Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues

By Norman Solomon

March 2, 2026

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

‘The Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was candid: “It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.”’ Photograph: Bettmann Archive

When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.

Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. “Truth and Consequence,” being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.

“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.

The book’s subtitle – offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope” – could hardly be more timely.

Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.

At the center of “Truth and Consequence” are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.

“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.

“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”

“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.

He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the U.S. war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.

“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”

Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing – sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence – and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”

The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power – those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”

And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders – or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.”

1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”

Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.

“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”

1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”

By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”

And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence – from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”

1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”

1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”

1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”

1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”

Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”

Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine includes an afterword about the Gaza war. His new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, is free in e-book formats.

OPINION

America's crazed new obsession is nothing more than a tall tale

Robert Reich
February 28, 2026 
RAW STORY


Robert Reich. Picture: Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics/Wiki Commons.

I’m very short. At my zenith I was 4 feet, 11 inches.

From time to time, worried parents of abnormally short children phone or email me seeking reassurance. I tell them that if they or their children are desperate, they can resort to limb-lengthening surgeries, growth hormone treatments — humatrope — with unknown and potentially dangerous side effects, or a wide variety of homeopathic and crank remedies. But I discourage this.

The newest craze is height surgery, a procedure in which the leg bones are fractured and implanted with devices that slowly stretch them over several months. It can add three or so inches per procedure to a person’s height

Mario Moya, chief executive at the LimbplastX Institute in Las Vegas, says demand for height surgery has been surging. Dr. S. Robert Rozbruch, an orthopedic surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, says he used to see about 10 cases a year; last year, his clinics had 155 cases.

Last week, the New York Times ran a long feature on height surgery. The procedure was even used recently as a plot point in the film Materialists.

Why are so many parents worried about their child’s height these days? Maybe because, in this era of record-breaking inequality, they believe greater height will give their kid a leg up.

I gently urge the parents of short children not to seek height surgery or anything else to make their children taller.

I tell them to love their short kids, to inundate them with affection, and they’ll be okay.

I should know. I was bullied and ridiculed as a young kid, as I’ve recounted in my memoir, Coming Up Short.

Starting when I was around six years old, my mother and grandmother Minnie told me not to worry that I was at least a head shorter than other kids my age because I’d “shoot up” when I got to be 13 or 14 years old. I pictured a magic beanstalk; one morning, I’d wake up and be 6-foot-10. But by the time I was 15, I remained an inch under five feet, and I never got any taller.

Soon after John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, when the whole country seemed to be bubbling with optimism, my optimistic mother took me to see a doctor in New York who specialized in bone growth. He took a bunch of measurements, asked questions about the heights of my grandparents and great-grandparents (they were all normal), made some X-rays, drew some blood samples, and three weeks later phoned to say he had no idea why I was so short.

Reluctantly, I gave up waiting to shoot up. By that time I wasn’t particularly worried about being bullied or ridiculed. But being a very short man wasn’t especially helpful when it came to dating. A few years later, Dartmouth College, which was then all-male, seemed comprised almost entirely of big young men able to swoop the inhabitants of women’s colleges literally off their feet. (When I swooped in, they seemed to flee.)


That’s where things stood, as it were, until I was in my 30s, when my then wife (about five inches taller than I) and I contemplated having children. Medical science had advanced considerably over the two decades, because there was an answer to why I was so short.

I inherited a mutation called Fairbanks Disease, or multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, a rare genetic disorder that slows bone growth. (The actor Danny DeVito also has this condition.) Normal bones grow when cartilage is deposited at their ends. The cartilage then hardens to become additional bone. But my cartilage didn’t work that way.

Not only were my bones short, but the experts predicted I’d also have pain in my joints. I’d often tire, they said, and have problems with my spine. I’d have arthritis all over, and I’d waddle when I walked. Other things would go wrong as well.


Their predictions were accurate. I have had problems with my hips, and in my late 30s had to replace both. I had a bout of grand mal seizures in my late 30s, which neurologists couldn’t explain. There’s no need to bore you with my aches and pains. But the geneticist I consulted explained that the odds of passing this mutation to my children were very small. Even if they had it, the odds that it would slow their bone growth or cause any other irregularities, or be passed on to their own children, were minuscule.

We decided to have kids. And our sons turned out perfectly normal. But what’s “normal” anyway? And why is normal so important? I’ve had a wonderful life. I have a loving family. I’ve had good friends, work that I consider satisfying and important, reasonably good health except for the above-mentioned problems. So what if I’m very short?

Researchers have correlated being taller with greater income, high-status jobs, and positive perceptions of leadership. And it can be a tricky issue in an era of dating apps that can filter for height preferences.

Yet David Sandberg, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studied hundreds of children in the Buffalo area and found no real problem with being short and little benefit to being tall. In fact, height didn’t affect the number of friends those kids had, or how well they were liked by others, what others thought of them, or even their own perception of their reputation. But when psychologists Leslie Martel and Henry Biller asked several hundred university students to rate the qualities of men of varying heights on 17 criteria, short men were assumed to be less mature, less positive, less secure, less masculine, less successful, less capable, less confident, less outgoing, more inhibited, more timid, and more passive. In another study, only two of 79 women said they’d go on a date with a man shorter than themselves (the rest, on average, wanted to date a man at least 1.7 inches taller).

Heightism has even infected our language. Respected people have “stature” and are “looked up to.” People are more likely to make disparaging cracks about short people because nobody gets pulled up short for doing it — except for Randy Newman, who went too far with his “Short People (Got No Reason to Live)” song, which he has apparently regretted ever since.

When it comes to choosing leaders, our society is exceptionally heightist and seems to be getting more so. My dear friend and mentor, the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was 6-foot-8. He once said that favoring the tall was “one of the most blatant and forgiven prejudices in our society.” (When we walked around together, chatting away, people stared at us as if we were a carnival act. We laughed it off.)


When I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, it seemed that the only attribute reporters wanted to cover was my height. Regardless of what I said in my speeches, the Boston Globe ran photos of me standing on boxes so I could see over the podium. The right-wing Boston Herald ran a headline on its front page charging “Short People Are Furious with Reich” because I had joked about my height on the campaign trail. None of it helped me with that election. But I didn’t lose because of my height. I lost because I was a lousy campaigner.

Research shows that voters do prefer taller candidates. A paper published in 2013 by psychologists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands analyzed the results of American presidential elections dating back to 1789. They found that taller candidates received more votes than shorter ones in roughly two-thirds of those elections. And the taller the candidates were relative to their opponents, the greater the average margin of their victory. Among presidents who have sought a second term, winners have been two inches taller, on average, than losers. The authors conclude that height may explain as much as 15 percent of the variation in election outcomes. Presidents are becoming taller relative to average Americans (as measured by army records of recruits of the same age cohort). The last president shorter than this average was William McKinley, elected in 1896.

A survey of the heights of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies showed they were on average six feet tall, about 2.5 inches taller than the average American man.

Why are we so heightist? Probably because of some genetic trigger in our brain that told early humans they needed the protection of very big men. Other things being equal, large males are more to be feared, and they live longer. An impulse to defer to them, or prefer them as mates, makes evolutionary sense.


In Size Matters, Stephen S. Hall writes that in the 18th century, Frederick William of Prussia paid huge sums to recruit giant soldiers from around the world, thereby giving tangible value to matters of inches, and revealing “the desirability of height for the first time in a large, post-medieval society.”

But hey, I’m okay with being protected by giant soldiers, big security guards, and massive first responders. I don’t want to do these sorts of jobs anyway. I’m fortunate to have grown up (or at least grown upward) in a society that values brains at least as much as brawn. And to have had parents who loved me for who I was.

Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

Elders Are a Powerhouse of the US Pro-Democracy Movement

Today’s seniors are not sitting at home knitting sweaters for their grandkids — we are engaging in civil resistance with passion and determination in many meaningful ways.

By Bill Winkley

March 1, 2026

Source: Waging Nonviolence

Jeanne, who turns 100 later this year, at a protest. (Waging Nonviolence/Bill Winkley)

As a senior, I’m trying to do my part to push back against the daily dismantling of the nation by the Trump administration. And I’m not alone.

Around 25 percent of adults in the United States are seniors. We are a powerful demographic for reclaiming and restoring democracy in this country. We want to build upon the 250 years of its existence and support its return to a position of international leadership.

In my 85 years as a citizen of the U.S., I’ve done my best to be a good one. Never shy to engage with worthwhile causes, I have been involved with disability rights, vocational rehabilitation, special education, domestic violence prevention and rehabbing offenders, senior services, youth services, food and water security, and immigrant and minority rights. I have tried to advance justice in the U.S., and some 16 plus other nations in which I have worked. Yet, since 2016, my pride in my own government has waned precipitously.

I now live in a senior independent living facility with some 50 other seniors. We are often willing to overlook our increasing infirmities and dwindling resources to engage with passion and determination. We take great pride in having a positive influence on our children — both biological and otherwise — by teaching them our values and how to uphold them.

I have scores of senior friends and family members — some are more physically capable, but many have limited mobility or are even homebound. However, all of them are engaging in civil resistance in meaningful ways. I’ve learned from them that there are many opportunities for peaceful engagement in the resistance.

Those with limited mobility are posting and commenting on social media. Those with economic means are donating to progressive candidates. Many are phone banking and writing postcards to voters and potential voters with groups like Seniors Taking Action. Others boycott businesses that support the current administration, write letters to the editor and call in to radio talk shows.

I’ve seen many seniors (and non-seniors) with canes, walkers and wheelchairs at all of the protest events I have attended. At one demonstration, an elderly, disabled fellow showed up in a wheelchair equipped with hydraulic lifts that put him at eye level with the other protesters. He was not only able to see what others saw, but others saw him, his sign and his strength as a demonstrator with the same passion and potency.

I have a friend who turns 100 later this year and uses a walker to travel any distance from our communal residence. She is one of my role models, and has taught me how to maximize my presence and impact at large demonstrations. Last summer, she made careful preparations for the No Kings protest, which was planned at the federal building located roughly a mile from our home. Before the event, she made two round-trip trial runs to build stamina and reassure herself it was doable.

When I arrived at the protest, she had already strategically placed herself where her homemade sign could be seen and she could see, hear and engage fully with the activities. At a subsequent event, with yet another sign, she was one of several League of Women Voters who sported a banner extolling their values. My friend is a firebrand who never misses an opportunity to participate.

Another friend in her mid-70s has been totally blind since early childhood. She marches in most if not all demonstrations in her area. She religiously contacts her elected officials at both the federal and state levels, expressing her appreciation for deeds well done, dismay for bad moves, and suggestions or demands for more effective action. As a Latina woman who grew up in a poor neighborhood in El Paso, the child of a single mother and sister to four younger siblings, her life experience and upbringing has taught her the importance of advocating for herself and for others. With ICE violating the rights of so many minority folks right now, she is standing up in both English and Spanish, and making sure she is heard loud and clear.

My spouse, Stan Coleman, a director, actor, vocalist and pianist, directed a local theater production of the 1936 play “It Can’t Happen Here,” based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning author, Sinclair Lewis. The performances opened the audience’s eyes to the existential threat Trump and his followers pose to our way of life.

Other seniors have engaged in the boycotts of Target, Disney and ABC, as well as Tesla Takedown. Other elders are leaning on their alma maters to support critical issues like student organizing and protesting, avoiding campus repression, standing up for immigrant student rights, and refusing to buy into the authoritarianism of Trump’s campus compact. Since schools depend on alumni for financial support, especially through legacies, seniors are leveraging their position as potential donors to shore up their colleges’ willingness to defy Trump’s efforts at coercion and control.

As part of our resistance, my spouse and I have chosen to be active founders and members of the local chapter of States Win, formerly known as Sister District Project. This national effort works to support key state-level candidates for office through marches, bar trivia fundraisers and direct donations. Seniors make up more than 50 percent of our chapter. Additionally, our queer, senior walking group (called the “Talkie-Walkies” because we do more talking than walking) frequently sits for hours in front of our main library here in Eugene, Oregon, inviting passersby to register to vote.

Two of the founders of our States Win chapter, both women in their mid-to-late 70s, regularly travel to the home area of the candidates we are supporting and spend days knocking on doors to promote them. They report few negative reactions to their presentations. Could their age or the fact that they are seniors — and have expended considerable effort and expense to do what they are doing — be a factor in this positive reception? SDP’s impact nationally has been formidable: We helped flip both Virginia and Washington State from red to blue trifectas, where all three branches of the state government are now dominated by Democrats.

Making donations is one advocacy activity many seniors can do with little effort. Almost every person I know participates as a donor, in small or large amounts, often as just one way they engage in political activism. My spouse and I have developed a profile for those we support: We look at their platform and what in their history informs it; how they have performed in other political positions, in advocacy groups and in movements; how they have overcome difficulties to be successful; their support for minority rights; and their passion for all of the above.

Phone banking has been shown to be effective in swaying non-voters and regular voters to vote for progressive candidates. It is an activity one can do from home with proven impact. Many, many of my elderly friends participate. Writing postcards can be a solo act from the comfort of one’s kitchen table or a social event with a group of like-minded activists. Seniors might be the largest demographic engaged with postcard writing. One friend, in particular, has handwritten over 1,000 postcards in the past two years.

Signing petitions, joining and supporting advocacy groups such as Southern Poverty Law Center, Amnesty International and the ACLU, door-to-door canvassing, writing letters and emailing, are all methods of civil, peaceful resistance that countless seniors are involved in.

Additionally, with isolation being associated with dementia, the social value of many of these activities can be meaningful. Being with others builds awareness and commitment, both of which foster mental health, along with civil resistance. In Eugene, many of us gather at a store called Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts, or MECCA, where people make signs using both new and used materials, and share ideas with others of similar persuasion. My 84-year-old supper tablemate never fails to show up at a demonstration with a new and clever sign she created at MECCA. Folks often photograph her with her sign.

Importantly, all of these resistance efforts are nonviolent, which has been shown to be the most effective way of waging struggle. Trust us on this. Not only have seniors lived long enough to know what works, the book “Civil Resistance: What Everybody Needs to Know”proves it. Erica Chenoweth demonstrates that nonviolent movements have succeeded twice as often as violent ones over the last century. Along with my fellow senior activists, I often attend Chenoweth’s webinars with the Ash Center at Harvard University.

The activism carried out by our nation’s elders is laudable and extensive. Attend any rally, march, protest and look at the amount of white hair in the rising sea of protesters. Today’s seniors are not sitting at home knitting sweaters for our grandkids or pasting memory photos in albums. Nope, we are out there pushing back and fighting for a far better gift for them: We are assuring a future where we have a fully restored and improved democracy.

Don’t mess with seniors!\\\Email

Bill Winkley

Bill Winkley has worked as a teacher, rehab counselor, administrator and consultant in non-profit management. He has lived and worked extensively around the world. Today he coordinates the work of One Family International in developing nations from his home in a senior independent lives facility in Eugene, Oregon.

How To Build A Monster: The Man-Child Goblins Who Never Heard “No”

Kathleen Wallace

 February 27, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

We’re seeing the results of raising wealthy mediocre men in a bubble—a bubble free of pesky limitations to their horrendous behavior. A rarefied place from which they were never taught the barest of consequences for terrible actions. These were the kinds of boys who had all of their misbehavior explained away and then someone else swooped in to clean up the mess, as if it never happened. Whether we are speaking of Trump, of ex-Prince Andrew, that creepy ass son of Norway’s crown princess, or hell, certain members of our Supreme Court, the oligarchs have lived protected lives free from repercussions. It’s as if you take a young boy, perhaps one with antisocial and narcissistic tendencies to begin with, and you give him everything he wants–you never correct cruel behavior and in fact actively blame his victims at the hint of any consequences. This informal scientific experiment gives you a problem not just for the immediate victims of the man-boy, but for society as a whole. These boys grow up having never felt the most basic human condition, that of consequences. And in a society based on exploitation and subjugation, these are the very men who thrive and generally find themselves in amplified positions of power.

How does a man who has been at the helm of six corporate bankruptcies land a television show that glamorizes him as a titan of industry? How does a man brag about grabbing women by the pussy and declare that he would date his daughter, if you know, she wasn’t his daughter, not get met with vomit? How does a man who married three times, with kids from all these different baby mommas proclaim himself the protector of family values? Do a thought experiment and try to imagine a woman, hell, how about a woman of color, saying any of these things. Would she have had a political career? Would she have landed anywhere outside of perhaps an involuntary lobotomy? We are shaking our heads at the trauma being inflicted upon us as a nation, even internationally, from men like this, but how else would the story end when you allow such an upbringing and such acquiescence to cruelty? It is ludicrous to have allowed such creatures any type of power; they simply don’t have the emotional maturity or learned/inherent decency to be trusted with a task like taking out the trash on Monday. They can’t even be trusted not to attack the babysitter. They claim the Inuit had a solution for men such as this. They took them out “fishing,” and sometimes they didn’t come home. I’m sure they left them some nice place to live out their lives, of course.

That one brother in the Trump family who sounds as if he were a decent man, well, we know what happened to him. He was considered a black sheep for being…a major airline pilot. Yeah, that’s a terribly embarrassing occupation among a family of racist real estate slumlords—ones so bad that Woody Guthrie wrote “Old Man Trump” about their shit behavior. But Donald was golden and was given treasure after treasure from his rotten old daddy. No failure was too messy; all was forgiven as long as the aggressive bravado was maintained. That other brother drank himself to death. That family selected for pathology and celebrated it, and now it’s all our problem.

So anyway, we have 14 seasons of that insipid show celebrating the failed business-monster. They say a time traveler might go back and find Baby Hitler and well, you know, but maybe those time travelers should be looking for Baby Mark Burnett, and you know, uh……. talk that baby out of future life choices.

In a similar vein, we have ex-Prince Andrew Castlebottom-Mountbatten-Windsor-PedoPastyFace of the Three Gorges of Dragonfornication living out his best life for around 60 years. A man that Princess Diana said was very happy to sit in front of the television all day watching cartoons. She also said that he was loud, aggressive and rude, so of course, he would be the Queen’s favorite. A stupid, crass oaf given the chance to be aggressive with staff, to never work a true day in his life? What could go wrong? Oh yeah, Virginia Giuffre ends up dead, there’s that.

But we let these men thrive for so long, and we elevate them to heights of power. So many were comfortable with Trump’s behavior because that’s what they know from their own flawed upbringings. I’ll never forget hearing a woman say in response to the “grab them by the pussy” issue that this was just how men talk and she was resigned to that fact. We have resigned ourselves to the fact that these types of men do talk like that and their actions follow. We have for so long accepted that these are the men to lord over us. It’s as if most of the populace has a learned helplessness against these monstrous fellows. Perhaps so many have been in abusive situations where they were unable to extract themselves…think abused children with a violent patriarch, and this becomes the norm they accept because it’s what they know. They believe hierarchy is natural and some people simply count more than others. This one sick belief is the wellspring of all that is wrong.

Small and aggressive men have treated women this way in exponential numbers throughout history. Look at the intimate partner violence stats. Trump’s regime is very much treating the nation and the world in a manner similar to an abusive partner. First, you isolate the victims (purposefully alienate all other nations so the people of the US are alone). You make them think they don’t deserve much of anything, say universal health care, a living wage, a life free from an oncology soup of chemicals. You gaslight the hell out of them until they can’t even figure out what is true and what is not. Then you have a hollowed-out shell of a person, of a citizen. An individual is completely ready to believe any nonsense dished out, because to them, that surrender equals a misguided notion of safety.

And if we keep producing these man-children who view the world as little more than toys to break, we will all become broken and our world will find a way to erase us. Nature feels no such need to acquiesce to man-children. You cannot let the worst of the worst continue to hold positions of wealth and power and expect any conclusion but disaster. If we look at this situation with clear eyes, the very idiocy of listening to these types of individuals is overwhelmingly clear.

Even if these men have not faced significant consequences over the years, it is now a time of reckoning. Andrew is getting a tiny taste of these repercussions, and we must make sure to expand on this and no longer normalize any of the rapist mentality that is ruining the lives of 99% of the globe.

We live on this earth, a place so painfully beautiful and pregnant with all of our highest potential. To see a future of meaning and love, these man-child goblins need to be relegated to the painful past.

Kathleen Wallace writes out of the US Midwest. Her writing is collected on her Substack page.

The Art of the Steal and the Privatization of the Presidency

John W. Whitehead – Nisha Whitehead

 February 27, 2026

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

In his State of the Union address, President Trump declared that America is entering a “Golden Age.” Golden for whom?

For a president who lives lavishly in a taxpayer-funded mansion, jets around to weekend golf getaways at taxpayer expense, and dismisses concerns about “affordability” as fake news, life might indeed be gilded.

For the rest of the country, it is fool’s gold.

Nearly six-in-ten Americans say the country is worse off now than it was a year ago. Groceries cost more. Utilities cost more. Housing costs more.

For millions of families, this is not a golden age.

It is a painful lesson in imperial economics: the billionaire class lives large while “we the people” are told to live small.

Trump is not working to make America great again. He is working to expand his wealth, protect his investments, and rule in gilded comfort at taxpayer expense.

As a candidate, Trump promised to “drain the swamp.”

Instead, the swamp has been privatized.

When it comes to the true state of our nation, Americans would do well to examine not just what the Trump administration has accomplished—or failed to accomplish—but who has profited.

The highest public office in the land has become a personal revenue stream for Donald Trump & Co.—a vehicle for private enrichment that monetizes access, influence and public assets while the public pays the tab.

To monetize the presidency is to treat public power as property—something to be leased, leveraged and exploited for private gain.

This is how you bilk a nation.

The man who once lent his name to the ghostwritten The Art of the Deal is now authoring a far more instructive manual: The Art of the Steal—a step-by-step guide to how to convert a constitutional republic into a personal brand.

According to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion… All told, Mr. Trump has profited from his return to the presidency by an amount of money equal to 16,822 times the median U.S. household income.”

Power attracts conmen and swindlers. It always has. But never has the grift been so openly institutionalized.

Just consider the entries in this administration’s ledger.

Personal indulgence and vanity projects:

$400 million and counting for a White House ballroom underwritten by corporate giants whose regulatory futures sit squarely in presidential hands.

$70 million for a luxury jet with a private bedroom so DHS secretary Kristi Noem can fly around in comfort with her rumored partner.

$28 million for an Amazon documentary on Melania Trump.

Tens of millions for Trump’s weekend golf trips to Mar-a-Lago, including what he charges the American taxpayer for the Secret Service to be housed at the resort.

Policy decisions that generate revenue or leverage:

Billions in stealth taxes disguised as “emergency” tariff revenues paid for by the American people. According to NPR, the federal government is now collecting roughly $30 billion per month in tariff revenue—far more than it collected from import taxes before Trump returned to office—largely paid for by American consumers. So when Trump tries to sell Americans on the idea that tariffs could eventually replace income taxes—a clear bid to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling against his tariff policy—don’t believe it. That’s just another money grab.

A $10 billion taxpayer buy-in to a privatized Board of Peace created and controlled by Trump in perpetuity with no real oversight or accountability.

$230 million in damages Trump claims he is owed over investigations into his own past misconduct.

Another $10 billion in damages which Trump claims he is owed after an IRS contractor was convicted of leaking his tax information.

Millions in trademark rights and licensing fees tied to Trump’s name on public infrastructure. As trademark attorney Josh Gerben notes, “The move raises unusual questions about the intersection of public infrastructure and private brand ownership. While presidents and public officials have had landmarks named in their honor, a sitting president’s private company has never in the history of the United States sought trademark rights in advance of such naming.”

At least $23 million from licensing Trump’s name overseas since his re-election.

$4 billion flowing into Trump family coffers in the first year of his second term, including $867 million through cryptocurrency ventures.

Public money redirected toward private allies and enforcement expansion:

$128 million for an ICE warehouse purchased three years earlier for $29 million—a $100 million markup benefiting a Russian-backed company.

$15 million earmarked to feed starving children internationally, which was instead impounded for OMB director Russell Vought’s security detail.

$51 billion in taxes not paid by Amazon, Alphabet,  Meta, and Tesla in 2025 after receiving a 4.9% tax rate.

A $10 billion government contract between the Army and Palantir, founded by Trump supporter Peter Thiel.

Foreign entanglements and gifts:

A $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, which will be retrofitted at taxpayer expense for Trump’s official use as Air Force One and which he plans to take with him when he leaves office.

Hundreds of millions more from foreign government-linked investors gaining access through the purchase of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency ventures.

These are not isolated expenditures. They reveal a pattern.

They speak to the blueprint Trump has used to monetize his stint in the White House.

The Founders anticipated precisely this danger: a president tempted to convert public trust into private profit. The Constitution’s Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses were intended to prevent a president from profiting from office.

With Congress unwilling to enforce the Constitution and the courts slow to intervene, these guardrails have weakened.

As the Brennan Center concludes, “Not even the most notorious public corruption scandals from American history can match the scale of Trump’s profiteering in terms of total dollar amount.”

This is how access to power is sold to the highest bidders.

The American system of government was designed as a constitutional covenant: power delegated, limited, and bound by law.

What we are witnessing is transactional governance: access traded, favors exchanged, loyalty rewarded, and policy negotiated like a business deal.

This pay-to-play culture now permeates the highest levels of power.

The U.S. government is fast becoming a self-serving, money-laundering enterprise masquerading as legitimate authority.

The choice before us is not partisan. It is constitutional.

A republic cannot survive when public office becomes private property.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how republics fall.

It is time to drain the swamp.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest books The Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield America: The War on the American People are available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.