The economic calamity before us is not a mystery. It is a crime scene, and the evidence points directly to the arrogant, ignorant policies of Donald Trump and the cowardly, complicit performance of politicians like Cory Booker.

The deal Canada just signed with China—the one that will flood our market with state-subsidized electric vehicles—is the direct fruit of their mutual failure.

Trump lit the match with his tariff wars, treating our oldest allies like enemy combatants in a global economic fight he never understood. His "America First" bluster was always a fraud; it was "America Alone." He shattered our reputation as a stable partner, bullied Canada and Europe, and created the vacuum of trust that China is now eagerly filling.

This economic disaster unfolding before our eyes—this betrayal of the American worker—was not an act of God. It was a deliberate, manufactured crisis, authored by the arrogant ignorance of Donald Trump and enabled by the calculated silence of politicians like Cory Booker who know better but lack the courage to act.

The spectacle is so absurd it almost defies belief: a sitting U.S. president is openly threatening to order the U.S. military to invade and annex Greenland, the sovereign territory of a founding NATO ally.

The White House, with a chillingly casual tone, confirms that using force against Denmark is “always an option.”

European leaders warn this would destroy NATO. Retired generals call it strategic suicide. Senators from the president’s own party sputter that it’s “stupid” and “catastrophic.”

Yet the threat persists. Why?

I remember when the United States was a global leader on human rights.

The United States once worked to promote respect for human rights and the rule of law abroad, even as it sometimes veered into colonialism and imperialism, or sometimes abandoned its democratic ideals entirely.

There was a time when the world looked to us not just for our military or economic power, but for the power of our example—a beacon of freedom and a champion of the dignity of every human being.

The recent sermon from former President Barack Obama to House Democrats is not a call to unity, but a blueprint for betrayal.

His insistence that the party should mute its ideological divisions and “focus on winning” is a calculated strategy by the moderate establishment to hijack the coming Blue Wave—a wave built on the repudiation of Trumpism and the hunger for transformative change—and channel its energy into preserving a bankrupt status quo.

Obama’s soothing platitudes about how our “differences aren’t that big” are a profound insult to every voter demanding material change. He seems to ignore the fact that after eight years of profound moderation and contempt for the radical demands for progressive critics who believed incrementalism was a road to disaster, Americans choose to burn down the political establishment by embracing Bernie Sanders and then shifting to Donald Trump. 

America — stop pretending you live in a free country.

We used to brag that “no nation is freer than the United States.”

But that — like the foggy memory of a republic where the people, not the powerful, determined their fate — is gone.

We are facing a silent, insidious pandemic.

It does not spread through coughs or sneezes, but through the very water we drink, the soil that grows our food, and the air we breathe. This is the pandemic of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and for too long, our political leaders have treated it as a distant, purely medical concern. They are dangerously wrong.

AMR is an environmental crisis, fueled by corporate pollution and governmental neglect, and it represents one of the gravest threats to global health and security in the 21st century.

For three decades, we have lived with a foreign policy that asks everything of the many and delivers everything to the few.

It is a policy forged in distant think tanks, executed through endless deployments, and paid for in the lost lives of our children and the hollowed-out promise of our towns.

It is a record of catastrophic failure: over 20 years of unsuccessful military interventions, $3 trillion spent, thousands of our own dead, and hundreds of thousands of others. The burden has never been borne by those who champion these wars in Washington salons, but by the working-class kids from places most of us will never see on a map.

There is a prejudice in American politics that has hampered the candidacies of good and smart people like Bernie Sanders and Zorhan Mamdani.

The peddlers of panic and the merchants of misinformation, who so brazenly equate Democratic Socialism with the jackboot of tyranny, display intellectual dishonesty that is not just a political strategy, but a profound betrayal of the American capacity for reasoned debate.

They wield the term “socialism” not as a descriptor, but as a cudgel, hoping the ghost of Stalin will do their work for them, all while willfully ignoring the vibrant, prosperous, and fiercely democratic nations that have already built the world America's Democratic Socialists seek to emulate.

The climate crisis is not a distant threat; it is a present and escalating danger with consequences that are both vast and microscopically precise.

One of the most underreported and perilous of these consequences is the release of ancient microbes and pathogens from the thawing Arctic permafrost.

When I discussed the risk of deadly new diseases in 2018, I had no idea that a novel coronavirus would cripple the world economy and kill more than 7 million people, but it was only a matter of when something like this would occur.  

There is a perverse form of arithmetic practiced in the hallowed halls of justice and environmental agencies, a calculus where accountability is divided by profit and the result is always a fraction of what is owed. 

It is the math of the plea bargain for planetary crime, and its most damning proof point is the languishing, toxic wound known as the Passaic River.

The Passaic River’s name means “peaceful valley.” But in a bitter twist, its waters soon flowed with the residue of a chemical weapon manufactured on its banks for the Vietnam War.