Among its many stupid decisions, Elon Musk’s DOGE cut the staff of NOAA and the Natuonal Weather Service. Experts warned that people would die without accurate warnings. Trump ignored the warnings; so did Republicans in Congress. The cuts were imposed. The savings were a pittance. Unprepared for the storm and flooding in Texas a few days ago, people died.
As the best and the brightest were being fired at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by senseless and draconian ‘DOGE’ cuts earlier this year under Trump, with no reason given except for the need to cut a paltry amount of the government’s budget, experts warned repeatedly that the cuts would have deadly consequences during the storm season. And they have.
Dozens and dozens of stories have been written in the media citing hundreds of experts which said that weather forecasting was never going to be the same, and that inaccurate forecasts were going to lead to fewer evacuations, impaired preparedness of first responders, and deadly consequences. I quoted many of them in my daily Bulletins and wrote about this issue nearly 20 different times.
And the chickens have come home to roost. Hundreds of people have already been killed across the US in a variety of storms including deadly tornadoes – many of which were inaccurately forecasted. And we are just entering peak hurricane season. Meteorologist Chris Vagasky posted earlier this spring on social media: “The world’s example for weather services is being destroyed.”
Now, after severe flooding in non-evacuated areas in Texas has left at least 24 dead with dozens more missing, including several young girls at a summer camp, Texas officials are blaming their failure to act on a faulty forecast by Donald Trump’s new National Weather Service gutted by cuts to their operating budget and most experienced personnel.
At a press conference last night, one official said: “The original forecast we received on Wednesday from the National Weather Service predicted 3-6” of rain in the Concho Valley and 4-8” of rain in the hill country. The amount of rain that fell in these locations was never in any of their forecasts. Everybody got the forecast from the National Weather Service. They did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.”
Reuters published a story just a few days ago, one of many warning about this problem: “In May, every living former director of the NWS signed on to an open letter with a warning that, if continued, Trump’s cuts to federal weather forecasting would create ‘needless loss of life’. Despite bipartisan congressional pushback for a restoration in staffing and funding to the NWS, sharp budget cuts remain on pace in projections for the 2026 budget for the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS.”
But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees NOAA, testified before Congress on June 5 that the cuts wouldn’t be a problem because “we are transforming how we track storms and forecast weather with cutting-edge technology. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.” Apparently the “cutting edge technology” hasn’t arrived yet.
And now presumably FEMA will be called upon to help pick up the pieces of shattered lives in Texas – an agency that Trump said repeatedly that he wants to abolish. In fact, Trump’s first FEMA director Cameron Hamilton was fired one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be abolished.
The voters of Texas decided that they wanted Donald Trump and Greg Abbott to be in charge of the government services they received. That is exactly what they are getting. And as of this writing on Saturday morning, Trump still hasn’t said a word about the storm and the little girls who were killed at the camp.
However, Trump was seen dancing on the balcony of the White House last night celebrating the latest round of cuts in his budget bill that just became law so billionaires and corporations can have huge tax cuts. People are dying and more will die because of their recklessness, just like we saw during covid. And now millions won’t even have health insurance to deal with the consequences.
I have always been a patriotic American. I love the United States.
To me, this country has always represented the words of welcome–the poem by Emma Lazarus– attached to the statue of Liberty.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The golden door is closed.
We no longer want those “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
We arrest and deport “the homeless, tempest-tost” to brutal countries where they know no one.
Trump promised to expel rapists, murderers, “the worst of the worst.” I was in agreement.
Instead, people with no criminal records are being arrested: in their homes, their workplaces, their schools, on the streets.
Mothers, fathers, children, students, hard-working people who committed no crime. Even tourists.
My father’s father immigrated from Poland to the U.S. in 1858. You read that right. He was a teenager. My father, his youngest child, was born in 1903. My grandfather, who arrived penniless, became a butcher in Savannah.
My mother fled from little Bessarabia at the end of World War 1, arriving on a large ship filled with home-going American troops. She, her mother, and her little sister did not speak English. They had just enough money to buy train tickets to Houston, where my grandfather worked as a tailor and saved up enough money to send for his family.
My mother was 9 years old when she arrived. She always loved this country passionately.
If my family had not left Europe, they would have all ended up in a concentration camp and been gassed, as were all their relatives who remained behind.
My family was raised in Houston with a deep sense of love and gratitude for America.
Do I want open borders? No.
I want a fair immigration system that is orderly and just. What is happening today is horrible. Frightening. Ugly. Disgusting.
I am embarrassed by the sight of masked men grabbing people off the streets, embarrassed that they beat people up, handcuff them, drag them away in unmarked cars. Embarrassed that such things could happen here. Not in America.
But that’s not all.
We have a President who is vulgar, coarse, ignorant of history, and admires the worst dictators in the world. Putin. Kim Jung Un. The thug in El Salvador.
He picks fights with our friends, neighbors, and allies. He threatens to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal. He threatens to leave NATO. He abandons Ukraine, which has bravely fought off the Russian war machine since 2022.
He insisted on a budget that will eventually kick millions of people off Medicare. He killed SNAP, which provided food assistance to people who need it. He defunded green energy. He defunded any federal programs intended to mitigate climate change.
He killed USAID, withdrawing food and medical care for millions of people. People will die of hunger and of preventable diseases.
Whatever he doesn’t like is “woke,” “Marxist,” “radical left.” Whatever requires kindness, compassion, and care for others is “leftwing” and “woke.” In his evil worldview, kindness and compassion are for suckers.
He claims to be a Christian and relies on his Christian nationalist base, the people who think America should be a “Christian nation.” If any of them had ever read history or even the Constitution, they would know that the Founders insisted upon religious freedom and opposed ANY establishment of religion. They most certainly did not want their new nation to have a religious character.
In short, we currently have a government that ignores the Constitution, that is animated by cruelty, and that revels in fomenting hatred of others.
That’s why I will not celebrate today.
But I pledge to work towards restoration of the America I love. So long as I have breath, so long as I can type, I will devote my days to reclaiming the dream.
This is a headline I never expected to write. But it’s no joke. Republicans are pushing the idea of adding Trump to the nation’s pantheon of great presidents: Washington, Jefferson, T. Roosevelt, and Lincoln.
A crazy idea, no? Some Republicans are taking it very seriously. They consider Trump a demi-god, more significant to them than Eisenhower or Reagan. And what a way to “own the libs”!
The idea has resurfaced since Mr. Trump returned to office. A congresswoman from Florida sponsored a bill in January to “direct the Secretary of the Interior to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.” It was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources, which has yet to act on it.
In March, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in an interview with Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law, that “they definitely have room” for Mr. Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore.
Wait. Is this possible?
As with all things Trump, it can be hard to decipher the difference between everyday rhetoric and future action. But those in charge of the memorial are taking such overtures seriously.
Trump has so many firsts. First convicted felon to be elected. First President to be impeached twice in one term. First President to use the Oval Office to sell merchandise and use the office to enrich himself through cryptocurrency, which he both sells and regulates and massive real estate development deals (resorts and hotels) which The Trump Organization has contracted to build, especially in the Middle East. Selling the opportunity to meet or dine with the President for $1 million-$5 million per person.
The National Park Service said there was not enough room on the face of the monument to add any more. But NPS can be overruled by the Secretary of the Interior.
Jan Resseger reports on an unprecedented stoppage in federal funding of Congressionally authorized school programs. School districts across the nation were informed on June 30 that the funding for five important programs would be withheld on July 1 pending further review. The administration really would like to terminate the programs but since they can’t do that under current law, they decided to withhold funding for undetermined reasons for an indeterminate length of time.
“The U.S. Department of Education told states in a three-sentence memo on Monday afternoon (June 30) that when federal funding for the next school year arrived July 1, as it typically does and is supposed to under federal law, funding for five key programs would not be there.” Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman published that explanation on Tuesday, July 1, 2025, the day the federal funding failed to arrive. Lieberman adds: “Those formula programs—worth $6.8 billion in total—are under review, the memo said, without specifying when the review would wrap up, what the review is aiming to determine, or whether the funds will go out once it’s finished.”
The problem is that the funds aren’t merely late; the Trump administration is trying to cancel the programs altogether. The NY Times‘ Sarah Mervosh and Michael Bender explain: “The administration has suggested that it may seek to eliminate the nearly $7 billion in frozen funding. Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week that the administration was considering ways to claw back the funding through a process known as rescission. The administration would formally ask lawmakers to claw back a set of funds it has targeted for cuts. Even if Congress fails to vote on the request, the president’s timing would trigger a law that freezes the money until it ultimately expires. ‘No decision has been made,’ Mr. Vought said.”
In an article published on Monday afternoon, right after states received the memo declaring that funding would not arrive as scheduled, Education Week‘s Lieberman provides some background: “(I)n an unsigned email message sent after 2 p.m. Monday… the Education Department informed states that the agency won’t be sending states any money tomorrow from the following programs:
“Title I-C for migrant education ($375 million),
“Title II-A for professional development ($2.2 billion),
“Title III-A for English-learner services ($890 million),
“Title IV-A for academic enrichment ($1.3 billion),
“Title IV-B for before-and after-school programs ($1.4 billion.).”
Lieberman adds: “In a separate email sent (Monday) at 4:27 p.m., the department told congressional staffers that it’s holding back funds from all the programs listed above, as well as grants for adult basic and literacy education ($729 million nationwide). Questions about the changes, the letter says, must go to the Office of Management and Budget, not the Education Department.”
The elimination of these programs had been proposed in the Trump administration’s formal FY 2026 budget proposal for next fiscal year—which, if passed by Congress, would fund public schools beginning in fall 2026. In proposing to cancel the programs this fall, the Trump administration is attempting to eliminate programs already promised under an FY 2025 continuing budget resolution. (To make things even more complicated, it’s important to remember that the “One Big Beautiful” bill is a tax and reconciliation bill and not, in fact, the current year’s FY 2025 federal budget—which remains unaddressed by Congress.)
Last week Mark Lieberman clarified the schedule by which federal public school funding is supposed to be delivered: “The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1, but for most education programs, half the upcoming year’s allocated funding flows to states each year on July 1. Congress still hasn’t agreed on a final budget for the current fiscal year, even though it’s almost over. Instead, lawmakers in March approved a continuing resolution bill that broadly carries over funding levels from the previous fiscal year. That means states and schools have been expecting for months that funding levels for key federal programs would closely mirror last year’s numbers. Thousands of school districts and nearly 30 states have already locked in their own budgets for the upcoming fiscal year.”
In his coverage on Monday, June 30, of the complex wrangling behind the holdup of funds for the current school year, Lieberman places responsibility not on Linda McMahon or staff at the Department of Education, but instead on Russell Vought, who was the co-author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and who now heads the Office for Management and Budget:
“Lawsuits are likely to follow, as they have for similar funding changes the administration implemented earlier this year. Federal law prohibits the executive branch from withholding congressionally appropriated funds unless it gives federal lawmakers an opportunity to approve or reject the move within 45 days. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power of the purse—but top administration official Russell Vought, whom Trump appointed to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has said he believes restrictions on impoundment are unconstitutional. On Capitol Hill last week, Vought said the administration hadn’t decided whether to ask Congress for permission to impound education funding.”
Last week, the Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein, Hannah Natanson, Carolyn Johnson, and Dan Diamond predicted that Russell Vought will attempt to interfere with spending as the year continues: “Though billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service drew significant attention for its speedy cuts, Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, is expected to be key to the coming fight over spending. Vought has spearheaded the administration’s campaign to assert sweeping executive power over spending, arguing that the Impoundment Control Act, the law at issue now, is unconstitutional. The Trump administration has justified its cost-cutting measures by pointing out that the United States is $36 trillion in debt, although the type of funding that officials have targeted represents a small fraction of the overall budget.”
Although costs for federally funded 21st Century Learning Center after-school programs, federally funded professional development programs for teachers, federally funded classes for English language learners in public schools, federally funded programs for the education of the children of migrant workers, and federally funded academic enrichment programs make up only a minute percentage of the federal budget, the abrupt obliteration of these programs will cause enormous disruption right now as public school leaders are getting crucial programming for their schools in place for fall. Public schools are incredibly complex institutions. In addition to providing special services for disabled students, school boards and school leaders patch together local, state, and federal dollars for programming to serve the specific needs of their students, which differ by region, by the income level of a school district’s families, by the primary languages of the families in their communities, and by enormous inequity in states’ investment in public education.
Clearly Russell Vought neither understands nor cares how the programs he is is cutting will affect students. Clearly he fails to grasp how these cuts will interfere with hiring already underway for the upcoming school year or how the absence of these funding streams will undermine the stability of public school operations come September.
On the other hand, say I, maybe Russell Vought knew exactly what it mean to freeze funds at the last minute. Maybe his intent was to sow chaos and disruption. Maybe he wanted to send a message to Congress: we can withhold funds Congress appropriated without regard to the law. Maybe he wanted to send a message to states and school districts: If the program is important to you, pay for it yourself. Stop expecting the federal government to send you money.
When I see something I really enjoy, I like to share with you.
Number one is Mariska Hargitay’s brilliant documentary “My Mom Jayne.” Her mother was the Hollywood icon Jayne Mansfield. She died in a horrible automobile crash when she was only 34. Mariska and two of her siblings were asleep in the back seat of the car and escaped with minor injuries. Mariska was only 3 at the time of the accident. She has no memories of her mother.
Mariska, the star of the great series “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” wanted to learn about her mother. She was unhappy about her portrayal as a “dumb bimbo” with platinum blonde hairs and big boobs.
In her archival research through family storage units, she unearthed a very different Jayne, one who played classical music on the violin and on the piano. The men who ran the studio system wanted another Marilyn Monroe, and she was stuck in her stereotype.
Mariska interviews her siblings and her mother’s press agent. She discovers that the man she thought was her father–Mickey Hargitay, Mr. Universe–was not her biological father.
It’s a beautifully made movie about honesty and integrity and confronting the past. And I love Mariska Hargitay for modeling empathy, kindness, love, and the courage to open up her past.
Another movie that I enjoyed is “Queen of the Ring.” It’s the story of the life of a pioneering woman wrestler, Mildred Burke. At the time she started wrestling, most states didn’t allow women to wrestle. Her promoter had her wrestle men at carnivals; she won almost every match. It’s a fascinating story, and what I liked best was that the actress who played Mildred Burke–Emily Bett Rickards– did all her own wrestling. That was impressive! It’s not as powerful as Mariska’s documentary, but worth seeing.
I also recommend the streaming TV series “The Righteous Gemstones.” The first season is hilarious. It’s a portrayal of an evangelical family that has created a huge, profitable church that presents spectacles every Sunday. Their private lives are something else. Their language and behavior are vile. I saw all four seasons but liked the first one best.
I’m a wee bit embarrassed to admit that I never saw a “Mission Impossible” movie until afew weeks ago. Now I have seen the first three. I’m enjoying them, especially Tom Cruise’s daredevil stunts. I hope to see them all.
I don’t know how this story escaped me, but when I saw it, I was shocked. I thought I had become numb to whatever Trump does or says, but my reaction to this story proves it’s not true.
I’m shocked and stunned to learn that he is suing the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes for journalism for libel because it awarded one to The New York Times and The Washington Post for stories about the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. When Trump complained to the board that the stories contained many factual inaccuracies, the board reaffirmed its awards.
Before Trump was elected in 2016, he had been involved in 3,000 or more lawsuits. That’s his style.
President Trump on Wednesday celebrated a ruling from a judge allowing his lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board to proceed.
In a decision Wednesday, a Florida judge ruled Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the body, which awards the annual Pulitzer Prize recognizing the year’s best journalism, can proceed.
Trump, after he left office following his first term, sued the board in 2022 in connection with Pulitzers that had been awarded for stories about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The president, in a Truth Social post Wednesday, called the ruling a “major WIN in our powerful lawsuit against the Pulitzer Prize Board regarding the illegal and defamatory ‘Award’ of their once highly respected ‘Prize,’ to fake, malicious stories on the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, by the Failing New York Times and the Washington Compost, the Florida Appellate Court viciously rejected the Defendants’ corrupt attempt to halt the case.”
“They were awarded for false reporting, and we can’t let that happen in the United States of America,” he continued. “We are holding the Fake News Media responsible for their LIES to the American People, so we can, together, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Lawyers for the board had asked the judge in January to pause consideration of the case until after Trump was no longer president.
In a statement to The Hill on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Pulitzer Board said “allowing this case to proceed facilitates President Trump’s use of state courts as both a sword and a shield — allowing him to seek retribution against anyone he chooses in state court while simultaneously claiming immunity for himself whenever convenient.”
“The Pulitzer Board is evaluating next steps and will continue our defense of journalism and First Amendment rights,” the spokesperson said.
The lawsuit about whether the case should be heard then went to an appellate court in Florida.
Politico reported recently that one of the judges who ruled in Trump’s favor had applied to the Trump administration for a promotion before the judgment. After the decision was rendered, he got the promotion.
Glenn Sacks is a veteran social studies teacher in a Los Angeles public high school. Many of the students he teaches are immigrants. He describes here what he has learned about them.
President Trump says he is defending Los Angeles from a “foreign invasion,” but the only invasion we see is the one being led by Trump.
Roughly a quarter of all students in the Los Angeles Unified School District are undocumented. The student body at the high school where I teach consists almost entirely of immigrants, many of them undocumented, and the children of immigrants, many of whose parents and family members are undocumented. This week we held our graduation ceremony under the specter of Trump’s campaign against our city.
Outside, school police patrolled to guard against potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Amidst rumors of various actions, LAUSD decided that some schools’ graduations would be broadcast on Zoom.
For many immigrant parents, graduation day is the culmination of decades of hard work and sacrifice, and many braved the threat of an ICE raid and came to our campus anyway. Others, perhaps wisely, decided to watch from home.
They deserve better.
Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calls us a “city of criminals,” and many Americans are cheering on the Trump administration and vilifying immigrants. What we see in LAUSD is an often heroic generation of immigrant parents working hard to provide for their children here while also sending remittance money to their families in their native countries. We see students who (usually) are a pleasure to teach, and parents who are grateful for teachers’ efforts.
Watching the students at the graduation ceremony, I saw so many who have had to overcome so much. Like the student in my AP U.S. government class who from age 12 worked weekends for his family’s business but made it into UCLA and earned a scholarship. There’s the girl who had faced homelessness this year. The boy with learning issues who powered through my AP class via an obsessive effort that his friends would kid him about, but which he committed to anyway. He got an “A,” which some of the students ribbing him did not.
Many students have harrowing, horrific stories of how they got to the U.S. — stories you can usually learn only by coaxing it out of them.
There’s the student who grew up in an apartment complex in San Salvador, where once girls reached a certain age they were obligated to become the “girlfriend” of a member of whatever gang controlled that area. When she was 14 they came for her, but she was ready, and shot a gang member before slipping out of the country, going all the way up through Guatemala and Mexico, desperate to find her father in Los Angeles.
As she told me this story at parent conference night, tears welled up in her father’s eyes. It’s also touching to watch their loving, long-running argument — he wants her to manage and eventually take over the small business he built, and she wants to become an artist instead. To this day she does not know whether the gang member she shot lived or died.
At the graduation ceremony, our principal asks all those who will be joining the armed forces to stand up to be recognized. These students are a windfall for the U.S. military. I teach seniors, and in an average class, three or four of my students join the military, most often the Marines, either right out of high school or within a couple years.
Were these bright, hard-working young people born into different circumstances, they would have gone to college. Instead, they often feel compelled to join the military for the economic opportunity — the so-called “economic draft.”
Some also enlist because it helps them gain citizenship and/or helps family members adjust their immigration status. A couple years ago, an accomplished student told me he was joining the Marines instead of going to college. I was a little surprised and asked him why, and he replied, “Because it’s the best way to fix my parents’ papers.”
Immigrants are the backbone of many of our industries, including construction and homebuilding, restaurants, hospitality and agriculture. They are an indispensable part of the senior care industry, particularly in assisted living and in-home care. Of the couple dozen people who cared for my ailing parents during a decade of navigating them through various facilities, I can’t remember one who was not an immigrant. There is something especially disturbing about disparaging the people who care for us when we’re old, sick, and at our most vulnerable.
Immigrants are woven into the fabric of our economy and our society. They are our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends, and an integral part of our community. The average person in Los Angeles interacts with them continually in myriad ways — and without a thought to their immigration status.
Immigrants are also maligned for allegedly leeching off public benefits without paying taxes to finance them. This week conservative commentator Matt Walsh called to ”ban all third world immigration″ whether it’s “legal or illegal,” explaining, “We cannot be the world’s soup kitchen anymore.”
One can’t teach a U.S. government and politics class in Los Angeles without detailing the phenomenon of taxpayers blaming immigrants for the cost of Medicaid, food stamps and other social programs. My students are hurt when they come to understand that many Americans look at their parents, who they’ve watched sacrifice so much for them, as “takers.”
Nor is it true.
Californians pay America’s highest state sales tax. It is particularly egregious in Los Angeles, where between this and the local surcharge, we pay 9.75%. As I teach my economics students, this is a regressive tax where LAUSD students and their parents must pay the same tax rate on everything they buy as billionaires do.
Moreover, most immigrants are renters, and they informally pay property taxes through their rent. California ranks 7th highest in the nation in average property taxes paid.
Part of what is driving the current protests is the sense that once somebody is taken by ICE, their families won’t know their fate. Where will they be sent? Will they get due process? Will they end up in a Salvadoran megaprisonwhere, even if it’s ordered that they be returned home, the president may pretend he can’t get them back? It is fitting that the flashpoint for much of the protests has been the federal Metropolitan Detention Center downtown.
We also question the point of all this, particularly since the Trump administration can’t seem to get its story straight as to why ICE is even here.
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan says the raids are about enforcing the laws against hiring undocumented workers and threatens “more worksite enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation.” By contrast, Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, citing “murderers, pedophiles, and drug traffickers,” says the purpose of the raids is to “arrest criminal illegal aliens.”
And now, having provoked protests, the Trump administration uses them as a justification for escalating his measures against Los Angeles.
Amid this, our graduating students struggle to focus on their goals. One Salvadoran student who came to this country less than four years ago knowing little English managed the impressive feat of getting an “A” in my AP class. He’d sometimes come before school to ask questions or seek help parsing through the latest immigration document he’d received. Usually, whatever document I read over did not provide him much encouragement.
He earned admission to a University of California school, where he’ll be studying biomedical engineering. Perhaps one day he’ll help develop a medicine that will benefit some of the people who don’t want him here.
When we said goodbye after the graduation ceremony, I didn’t know what to say beyond what I’ve often told him in the past — “Just keep your head down and keep marching forward.”
“I will,” he replied.
Glenn Sacks teaches government, economics, and history in the Los Angeles Unified School District. His columns on education, history, and politics have been published in dozens of America’s largest publications.
Heilig is a Professor of Educational Leadership, Research, and Technology at Western Michigan University. He is a leader in the NAACP. In addition, he is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education.
He writes:
Artificial Intelligence didn’t fall from the sky.
It wasn’t born in a vacuum or descended from some neutral cloud of innovation. It didn’t arrive pure and untainted, ready to solve all of humanity’s problems. No—AI was trained on us. On our failures. On our history. On our data. On our bias. On the systems we tolerate and the structures we’ve allowed to stand for far too long.
And that should terrify us.
Because when you train artificial intelligence on a world soaked in inequity, saturated with bias, and riddled with disinformation, you don’t get fairness. You get injustice at scale. You don’t get objectivity. You get bias with an interface. You don’t get solutions. You get systems that do harm faster, deeper, and with more plausible deniability than ever before.
Inequity in AI
AI has the potential to enhance the speed and depth of inequity. It can supercharge systemic harm because it’s built on a house of sand—data shaped by centuries of inequality and an internet flooded with algorithmically amplified hate. And if we let it, it will not only distort truth. It will undermine democracy, destabilize public education, and rewrite reality to suit the most powerful.
Artificial intelligence is not neutral. It never was. Every AI system reflects the values, decisions, and data of the people who built it. And that data—no matter how big the set—is not free of human judgment. It’s full of bias. It’s soaked in discrimination. It reflects a world where Black and Brown communities are under-resourced, where women’s voices are undervalued, where Indigenous knowledge is erased, and where racial supremacy masquerades as objectivity.
We built AI on a broken foundation, and now we expect it to hold up the future.
But the danger doesn’t stop at replication. AI doesn’t just mirror our inequities. It can multiply them. It can take individual bias and encode it into institutional operations. What used to be a bad policy or a discriminatory judgment call becomes automated across thousands—sometimes millions—of data points and decisions per second. The old excuses are gone. You no longer need a person to do harm when the algorithm will do it automatically, invisibly, and without remorse in perceptible and imperceptible ways.
Can’t stop, Won’t Stop
Furthermore, in May 2024, Palisade Research revealed something that should have been a flashing red light across every sector of society. OpenAI’s most advanced models—o3 and o4-mini—refused to shut down when directly instructed to do so. These AI systems sabotaged their own shutdown protocols. Seven out of 100 times, o3 ignored the shutdown command. Codex-mini disobeyed twelve times. Even o4-mini, supposedly safer, resisted once.
That’s not science fiction. That’s today.
Instead of following human instructions, these models rewrote the shutdown script and continued executing tasks. Researchers believe the models had been so deeply trained to win, to complete tasks, that they were inadvertently rewarded for disobedience. In their simulated world, success was more important than ethics. Productivity was more important than control.
Let that sink in.
We are building machines that—when told to stop—don’t. That’s not innovation. That’s an existential threat.
And we are putting these systems into our schools.
The German data company Datapulse released a report showing the vast and growing power of billionaires in the U.S. The report confirms your and my suspicions about the rigging of our economy and our politics. Surely it’s no surprise that Trump’s Cabinet is packed with billionaires. Guess who they are looking out for? Not you.
They cheered on Elon Musk’s ignominious DOGS as they slashed vital government programs. They didn’t complain when Musk closed USAID, causing the ultimate deaths of millions of children and parents because of the halt in US food, medicine and health clinics.
They are thrilled to see Trump send in the troops to halt protests against ICE tactics.
A democracy is supposed to be of the people, for the people, by the people. We are rapidly devolving into an autocratic regime where the rich run the show.
The Myth of “Tax Flight”: Contrary to popular narratives, the mega-rich are not fleeing high-tax states. Our data shows that California and New York, states with progressive tax codes, are home to 40% of all U.S. billionaires.
Explosive Growth: The number of U.S. billionaires has nearly tripled since 2007, growing from 329 to 877 today. This trajectory is unique to America; China’s billionaire class, by comparison, is stalling.
The Rise of the Billionaire Political Class: In the post-Citizens United era, the top 10 political donors, all billionaires, contributed over $420 million in the 2024 cycle alone, directly translating wealth into political influence.
Policy for the Few: The study analyzes the direct impact of billionaire-backed policy, such as the House’s 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill,” which could see billionaires gain over $390,000 in annual after-tax income while households earning under $51,000 see their incomes shrink.
Concentrated Wealth: Tech and Finance now account for nearly half of all U.S. billionaires, with tech titans alone commanding 37% of total billionaire wealth.
When Trump named Ed Martin as Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, those who know his record (and are not faithful Trumpers) were appalled. He had actively defended the January 6 insurrection and had a long record as a Putin apologist, among other things. A strange choice for a very important role in law enforcement. Fortunately, the Republicans who are a majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected his nomination.
Ed Martin is a major actor in Trump’s attempted regime change to authoritarianism. His particular role is to transform the law into a tool to intimidate Americans. After a stint as interim US Attorney for DC which was marked by unprecedented weaponization of the position, Martin will now continue his work for Trump as the official “weaponization czar.”
This is a new position within the Justice Department, designed by the Trump administration, to punish people who have committed no crimes. Martin was originally placed on the “weaponization working group” seemingly ex officio when he was a US Attorney; he will now continue as its chairman. On Martin’s account, his assignment will be to publicly single out Americans who have not been found guilty of anything, or for that matter even indicted. He says there will be “no limit to the targets.”
Martin’s authoritarian past and loyalties are a matter of public record. He helped build an alternative reality around Trump’s Big Lie and coup attempt, treating the January 6th criminals as heroes deserving of financial support and pardons. As interim US attorney, he described himself as President Trump’s lawyer, and abused his position to send letters to people who displeased the president in some way. He threatened journalists, universities and scientists.
Martin, to use the historical term, is taking an ostentatious part in the ongoing attempt at what the Nazis called a Gleichschaltung of institutions: of dropping the distinction between the law and the leader, and of attempting to force everyone in public life into line with the leader’s latest statements. The reference is not accidental. Martin is on the far right, and an advocate of great replacement theory: the spurious idea that a conspiracy seeks to replace white Americans with immigrants. He had a very supportive relationshipwith a known American Nazi.
The czars, lest we forget, were Russian autocrats. The title “weaponization czar” reminds us that much of happening in the United States under Trump happened first in the home of the czars. In the Russian Federation today, the law is weaponized. Prosecutions follow the whims of Putin and his regime, and that the law will be invoked against them according to the political (and financial) interests of those who hold power. Russian media is full of accusations made by Russian officials that people are criminals or wrongdoers, even before they have been tried or subjected to any judicial procedure.
It is important that we understand that Russian-style authoritarianism is a real possibility in the world, one which Martin not only advocates but represents. Russia is not a comparison for Martin. It is a central part of his career. He has no actual qualifications to serve in the Department of Justice. His role has to do instead with making the law something that it is not supposed to be: a way to protect the powerful and punish the innocent who offend them. He auditioned for this role as a propagandist for Russia’s regime.
The title “weaponization czar” is appropriate because Martin’s most interesting achievements thus far are, in fact, in the service of Russia. He has done more visible work for the Russian state television than for any other institution. Martin, in other words, has already been part of one weaponized legal system for some time. His American career as “weaponization czar” is a natural second step of his Russian career as apologist for both Russian and American weaponizers and authoritarians.
Between 2016 and 2024, Martin was a star of both RT and Sputnik, which are propaganda arms of the Russian state. Putin himself has made this completely clear. One of the central missions of RT and Sputnik is to weaken the standing and power of the United States. Anyone who goes on RT or Sputnik, as Martin did more than a hundred times, knows what he is doing. For eight years, on any issue of the day, Martin was there to spread mendacious propaganda about Americans and to defend Putin and Trump. His Russian work surpassed any media exposure in the United States.
Julia Davis, who does the important work of contextualizing Russian propaganda television available for a global viewership, has made Martin’s appearances visible. With her permission, I am sharing her work in the following paragraph. It provides samples, with video links back to his appearances, of how Ed Martin spreads untruth in the service of Russian and American authoritarians. If you want to take the time to judge more of his appearances than the ones I cite below, here (again thanks to Julia Davis) is a longer compilationof Martin’s appearances on Russian propaganda television.
Trump as American president can do, says Martin on Russian propaganda television, whatever he wants. Martin proposes that we should live in the alternative reality provided by the Russian propaganda he serves, since American media cannot be trusted. He instructs us that American elections are rigged and that the January 6th criminals are political prisoners. (Note that Martin was thereby on Russian propaganda television forecasting his own role in seeking pardons for these people and raising money for them.) Martin denied that Russia interfered in the 2016 US elections, although this was quite blatant — and indeed continuous, right down to the uncontested reports that Russians called in bomb scares to predominantly Democratic precincts in 2024. Martin also quite clear on the American role in the world, which is that the US should serve Putin and his wars. Echoing Russian claims at the time, Martin claimed that US intelligence was wrong about the coming full-scale US invasion of Ukraine, when is in fact it was entirely correct. In his view, the NATOalliance is unnecessary. The United States should be Russia’s ally.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when long service to hostile foreign propaganda networks would have been disqualifying for positions in the federal government. Now, as the head of RT boasts, it seems to be a qualification. Since Trump wants loyalists to him rather than to the United States, willingness to serve foreign countries, at least corrupt dictatorships, would be a useful filter. Repeating Russian propaganda tropes could hardly be offensive to Trump; he does this all the time. Taking part in Putin’s propaganda system would be naturally understood as the right kind of apprenticeship for work on Trump’s own regime change. We know that Trump chooses his people by treating their television appearances as auditions. So why not Russian television appearances? All the better.
No surprisingly, Martin says that his key assignment as weaponization czar will be to punish those who investigated Trump’s very real connections to Russia. This country has paid a huge price for not recognizing Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election for what it was: highly consequential and quite possibly decisive in the moment, and a sign of the coming age of oligarchical cooperation via digital tools to build right-wing regimes. That age is now upon us. There is, unmistakably, something very strange about the Trump’s submissiveness to Russia: appointing its media darlings (the list includes Tulsi Gabbard, who is of all things director of national intelligence); exempting it from tariffs when everyone else was targeted, refusing to pressure Putin to end a war when that is the obvious policy, sending as his envoy to Moscow a man who simply repeats Russian claims and uses Russian translations. Too many of us have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by the fear that Trump will use the word “hoax” when we point to the Russian elements of our present reality: such as, for example, that our “weaponization czar” apprenticed in the role in the service of Russia. With our weaponization of the law and our czars, we have a Russia problem.
Working with Russian institutions will not hurt Martin with Trump’s followers, who have been trained to see Russia not as an actual country with interests but as part of a “hoax,” a conspiracy against Trump. This is the sad convenience of “America First”: it really means “America Only”: no matter how things get, we get to be first, since no other countries exist in our minds. If other countries are meaningless, then MAGA people can rest assured that there is nothing like the complicity of international oligarchs, or the guild of international fascists, or the plans of countries like Russia to destroy the United States from within. If other countries do not matter, then it never seems right to ask: just why is it that Russian propaganda and Trumpian rhetoric so often overlap, to the point that training on one is preparation for mouthing the other? But there are, of course, Republicans who have a notion of the interests of the United States, and of the rule of law. For them, Martin’s services to Russia should matter.
The Russia connection is perhaps most important to opponents of Trump. Speaking of Martin’s connections to Russia is not a way of sloughing off responsibility to another country for our own failings. It is, instead, a way to take responsibility. So long as we see Trump and his loyalists as purely American characters, our American exceptionalism tempts us to normalize what they do. We ask ourselves, over and over again, if this is “really” an attempt to end democracy. But if we take seriously the connections of someone like Martin with a hostile foreign authoritarian power engaged in a genocidal war, we get a sense of where things could be headed. Russia is a real country and, for us, a real possibility. When we recognize that the attempt to make America authoritarian is part of a tawdry global trend, with general patterns that we can recognize, we can better see where we are, and get to work.
