Critics flip as Patriot Front militia marches on Washington for July 4th

Members of the group Patriot Front ride the metro as a commuter looks on, during the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Cheney Orr

Sarah K. Burris

July 04, 2026 

ALTERNET


The white supremacist militia group, the "Patriot Front," has taken over the streets of Capitol Hill on the 250th birthday of the United States.

Videos show that a few hundred men showed up with face coverings, waving Confederate flags along with American flags, including some that were inverted. The front two men marching held metal red, white and blue shields.

According to George Washington University, “The group promotes an ultra-nationalist ideology centered on the idea of creating a white ethnostate in the United States, rejecting multiculturalism and diversity.”

One photo by a Reuters photographer showed the male-only group surrounding a Black woman on the metro as they filled the train car.

"Absolutely terrifying to have white supremacist hate group Patriot Front march through our streets today in Washington, DC. Their manifesto calls for a white ethnostate, excludes people of color from their definition of citizenship, and is deeply anti-Semitic and xenophobic," said human rights lawyer Mai El-Sadany.

At Union Station, the men gathered to call for "reclaiming the country and getting rid of immigrants," WTOP reporter Mitchell Miller said.

"These guys have such a popular message that they have to wear masks," quipped congressional reporter Jamie Dupree.

Ashley Murray, a senior DC reporter for States News, said that she asked a National Guard soldier who they were, and the soldier reported "protesters."

WUSA reporter Spencer Brooks was quick to correct those who thought that the marchers were Proud Boys. He said that in his experience, "they show up, march around in high visibility areas, then leave via metro or even U-Haul trucks."

One political site commented, "About 100 Patriot Front nazis showed up near the Mall in DC this morning, marched around aimlessly for about half an hour, got virtually no attention, then got on the Metro and went home..."

Democratic activist recalled Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who previously spread the conspiracy theory that the "Patriot Front" would "disappear immediately after we confirm Kash Patel" to lead the FBI. "What a coincidence that'll be." The comment was made on January 25, 2025. The conspiracy theory is that the militia was secretly FBI members trying to scare people. They remain a real group.

Twitter/X owner Elon Musk then perpetuated the conspiracy theory throughout 2024. He claimed that it was obviously a front group or psyop because police didn't remove the masks when they were arrested, reported Forbes after the protest. Those formally arrested were photographed by police without masks and Musk's social media site fact-checked his own post.

Lawyers remain in disbelief over ‘fascist Hellscape’ July 4 display in DC

Olivia Rosane,

 Common Dreams
July 4, 2026 


A member of the group Patriot Front gestures outside the Eastern Market metro station, on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Hundreds of members of the white nationalist hate group Patriot Front descended on Washington DC Saturday morning as the nation’s capital prepared to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Members of the group, wearing masks and carrying Confederate and US flags, rode the DC metro and marched around parts of Capitol Hill before departing the city by train, as WUSA reported. Beyond the march itself, no other incidents were reported connected to the group.

“What kind of fascist hellscape is [happening] on Pennsylvania Ave at the Eastern Market Metro stop?” Georgetown Law professor Josh Chafetz wrote on Bluesky upon spotting the group.

Chafetz said the group appeared to be all white and all male.



“Absolutely terrifying to have white supremacist hate group Patriot Front march through our streets today in Washington, DC,” human rights lawyer Mai El-Sadany wrote on social media. “Their manifesto calls for a white ethnostate, excludes people of color from their definition of citizenship, and is deeply antisemitic and xenophobic.”

In one video shared by WTOP reporter Mitchell Miller, members of the group stood in a line outside DC’s Union Station chanting, “Life, liberty, victory” and “Reclaim America.”



According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Patriot Front split from Vanguard America after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, at which white supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into counterprotesters, killing anti-racist activist Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.

“Patriot Front is an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism. Patriot Front focuses on theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country,” SPLC explains.

The group believes that democracy no longer functions and wants to transform the US into a “pan-European” ethnostate that excludes both citizens of color and new immigrants and refugees.

One image from a Reuters photographer shows the masked Patriot Front marchers standing around a Black woman sitting on the DC Metro.

“This image is from today. A Black woman sits on the DC metro as masked white nationalists prepare to march on our nation’s capital. This is America’s 250th anniversary,” attorney Aaron Parnas posted on social media.



Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, blasted the group for carrying Confederate flags and embracing fascism while claiming the mantle of US patriotism.

“You have no right to call yourself a ‘[patriot]’ while carrying the flag of one of America’s enemies, and claiming victory on behalf of the ideology that fueled another—both of which the US defeated,” D’Arrigo wrote on social media.

Fox News host’s response to white supremacist rally leaves ex-GOP lawmaker floored

Alexander Willis
July 4, 2026 

RAW STORY

A commuter sits as members of the group Patriot Front stand at the Eastern Market metro station, on the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 4, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard


As dozens of masked men from the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched in the nation’s capital Saturday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham floated a theory in an apparent attempt to distance the GOP from the neo-fascist march, a theory that left one former Republican lawmaker floored.

On Saturday afternoon, journalist and writer Richie McGinniss uploaded a video of himself questioning people who appear to be members of Patriot Front standing in front of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.

Despite there being countless reports by reputable news outlets on Patriot Front’s march through the nation’s capital, Ingraham floated a bizarre theory regarding McGinniss’ video.

“I call fake,” reads a social media post on X published Saturday by Ingraham’s account, responding to the video published by McGinniss “Looks more like Antifa in costume. No one should be allowed to cover their faces.”

Adam Kinzinger, a former GOP U.S. House member from Illinois, issued Ingraham a blistering rebuke.

“Yes of course. Fake. That's the only defense you have to this?” Kinzinger wrote Saturday in a social media post on X. “How about condemning it?”

Billy Ray, a notable film director and screenwriter, also issued Ingraham a fierce response.

“Laura, why is it so scary for you to admit that this exists amid your party – and your audience?” Ray asked in a social media post published on X Saturday. “If you were an actual journalist, you’d have to.”

Europe Is Burning: The Deadly Heatwave That Exposes the Criminality of Fossil Capitalism and the Economy of Genocide

Michael Leonardi

July 3, 2026

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Conditions on 26 June 2026 as per ERCC – CC BY 4.0

Europe is on fire. Record-shattering heat waves have gripped the continent, pushing temperatures above 40°C (104°F) in multiple countries, buckling infrastructure, overwhelming hospitals, and claiming thousands of lives. This is not a natural disaster. It is the foreseeable, profitable outcome of decades of fossil fuel addiction and capitalist extraction.

According to a sobering analysis by The Economist, the late-June heat spike could cause around 12,000 excess deaths across Europe. The study, covering 854 cities, shows that human-caused climate change has made the event far more lethal than it would have been otherwise. France alone has already reported over 1,000 excess deaths, with Spain, Italy, and Germany also suffering heavy tolls, and northern countries — that are often less prepared for the heat — facing temps well over 30°C degrees. The elderly and the poor are paying the highest price. The World Health Organization has confirmed more than 1,300 excess deaths linked to the heat since June 21.

The oceans tell an even darker story. In June 2026, global sea surface temperatures reached a new all-time record, hitting averages of 21.0°C according to the EU’s Copernicus Marine Service — surpassing previous records set in 2023 and 2024. Scientists warn we are entering “uncharted territory,” with marine heat waves expanding and intensifying. A supercharged El Niño has thrown more fuel on an already burning planet, but the root cause is clear: decades of unchecked carbon emissions by the fossil fuel industry.

This is not misfortune. This is mass murder by profit.

The fossil fuel giants — ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, Italy’s ENI — have known for half a century that their products were cooking the planet. They lied, they lobbied, they delayed, and they continued drilling, fracking, and expanding. In 2025 alone, ENI reported adjusted net profits of around €5 billion, while European oil majors collectively posted obscene windfall gains. Greenpeace and other reports have repeatedly exposed how these companies continue to prioritize extraction over survival, even as they greenwash their images with token “transition” investments that amount to a fraction of their fossil fuel spending.

ENI has been deeply entangled in energy deals tied to Israel’s operations in occupied Palestinian waters, supplying crude oil that powers the military apparatus carrying out what many legal experts describe as genocidal actions in Gaza. Fossil capital doesn’t just warm the planet — it fuels the wars and occupations that accelerate ecological collapse.

Nowhere is this more obscene than in the fusion of war and ecological destruction. The world’s militaries — led by the United States and its allies — are among the largest institutional emitters on Earth. The ongoing genocides in Gaza and the Sudan, and wars in Ukraine, Iran and elsewhere pour tens of millions of tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere through fuel-guzzling jets, tanks, bombs, and reconstruction. Every missile fired, every drone launched, every city reduced to rubble accelerates the very climate breakdown that makes these heat waves deadlier. War is not separate from the climate crisis — it is one of its most vicious engines.

The new priests of the digital age — the hyperscale data centers powering Artificial Intelligence — are adding massive new heat to an already overheating planet. Data centers consumed about 415 TWh globally in 2024, roughly 1.5% of world electricity, and are projected to nearly double by 2030. In Europe, demand is exploding. A single large AI training facility can consume as much power as 100,000 households, while the heat they generate raises local land surface temperatures by an average of 2°C, with some areas seeing spikes as high as 9°C. The AI boom is not “clean tech” — it is another ravenous consumer of fossil energy in a system that cannot stop growing.

Even more terrifying is the human body’s hard limit. Scientists define a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C (95°F) as the theoretical survivability threshold — the point at which, even in shade with unlimited water, the human body can no longer cool itself through sweating. Recent studies show that deadly heat stress is already occurring at lower wet-bulb levels, especially for the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions. During this heatwave, large parts of southern Europe approached or breached dangerous thresholds, where mortality spikes dramatically. We are not just losing comfort. We are losing the basic environmental conditions required for human survival.

Skeptics still trot out tired arguments: “It’s just natural cycles,” “The models are wrong,” or “Alarmists like Guy McPherson have been predicting doom for years.” McPherson, the controversial ecologist who has long warned of near-term human extinction, continues to argue that we are witnessing abrupt, irreversible collapse driven by feedback loops — Arctic methane release, permafrost thaw, and accelerating warming. While his exact timeline remains debated, the underlying science he cites — runaway warming and tipping points — is increasingly validated by mainstream observations. The deniers’ real record is one of consistent failure: every prediction of “cooling” or “stabilization” has been falsified by relentless temperature records, melting ice, and rising seas. Their skepticism is not science — it is ideological defense of a dying profit model.

Europe likes to call itself a climate leader. In reality, it remains dangerously unprepared. Most cities lack proper cooling infrastructure. Heat action plans are inadequate. Vulnerable populations are abandoned to suffer and die while governments prioritize corporate profits and military budgets over human survival.

The message of this heat wave is brutally simple: we are no longer approaching the abyss. We are in free fall. Every additional fraction of a degree means more corpses, more suffering, and more irreversible damage to the only home we have.

The time for half-measures and greenwashed promises is long past over. We need a ruthless, immediate dismantling of the fossil fuel economy, an end to the wars that feed it, and a radical reorientation toward genuine justice — for people and for the planet.

The heat is not coming. It is here. And even with the dismantling of the criminal system driving it, it is only likely to get worse — until it becomes unsurvivable. Strategies exist that could help provide some temporary relief if the world collaborated and cooperated to implement them. The struggle for human existence has begun. The question is whether we will fight with the urgency this moment demands to prioritize our common humanity and our planet above allowing business as usual to steam ahead.

Michael Leonardi lives in Italy and can be reached at michaeleleonardi@gmail.com

The Mad Scramble to Dim Sunlight

Robert Hunziker
July 3, 2026

Image by Johannes Plenio.

Whew! it’s hot out there, and the more the planet heats up, the more geoengineering appeals to billionaire types willing to bankroll projects to reflect sunlight to outer space.

But solar radiation management (SRM) is a touchy subject that’s yet to make an impact on global warming. Who knows, maybe it never will… meaning, not in enough time. Alas, the unexpected rapid rate of global warming has shortened the time frame that’s available to do something constructive. And SRM, like a dangling participle, needs a lot of work.

The harsh reality of today’s climate change has snuffed out years of theatrics by climate advocates failing to convince world governments and the public of how real and dangerous it really is as a threat to life on Earth. Nowadays, global heat itself is proving climate change is a real threat to life. This is a new phenomenon that’s never happened before to this extent throughout all of human history.

How can anybody fail to recognize global heat setting new records year-by-year for 11-12-straight years? That is according to the World Meteorological Organization. Europe certainly recognizes it; people die in botched attempts to escape heat. The extreme heat makes the nightly headlines with EU roads buckling, trains suspended, tracks bending, schools closing, nuclear plant shutdowns, power cables breaking. This is climate change challenging economic infrastructure. It’s likely to get worse.

This is not normal.

Don’t fall for climate deniers in the U.S. that cook-up stupid stories to diminish the threat of climate change, e.g., “more people die from winter cold than from summer heat” recently stated by a senior administration official. Oh please!

Meanwhile, there’s an element in society, known as technocrats, that boldly, hubristically believe human ingenuity via geoengineering will challenge and defeat climate change before it defeats them. They’re probably wrong.

MIT on Geoengineering

MIT recently weighed in on the subject: Geoengineering Faces Major Practical Challenges, MIT d/d June 18, 2026. Subtitled: “There’s a lot to figure out about the controversial climate tech.”

For example: “Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of ‘Pull in Case of Climate Emergency’ to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet… But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle,” Ibid.

Accordingly, attempting to alter the climate to save our collective butts from horrific global heat might be a lot harder than anybody realizes. And according to the study underlying the MIT article, “to actually actively cool the planet in a significant way, and to make sure we understand exactly what effect we’re having, there’s a lot that researchers still need to learn… There are major concerns about what effects might come from large-scale attempts to cool the planet. The effects could be positive for some parts of the globe and negative for others.”

The impact of our rapidly changing climate that’s directly influenced by too much fossil fuel CO2 spewing into the atmosphere is found on the nightly news. Cars tumble down flooding city streets and black ash from Canada’s biblical wildfires have sprinkled across America’s Great Lakes in the recent past, a casualty of global warming drying out the boreal forest and dangerously destroying a powerful carbon sink. During 2025-26 record-setting fires hit Florida, California, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Nebraska all shattering historic records for burned acreage and unheard-of insurance losses.

None of this is normal.

Major insurance companies have been regularly speaking out about extreme climate change as a risk to the functioning capitalistic system. Some have gone so far as to express outright destruction risks, see: Climate Crisis on Track to Destroy Capitalism, Warns Top Insurer.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, in private, geoengineering of the planet’s atmosphere increasingly catches the attention of billionaire money. All of which brings to surface an upcoming controversial issue that’s certain to turn heads. In fact, geoengineering has quietly but assuredly drawn fierce battle lines for years. It brings out the brightest and the best in academia as well as the lowest of conspirators into a clashing of interests with sparks flying.

The Chemtrail Conspiracy Theory has a long history of claiming airplane contrails have been releasing solar radiation management chemical agents for purposes of weather modification or some other purpose. This has been met by strong pushback by federal agencies and the scientific community, finding no signs of legitimate evidence. Interestingly, ex-CIA employee and famous whistleblower Edward Snowden, who had no axe to grind at the time, in a Joe Rogan interview said he used his “ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, the CIA, the military, all these groups. I couldn’t find anything… no evidence of aliens or mysterious chemtrails.” Nevertheless, RFK, jr. endorsed chemtrail conspiracy theories. And there are serious students of chemtrails that maintain it is real. This remains a big ball tossed into the air that hasn’t landed yet.

Now, it’s coming to light that private entities have been taking pokes at geoengineering the atmosphere in the spirit of mitigating global heat, which has dramatically increased to a new higher level suddenly and unexpectedly. Climate scientists have addressed this new danger of a “fundamental shift” as global warming jump-shifted 10-times normal, in only one year, along with surprisingly massive and extensive ocean heat waves across almost the entire oceans lasting over 500 days, confounding scientists (see- Ocean Heat Goes Ballistic).

Ocean Heat Content (OHC) has been setting new records, every year, for nine consecutive years. This all adds up to one hell’uva scary climate onslaught with a new regime of heat in the offing. This festering problem has been identified by elite scientists, and it’s downright scary. Human activity is negatively impacting the complexion of the planet via a massive acceleration phase of extreme heat with Antarctica on edge.

Some billionaires have taken notice. A recent Politico article, Researchers Quietly Planned a Test to Dim Sunlight. They wanted to ‘Avoid Scaring’ the public d/d July 27, 2025, exposes behind the scenes activity to influence (geoengineer) the atmosphere, which sparks enormous international attention. Is it morally kosher, will a Frankenstein climate haunt civilization, will it disrupt nature more so than it helps, will it work?

The Politico article flushes out an aborted attempt a year ago on a retired aircraft carrier to test a device to create artificial clouds. Come to find out, their intentions went well beyond that initial experiment. The bigger plan involved spaying salt water to dim the sun’s rays over a stretch of ocean larger than Puerto Rico.

According to the article: “The details outlined in funding requests, emails, texts and other records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News raise new questions about a secretive billionaire-backed initiative that oversaw last year’s brief solar geoengineering experiment on the San Francisco Bay,” Ibid.

As further stated, human tinkering with the climate has drawn political backlash as well as generating conspiracy theories all of which adds to challenges of even small-scale tests. The test referenced by the article lasted all of 20 minutes run by the University of Washington intended to last months. It was shut down by Alameda city officials that did not buy into secretive testing without prior public notice.

The university’s Marine Cloud Brightening Program has much bigger plans than the Alameda pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda. The Program had received some federal funding and wanted to gain use of government ships and planes. The Program in concert with a geoengineering advocacy group Silver Lining and the scientific nonprofit SRI International has its eyes set on big dealings to “fill in gaps” of safety and effectiveness of the technology.

“Alameda was a steppingstone to something much larger, and there wasn’t any engagement with local communities,” said Sikina Jinnah, an environmental studies professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz. “That’s a serious misstep,” Ibid. Meanwhile, the University of Washington maintains innocence of any intention to alter the climate, rather, their only goal was to research the technology, not deploy it. Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric professor at the university said: “There are no plans for conducting large-scale studies that would alter weather or climate.”

With global warming coming of age much sooner than even most negative warnings predicted and stronger, sooner than climate scientists expected, geoengineering to deflect incoming solar radiation is assured to get much more attention, begging the ultimate question of whether humans should mess around with nature; although, greenhouse gases like CO2 have already demonstrated human interference causes too much heat. In a very real practical sense, fossil fuel emissions (CO2) have already geoengineered the climate for over 200 years, resulting in a haywire climate system characterized by unprecedented events almost every year. “Unprecedented” is fast losing its impact as a statement of alarming fact. It’s become a routine fact.

Still, the million-dollar question: If we broke it, can we fix it?

Critics of SRM are adamant and abundant, for example, Solar Geoengineering Could Wreak Havoc on the Planet, Sierra d/d September 21, 2023: “Dimming the sun to slow down global warming might buy us some time. But it would also come with significant risks. The impact would not be uniform across the globe and cause serious disruption of established weather patterns that agriculture relies upon. And a moral hazard would exist as it encourages fossil fuel polluters to ignore needed cuts in CO2 emissions. And, what if it becomes necessary to stop, to turn it off, then what? And who gets control of tampering with the global thermostat may be impossible to reconcile.”

Big question marks remain as serious obstacles to practical geo-engineering of solar radiation, anytime soon.

‘Hopeful’ Credible Solutions

For those interested in pursuing detailed information about potential practical solutions, there are some early-stage private organizations that command attention, e.g., Climate Restoration, which advocates iron-fertilization of ocean ‘eddies’ to initiate a process to absorb and rebalance CO2.

Additionally, a recent article: “Letter: Greenland Meltdown and the Reasons It Matters” in Financial Times d/d January 25, 2026 by John Nissen, Chair of the Planetary Restoration Action Group, London: “A pressing need exists to start lowering the Arctic temperature while it is still just possible using the most powerful, available cooling technique, stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI))”

The above-mentioned organizations base their solutions on historic evidence of nature’s volcanic eruptions affecting the global climate system.

As stated by The Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program (SGRP), solar geoengineering is not a replacement for reducing emissions or adapting to climate impacts. In other words, SRM is only one tool in a very big fixit box. It does not remove what’s already been done. Scientists say this must be done to fix things, but direct air capture (DAC) of CO2 is immature, inadequate, and laughable, like taking a peashooter to a war zone. In part, this is why polar scientists at recent scientific meetings insist CO2 emissions must stop now or Antarctica is assured of acting out.

Monitoring the Sky

It should be noted that NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Lab monitors the sky for renegade sunlight dimmers: “Every few weeks, researchers in Boulder, Colorado, release a balloon that rises 17 miles into the sky. Similar balloons are launched with less frequency from sites in Alaska, Hawaii and New Zealand; Reunion Island, near the coast of Africa; and even Antarctica. They make up the building blocks of a system that would alert American scientists to geoengineering.”

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, as of May 21, 2026, the Trump administration has proposed a 32% cut in NOAA’s funding.

“Since September of 2024, federal science agencies in the US have axed nearly 120,000 employees, in a stinging loss for public research. Some of the heaviest impact was felt by scientists studying the climate.” (source: Futurism, June 25, 2026)

Meanwhile, global warming is not waiting around for stupid humans to figure out how to fix a problem they’ve created, but ignored, for more than a couple of centuries. After 200 years of feeding the beast, the fuse has finally been lit, and it’s burning like a house afire. For evidence, just ask any major home insurance company.

A bigger question is whether there’s enough time to organize the world to agree to attempt dimming sunlight. This hasn’t even begun to coalesce yet, but there is plenty of discord.


Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com

What is There to Celebrate on the 250th Anniversary of the United States of America?

By C.J. Polychroniou

June 30, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by John Trumbull/Wikimediacommons, in public domain

On July 4, 2026, the United States of America turns 250 years old. Should the Left celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with the signing of the Declaration of Independence? After all, this is a nation with a very dark and ugly past — with racism, genocide, and imperialism deeply embedded in its psyche.

Surely Native Americans have no reason to celebrate. The history of the United States government’s treatment of Native Americans is one of cruelty, oppression, and extermination. Leaving aside the 56 million indigenous people that were killed by European settlers across the Americas by 1600, since its independence in 1776, the U.S. government has launched more than 1500 attacks against various indigenous people, slaughtering them, and taking their lands. Native Americans in the U.S. continue to face oppression, poverty, and discrimination, and rank near the bottom of all other groups in terms of health, education, and employment.  

What about blacks? Do they have a reason to celebrate a nation that denied them their humanity for much of those 250 years, while they continue to experience racial discrimination to this day? Racism against blacks remains very much widespread in the Good Ol’ USA.

Should American women have a reason to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday? They have been treated as second-class citizens until fairly recently, and while many countries around the world have or had female leaders, it is a widely shared belief that the U.S. is still not ready for a woman president.

If anything, a major milestone like the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence should be an opportunity to confront the nation’s dark and ugly past and reflect on what has gone wrong with U.S. democracy and what we can do about it. After all, isn’t it a tragic irony that the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, which is supposed to honor the principles of liberty and equality upon which the nation was allegedly founded, will take place with an administration in power whose own beliefs and actions embody the very tyrannical rule that the Declaration of Independence sought to overthrow?

What manner of national progress is this?

But history is not a linear progression. Nor is it guided by the realization of freedom and rationality, as Hegel thought. Human history moves in a spiral, and irrationality makes up a great part of human life and history. Moreover, not only does the value of ideals vary greatly (Nazism and imperialism were as potent ideals as those of democracy and self-determination), but there is usually a disconnect between ideals and political reality. Some of the lofty principles in the Declaration of Independence, such as “all men are created equal,” collided with the facts on the ground and, in fact, had a very narrow interpretation when they were written, as they applied only to white, propertied men.

Indeed, in 2026, we have a president who likes to govern like a king, or a dictator. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court has given Donald J. Trump king-like powers. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Trump 2.0 has demolished democracy by initiating a new age of authoritarian rule with civil and human rights rollbacks, weaponizing the federal government against the president’s political rivals, and unleashing a paramilitary squad of fascist thugs into communities across the nation. It is also hardly surprising that Trump has become the most corrupt president in U.S. history. He is exploiting shamelessly the highest office in the land to enrich himself and his family.

Trump’s enablers extend beyond today’s Supreme Court, which has moved so far rightward that it qualifies as the most reactionary in the nation’s modern history. It includes the plutocrats, media conglomerates, evangelical Christians, and pro-Israel political networks. Retail corporations, major law firms, and academic institutions capitulated with such ease to Trump’s bullying tactics that they made a mockery of liberal ideals.

All that being said, it is difficult not to appreciate the importance of the Declaration of Independence. It is indeed one of the most important documents in the history of politics and ideas for the simple but radical fact that, by articulating the intention of the American colonies to separate from British rule, it established the principles of self-government and individual rights while connecting equality and freedom.

Being profoundly influenced by the philosophical thinking of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (unlike contemporary U.S. leaders, the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams were deeply learned men and had extensive knowledge of history and philosophy), the Declaration of Independence solidified the claims of social contract theory—that is, the idea that governments receive their just powers from the consent of the governed—and justified rebellion against tyranny. Within just a couple of decades, the Declaration of Independence inspired revolts across the globe. It had great impact on political and philosophical debates leading up to the French Revolution (1789) and served as a reference point behind the slave revolt against French colonial rule in Haiti in 1791 and the Irish rebellion against British rule in May 1798.

When Ho Chi Ming declared Vietnam an independent nation on September 2, 1945, he paraphrased the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He opened his declaration of independence with the statement from the 1776 Declaration “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” But then he updated those words by saying “In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have the right to live, to be happy and free.”

Indeed, the Declaration of Independence served as a “universal blueprint” for the anti-colonial struggles that occurred after World War II. It is indeed a radical document. One of its foundational principles is that “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish” governments that become destructive to their fundamental rights. This principle is a cornerstone of democratic theory and should never be forgotten.

Ironically enough, all U.S. administrations have largely abandoned the fundamental principles underpinning the Declaration of Independence–and none more so than President Donald Trump’s administration. The country is on a very slippery path under Donald Trump’s imperial proto-fascism. Democracy is dying before our very own eyes and Trump’s desire to reshape the world order not only creates more uncertainty and instability but risks opening a Pandora’s box.

It is in this context that the Declaration of Independence should serve as a stark reminder of the need for a call to action when a government, like the one represented by Donald Trump, acts illegally and unconstitutionally to weaken democratic institutions and engages purely in self-dealing while endangering our communities. We have a monstrous, tyrannical government in power that the People must stand up to with all their might before it ruins everything.  

If we must, what we need to celebrate on the 250th anniversary since the signing of the Declaration of Independence is nothing more and nothing less than the basic principles and ideas behind this document, in an updated manner, of course, à la Ho Chi Ming, while being fully cognizant of the fact that we still have a long way to go to achieve equality in this country. That was not the intention of those who drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence; nonetheless, they gave the world a political and philosophical document for the ages.

250th: Their Heroes Are Monsters to Us

Ishmael Reed
July 3, 2026


Stereoscope photograph of the slave quarters at Monticello, 

James C. Sawders, Keystone View Company, Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.

The segregated American media spent the week leading up to the Fourth of July praising the founding fathers and paying tribute to other American heroes. Heroes to them. Monsters to us.

For CNN, Kit Carson is a hero. They showed a scene in which Carson walked miles, nearly barefoot, to rescue his men. We grew up watching the exploits of Kit Carson on cartoon shows. Our Settler education didn’t inform us that Kit Carson committed atrocities against the Navajo. How did the Navajo regard the American hero, Kit Carson? From a site called Partnership with Native Americans.


In 1863, General James Carleton began a renewed effort to eradicate the Navajo. In charge of the operation was Colonel Kit Carson. Knowing he couldn’t defeat the Navajo militarily, Carson began to destroy the Navajo homes, crops, and livestock. More than two million pounds of corn, a staple of the Indian diet, were burned. Forced to survive on nuts and berries many families, starving during the long winter months, began turning themselves into the military. About 8,000 men, women, and children were forced to make the “Long Walk” to Basque Redondo, a reservation in New Mexico about 300 miles away. Many died on the way of hunger and cold. Others drowned when they were forced to cross the Rio Grande during the spring floods.

Douglass Brinkley is a good guy. I spent a couple of days with him in New Orleans under a grant he’d received to bring writers to New Orleans. But now, he’s become a TV historian instead of someone who would challenge the decadent old boy Historical establishment, now under attack from a generation of women, Black, and Native American historians. But he’s right at home in a media that considers Confederacy apologist Ken Burns a historian. On a Wed.TV show, he expressed his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt.In 2021 Brinkley was named the inaugural historian in residence at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

How do Blacks feel about Theodore Roosevelt?


America’s Black Holocaust Museum’s Post

On December 30, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonorable discharge of 167 Black soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Regiment following what became known as the Brownsville Affair—one of the most consequential racial injustices in American military history.

The events that led to the order began months earlier, on the night of August 13, 1906, in Brownsville, Texas. A white bartender was killed and a police officer wounded by gunfire. Almost immediately, white residents accused Black soldiers stationed nearby at Fort Brown. Despite testimony from commanding officers that the soldiers were in their barracks at the time, and despite glaring inconsistencies in the physical evidence, local authorities focused exclusively on the regiment.

… No individual soldier was identified as a suspect, and no court-martial ever took place.

Nevertheless, under political pressure and citing a supposed “conspiracy of silence,” Roosevelt imposed collective punishment. His order stripped all 167 soldiers of their honor, pensions, and the possibility of future federal employment. Many of the men had served honorably for years, including during the Spanish-American War. Some were nearing retirement and lost the economic security they had earned through decades of service.

The consequences were lifelong. Families fell into poverty. Reputations were destroyed. The Army’s decision reinforced a painful contradiction: It was not until 1972 that the U.S. Army formally acknowledged the wrongdoing and exonerated the soldiers.”

I asked one of Theodore Roosevelt’s biographers why he omitted Roosevelt’s role in the Brownsville incident. He said that he didn’t have space to include it. Booker T. Washington tried to persuade Roosevelt to give the soldiers a fair trial.

Francine Prose showed up in the Guardian on July 2nd, where she expressed her reverence for Thomas Jefferson, a hypocrite who found slavery ”excreable,” yet bred Slaves like livestock and consigned them to cramped quarters that were unsanitary. He broke up families and had his slaves beaten. Indeed, he might have beaten them himself. A visitor from France said that he accompanied Jefferson as he reviewed his slaves and that while walking up and down, he slapped a riding crop in his hand. The slaves responded to this gesture by trembling. Though much has been made about his having a Black mistress, another oral tradition describes him as a promiscuous rapist. Why would feminists honor this man? I think Jefferson is admired for his Hollywood Raj look, the name given to Cary Grant and other British actors who acted in films that promoted British imperialism.

Benjamin Franklin was called “Old Double-Face; ” yet he was smarter than the other Founding Fathers. Franklin began opposing slavery in the late 1750s after visiting a school for Black children and realizing their lack of education was due to their environment, not nature. His opposition peaked at the end of his life. He became the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1787. He petitioned Congress to end slavery in February 1790. While Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton advocated the extermination of Native Americans, Franklin protested the massacre of Native Americans.

Benjamin Franklin protested the 1763–1764 slaughter of 20 peaceful, unarmed Susquehannock (Conestoga) Indians by writing a fiery pamphlet titled A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. He condemned the killers as a “barbarous mob” and passionately argued against collective racial punishment.

So if the country needs a founding father, maybe it should be Franklin?

Priapic Ambitions: Notes on George Washington

Jeffrey St. Clair

 July 3, 2026

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Portrait of George Washington (detail) by Charles Willson Peale (1776).

+ I excavated my way through Ron Chernow’s bulging, semi-woke (by the standards of the Texas Schoolbook Commission)  biography of George Washington. I say, “semi-woke,” because while it discreetly admits that Washington was a patrician dandy of no exceptional military or administrative genius, who abused his troops, committed war crimes, bought his first election to public office with booze, and held 100s of slaves, often treating them cruelly in response to his own ineptitudes as a gentleman planter, it is quick to balance any evidence of fault in the character of the founding father with a statement to the effect that “while this may sound extreme to our ears, it was fairly typical for the time.” Which is, of course, exactly the point.

+ While Chernow’s text is rather elliptical on these decisive episodes in Washington’s life (there’s little risk of it being pulled from libraries in most of the states, at this point), the book is generously foot-noted with primary sources, many of them in Washington’s own hand (he was a prolific self-promoter of his own exalted life), which fill-in the more tenebrous aspects of his character.

+ The first member of the Washington clan to step foot in Virginia was John, who came ashore in the Tidewater area in 1676. George’s great-grandfather wasn’t much of a farmer (after all, he only owned three slaves and some Irish “servants”), but he did amass thousands of acres of land along the Potomac and received a military commission to kill Indians in Maryland, where he earned a reputation for treachery and slaughter. In one notorious incident, Washington murdered five Indian leaders who had come to negotiate a treaty, then claimed their land. He was known by the Potomac tribes as Conotocarious, “destroyer of villages, devourer of homes.”

+ It turns out George Washington could have easily run a CIA black site or the Gitmo torture camp. As an officer of the VA Regiment in the French & Indian wars, he proved a sadistic disciplinarian inflicting as many as 1500 lashes a day for relatively minor offenses: “drinking in and informed another officer he “was determined to hang two or three at a time as an example to the others. (ie., his soldiers).” He kept his condemned prisoners in iron chains in total darkness. In a letter to Robert Dimwiddie, the Lt Governor of VA, with whom he would later clash in the revolutionary war, Washington wrote coldly: Your honor will, I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them. It conveyed much more terror to others and was for example’s sake we did it.”

+”To live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”

– Rev. Peter Fontaine, 1757

+ Though they can’t be blamed for its pompous and derivative neo-classical design, seven master black carpenters built most of the plantation house at Mount Vernon. They were all enslaved by Washington. The overseer of the construction, Humphrey Knight, wrote Washington, assuring the young land baron that he wasn’t light with the whip when he spotted a loose board or crooked plank: “As to the carpenters, I have minded ’em all I posably could and has whipt ’em when I could see a fault.”

+ Martha Washington kept her own sister, Ann Dandridge, as a slave. Ann was the daughter of Martha’s father John Dandridge and a young, enslaved woman, who was half-black, half-Cherokee. Ann lived as a slave at Mount Vernon until 1802, after first George, then Martha died.

+ Re: Pentagon contracts & high-tech weaponry, when Washington learned the Continental Army only had 300 barrels of gunpowder–not the 10k he’d been promised–Benjamin Franklin urged him to arm the troops with bows and arrows. “They’ve worked pretty well for centuries,” Franklin wryly noted. If only the bow-makers had had a PAC!

+ George Washington had a brilliant aide-de-camp during the final three years of the Revolutionary War. No, not Alexander Hamilton. His name was John Laurens. Laurens was that rare thing: a wealthy abolitionist from South Carolina. Even rarer, his father had amassed the family fortune through the slave trade, purchasing and selling as many as 10,000 people captured in Africa and shipped in chains to Charleston. Laurens had already developed plans to free his own family’s slaves and eagerly approached Washington with a daring scheme to shift the balance of power in a stagnating war, especially in the South, where British forces had just ransacked and torched Savannah. Laurens proposed emancipating at least 3,000 blacks who would be willing to serve in a South Carolina regiment to confront the marauding troops of Banastre Tarleton, who had terrorized the southern coast from Virginia to Georgia. Members of the Continental Congress warmed to the plan and some even wanted to go further, emancipating all slaves who’d be willing to serve in the American army.

After all, at that point, the Continental Army was already more integrated than any US army until the Vietnam War, with free blacks accounting for more than six percent of the total force. But Washington, who still owned or controlled as many as 300 slaves, recoiled at the idea of arming emancipated blacks in the South. He rejected Laurens’ plan and quietly contemplated a scheme, typically reactionary, of his own: sell off the slaves of Mt. Vernon and his other properties and loan the proceeds to finance the maintenance of his bedraggled army. In a letter to his plantation overseer (and distant cousin) Lund Washington, the general wrote that if the Americans lost the war

it would be a matter of little consequence to me whether my property is in Negroes or loan certificates, as I shall neither ask for, nor expect, any favor from his Most Gracious Majesty…the only points therefore for me to consider are…whether it would be most to my interest, in case of a fortunate determination of the present contest, to have Negroes and the crops they will make, or the sum they will fetch and the interest of the money.

So the war dragged on another three years, until finally the decisive blow was struck at Yorktown, where the nearly all-black First Rhode Island Regiment made one of the most audacious raids. As for Laurens, who dreamed of abolishing slavery across the Americas, he soon became one of the last casualties of the war, shot in the head during a skirmish with British troops pillaging a rice field along the Combahee River, a couple of weeks after the British fled Charleston.

+ George Washington’s First Inaugural Address was written by James Madison. Congress’s Response was written by James Madison. And Washington’s rejoinder was written by…James Madison. At the operational level, America’s politics has always been a charade.

+ Even George Washington drew the line at separating the families of the people he “owned”…

+ Baron Johann de Kalb, a German mercenary whom Lafayette recruited to aid the American Revolutionaries on Washington’s military acumen:

He is the most amiable, obliging, and civil man, but as a General he is too slow, even indolent, much too weak and is not without his portion of vanity and presumption. 

+ George Washington railed incessantly against the war profiteers and speculators during the Revolution, calling them “plundering scoundrels,” while today’s members of Congress (and sons of Trump) make millions trading in weapons and oil stocks, as their states and districts get gouged at the pump.

+ For all of his faults, Washington was no nativist. He encouraged mass immigration to the young Republic, writing  to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp in 1788: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

+ Tom Paine, that Che Guevara of the 18th century, in a letter to George Washington, May 1, 1790: 

Our very good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, has intrusted to my care the key of the Bastille, and a drawing handsomely framed representing the demolition of that detestable prison. I feel myself happy, and being the person through whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the spoils of despotism, and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted into Europe….

Soon, the nation Washington was building would be putting its own dissidents into similar prisons, under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

+ During the war, Tom Paine served as George Washington’s chief propagandist. His fiery pamphlets kept the money flowing and the popular spirits elevated even as the Revolutionary Army stumbled and stuttered up and down the Atlantic seaboard. After the Brits called it quits and Washington assumed power, he turned his back on his old friend. When Paine, the trans-Atlantic rebel, faced the guillotine in Revolutionary France for refusing to endorse the execution of the King, Washington failed to intervene, ignoring the urgings of Jefferson and Franklin. (Paine survived the Terror by a freak accident, as the prison guards mismarked his cell door.) Paine came to consider Washington a “counter-revolutionary” (he coined the term), denouncing the former revolutionary-turned-imperious leader as either “an apostate or an imposter.” 

+ Washington wasn’t a religious man. He countenanced religion, but didn’t practice it. He saw himself, a little grandly perhaps, as a figure of the enlightenment, a man of reason and science. If anything, he was a Deist, who believed in a Supreme Being and saw Jesus as a moral teacher, not a god. Still, he wasn’t hostile to religion in the manner of his fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who, in an 1816 letter to the writer Horatio Gates Spafford, described the divinity schools of Harvard and Yale as “seminaries of despotism.” For Jefferson, the Church was as oppressive as the monarchy.

Jefferson and Washington certainly were no Christian Nationalists. Jefferson wasn’t even a Christian. His biographer Joseph Ellis describes him as a secular humanist, though I don’t know what kind of humanism can rationalize holding other humans in bondage. Perhaps a future Supreme Court decision from Alito or Thomas will explain.

+ Hirsute historical note: The powdered wigs worn by European and American elites in the 17th and 18th centuries were originally designed to cover hair loss from syphilis and only later became such powerful symbols of status and high station that most of George Washington’s portraits depict him wearing one, though he never did. He did use scented powder on his hair, though that was mainly to prevent lice and to disguise the smell of the animal lard pomade used to flatten and sculpt his naturally red locks. (See: Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair by Emma Tarlo.)

+ In reading about Washington, I’ve become increasingly distracted by Peggy Shippen, wife of Benedict Arnold. Washington was so entranced by her that, even after evidence of her complicity in Benedict’s treason came to light, he refused to believe it. Shippen was reportedly the highest-paid British spy of the Revolutionary period. Aaron Burr was almost certainly right in charging that Shippen was not only central to the conspiracy but also enticed Arnold into becoming a British agent and surrendering West Point. This image of Shippen, whose coif would have shamed Madame Pompadour, gives you some idea of what charged the erotic fantasies of the nation’s first president, who called himself “a votary to love.” He remained in the thrall of a similar “Georgian era” English beauty, Sally Fairfax, who fled the nearby Belvoir plantation at the start of the Revolution for Bath, England, for most of his life…

+ Speaking of Burr, in Gore Vidal’s novel the slight that prompts the fatal duel on the Heights of Weehawken is Hamilton’s assertion that Burr regularly had incestuous relations with his daughter Theodosia, these maulings occurring at roughly the same time Burr’s other hated rival, Thomas Jefferson (who had manufactured evidence against Burr at his treason trial), was raping his enslaved house servant Sally Hemings. So when the Originalists piously ask about some Constitutional nuance, what was the intent of the Founders? It was probably something designed to indemnify their own felonious predilections.

+ There’s no question Washington obsessed over sex. On his bookshelves lurked two of the age’s most notorious sex tutorials, The Lover’s Watch: or the Art of Making Love by Aphra Benn and Daniel Defoe’s Conjugal Lewdness: or Matrimonial Whoredom. The question is why the father of the country failed to father any children by Martha or any of his hundreds of enslaved women? (Martha gave birth to four children in her first marriage, so the lack of fecundity in her relations with George probably didn’t originate with her.) Was it sterility or impotence? If you’d been able to peek inside Washington’s medicine cabinet at Mount Vernon, you’d have found it well-stocked with Spanish Fly, the sex potion made from dead blister beetles, purchased, like Viagra today, by mail order. In Washington’s case, it came from chemists in London in four-ounce jars.

+ But Spanish Fly often proved lethal, especially when administered to women orally. (Men tended to rub the mixture on their penises, hoping to swell and prolong their erections.)  In 1772, the Marquis de Sade fatally poisoned five Parisian prostitutes when, in anticipation of a weekend orgy (at which he longed to spend hours with his nose between their buttocks sampling their farts), de Sade compelled the young women to eat anise seed cupcakes liberally laced with Spanish Fly. Since Martha outlived George, we can perhaps assume that the orders of Spanish Fly were meant to fortify his own faltering Priapic ambitions.

+ While George Washington, the Father of the Country, didn’t have biological progeny that we know of, during his second term, his favoritism toward Alexander Hamilton led to charges that Hamilton was actually his illegitimate son. (This might give new subtext to “The Room Where It Happened.”) American politics has always featured this scurrilous element. It’s one of its most endearing features and, at least until Trump, has helped to serve as a check on the development of cult-like followings for American presidents. (See The George Washington Scandals by John C. Fitzpatrick.)

Washington’s false teeth, some of which were extracted from enslaved people. Photo: Mount Vernon.

Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

From Independence to Interdependence

By Lawrence S. Wittner

July 3, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

As Americans and people of other former colonies recognize, there’s a great deal to be said for national independence.

But, at times, we might also wonder: is it sufficient?

Until recently in human history, imperialism was widespread. In 1939, Britain’s Empire and Commonwealth alone had direct or de facto political and economic control of 25 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its land mass. In fact, only a century ago, nearly half of today’s independent nations were European colonies.

Imperialism, of course, had severe drawbacks. For the colonized, these drawbacks included genocide, enslavement, exploitation, and the looting of resources. But the colonizers, too, despite the vast riches acquired by a small minority among them, suffered losses. They perished in imperialist wars, died of starvation and diseases, and became infected by arrogance, brutality and racism. Above all, imperialism denied people in the colonies the right to self-government and, therefore, the right to determine the future of their own nations.

But World War II destabilized the imperialist system and, also, discredited it. As a result, a vast wave of decolonization occurred in the aftermath of the war, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Although there are still holdouts from the worldwide anti-imperialist approach―Vladimir Putin, committed to annexing Ukraine, Benjamin Netanyahu, battling to prevent Palestinian statehood, and Donald Trump, constantly demanding new territory―for the most part national independence has become the acceptable norm.

The problem, however, is that although national independence is preferable to imperialist domination, it does not get us very far toward solving some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Perhaps the most serious of the problems facing us today is war, with wars currently raging throughout large portions of the world. Global military spending continues to soar (reaching $2.9 trillion in 2025), with enormous increases already slated for the future. The result is―and seems likely to continue to be―an enormous loss of lives and economic resources. 

Nuclear weapons, of course, threaten to turn war into a catastrophe almost beyond human comprehension, annihilating virtually all life on earth. And yet, in a sharp break with the nuclear arms control and disarmament measures of past decades, the nuclear powers have recently abandoned their commitment to reducing and, ultimately, abolishing the nuclear menace. Having increased their nuclear spending by 19 percent in 2025, they are currently developing a dazzling array of new nuclear weapons.

How are nations going to deal with the immense problem of war and modern weaponry without collective action? Certainly, the solution to the problem does not lie in the hands of any one nation.

If human beings, as well as other species, are not exterminated in the near future by war, they are likely to face gradual extinction by environmental catastrophe. Global warming, the loss of biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, melting ice caps, sea level rise, soil degradation, overfishing, and a host of other ills are already here and leading to an increasingly unsustainable, unlivable future. Meanwhile, intense heat, raging wildfires, and massive floods are destroying agriculture and sending millions of desperate climate refugees fleeing from their homelands.

Effective protection of the world’s environment surpasses the ability of any one nation, however well-meaning. Surely it is a global matter, requiring global cooperation.

Diseases, of course, also transcend national lines. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, caused between 15 million and 18 million deaths in nations around the world. But, of course, in recent decades there have been other disease epidemics and pandemics that have shown no regard for national boundaries, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, influenza, hepatitis, SARS, swine flu, dengue fever, Western African Ebola, mpox, MERS, and cholera.

When it comes to diseases, there has been widespread recognition that a global approach is necessary. As a result, 192 nations belong to the World Health Organization (WHO). Three nations, however, stubbornly resist WHO membership. The United States is one of them, thanks to the decision of U.S. President Trump to withdraw from it.

Numerous other challenges―including widespread poverty, the irresponsible behavior of multinational corporations, mass migration, resource scarcity, and the risks of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence―also suggest the need for global collaboration.

These kinds of global issues are frequently discussed at the United Nations, leading to statements made by the UN Secretary-General and other UN officials that appeal for remedial action. But, unfortunately, some nations, and especially the great powers, which seem less committed to global betterment than to their own national agendas, have seen to it that the United Nations is denied the authority and the resources to adequately address these challenges. Russia, for example, has repeatedly vetoed UN Security Council resolutions calling for an end to its continued military invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine. For its part, the United States has compiled a debt of nearly $4 billion to the cash-strapped United Nations by halting its payments for UN dues and UN peacekeeping operations.

The logical solution to the frustration of collective action is to strengthen the United Nations. Several proposals have been advanced along these lines, including enhancing the power of the General Assembly and limiting the veto in the Security Council. In addition, a campaign has recently been launched to reduce the obstacles to more effective UN action in global affairs by employing Article 109 of the UN Charter to hold a UN Charter review conference. If this conference were held and the Charter revised, it could transform world organization into what the campaign calls “a stronger, fairer, and more inclusive international system.”

But the strengthening of the United Nations won’t occur automatically. It will require worldwide public pressure, driven by citizens’ organizations committed to peace, environmental sustainability, public health, and other global imperatives. Ultimately, it’s up to these organizations and to their allies among wise public officials to secure the next great shift in human consciousness and behavior―a shift from a parochial national independence to the interdependence of nations.Email

Lawrence S. Wittner

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Lawrence ("Larry") Wittner was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and attended Columbia College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1967.  Thereafter, he taught history at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, at Japanese universities (under the Fulbright program), and at SUNY/Albany.  In 2010, he retired as professor of history emeritus.  A writer on peace and foreign policy issues, he is the author or editor of twelve books and hundreds of published articles and book reviews and a former president of the Peace History Society.  Since 1961, he has been active in the peace, racial equality, and labor movements, and currently serves as a national board member of Peace Action (America's largest grassroots peace organization) and as executive secretary of the Albany County Central Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO.  On occasion, he helps to fan the flames of discontent by performing vocally and on the banjo with the Solidarity Singers.  His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press).  More information about him can be found at his website:  http://lawrenceswittner.com.