happen if we eventually develop superintelligent software. Just as the best eschatological reflection helps people act responsibly in the present, the best moral reflection on AI helps people respond to the current needs of other humans.

(Russell P. Johnson is associate director of the undergraduate religious studies program at the University of Chicago Divinity School. A version of this article first appeared on Sightings, a publication of the divinity school’s Marty Martin Center. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

Opinion

Sacred marches and sacred music in a time of empire

(RNS) — Bad Bunny's joyful Super Bowl halftime show, a group of monks walking hundreds of miles for peace, protesters singing in the streets.

Bad Bunny performs during halftime of the NFL Super Bowl 60 football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, Sunday, Feb. 8, 2026, in Santa Clara, Calif. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Kaitlin Curtice
February 20, 2026
RNS


(RNS) — A combination of recent events has illuminated for me, once again, the power of sacred resistance in the face of cruelty and oppression. Sacred resistance is more than just protest, more than social media posting, more even than advocacy. Sacred resistance can include those things, but it is also embodied, it is done in community, it is aspirational in its call to joy, to the celebration of humanity, to justice. It embraces the prophetic power of art — in music, in poetry, in paintings, in film — alongside the strength of a crowd with a common purpose. Sacred resistance is subversive, but it is wholly human.

I have witnessed this sacred resistance in Bad Bunny’s defiantly joyful Super Bowl halftime show, in a group of monks walking hundreds of miles for peace, in protesters singing in the streets and in our very homes as we care for one another in a time of immense violence.

Each offers an example of how we can resist the status quo of hate, greed, colonialism, racism, xenophobia and sexism — by showing up with joy, movement, poetry, long walks, music, online and in-person presence and by holding space with one another to rest and to heal along the way.

During Bad Bunny’s halftime show — itself a stunning tribute to Puerto Rico — Ricky Martin sang the lyrics to “Lo que le paso a Hawaii,” a story of survival, grief and dreams living on despite colonialism.

Hawa’ii and Boricua, what we call Puerto Rico today, share a history of brutal colonialism. Puerto Rico has lived under colonial rule since 1493, when Columbus arrive on Taíno land. Today, the island holds the status of “territory” in the United States, with little agency and no congressional representation. The United States overthrew the monarchy of Hawa’ii in 1893, devastating the Native Hawaiian population and culture, which continues today through an extravagant and extractive tourist industry.

A few of the lyrics in Ricky Martin’s song spoke to the struggles in both Puerto Rico and Hawa’ii:

Quieren quitarme el río y también la playa (They want to take away the river and also the beach)

Quieren al barrio mío y que abuelita se vaya (They want my neighborhood and they want grandma to leave)

Que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái (I don’t want them to do to you what they did to Hawa’ii)

Benito Ocasio’s halftime show was about more than music; it was a celebration of Puerto Rican culture and community, a celebration of the whole of the American continents, looking to the future while also speaking the truth about the past and about the present that we find ourselves in.

Buddhist monks participating in the “Walk For Peace” are seen with their dog, Aloka, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026, in Saluda, S.C. (AP Photo/Allison Joyce)

And then there was a group of Vietnamese Buddhist monks, nuns and their dog, Aloka, who walked from Texas to Washington, D.C., for peace, marching on bruised feet because they believed the world needed to bear witness not just to violence but to the power of spiritually grounded practices. Every time I saw the monks in a reel on Instagram or in the news, I was reminded of the power we hold in our very bodies — that our spiritual life, our commitment to justice and care in the world, happens not just through prayer but through action rooted in kinship and belonging. When we begin to understand the threads of community that build webs of resistance in the world, we can prepare ourselves for whatever is next.

I was recently with an elder who is the tribal chairman of the Grand River Band of Ottawa Indians, and he talked to me about The Long Walk, a march organized by the American Indian Movement in the 1970s from Alcatraz to Washington, D.C., over five months. They gathered together with their allies who joined them along the way to protest the United States government’s broken treaty promises, especially around land sovereignty and water rights. What began with around 3,000 people ended in more than 30,000, speaking to the power of building community through movement. The march was a political statement, but, like the monks’ walk, it was also a spiritual one. Along the way they passed a peace pipe, they danced, sang and educated the masses on Indigenous rights and care for the earth.

And now, Indigenous peoples dance in the streets of Minneapolis, holding vigil, praying and caring for their community through sacred resistance. Earlier this month, a group of Indigenous peoples led by Migizi Spears of the Red Lake Nation set up a prayer camp in front of the Whipple building, a building tied to the oppression of the Dakota and Ho-Chunk people, to protest the violence and wrongful detention of people by ICE. They held vigil, prayed, sang and named the truth of history so that it won’t be repeated. It was a form of sacred protest and a vision for who we should be in this time.

Indigenous people perform during a memorial honoring Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, who were both recently fatally shot by federal agents, on Sunday, Feb. 1, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)

In an era in which Donald Trump is president, the necessity of resistance is visceral and clear. But how do we show up to this moment in ways that will create change?

Maybe it begins with looking up the lyrics to a song in Spanish or learning about the history of places like Puerto Rico, Cuba or Hawa’ii, histories that will make clear how borders are a colonial construct. We learned this in Bad Bunny’s halftime show, and as a lesson that many Indigenous people have taught again and again. Constructed borders keep us from recognizing the humanity present in those beyond our colonial boundaries and markers.

Listen to the stories of the oppressed. Read books and celebrate art created by those on the margins, whose stories don’t often get told. When we diversify the stories we take in, especially during a time when those stories are being suppressed, we expand our perspective and grow our community.

Grieve what America isn’t — and never has been. Many people are afraid to grieve the loss of an image of America they deeply wanted to be true. We have to come to terms with the foundational violence of this country: the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Black people. Those violences did not simply end; they are perpetuated through racist policing strategies, discriminatory housing and lending practices, the extraction of natural resources from Indigenous lands. Grief is essential in resistance work.

But you don’t have to do it alone. Show up to a community meeting, to a vigil, to a march, get involved in resistance art (like this Philadelphia art community knitting anti-ice hats once a week). Our resistance movements fall apart if they aren’t sustained by communal care and joy.

One of my favorite elders, Choctaw teacher Steven Charleston, writes in his book “Ladder to the Light”:

“When we share our questions together, we become our own answer. We discover there is no one right way to do everything. We understand that no single plan will encompass the way forward. If we seek to bring light into darkness, then we must rely on the wisdom of us all.”

May we ask the questions we need to ask, and may we realize we are also capable of the answer.

(Kaitlin B. Curtice is an award-winning author and poet. She is the author of several books, including “Native: Identity, Belonging and Rediscovering God” and “Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day.” She is also the director of the Aki Institute. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)