Marco Rubio hit with devastating clip on MS NOW as he fails fuming MAGA's own test

Daniel Hampton
March 19, 2026 

RAW STORY

(Screengrab via MS NOW)

MS NOW's Ari Melber on Thursday exposed what he framed as a glaring act of MAGA hypocrisy — playing a side-by-side clip of right-wingers melting down over Bad Bunny's Spanish-language Super Bowl halftime show while Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered an entire address in Spanish.

"Nobody understood a thing!" Fox News host Jesse Watters bemoaned to viewers about the half-time show.

"Not one word of English?" another MAGA commentator raged.

Melber then played a side-by-side clip of Rubio delivering March 7 remarks in Spanish on television from the podium.

"To get up there and perform the whole show in Spanish is a middle finger to the rest of America!" MAGA Megyn Kelly fumed about Bad Bunny's performance.

Rubio "failed" Kelly's "test," Melber said in a separate segment teasing his takedown. He again let the contrast speak for itself, rolling footage of Rubio doing exactly that.

"For MAGA, apparently it's okay when they do it," Melber said dryly. After sharing a Spanish message to viewers, Melber added: 'Hope nobody's upset.'"

Melber brought on music journalist Neil Shah, a former longtime Wall Street Journal reporter and author of an upcoming book on the 2010 hip-hop boom, to put the backlash in context.

Shah said Trump and MAGA's complaints about Bad Bunny were "just out of touch with the reality of music," pointing out that the Puerto Rican superstar has been Spotify's number one artist for much of the last five years.

"Streaming has allowed many of these global artists to crash through the traditional gatekeepers in the American music industry," Shah said, citing Latin music, K-pop, and Afrobeats as genres that have exploded precisely because platforms opened doors the traditional industry kept closed.

Missiles, Memes, and Masculinity: When the White House Turns War Into Entertainment

By Rob Okun

March 10, 2026

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

A week into Trump’s illegal war against Iran, the White House released a 42-second video on X, featuring movie scenes spliced with real military footage of strikes in Iran, promising “justice, the American way.” Rather than sober statements about national security or the grim human realities of war, the March 5 video resembled a movie trailer.

The clips stitched together real footage of missile strikes with pop-culture heroes: Russell Crowe in Gladiator, Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Keanu Reeves’ relentless assassin in the John Wick films. Even SpongeBob SquarePants made an appearance. The video was immediately mocked for reflecting the militaristic fantasies of teenage boys (see Hegseth, Pete), more than that of the US starting a war.

The editing followed a familiar formula: a heroic movie quote, a dramatic cut to real explosions, then a video-game style victory sound. War, apparently, has become content. Actor Ben Stiller publicly demanded the removal of a Tropic Thunder clip, used without permission, stating, “War is not a movie.”

The controversy over these videos isn’t only about taste or messaging. It’s about something deeper: the way American political culture still equates masculinity with domination and violence. When leaders celebrate military strikes using action-movie heroes and gaming tropes, they reinforce one of the oldest myths about manhood—that men’s strength is proven by crushing enemies. 

Criticism of the videos continues for trivializing violence. Coverage from Reuters described them as part of a broader “meme war,” blending Hollywood imagery and gaming culture with real military action.

For generations, boys have been raised on stories where one’s manhood is proven through violence. Movies, video games, and political rhetoric repeat the same narrative: the male hero defeats the enemy through superior power. What do these videos reveal about the way masculinity is still defined in 21st century America?

In this framing, restraint looks weak. Empathy looks soft. Diplomacy looks naïve. Real men strike back. 

Really!? A quarter of the way through the new century, the slow, steady gains of an  international movement to redefine masculinity still remain beneath the radar.

The White House videos used Hollywood mythology to bolster its geopolitical messaging. Consider the imagery: Maximus in Gladiator embodies righteous vengeance. Maverick in Top Gun represents fearless individualism. Tony Stark’s Iron Man combines technological power with swaggering bravado. The assassin played by Keanu Reeves in John Wick eliminates enemies with unstoppable efficiency.

Psychologist Mary L. Trump—Donald Trump’s niece—has written about how fragile masculinity often masks deep insecurity. In her book Too Much and Never Enough, she describes a family culture in which vulnerability was treated as weakness and domination became the only acceptable form of strength. That dynamic doesn’t stay confined to one family. It echoes through political culture.

When leaders, almost always white and male, celebrate explosions with movie quotes and gaming sound effects, they reinforce a version of masculinity that sees empathy as weakness and violence as proof of strength.

This culture carries real consequences. The overwhelming majority of violence worldwide—from mass shootings to domestic abuse to war—is committed by men. Researchers who study masculinity point to rigid expectations that equate manhood with dominance and emotional suppression. 

When political leaders celebrate military violence using the imagery of hypermasculine fictional heroes, they reinforce those expectations rather than challenge them. What’s the message for our sons and grandsons?

Consider what’s missing from the videos: no civilians running from falling bombs. No grieving families. No returning veterans struggling with trauma. War is no longer presented as solemn or ethically complex; it is packaged like a video game. If a podcaster promoted that, we’d be outraged. That our government is doing so demonstrates just how morally bankrupt the Trump administration is.

War appears not as tragedy, but as spectacle.

Across the country—and around the world—men are challenging the old patriarchal script. They are often choosing caregiving over breadwinning, confronting sexism rather than ignoring it, and working to prevent violence in their communities.

Their courage doesn’t appear in action-movie montages, yet it may be far more important. Because the real challenge facing our society isn’t simply defeating enemies abroad; it’s transforming manhood at home.

If we want a safer, more humane world, boys must learn that real courage isn’t measured by explosions or victory screens. It’s measured by the ability to protect life, show compassion, and reject violence—even in a culture that socializes you to believe violence is what makes you a man.

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Rob Okun (robokun50@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male, which has long chronicled the profeminist men’s movement. The magazine is now published by the Canadian NGO, Next Gen Men.

'Draw the line': NFL veterans rage against Trump using their image to sell his war

Feb 11, 2026; Seattle, WA, USA; Seattle Seahawks players react during the Super Bowl LX trophy celebration at Lumen Field. Mandatory 

Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Bruce Haring 

March 12, 2026

ALTERNET

President Donald Trump’s administration has angered former college and pro football players by conflating their hard hits on the gridiron with military strikes in Iran.

The Washington Post spoke to several players featured in a White House created clip that began circulating last week on X. They expressed disgust that their athletic achievements were used to illustrate bombing human beings.

The Trump administration has a long history of using clips and songs to illustrate its points, often despite the objections of the people who created or are depicted in them.

The WaPo cited a recent montage using war movie clips with bits from Ben Stiller's film, “Tropic Thunder,” with Stiller responding that he had “no interest in being part of your propaganda machine.”

In the football clips recently released, Kenny Bell of the University of Nebraska was pictured delivering a block that de-cleated a Wisconsin player during the 2012 Big Ten title game.

Bell, now 34, said he was “disgusted” to be part of the montage, which used music from AC/DC’s song “Thunderstruck” as its soundtrack.

“For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick,” Bell told The Washington Post. “I don’t want anything to do with images like that.”

The clip was still online as of Thursday morning and has garnered 10 million views on X. The NFL, which is usually aggressive in its protection of its intellectual property, did not respond to the Post's request for comment.

Others depicted in the clip include retired linebacker Ray Lewis and safeties Ed Reed and Kam Chancellor. So far, Reed posted his dismay on X. “I do not approve this message.”

Mason Foster, a former Tampa Bay Buccaneers linebacker, was depicted crashing into a receiver during a preseason game in 2011. That’s followed by a bomb that explodes on a rocky landscape in Iran.

Foster told The Post he was shocked after he was sent the video.

“I’m at a loss for words,” Foster said this week. “It’s a strange feeling, seeing those clips like that. I don’t think anything going on in the world today is as simple as a great football play or a hit. I’m still wrapping my head around it.

“When people are losing their lives, I don’t think it can compare to a game," Foster added.

Bell and Foster both said they want the White House to remove the video.The rightsholders, including the NFL, should use the courts if they don’t, they said.

The White House declined to comment to The Post on the players’ concerns.

Removal may not be easy. Rebecca Tushnet, a First Amendment professor at Harvard Law School, said courts “have historically been hesitant to let copyright owners assert infringement in political ads and political speech,” usually opting for the “fair use” doctrine.

“The argument here seems to be: Sports and killing people are fun things that Americans are good at," Tushnet said. "That is, although repulsive, an argument.”

Stunning new White House video shocks critics — and even 'MAGA isn’t impressed': analysis

Screen capture of White House video.

Sarah K. Burris 

March 12, 2026 

ALTERNET

The White House released a new AI video to promote the war in Iran, depicting the people of Iran as bowling pins and President Donald Trump as the bowling ball.

Adam Boulton, a presenter at Times Radio, called the clip the "most shocking video yet," noting that "MAGA isn't impressed."

"On 28 February at least 168 people, most of them schoolgirls, were killed in an air strike at Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ primary school in Minab, Iran," he began.

At first, the administration tried to claim that it was Iran who fired the Tomahawk missiles on the school, doing a "double tap" when there were survivors.

“We think it was done by Iran, because they’re very inaccurate with their munitions,” Trump said on March 1.

Iran doesn't have Tomahawk missiles. The U.S. does.

CNN broadcast images of parts of the weapons used on Wednesday, making it very clear that the weapons that hit the school were, indeed, American

Overnight, the official White House account posted a meme video that Boulton said demonstrates "once again the puerile, callous attitude of the administration to this conflict."

"The Iranians are portrayed as angry cartoon bowling pins, marching across a desert brandishing Kalashnikovs and a placard insisting 'We won’t stop making nuclear weapons!'" he wrote in the column. An American bowling hero then throws his ball at the pins with the Lynyrd Skynyrd song "Free Bird" playing in the background. The word "Strike" flashes on the screen like a cartoon. They then cut to the bomb strikes from the U.S. on Iran.

"Just in case you couldn’t believe what you were seeing, the final slate signs off: 'THE WHITE HOUSE President Donald J. Trump,'" Boulton added.

The writer believes that Trump is growing increasingly angry that his own supporters aren't lining up to support his new war. Trump spent 2024 promoting his "America First" agenda and saying that he would end wars, not start new ones. Once entering office, he justified smaller attacks, like the intervention in Venezuela, by saying that his new "Don-roe Doctrine" is to prioritize the Western Hemisphere. Iran doesn't even fit that characterization.

"The bowling meme video, however, doubles down on the Trump administration’s macho, gung-ho approach to his war, epitomised by the boastfully self-styled 'Secretary of War' Pete Hegseth" Boulton continued. "Sure enough, bearing the brunt of Trump’s anger at those who are fleeing from him is a woman: Marjorie Taylor Greene."

New numbers show that MAGA is hemorrhaging women from the coalition it used to win in 2024.

“‘Make America Great Again’ was supposed to be America first, not Israel first, not any foreign country first, not any foreign people first,” Greene said when speaking to The Megyn Kelly Show a few weeks ago.

While Trump tries to turn the war into "flippant online thrills [...] reality is biting," Boulton writes.

America Runs on Care Work, and I’m Tired of Pretending Otherwise

The labor that sustains human life gets pushed to the margins, while the labor that scales software gets paraded on magazine covers.


A caregiver holds the hand of an elderly patient.
(Photo via Getty Images)

Neal K. Shah
Mar 08, 2026

Common Dreams


A few days ago, I stared at a federal bar chart on my laptop and felt my stomach drop. I started asking people a party-trick question: What’s the biggest occupation in America? Almost everyone guessed something visible: teachers, retail, fast food, office work. That’s what our culture trains us to notice.

Then I pulled up the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) “largest occupations” data, and the answer was sitting there in plain English: Home Health and Personal Care Aides, 3,988,140 people.

I’m not reading that as an abstract statistic but something I see daily through my work in running CareYaya, a social enterprise that helps families find affordable in-home care support. I hear the voices behind those numbers every day: the exhausted daughter trying to keep her job, the older man determined to stay in his own house, the care aide who shows up anyway even when her own life is fraying.

What hit me wasn’t just the size of the workforce, but the silence with which society treats caregivers.

Care work sits at the intersection of everything America avoids looking at directly: aging, disability, dependence, death, and the truth that every “independent” adult is one accident, cancer, or dementia diagnosis away from needing help.

In a country that can’t stop talking about “the economy,” I rarely see the economy described the way it actually functions at street level. I see caregivers keeping older adults safe so that family members can work, so the bills get paid, so other industries keep humming. I see care work acting like the hidden scaffolding under everything else.

And, I see how quickly that scaffolding gets treated as disposable labor.

When I talk to families, they often whisper about their difficulties getting care support almost like they’re confessing a moral failure. “We’re trying,” they tell me, as if the need for help is some private weakness instead of a predictable part of aging or serious illness. When I talk to care aides, they talk about the stress from the care work. They talk about rushing between clients. They talk about loving the work and sometimes still not being able to make rent.

PHI’s snapshot of the direct care workforce puts numbers to what I keep hearing, that median annual earnings for direct care workers were just $25,015. I read that figure and think about what it really means in 2026 America: The largest job category in the nation is, effectively, a low-wage backbone.

I also think about who gets stuck holding the bag. Care work is still treated as “women’s work” in the cultural imagination, and that bias leaks into policy, pay, and prestige. I watch the same pattern repeat: The labor that sustains human life gets pushed to the margins, while the labor that scales software gets paraded on magazine covers.

What makes me angrier is that this isn’t a small sector we can ignore until later. The BLS projects 17% growth from 2024 to 2034 for home health and personal care aides, with about 765,800 openings each year on average. This is not a “future” problem but rather a present problem that is going to grow much worse, faster.

And yet I keep watching public conversations drift toward fantasy. I hear endless speculation about AI replacing workers, while the largest workforce in America can’t even get a stable ladder, a living wage, or basic respect. I hear investors pitch “aging tech” like it’s a consumer gadget category, while the core issue is whether a real human being can afford to do this work and stay in it.

I don’t think this is an accident, but rather, a choice embedded in our system.

Care work sits at the intersection of everything America avoids looking at directly: aging, disability, dependence, death, and the truth that every “independent” adult is one accident, cancer, or dementia diagnosis away from needing help. So we do what societies often do with uncomfortable truths. We outsource them, we underpay them, and we call them “personal responsibility.”

Even the funding structure says it all. Medicaid is the main payer of long-term services and supports in the US, and a recent Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services brief says so plainly: “Medicaid is the largest payer for long-term services and supports (LTSS) in the United States.” I read that line and think about the whiplash families face when they confront a vast public health need paired with political rhetoric that treats caregivers and recipients like line items to be squeezed.

So when I’m asked what to do, I start with a moral stance and then I get practical.

I want a country that pays the people who keep elders safe, like they truly matter. I want Medicaid rates and payment models that stop forcing providers into churn, and stop forcing workers into poverty. I want training and advancement pathways for care workers, and I want the caregiving workforce to have real power: bargaining power, scheduling power, and dignity at work.

I also want us to stop acting surprised when the care workforce pipeline breaks. If the biggest job in America is care, then the “care crisis” isn’t a niche issue, but a core labor rights issue; a public investment issue; and an economic issue that’s as critical as housing, wages, and healthcare.

When I look back at that BLS bar chart, I don’t see a pop-quiz type question anymore. I see millions of workers holding up millions of families. I see the work that makes the rest of American life possible.

And I can’t unsee the insult of how little we talk about it.

If I want anything from readers, it’s this: I want you to say the name of the job out loud, and then demand that we build an economy that treats it as essential, because it is.


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Neal K. Shah
Neal K. Shah is the CEO of CareYaya, a social enterprise advancing health equity for the aging population.
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Nationalize Amazon

Jon Hochschartner

 March 2, 2026

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There are many lessons we could take from the last decade of American politics, in which our country has degenerated further and further into an oligarchic hellscape. One I hope a majority would agree with is that current levels of wealth inequality are incompatible with political democracy. There are various ways this issue might be addressed, but one I’d prefer is nationalizing giant corporations, like Amazon, by which I mean putting them under public control and redirecting the profits to socially-beneficial ends.

I was struck by a recent post that appeared on the website Bluesky, which said that given Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a net worth of more than $253 billion, he could light $1 million on fire every day for almost 700 years without exhausting his funds. If this wasn’t incredible enough, a number of commentators pointed out the post was misleading, since Bezos earns more than $1 million in interest every day, so, actually, the oligarch could burn $1 million a day in perpetuity. This is, needless to say, outrageous.

Compared to many, I live a life of privilege. And, yet, is there any sense in which I can claim equality with Bezos? The question is laughable on its face. Take our ability to participate in the democratic process. Sure, we both have one vote, but, if I want to influence the views of others, I must write a letter to the editor which newspaper staff choose to run or create a short-form video which happens to go viral. In contrast, Bezos can purchase even more of the media landscape than he already has and change the editorial line as he sees fit.

To help neutralize this threat to democracy, we should nationalize companies like Amazon. The federal government should take over all aspects of the business, from the stock warehouses and delivery fleets to its streaming applications and cloud-computing services. The profits could be put toward any number of worthy projects, like rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, funding local news organizations in communities without them, providing free healthcare to all, or offering no-cost college education to anyone who wants it.

Personally, as an animal activist, I’d like to see a portion of such profits devoted to funding cultivated-meat research. For those who don’t know, cultivated meat is grown from livestock cells, without slaughter. I view developing this technology as the most promising means of reducing nonhuman suffering and premature death. We should be establishing facilities like the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture across the country. The point, however, is these profits could be put toward anything we might democratically decide on.

Present levels of wealth inequality are destabilizing the United States in any number of ways. Among other things, it’s fueling a fascist movement which has taken control of the White House and the wider Republican Party. Such politics reflect what’s been termed ‘the socialism of fools,’ a far-right populism which blames racial, religious and gender minorities for the existing, miserable state of affairs, rather than the obscenely wealthy. Let’s help preserve American democracy by nationalizing giant companies like Amazon.

Jon Hochschartner is the author of a number of books about animal-rights history, including The Animals’ Freedom Fighter, Ingrid Newkirk, and Puppy Killer, Leave Town. He blogs at SlaughterFreeAmerica.Substack.com.

 

The Whole Economy Pays the Amazon Tax

By Cory Doctorow

March 1, 2026Z

Source: Pluralistic

Automation at a Amazon’s delivery station in Maspeth, Queens has led to box pile-ups and speed-up for remaining workers. Photo: Romuald Meigneux/SIPA

Selling on Amazon is a tough business. Sure, you can reach a lot of customers, but this comes at a very high price: the junk fees that Amazon extracts from its sellers amount to 50-60% of the price you pay.

That’s a hell of a lot of money to hand over to a middleman, but it’s not like vendors have much choice. The vast majority of America’s affluent households are Prime subscribers (depending on how you define “affluent household” it’s north of 90%). Prime households prepay for a year’s worth of shipping, so it’s only natural that they start their shopping on Amazon, where they’ve already paid the delivery costs. And because Amazon reliably meets or beats the prices you’d pay elsewhere, Prime subscribers who find a product on Amazon overwhelmingly stop their shopping at Amazon, too.

At this point you might be thinking a couple things:

I. Why not try to sell the non-affluent households, who are far less likely to subscribe to Prime? and

II. If Amazon has the lowest prices, what’s the problem if everyone shops there?

The answers to these two questions are intimately related, as it happens.

Let’s start with selling to non-affluent households – basically, the bottom 90% of American earners. The problem here is that everyone who isn’t in that top 10% is pretty goddamned broke. It’s not just decades of wage stagnation and hyperinflation in health, housing and education costs. It’s also that every economic crisis of this century has resulted in a “K-shaped” recovery, in which “economic recovery” means that rich people are doing fine, while everyone else is worse off than they were before the crisis.

For decades, America papered over the K-shaped hole in its economy with debt. First it was credit cards. Then it was gimmicky mortgages – home equity lines of credit, second mortgages and reverse mortgages. Then it was payday lenders. Then it was “buy-now/pay-later” services that let you buy lunch at Chipotle on an installment plan that is nominally interest-free, but is designed to trap the unwary and unlucky with massive penalties if you miss a single payment.

This produced a median American who isn’t just cash-poor – they are cash-negative, drowning in debt. And – with the exception of a brief Biden intercession – every presidential administration of the 21st century has enacted policies that favor creditors over debtors. Bankruptcy is harder to declare, and creditors can hit you with effectively unlimited penalties and confiscation of your property and wages once your cash is gone. Trump has erased all the small mercies of the Biden years – for example, he just forced 8,000,000 student borrowers back into repayment:

https://prospect.org/2025/12/16/gop-forcing-eight-million-student-loan-borrowers-into-repayment/

The average American worker has $955 saved for retirement:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/955-saved-for-retirement-millions-are-in-that-boat-150003868.html

There’s plenty to worry about in a K-shaped economy – big things like “political instability” and “cultural chaos” (the fact that most people are broke has a lot to do with the surging fortunes of gambling platforms). But from a seller’s perspective, the most important impact of the K-shaped economy is that only rich people buy stuff. Selling to the bottom 90% is a losing proposition because they’re increasingly too broke to buy anything:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations

Combine the fact that the richest 10% of Americans all start their shopping on Amazon with the fact that no one else can afford to buy anything, and it’s easy to see why merchants would stay on Amazon, even when junk fees hit 60%.

Which brings us to the second question: if Amazon has the best prices, what’s the problem with everyone shopping there?

The answer is to be found in the California Attorney General’s price-fixing lawsuit against Amazon:

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-exposes-amazon-price-fixing-scheme-driving-costs

The suit’s been running for a long time, but the AG’s office just celebrated a milestone – they’ve finished analyzing the internal memos they forced Amazon to disgorge through civil law’s “discovery” process. These internal docs verify an open – and very dirty – secret about Amazon: the company uses its power to push up prices across the entire economy.

Here’s how that works: sellers have to sell on Amazon, and that means they’re losing $0.50-$0.60 on every dollar. The obvious way to handle this is by raising prices. But Amazon knows that its power comes from offering buyers prices that are as low or lower than the prices at all its competitors.

Amazon could ban its sellers from raising prices, but if they did that, they’d have to accept a smaller share of every sale (otherwise most of their sellers would go broke from selling at a loss on Amazon). So instead, Amazon imposes a business practice called “most favored nation” (MFN) pricing on its sellers.

Under an MFN arrangement, sellers are allowed to raise their prices on Amazon, but when they do, they must raise their prices everywhere else, too: at Walmart, at Target, at mom and pop indie stores, and at their own factory outlet store. Remember: Amazon doesn’t have to have low prices to win, it just needs to have the same prices as everyone else. So long as prices rise throughout the economy, Amazon is fine, and it can continue to hike its junk fees on sellers, knowing that they will pay those fees by raising prices on Amazon and everywhere else their products are sold.

Like I say, this isn’t really a secret. MFN terms were the basis of DC Attorney General Ken Racine’s case against Amazon, five years ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

Amazon’s not the only company that does this. Under the Biden administration, the FTC brought a lawsuit against Pepsi because Pepsi and Walmart had rigged the market so that when Walmart raised its prices, Pepsi would force everyone else who carried Pepsi products to raise their prices even more. Walmart still had the lowest prices, but everything everywhere got more expensive, both at Walmart and everywhere else:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart

Trump’s FTC dropped the Pepsi/Walmart case, and Amazon wriggled out of the DC case, but the California AG’s office has a lot more resources than DC can muster. This is a timely reminder that America’s antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level as well as by the federal authorities. Trump might be happy to let Amazon steal from Americans so long as Jeff Bezos neuters the Washington Post, writes a check for $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and makes a garbage movie about Melania; but that doesn’t stop California AG Rob Bonta from going after Amazon for ripping off Californians (and, in so doing, develop the evidentiary record and precedent that will allow every other state AG to go after Amazon).

The fact that Amazon’s monopoly lets it control prices across the economy highlights the futility of trying to fix the Amazon problem by shopping elsewhere. A “boycott” isn’t you shopping really hard, it’s an organized movement with articulated demands, a theory of change, and a backbone of solidarity. “Conscious consumption” is a dead-end:

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/individual-boycotts-collective-action-ice

Obviously, Californians have more to worry about than getting ripped off by Amazon (like getting murdered or kidnapped by ICE agents who want to send us all to a slave labor camp in El Salvador), but the billions that Amazon steals from American buyers and sellers are the source of the millions that Bezos uses to support Trump’s fascist takeover of America. Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.

That’s why, when we hold new Nuremberg trials for Trump and his collaborators, we should also unwind every merger that was approved under Trump:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

The material support for Trump’s ideology of hate, violence and terror comes from Trump’s program of unregulated corporate banditry. A promise to claw back every stolen dime might cool the ardor of Trump’s corporate supporters, and even if it doesn’t, zeroing out their bank-balances after Trump is gone will be an important lesson for future would-be billionaire collaborators.