Liberal Blogosphere

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:09:14 +0000

UN verifies rapes of Palestinians, but still cites no Israeli victims

Ali Abunimah

3 June 2026

Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, amplified Israel’s 7 October mass rape claims despite the absence of verified victims. (Inter-Parliamentary Union/Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

This article contains explicit descriptions of sexual violence.

UN investigators have verified multiple rapes of Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces, but have still not verified a single claim of sexual violence against Israelis on or after 7 October 2023.

In his latest annual report to the Security Council on sexual violence in armed conflict, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warns that the verified crimes against Palestinians should be seen as “indicative of incidents and patterns” more broadly.

For the first time, Guterres added Israel’s military and security forces to the UN list of entities credibly suspected of responsibility for patterns of rape or other forms of sexual violence.

The full extent of those crimes is difficult to document because Israel continues to deny UN investigators access to detention sites and to Gaza, while reporting is further obstructed by “explicit threats” from Israeli forces “coercing detainees not to report abuse,” according to the report.
Rapes and gang rapes

The UN verified sexual violence, including rape and sexual violence used as torture, by Israeli forces against 31 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank: 14 men, seven women, nine boys and one girl.

Thirteen of these cases occurred in 2025, and 18 in 2023 and 2024. The violations included rape, rape with objects, gang rape, attempted rape, forced nudity, threats of rape, unwanted touching of breasts and genitals, genital violence, targeted shooting of the genitals, and strip and cavity searches “without apparent security justification.”

Rape and gang rape, sometimes repeated, were verified against nine victims, most of them from Gaza.

The UN identified the perpetrators as Israeli military and security forces, including the Israeli army, the Israel Prison Service, its Keter special forces, and Yamam, the police “counterterrorism” unit.

The abuses took place mainly during detention and interrogation, including in prisons and detention camps at Sde Teiman, Etzion, Majnunah, Megiddo, Ofer, Ramla, Hasharon, Shatta, Nafha, Damon and Gush Etzion police station. Others occurred at checkpoints and during Israeli military operations.

The victims included journalists and human rights defenders. Some violations were filmed or photographed, including one of the rapes.

Women detainees were subjected mainly to threats of rape, forced nudity, unwanted touching and “humiliating or degrading strip searches without justification.”

Men and boys were subjected to rape, attempted rape and genital violence, leaving five male victims with severe rectal bleeding or swelling for days or weeks, in some cases without medical treatment.

The report adds that released detainees returned to catastrophic conditions in Gaza.

The UN report says Israel’s longstanding failure to hold its forces accountable has created a climate of impunity for violations against Palestinians.

It cites the case of five Israeli reserve soldiers indicted in February 2025 for severely assaulting a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman in July 2024.

Despite video and medical evidence – and allegations that the assault included inserting an object into the victim’s anus, causing severe rectal injuries – the indictment did not include charges of rape or sexual violence.

In March 2026, all charges were dropped and the alleged perpetrators have been widely celebrated in Israel as heroes.

These findings are consistent with other independent investigations into systematic Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians.
No verified Israeli victims

Meanwhile, the new UN report contains no new evidence backing up Israel’s claims of mass rapes and systematic sexual violence by Palestinians on 7 October 2023. In fact, it appears to further undermine those claims.

In his report to the Security Council last year, Guterres listed Hamas – though not Israel – as a party responsible for patterns of sexual violence and rape.

In last year’s report, Guterres stated that a mission to Israel in early 2024 led by Pramila Patten, the secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence, “found clear and convincing information that some hostages taken to Gaza were subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence during their time in captivity.”

Guterres also wrote that Patten’s mission “found reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred during the attacks of 7 October 2023 in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape.”

Patten’s claims, contained in a separate special report published in March 2024, were widely reported at the time as corroborating Israel’s narrative.

However, last year’s report by Guterres specifically states that evidence Patten cited was “circumstantial” and Guterres did not state that any case of sexual violence including rape had been verified.

Guterres’ 2026 report still makes no reference to verified Israeli victims of alleged sexual violence by Palestinians, including rapes.

It states that after two ceasefire deals in 2025 led to the release of more than 50 captives held by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Gaza, six Israeli former captives publicly alleged sexual violence.

They included one female captive released in January 2025, two women released in 2023 who spoke publicly in March 2025 and three male captives released in October 2025.

Guterres states that “the United Nations was not able to verify any of these reports, given the continued denial of access by the Government of Israel to competent United Nations bodies to carry out investigations.”

The secretary-general’s report is totally silent about any new evidence, let alone victims, that could corroborate Patten’s sweeping 2024 claims regarding sexual violence on 7 October.

Guterres also notes that the UN “has not as yet received information on indictments by the authorities in Israel for charges of sexual violence against detained Palestinians accused of involvement in the attacks.”

Despite the sensational headlines generated by Patten’s March 2024 report, its detailed findings actually undermined more than they supported Israel’s propaganda narrative: For instance, Patten’s team was unable to find a single photo or video documenting any rapes on 7 October or containing “tangible indications of rape.”

What is clear from this year’s annual report is that the UN has not obtained any new evidence since then.

That is consistent with earlier findings.

In June 2024, the UN Human Rights Council’s independent commission of inquiry into the events and aftermath of 7 October 2023, stated that it had reviewed reports of Israelis being raped “but has not been able to independently verify such allegations.”

The commission also said it was “unable to verify reports of sexualized torture and genital mutilation” of Israeli victims.

In January 2025, an Israeli prosecutor admitted that authorities had zero complainants in alleged cases of 7 October rapes.

And last month, a 300-page Israeli report attempted to revive the mass rape narrative, but also failed to document a single credible case of rape more than two and a half years later.
Rush to judgment

In a press conference last week launching the secretary-general’s new report, Patten confirmed that she “did not meet with any survivor” of supposed 7 October sexual attacks during her 2024 visit.

She said that early last year, she received an invitation from the Israeli government to return to the country, but protracted negotiations over the terms of the visit broke down over Israel’s refusal to provide any evidence that it was implementing measures to stop sexual crimes against detained Palestinians and to provide UN access to detention facilities.

At the press conference, Patten faced a direct challenge over her 2024 visit.

France 24 correspondent Jessica Le Masurier noted the concrete evidence of Israeli sexual crimes against Palestinians cited in this year’s report from the secretary-general, including videos and photos of abuses.

She contrasted that with the absence of evidence backing Israel’s claims about 7 October.

“I remember when you had your visit to Israel, you told me that you were not able to seek any evidence,” Le Masurier said to Patten. She then asked Patten whether “with hindsight, you regret that trip, seeing as it caused so many issues regarding actually being able to draw clear conclusions based on evidence.”

Patten replied that her 2024 visit to Israel “was of an exceptional nature, because of lack of access to relevant UN human rights monitors.” She argued that if she had not gone, “that would have meant that there would have been nothing in the secretary-general’s report on the 7 October attacks.”

One way of interpreting Patten’s response is that in the absence of credible evidence of sexual violence on 7 October, she and her boss António Guterres preferred to recycle and amplify unverified Israeli claims and atrocity propaganda rather than to wait for credible evidence – evidence that nearly three years later is still nowhere to be found.

In doing so, Guterres and Patten – deliberately or not – aided and abetted Israeli atrocity propaganda used to mobilize support for an ongoing genocide that the UN secretary-general still refuses to name.

Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:05:51 +0000

West Bank healthcare workers go on strike as Israel’s financial siege guts the Palestinian health sector

As Israel indefinitely withholds Palestinian customs revenues, public hospitals have cut hours and slashed healthcare workers' salaries. Patients are left to navigate a system running on interns and half-capacity labs.

By Qassam Muaddi

June 3, 2026

MONDOWEISS

Waiting hall at the Ramallah Medical Complex, May 2026. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)

The emergency section of the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah seems too calm for the city’s largest public hospital. Fewer than ten people sit in the waiting hall, the floor tiles still shining clean as an employee mops the floor every five minutes. Inside the emergency hall, four nurses stand behind the central counter, while behind closed curtains, patients lie on beds, some waiting to be transferred to a specialized section or to be seen by the ER nurses. Three of the beds are empty.

Abeer, a woman in her forties, comes from behind one of the curtains and exits to the waiting area, where she sits. “My mother-in-law is inside, and they took some blood samples for a test,” she said. “We have to wait for the results and then go see a private doctor, because there aren’t any doctors here.”

For six months, Palestinian public doctors have been on strike, demanding that their salaries be paid in full in light of the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) budget cuts due to Israel’s continued piracy of Palestinian customs money, which it normally collects on the PA’s behalf as per the 1993 Oslo Accords. While the PA’s financial woes have cycled on and off for the past five years, Israel has been indefinitely withholding Palestinian customs money since October 2023, turning economic hardship into a full-blown crisis. As a result, the PA has been paying incomplete salaries to all public employees while simultaneously reducing service hours across several sectors, especially in healthcare.

Last week, the doctors’ union accused the PA government of reneging on several understandings it had reached with the union, and vowed that doctors would accept no less than “full salaries for full working hours.” In an interview with the local Raya FM radio station, the head of the doctors’ union said that the union was “not engaging in any communication with the government,” adding that the union had told PA Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa that “medical service to patients cannot be reduced,” and that “doctors are ready to return to full service hours if their salaries are fully paid.”

Beyond the doctors, the nurses’ union also announced plans for protests against the ongoing crisis. In early May, the head of the nurses’ union told Raya FM that public sector nurses would begin reducing their service hours after “long months of salaries not being fully paid.” The PA had already reduced service hours for nurses since 2023, when Israel imposed strict movement restrictions on Palestinians across the West Bank. Since then, Palestinian public hospitals have been operating at only partial capacity, while Palestinian patients have been forced to turn to private hospitals for healthcare.

Waiting hall at the Ramallah Medical Complex, May 2026. (Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)

Inside the emergency room

At the Palestine Medical Complex, Abeer is joined by her husband, Jeries, who is also waiting for his mother’s test results. “The laboratory is right here, one corridor away, but it’s closed due to the strike,” he said. “We don’t know where the other laboratory is, or whether we have to wait or go look for the results ourselves, because nobody explained anything to us,” he said.

Later in the day, outside the hospital, Ayah (not her real name), a nurse in her early thirties, arrives at a coffee shop after a long day of work at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) hospital. Visibly tired, Ayah sighs as she speaks. “The crisis in public hospitals is just putting an extra load on private hospitals, and nobody knows how to manage it,” she said. Over the past year, Ayah had worked at the government’s Palestine Medical Complex until the beginning of the doctors’ strike, then at one of Ramallah’s prestigious private hospitals, before moving recently to the non-profit PRCS. She has witnessed the crisis unfold across all three branches of the health sector and lived through its implications as a nurse.

“Patients who come from public sector hospitals due to the strike expect private hospitals to be like public ones,” Ayah said. “They are mostly ordinary people who expect to be fully examined for a simple fever, and can’t afford the treatment they need.”

Ayah explained that many people come to private or non-profit hospitals only after exhausting all hope of being seen by a doctor at a government facility — and even then, only after their condition has already deteriorated.

“Yesterday, a 23-year-old man came to the PRCS hospital with a torn hand tendon after waiting to be seen by a doctor at the public hospital, and he ended up paying 600 shekels for his treatment,” Ayah said. “If he had come directly to the PRCS, his condition wouldn’t have deteriorated, and he would have only paid 90 shekels.”

Back at the Palestine Medical Complex, Abeer and Jeries continue to wait for their mother’s test results. Inside the emergency hall, the mother, Fadia, sits on the edge of the bed and explains how the doctors’ strike and the broader health sector crisis have affected her.

“I come from the village of Aboud, just half an hour from Ramallah, where there’s a public health center. They had a laboratory that was open every day, and I used to have my tests done there,” Fadia said. “Since last year, the laboratory staff in Aboud’s health center has come only once every two or three weeks, and I’ve had to come here to do my medical tests.”

“I used to buy all my medicines with public health insurance, paying exactly five shekels for any medicine, but since last year, many of these medicines are no longer covered by the public insurance,” Fadia said. “Now I have to buy my blood pressure medicines myself, and some cost up to 60 shekels.”

Fadia had three doctor’s appointments scheduled over the past two months, and all were canceled. “I continue taking my medicines as usual, hoping the crisis will be resolved by my next appointment,” she said.

Emergency Room at the Ramallah Medical Complex, May 2026.

(Photo: Qassam Muaddi/Mondoweiss)

But the crisis doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. In late April, hardline Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that the April batch of customs money belonging to the PA would also be withheld — estimated at around NIS 740 million ($246 million). Smotrich, who in September of last year pledged on X to bring about the PA’s collapse through economic strangulation, is the public face of an Israeli policy embraced by the entire Israeli establishment. This policy has also been affecting even the private sector of health services in Palestine.

“When I was working at a private hospital here in Ramallah, many nurses like me were being paid only 70% or 80% of our salaries due to the public hospital crisis,” Ayah said. “The private hospital I worked at depended on cases transferred to it from public hospitals covered by the health ministry, and when the ministry went into crisis, private hospitals did, too.”

Earlier in May, the director of the non-profit al-Najah University Hospital in Nablus told Al Jazeera that the PA’s health ministry owes $255 million to al-Najah alone, and that the hospital depends on the health ministry’s transfers for 80% to 90% of its budget.

What’s worse, Ayah said, is that once salaries started getting slashed, the workload on nurses in private hospitals increased, too. “But even with all the challenges of incomplete salaries in private hospitals, it’s nothing like in public ones,” she said with a smirk, mentioning that one of her colleagues at the Palestine Medical Complex walks to work for an hour every day, leaving home at 5:30 a.m. to arrive at the hospital by 6:30 a.m. “He’d rather save five shekels to buy bread for his family than spend them on public transportation,” she explained.

Ayah noted that nurses in public hospitals had their service hours reduced from October 2023 onward due to the movement restrictions imposed by Israeli forces. And with the reduction of hours came a reduction in salaries — but the PA’s financial crisis had already been raging for three years, leading many to interpret the reduced service hours as a way to cope with the financial strain.

“Nurses in public hospitals have been understaffed, but doctors, too, came under incredible pressure,” Ayah said. “Some doctors had to work up to three consecutive 24-hour shifts, barely sleeping, while nursing staff became increasingly dependent on interns,” she said.

Back at the Palestine Medical Complex, Fadia continues to wait on her emergency bed while a young female nurse takes her blood pressure. “How old are you, my child?” Fadia asks gently, with a soft smile. “I’m 23, Auntie, I’m still an intern,” the nurse replies. I ask her how many of the nurses on shift are interns like her. “Anyone with this tag on their uniform is an intern,” she says, pointing to a shiny name tag on her chest.

I peek out from behind the curtain into the emergency hall; everyone in a uniform, except for the four nurses at the central counter, has the same tag. There are ten to fifteen of them, all in their twenties. “Most of us here are interns, and the same goes for the specialized sections upstairs,” the young nurse says.

Abeer and Jeries enter the emergency section to check on Fadia and ask about the blood test results. “Are you still waiting for the results?” the young nurse exclaims. “You should go to the laboratory in the cardiac section to look for them yourselves,” she tells the couple.

I walk with Jeries to the second floor of the hospital, then through a long bridge corridor connecting two buildings, then across another waiting hall, and finally into the cardiac section’s corridor, where the laboratory is open. Three staff members are present, busy with their work. One of them looks up Fadia’s name on a screen. I ask what the difference is between them and the closed laboratory in the emergency section. “We are the same hospital laboratory, but we’re operating at half capacity to maintain the strike without leaving the hospital without a laboratory,” he replies.

Jeries takes his mother’s results and heads back to the emergency section. The results are good, and the family can return home to Aboud. As they gather their things and prepare to leave, an elderly man approaches the central counter and addresses the head nurse: “Have my wife’s blood results come back yet? And will any doctor see her today?” Meanwhile, the cleaning employee passes by again, mopping the shining tiles once more.

Qassam Muaddi
Qassam Muaddi is the Palestine Staff Writer for Mondoweiss. He covers social, political, and cultural developments in Palestine, and has written for several outlets in English and French, including the Catholic Terre Sainte Magazine and other outlets. Follow him on Twitter/X at @QassaMMuaddi.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:46:05 +0000

'Petty and vindictive' Trump 'is being publicly humiliated on the world stage'

U.S. President Donald Trump with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday, July 28, 2025 in Turnberry, Scotland. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)

Alex Henderson

June 08, 2026

ALTERNET

When President Donald Trump is accused of having a belligerent tone with longtime allies of the United States, he often responds that he is merely standing up for a country that has been disrespected and taken advantage of. Trump views himself as a symbol of American strength, but according to British journalist and i Paper reporter James Ball, the U.S. president is looking "weak" and "humiliated" in front of other countries.

"Trump's maniacal self-confidence has endured beyond the first year of his second term in no small part thanks to the constant flattery of his subordinates and a friendly online media ecosystem," Ball explains in the UK-based i Paper. "He seems to genuinely believe that he has 'ended 10 wars,' or that he is constantly breaking record highs in his approval ratings among Republicans. Neither is true."

Trump's "overweening self-confidence," according to Ball, "seems to" be the thing that "propelled" him "into his war with Iran" — a war that, Ball emphasizes, isn't going well for the United States.

"One of the founding principles of the MAGA movement was getting the U.S. out of its endless entanglements overseas, and instead putting 'America First,'" Ball notes. "But the pull of proving himself superior to his predecessors on Iran and the Middle East — Trump has spent a decade endlessly criticizing President (Barack) Obama's deal to curb Iranian nuclear enrichment — seemed to prove irresistible. On a high after kidnapping President (Nicolás) Maduro from Venezuela, and having received a flattering briefing from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming U.S. airstrikes could lead to regime change in Iran, Trump launched his own Middle Eastern adventure."

Ball continues, "Trump never set out a clear aim for the war, not least because he never bothered making much of a case for it, either to the public or to Congress. But it is impossible to claim the current situation as a win against any kind of goal. The world's economy remains on the brink of disaster, with the Strait of Hormuz blocked. Peace negotiations are in deadlock. The Iranian regime's hold on the country is more secure now than it was before US operations began."

Trump, the British journalist laments, is in way over his head with Iran — much to the detriment of the U.S. as well as its allies in other countries.

"Trump is a petty and vindictive man," Ball warns. "He has spent much of his second term trying to bring the power of the federal government to bear against his political enemies, for real and imagined slights. He has pursued vendettas for weeks, months and years against those he feels criticized him unfairly. Now, he is being publicly humiliated on the world stage, while every world leader watches on. What might a man like Donald Trump do in such a situation? Trump has made himself look foolish, and weak. That could make him more dangerous than ever.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:54:28 +0000

'Petty and vindictive' Trump 'is being publicly humiliated on the world stage'

U.S. President Donald Trump with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday, July 28, 2025 in Turnberry, Scotland. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok/Flickr)

Alex Henderson

June 08, 2026

ALTERNET

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:53:43 +0000

Higher Education Must Not Become a Research Arm of Militarized Power

Universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education.

By Henry A. Giroux ,

Truthout

June 8, 2026

A pro-Palestine protester holds a placard that says, "No more research for IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces)" during a 2024 rally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as student demonstrators demand divestment from Israeli military ties.Vincent Ricci / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.

What happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon.

We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing pressure to align their missions, research agendas, and pedagogical practices with the values, priorities, and imperatives of a society increasingly organized around the logic of war.

Militarized policies, values, identities, and modes of governance no longer merely creep into U.S. society. Under the Trump administration, they increasingly define it. Militarization now extends far beyond the battlefield, reshaping everyday life, public institutions, and the very meaning of citizenship. War is celebrated as a moral imperative, often wrapped in the language of religious righteousness and white Christian nationalism. Due process gives way to abductions and arbitrary detention, dissent is met with threats and repression, soldiers occupy U.S. cities, and political violence is normalized through a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric and state-sponsored spectacles that glorify force, exclusion, and domination. Democratic ideals are displaced by a culture of fear, manufactured insecurity, and the belief that the nation is besieged by enemies both within and beyond its borders — largely immigrants and people of color.

In this militarized landscape, critical thought is derided, informed judgment is replaced by ideological conformity, and institutions charged with nurturing democratic agency increasingly come under attack. This fusion of militarism, toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and white nationalist politics functions as a powerful form of public pedagogy, producing the authoritarian values, identities, and modes of agency that have historically provided the cultural foundations for fascist politics.
The Dangers of the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex”

The late U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the dangers posed by what he called the “military-industrial-academic complex.” In an earlier draft of his famous 1961 farewell address on the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower included the word “academic,” recognizing that universities could become deeply entangled with military power, corporate interests, and state security agendas in ways that threatened their intellectual independence and democratic mission.

Critics Slam Carney’s Plan to Jump-Start Canada’s Economy via Military Industry
Canada’s prime minister faces blowback for his plan to hike Canadian arms companies’ profits by 240 percent in 10 years. By Nora Loreto , Truthout March 3, 2026

This warning extends to countries that increasingly live in the shadow of the U.S.’s expanding warfare state and its militarized culture. For instance, against an increasingly militarized global order, the Canadian government has unveiled an expansive “Defence Industrial Strategy” backed by 81.8 billion Canadian dollars (around 60 billion in U.S. dollars) in new defense spending in Budget 2025, including 6.6 billion Canadian dollars devoted specifically to expanding the country’s defense-industrial infrastructure. The strategy marks the largest long-term expansion of Canada’s military economy since the Second World War.

What once appeared to be limited partnerships between North American universities and defense industries has evolved into a far broader transformation of higher education itself. As Canada dramatically expands military spending through its Defence Industrial Strategy, universities are increasingly being drawn into the orbit of defense priorities. Federal initiatives encourage partnerships between universities, defense contractors, and government agencies in fields such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, quantum computing, autonomous systems, and advanced surveillance technologies. Research funding is increasingly directed toward projects framed around national security, defense innovation, and military competitiveness. As these priorities gain influence, higher education is being reshaped by the social logics of militarization, technological control, and permanent security, altering not only what knowledge is produced but also the purposes to which it is put, raising urgent questions about the future of the university as a democratic public sphere.

Militarized knowledge production blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

The growing use of drones and AI-driven warfare systems is not simply a military development. It signals a broader transformation in how research and knowledge are produced, funded, and valued. As universities deepen their involvement in military research, fields ranging from artificial intelligence and data analytics to robotics and cybersecurity are increasingly organized around the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare. AI technologies are already being deployed by state agencies to monitor migrants, journalists, activists, and political dissidents, while drones have revolutionized warfare by making it cheaper, more remote, and less accountable. Under such conditions, knowledge is not viewed primarily as a public good serving democratic life. Instead, it is increasingly organized around military imperatives of prediction, control, targeting, and domination. The result is a form of militarized knowledge production that blurs the line between education and warfare, transforming universities into laboratories for the development of technologies whose ultimate purpose is often surveillance, social control, and lethal violence.

Michael S. Sherry rightly argues that in an age in which state power is increasingly organized through militarized values and security logics, military culture now shapes not only state policy but “broad areas of national life.” As David Theo Goldberg argues, militarization no longer operates only through armies and weapons systems. It increasingly shapes culture, technology, modes of governance, and everyday life. As Goldberg observes:

The military is not just a fighting machine…. It serves and socializes. It hands down to society, as big brother might, its more or less perfected goods, from gunpowder to guns, computing to information management … In short, while militarily produced instruments might be retooled to other, broader social purposes, the military shapes pretty much the entire range of social production from commodities to culture, social goods to social theory.

The implications for higher education are profound. Militarization does not simply reshape culture, technology, and governance. It also reorganizes the production of knowledge itself, aligning university research with the imperatives of surveillance, security, and warfare while legitimating authoritarian forms of power. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence research tied to military and surveillance applications deepens these dangers. Universities are increasingly helping to develop technologies used for predictive policing, automated warfare, mass surveillance, and forms of digital authoritarianism that blur the line between security and repression. Such developments are routinely justified in the language of innovation, efficiency, and national security, yet they raise profound ethical questions about the role of higher education in designing technologies that deepen inequality, expand state violence, erode civil liberties, and facilitate the killing of civilians, including children, in conflicts largely removed from public scrutiny.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political.

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural, and deeply political. Universities do more than train workers; they shape civic identities, ethical sensibilities, and the capacity for democratic agency itself. When higher education embraces military partnerships and military-driven research agendas, it legitimates a worldview in which security eclipses justice, technological efficiency displaces ethical reflection, and dissent is recast as a threat rather than a democratic necessity.
How Militarization Reorganizes the Production of Knowledge

As militarization becomes woven into the fabric of political culture, universities increasingly reorganize knowledge, research priorities, and technological innovation around the assumptions of permanent conflict, geopolitical competition, and security management. In doing so, higher education normalizes the belief that militarized knowledge and military solutions should govern everyday life. Yet militarization does not merely reshape research priorities and institutional culture. It also reorganizes historical memory, civic identity, and the very terms through which democracy is understood.

Militarization also bears heavily on the production of knowledge itself. As Fintan O’Toole observes, contemporary authoritarian movements do more than expand military power; they seek to reshape historical memory and civic consciousness. Shameful histories are recast as heroic achievements, while assaults on democracy are reimagined as acts of patriotism. The Confederate rebellion is transformed from a defense of slavery into a noble cause, much as the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is increasingly celebrated by its defenders as a patriotic uprising rather than an assault on democratic institutions. Equally troubling are efforts to remake the military itself through demands that soldiers be trained for loyalty to political leaders rather than to constitutional principles. Here, power seeks not only to command institutions but also to militarize knowledge, memory, and civic identity. Universities have a crucial responsibility to resist such distortions by defending historical truth, critical inquiry, and the capacity to distinguish education from propaganda.

As Kevin Baker notes, military solutions increasingly displace diplomacy, democratic institutions, and other civic responses to social problems. Within a culture saturated by militarism, aggression is celebrated as prevention, repression is justified in the name of security, and military force is invoked to discipline dissent and erode democratic values. Under such conditions, education is organized less around the imperatives of democratic culture than around the demands of the arms industry, surveillance systems, technological acceleration, and the national security state.

These developments become even more troubling when they intersect with the ongoing marketization of higher education. At its best, higher education functions as a democratic public sphere, a place where students learn to think critically, question authority, engage history, and imagine alternative democratic futures. Yet under the pressures of neoliberalism, universities have increasingly abandoned this mission. Education is now often reduced to job training, students are treated as consumers, faculty are deskilled and casualized, and learning is defined largely in instrumental terms. Questions about how education might nurture civic courage, ethical imagination, social responsibility, and democratic agency are increasingly sidelined in a market-driven university culture.

Yet the assault on higher education is not only economic. It is also ideological and political. In recent years, a growing chorus of liberal and conservative critics has claimed that universities have lost their way, charging that the humanities and critical scholarship have corrupted higher education through ideology and activism. Under the seductive language of “reform,” “balance,” “civility,” “institutional trust,” and “neutrality,” these critics present themselves as defenders of academic integrity while advancing a profoundly reactionary project. In some cases, liberal critics go so far as to treat “social justice” as a threat to scholarship rather than asking how power, exclusion, race, gender, class, empire, and inequality have always shaped what counts as knowledge. Their calls for neutrality, which function as a cover for depoliticization, do not protect intellectual freedom; they align with a broader assault on critical thought, historical memory, and democratic culture. They are aghast at the notion put forward by Thomas Chatterton Williams that “For humanities departments [and higher education in general] to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.” In doing so, they obscure the far more dangerous attacks on higher education coming from the right: censorship, book bans, assaults on DEI programs, the repression of student protest, and efforts to align universities with corporate, state, and military interests.

Critical scholarship is condemned as ideological, while militarized research, donor influence, state-directed threats of defunding, and forms of ideological indoctrination are celebrated as common sense. The real danger is not that universities have become too political, but that they are being stripped of their democratic mission and transformed into institutions that normalize conformity, surveillance, militarization, and authoritarian power. Higher education is not under attack because it has been ruined by the left. On the contrary, it is under assault by the Trump administration and a broader network of far right forces precisely because it keeps alive a dangerous truth: education is not merely about credentials, careers, or conformity to the status quo. At its best, it cultivates the capacity for critical judgment, informed dissent, compassion, and democratic agency. What authoritarian movements fear most is not ideological indoctrination but an educated public capable of questioning power, holding authority accountable, and imagining a more just future.

Militarization deepens anti-democratic tendencies. Research is increasingly tied to military applications, geopolitical competition, and outside funding rather than to the public good. Universities adopt the language of security, risk management, efficiency, and competitiveness while corporate and military values increasingly shape institutional priorities. As a Simons Foundation policy briefing warns, militarization has increasingly become a “default response” to political instability and global insecurity, reinforcing a culture in which social problems are framed through the logics of surveillance, strategic competition, and military preparedness rather than diplomacy, public investment, and democratic cooperation. As Professor Catherine Lutz notes, such actions run the risk of eroding legal and moral boundaries. In such a climate, higher education loses its civic character and becomes subordinated to the interests of the warfare state and defense industries.

As universities become increasingly tied to military and security logics, they risk abandoning their civic purpose in favor of a pedagogy of permanent emergency, one that privileges surveillance, strategic competition, and technological domination over critical inquiry, civic imagination, ethical responsibility, and social solidarity. What disappears in this militarized vision of higher education is the conviction that universities should cultivate informed citizens capable of holding power accountable rather than simply servicing the imperatives of the national security state.

Equally troubling, militarization reshapes the culture of the university itself. Militarized institutions reward conformity, secrecy, technocratic thinking, and instrumental rationality. Ethical questions about violence, disposability, colonialism, and state power are pushed aside in favor of managerial efficiency and national competitiveness. Students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, settler colonialism, genocide, sexual violence, or war crimes are too often met not with dialogue but with surveillance, administrative repression, and policing.

The dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.”

In such instances, the university ceases to function as a space for critical engagement and becomes instead an extension of a broader authoritarian culture. As scholar John Gills notes, the dominance of war-like values in both higher education and the wider civic culture prepares “civil society itself for the production of violence.” In this way, universities risk becoming agents of militarized socialization rather than sites of democratic education. Such developments raise not only political and educational concerns but also urgent ethical questions about the kinds of institutions that universities are becoming and the values they choose to endorse.

The militarization of higher education raises a profound ethical question: What happens when universities enter into partnerships with military institutions while remaining silent about documented human rights abuses associated with those same institutions? Such silence is never politically neutral. It suggest

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:49:44 +0000

'Appalling' video captures driver wrecking ancient National Park forest

By Oke (talk · contribs) - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1138764

Adam Lynch

June 06, 2026

ALTERNET

San Francisco Gate reports employees are searching for someone who appears to have illegally driven a car through the delicate bristlecone pines ecosystem of the Inyo National Forest.

“Adam Leidy, Inyo National Forest’s off-highway vehicle and over-snow vehicle program manager, posted two videos to his Facebook account in late May — one flagging tire marks on the wrong side of some ‘no motor vehicles’ signs and another one showing a Subaru on the move,” reports SF Gate. “Leidy asked anyone with information about the driver to contact Inyo’s dispatch at 760-873-2405.”

“Scientifically, I’m appalled,” said Jeff Holmquist, a researcher for the White Mountain Research Center, told SFGATE. “In my view, it’s obscenely damaging and extremely unfortunate.”

Home to some of the oldest trees on earth, the alpine region of the Inyo National Forest has remarkably vulnerable soil. Between the revered, ancient trees lies a fragile biocrust, a thin layer of living material consisting of algae, moss and lichen that binds the topsoil and protects it from harsh highland wind and sparse rain.

“Vehicle tires can compact soils and damage root systems — making it more difficult for plants to absorb water and nutrients — and also leave behind seeds of invasive species, according to a park spokesperson. “In high-elevation settings — especially in Bristlecone Pine forests and alpine tundra — this damage is particularly severe,” Inyo National Forest personnel told SFGATE. “These plants grow extremely slowly. A single vehicle driving just a short distance off-road can kill or damage hundreds of small plants and shrubs. Recovery of soils in these ecosystems can take decades or even centuries.”

Car tires carousing though restricted sections can damage slow-growing seedlings, or blast roots that would sooner rot away than recover. They certainly damaged the fragile biocrust, said the park spokesperson.

“My guess is that the tracks that this vehicle left will be there for the rest of my life and probably yours, too,” Holmquist told the paper. “… It’s a horrible thing, and I say that both as somebody who has a real reverence for the natural world and as a scientist. We’re ants compared to these ancient trees, in terms of size but particularly in terms of longevity. It’s such a peaceful, serene place. You have a sense of deep time as you sit at the base of these trees.”

Despite the destruction, SF Gate reports the citation for driving a vehicle off the road in a way that disturbs land, wildlife or vegetation only comes with a $250 fine. The agency’s main tool for against degrading the precious environment and filling it with invasive bramble is education, starting with clear signage.

“We also install physical barriers — rocks, bollards, and other structures — to discourage off-road driving,” the spokesperson told SFGATE. “And we invest in public education, because most visitors want to recreate responsibly; they just need clear guidance.”

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:38:50 +0000

As the Climate Crisis Heats Our Ocean, Trump Is Tossing the Thermometer

At a time when ocean heat, the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and other major changes are sending shock waves through scientific and decision-making circles, we need greater understanding of what we’re facing, not self-imposed blind spots.

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data collecting buoy is moored in the Indian Ocean.
(Photo by David Zimmerman/ NOAA)

Erika Spanger
Jun 06, 2026

Union of Concerned Scientists/Blog

It’s easy for us land dwellers to forget that we live on a water planet, more than 70% of it covered by a vast ocean. But we are entering an age—or more accurately, have created an age—when that fact will be impossible to ignore. With global climate change, the seas are rising, yes, but they are also warming, slowly but steadily, and that warmth is now reaching levels that can drive profound changes here on land. Many of those changes have begun, many are on display this year, and some will have seismic consequences going forward.

Almost as shocking as the scale of these changes are the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the very scientific instruments that enable us to understand them. We’ll get there. But first, a little immersion into our water planet to better understand what it means to overheat it and force the ocean to compensate.
Earth, Despite the Name, Is a Water Planet

‘Absolutely Crazy’: Horror as Trump Moves to Dismantle Crucial Ocean Monitoring System

A more representative, less terra-centric view of our 70% water planet.

(Photo by NOAA/NASA GOES via Smithsonian)

A quick refresher on Earth’s ocean. I mean, where did it even come from, all this water?

After Earth’s molten formation 4.6 billion years ago, the planet gradually cooled below the boiling point of water and, fueled by steam released from volcanoes, it rained for thousands of years, filling the low-lying surface of the planet. An era of bombardment by icy asteroids provided a huge additional volume of water. And voila, a water planet was born, almost entirely covered by one massive ocean. Tectonic activity eventually produced large land masses and, over time, both plate movement and global temperature fluctuations have greatly changed the shape of the ocean—and the land, our default perspective—e.g., tying more or less water up in ice. But with the exception of a couple of global ice ages, the liquid ocean has always dominated Earth’s surface. We’ve almost always been a “blue planet,” and always a water planet.
Water Manages Heat—and Thus Life—on Earth

This water was the birthplace of life on Earth. Indeed, water is considered the birthplace of carbon-based life anywhere, which is why scientists search for it in other solar systems. It took at least 500 million years for the first life to form in the ocean (~4.1 billion years ago), and once it did, life remained simple and aquatic for the vast majority of Earth’s history. It took fungi, plants, and especially animals big evolutionary leaps to venture out of the ocean (and much of it did not; today, nearly 80% of Earth’s animal life, measured in biomass, lives in the oceans), first to the tidal zone, then the coasts, and even today, with terrestrial life spanning most dry land, the ocean continues to exert tremendous influence on that life. It does this through a range of mechanisms. Chief among them, our ocean plays the dominant role in managing the Earth’s heat and making large regions of the planet habitable.

The ocean has spared us land dwellers from the true ~36°C consequences of our fossil-fuel burning actions. And we can’t tackle 1.5°C?

A core way the ocean does this is by absorbing solar radiation at tropical latitudes and distributing that heat via vast ocean currents to cooler parts of the world. These currents then distribute water that has cooled at the poles back toward the equator. Without this mechanism, the heat that makes life possible even in the otherwise frigid latitudes would remain concentrated around an intolerably hot equator. In this sense, the oceans are a great regulator of the global climate, tamping down extremes and supporting Goldilocks-style just-right regional climates around the world.

The oceans are also the primary source of moisture and precipitation—basically, weather—to land. As the sun heats ocean surface water, it evaporates, creating humid air that is transported by forces like winds and the Earth’s rotation, delivering precipitation, the water that makes terrestrial life possible.

So, if the role of the ocean in managing Earth’s temperature is fundamental to life on Earth, what happens when we overheat it?
The Ocean: an Unfathomably Huge Heat Buffer

A depiction of how the Earth has dealt with the energy imbalance created mainly by burning fossil fuels and adding heat-trapping molecules to the atmosphere. The oceans have spared us the true brunt of global warming, storing 91% of excess heat, up from 89% when this visual was created three years ago.(Graphic by Copernicus)

The ocean is estimated to have absorbed 91% of the excess heat, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels, that has been trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere. This heat storage is possible because of the ocean’s specific heat capacity—i.e., water takes a lot more energy to warm than land or air. Direct absorption of sunlight, the main way the ocean absorbs heat, depends on the level of albedo present, where darker surfaces, like the ocean surface, absorb more of the sun’s energy than light surfaces, like polar ice caps, which reflect it back to space. But other mechanisms, like heat exchange with the atmosphere, warm the ocean, too.

Without that excess-heat absorption and storage in recent decades, life on land would have been thrown into chaos (at best) by skyrocketing temperatures by now. According to one study, the heat taken up by the upper layer of the ocean between 1955 and 2010 was enough to warm the atmosphere by a jaw-dropping 36°C. This massive, climate-mediating role of the ocean puts our thus-far unsuccessful human efforts to keep warming to 1.5 or 2°C in sharp relief. That is, the ocean has spared us land dwellers from the true ~36°C consequences of our fossil-fuel burning actions. And we can’t tackle 1.5°C?

The Buffer Is Getting Thin

The vastness of the ocean means it requires tremendous inputs to respond. But the excess heat that carbon emissions have trapped since the start of the Industrial Revolution is one such tremendous input. Major recent research captures the scale in this way, according to one of a new study’s 50 authors, John Abraham: the heat absorbed by the ocean in 2025 alone is “like 12 Hiroshima bombs being detonated each second, for every minute, hour, and day for the entire year.”

The absorption of that heat means that the average temperature of the oceans has been steadily rising, and now those temperatures are reaching levels that fuel impacts, including on land, that we will be unable to ignore.

Overall, the ocean has broken average temperature records every year for the past nine years. Temperatures have increased most at the surface, where sea surface temperatures have warmed roughly 0.8°C between 1901 and 2020, and recently broke new monthly high records for thirteen consecutive months, starting in mid-2023. But deeper layers are warming, too. The chart below shows ocean heat content at different depths. And while slow ocean circulation constrains the movement of heat to great depths, ~20% of total warming is occurring below 700 meters.

(Credit: ECCO https://ecco-group.org/ohc.htm)

So, Where Are We Today?

The NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) data in the chart below shows 2026 SSTs rising to rival the record-breaking levels of 2024. This is influenced by the formation of a Super El Niño. Outlooks point toward new record high ocean temperatures this year, potentially creating the new hottest year on record for Earth in 2027.

2026 sea surface temperatures are now rivaling those of 2024, the warmest year on record. (Graphic by Copernicus)

Climate change is the clear driver here. Thanks to tools like Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI), we can now see the role of climate change in daily sea surface temperatures, and thus in marine heatwaves and other anomalies. According to the CSI, this week, both the notable heat in the Indian Ocean and that in the Equatorial Pacific (where the El Niño is forming) are made substantially more likely due to climate change.

The role of climate change in driving warm ocean surface temperatures.

(Graphic by Climate Central)

Symptoms of the Ocean’s Fever

These temperatures are now manifesting in impacts around the world and pointing toward accelerating change. In follow up blogs, we will unpack these symptoms in some detail, but to name significant ones:

Warmer water hastens the melting of “ocean-terminating” ice sheets (i.e., land-based ice connected to the ocean), contributing to sea-level rise; creates a warming feedback loop by shrinking sea ice and increasing the ocean-warming albedo affect; enhances ocean stratification, where warmer surface and cooler deep waters fail to mix and redistribute heat; this in turn can drive hypoxic conditions, starving deeper waters of oxygen; can slow major ocean currents (thermohaline circulation), which are driven by changes in density, in turn driven by water temperature and salinity; and can super-charge storm systems, from tropical cyclones to Nor’easters, causing stronger and more rapidly accelerating storms.

We have created an era of ocean heat consequences and now we must figure out how to live in it, even as we work to correct it.

Then there is the acute heat that manifests in marine heatwaves, a condition that is now chronic and widespread in oceans around the world. In 2023, an estimated 96% of the ocean by area experienced a marine heatwave. The most significant heatwaves (all recent) have disrupted marine food webs and caused major ecological harm, resulting in widespread, prolonged coral reef bleaching, large-scale wildlife deaths, and damaged commercial fisheries.

Given the ocean’s significant role in driving or influencing vastly-consequential terrestrial climate patterns, like the Asian Monsoon, ocean overheating has implications for the human systems that are attuned to those patterns, from water supply, to agriculture and food security, energy production, and more. We’ll be tracking ocean temperatures, reporting on developments, and digging into these implications in subsequent blogs.
An Age of Consequence for Warming a Water Planet

The tremendous capacity of the ocean to store away heat meant that the consequences of warming our planet were slower to be made visible. It now means that an enormous amount of excess heat energy now exists in the oceans, to be gradually released to other Earth systems in forms like direct heat to the atmosphere (as we see in El Nino years), melting of ice, and the supply of sea-surface heat that fuels tropical cyclones, to name a few.

It also means that releasing of that heat, slowing ocean warming, and eventually cooling the ocean cannot be accomplished on practical human timescales, but rather in hundreds to thousands of years. We have created an era of ocean heat consequences and now we must figure out how to live in it, even as we work to correct it.
Our Need to Understand Our Changing Planet Meets the Trump Administration

An essential requirement for meeting the era of ocean heat is better understanding how our oceans and climate are changing, and for this, we have global ocean and climate monitoring infrastructure. Here in the US, the Trump administration is attempting—through staff cuts, budget cuts, eliminating data and information (e.g., datasets and websites taken down), and dismantling our monitoring infrastructure—to make ocean, land, and atmospheric change harder to see.

It’s hard to think of a more monumental failure than overheating an ocean planet and handing it off to younger generations.

Most recently, the administration ordered the “descoping” of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observing Infrastructure Project, a system of sensing and data gathering infrastructure distributed in the North Atlantic and Pacific. Information is still sparse about this dismantling; the process is not transparent. What’s clear is that, at a time when ocean heat, the

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:29:57 +0000

Reclaiming the Pursuit of Happiness

Let’s celebrate the Declaration’s 250th by ending US poverty.

George, who is homeless, panhandles along a street in Lawrence on August 16, 2019 in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Fran Quigley
Jun 07, 2026

Common Dreams

Every week in our law school eviction court clinic, we see parents hustling from their workplaces, still wearing fast food and home healthcare uniforms, hoping to push back the day when they and their kids will be sleeping in their car. We see seniors and persons living with disabilities on the verge of eviction because they had to spend their rent money filling prescriptions. We see some of the 43 million people in the US who are living with hunger.

Every person suffering like this is a rebuke to the core promise of the Declaration of Independence. We should commemorate the Declaration’s 250th anniversary with a renewed commitment to the pursuit of happiness, which means our government fulfilling basic economic needs.

From the very first moment of its existence, the United States embraced economic rights. The Declaration of Independence’s second paragraph commits our government to protecting the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. The founders, as flawed as they were, knew that this promise included ensuring that basic needs are met.
“Not a Charity but a Right”—The Founders and Government’s Role in Ending Poverty

The Declaration’s main author, Thomas Jefferson, lamented the democracy-undermining existence of poverty. Natural rights are violated, Jefferson wrote, when some residents struggle and others prosper. So he insisted that the government has a duty to act to remedy the injustice, including through aggressively progressive taxation.

Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.

Other founders agreed. Alexander Hamilton explained that the General Welfare Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution (“The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect taxes... to provide for the General Welfare of the United States”) creates a government that addresses unmet economic needs. Hamilton’s fellow Constitution framer James Madison called for the new nation to enact laws that would “reduce extreme wealth toward a state of mediocrity, raise extreme indigence toward a state of comfort.”

For 18th century politicians, this type of government intervention was not hypothetical. Colonial governments instituted price controls on food and aggressively regulated gristmills to keep the cost of bread affordable for all.

The founder with the most pronounced vision of economic rights was Thomas Paine, author of the seismic pamphlet Common Sense and a driving force behind the American Revolution and the new government it birthed. Paine called for the redistribution of wealth via progressive taxation and for direct government anti-poverty interventions like old-age pensions, support for families with young children, full employment, and a basic income. “It is not charity but a right—not bounty but justice that I am pleading for,” he said.
The Meaning of the “Pursuit of Happiness”

Beyond the founders’ own words, it is clear from historical context that a 1776 commitment to protecting the unalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness” includes ensuring that subsistence needs are met. Law professor and dean Linda Keller’s comprehensive review of political thought and contemporary use of this critical phrase during the 18th century led her to conclude that basic economic rights are deeply rooted in the nation’s foundation.

“Its inclusion was not merely a rhetorical flourish, but rather the pursuit of happiness established an ‘unalienable right’ that includes an economic dimension,” Keller writes. “In particular, there are minimum needs that must be met in order to pursue happiness, for instance food, shelter, and clothing. Thus the government must provide the conditions to enable individuals to pursue happiness.”

Over the decades, other scholars have agreed. “The Declaration of Independence manifests a government’s affirmative role in protecting rights,” writes law professor Bert Lockwood. “Both the plain and ordinary meaning of happiness and its common usage in the 18th century indicate that the notion of happiness cannot be entirely separated from material well-being. Access to the minimal necessities of life, such as shelter or basic medical care, is thus an indispensable prerequisite to the notion of happiness.”

Charles Black, the longtime Yale Law professor and civil rights advocate who helped argue the legendary desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, said the point was obvious. “The possession of a decent material basis for life is an indispensable condition, for almost all people at all times, to the pursuit of happiness,” Black wrote. “The right to pursuit of happiness is going to be for all but a small minority of those in poverty, a pale sardonically grinning ghost of a right.”
“Necessitous Men are not Free Men”

US leaders since the founders have underscored this same point: Freedom and democracy cannot exist without first meeting the rights to basic human needs.

“Necessitous men are not free men,” Franklin Roosevelt announced as the foundation of his proposal for a Second Bill of Rights ensuring access to housing, healthcare, and living wages.

US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.

Soon after, the international community heeded Roosevelt’s call. Virtually every nation has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which enshrines into law the rights to housing, healthcare, and living wage incomes.

Yet the US has not ratified the treaty known as the ICESCR. Not coincidentally, every wealthy nation that has ratified does far better than the US in protecting the pursuit of happiness. Those nations have comprehensive and successful programs ensuring housing, healthcare, and adequate incomes for their residents. In those countries, the grim eviction court scenes we witness every week are almost unheard of.

We can do better, too. US voters have consistently expressed concern over our rampant wealth inequality, supported a government jobs guarantee, and called for recognizing housing and healthcare as government-enforced human rights.

These rights are necessary for the pursuit of happiness. The founders knew it, and so do we. Along with fireworks and picnics, let’s celebrate the 250th by finally fulfilling the real promise of the Declaration of Independence.

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

Fran Quigley
Fran Quigley directs the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:29:10 +0000

US Workers Are Paying the Price for Federal and State Refusal to Raise the Minimum Wage

Workers nationwide deserve wages that keep pace with the real cost of living.

Activists with One Fair Wage participate in a “Wage Strike” demonstration outside of the Old Ebbitt Grill restaurant on May 26th, 2021 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Gabriela Ramirez-Perez
Jun 07, 2026

OtherWords

For years, Congress and elected officials across the country have sidestepped one of the clearest economic problems facing working families: The minimum wage no longer keeps pace with the real cost of living.

Today, even full-time work at the federal minimum wage doesn’t pay enough to rent a market-rate two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. And too often, politicians have intervened to keep it that way.

For example, I live in Oklahoma, where the state minimum wage has been tied to the federal rate of $7.25 an hour since 2009. As a result, a full-time minimum-wage worker here earns about $15,000 a year before taxes—below the poverty line for an individual and wholly inadequate to survive.

This problem did not happen by accident.

An economy works best when working people can afford to participate in it.

In Oklahoma, some state lawmakers introduced bills to raise the minimum wage year after year—only to see those proposals die without a hearing or a vote. In 2014, the legislature went even further, passing a law that prevented cities and towns from raising local wages, even if local voters and community leaders supported the change.

That meant Oklahomans who wanted to see workers earn a fair wage were left with one remaining option: taking the issue directly to the people.

Again and again, voters in red, blue, and purple states alike have passed measures to raise their minimum wages. In the last decade or so, voters have approved minimum-wage increases in about a dozen states, including Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Washington, plus DC.

In early 2024, Oklahomans turned to the state’s initiative petition process as well. Over 150,00 voters signed a petition to place State Question 832 on the ballot. If approved, SQ 832 will gradually raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over several years and then index future increases to the Consumer Price Index after 2030.

Yet even as Oklahomans moved toward a vote, politics intervened. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt delayed the election for SQ 832 nearly two years. The wait is about to come to an end on June 16—when voters will finally get their say.

In the meantime, the delay and political games have forced working families in Oklahoma to wait as costs continue to rise. While wages for our lowest-wage workers have been frozen for 17 years, housing, groceries, and utility bills have all become more expensive.

Today, a minimum-wage earner in Oklahoma would need to work about 93 hours a week—more than two full-time jobs—just to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.

No one should have to work that much simply to survive. That fact is proof that the current economy is failing many of the people who keep our communities running.

Workers most affected by legislative inaction are the very people we rely on every day: home health aides caring for seniors, childcare workers helping parents stay employed, restaurant staff serving meals, retail workers keeping stores open, and hotel staff assisting travelers. Many of these essential workers still struggle to afford basic necessities.

Our working families have spent years shouldering the cost of federal and state inaction. They are paying the costs through financial stress, unstable housing, delayed healthcare, and less time with their families because they are constantly working to stay afloat.

Many other states have already raised the minimum wage above the federal level, recognizing a simple truth: An economy works best when working people can afford to participate in it.

SQ 832 gives Oklahoma voters the chance to move the state forward after years of legislative inaction. On June 16, Oklahoma voters can take an important step themselves.

But this issue should not rest solely on state ballot measures. Workers nationwide deserve wages that keep pace with the real cost of living—a goal that ultimately requires action from Congress, too.

Because hard work should mean stability, not poverty.

This column was distributed by OtherWords.

Gabriela Ramirez-Perez
Gabriela Ramirez-Perez is a policy analyst at the Oklahoma Policy Institute.
Full Bio >

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:25:41 +0000

Trans Athletes Don’t Threaten Women—Patriarchal Politicians Do

As the defense teams in Hecox and BPJ seek to police the bodies of transgender women and girls, all women and girls who don’t adhere to society’s rigid standard of femininity will feel the impact.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates rally outside the US Supreme Court as justices hear arguments in challenges to state bans on transgender athletes in women’s sports on January 13, 2026, in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Oliver Contreras / AFP via Getty Images)

Fatima Goss Graves
Jun 07, 2026

The Hill
The power politicians have over women’s bodies is one of the oldest tools of control in American history. Throughout that history, the promise of protecting women has been the longtime excuse for excluding women from civic life and limiting our freedom. That history isn’t over.

The Supreme Court will soon decide Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ—legal cases out of Idaho and West Virginia that will determine whether transgender athletes will be allowed to compete on women’s and girls’ school sports teams.

‘MAGA’s Weird Obsession’ Continues as House Passes Bill Forcing Schools to ‘Out’ Trans Kids

Idaho’s attorney general has argued that the bans ensure “women’s spaces and sports remain fair, safe, and dedicated to empowering female athletes.” Or, in other words, that we must allow politicians to pass these bans to “protect” women. Although the court’s decision is expected any day now, I have already made mine. Transgender sports bans are not and never have been about protecting women.

I have spent my career fighting to protect the bodily autonomy and legal protections of all women and girls. When people ask me, whether genuinely or in bad faith, why transgender women are unequivocally included in my organization’s work, I tell them the truth: Our fight is the same.

If you have been in the business of fighting for women’s rights and protections as long as I have, you know that women face many threats to their safety and autonomy, but not one of those threats includes transgender people.

The tactics being used to exclude transgender athletes are similar to those once used to keep women from casting a ballot, having a credit card, or getting the healthcare they need.

In 1776, a woman couldn’t own the clothes on her back, much less the home she built. Proponents of the practice said it was “intended for her protection.” One 100 years later, when women were shut out of the legal profession, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of such paternalism, even stating that “man is, or should be, woman’s protector.” And when women were later fighting for the right to abortion, we were told that our bodies are not our own.

It is no wonder, then, that the red herring of protecting women is being deployed in the Trump administration’s executive orders and in the Hecox and BPJ cases. It is the same excuse being used in a flurry of sports bans and anti-transgender bills that have been introduced and implemented around the country over the past six years. Ultimately, transgender sports bans fail to address the real threats women face in sports, like unfair pay and unequal access to training and facilities.

The great irony is that bans against transgender women in women’s sports, women’s bathrooms, and other areas of public life actually endanger all women. The Idaho law that the Hecox case is challenging, for example, requires women and girl student-athletes whose sex is disputed to undergo invasive sex testing, including physical examinations. Athletes in men’s sports are not subject to the same degradation.

For as long as women and girls have been allowed to participate in sports, their bodies have been scrutinized. From non-white women who do not conform to white beauty standards, to girls with short hair or baggy clothes, to those who are deemed too strong, women athletes who do not perform femininity as some deem correctly have been harassed, punished, and forced to face humiliating tests to prove their gender.

It is no accident that Project 2025 and its supporters are pushing both anti-transgender legislation and a rollback of women’s protections against sexual harassment and assault, their right to reproductive healthcare, and even their ability to vote. Today, as the defense teams in Hecox and BPJ seek to police the bodies of transgender women and girls, all women and girls who don’t adhere to society’s rigid standard of femininity will feel the impact.

If you have been in the business of fighting for women’s rights and protections as long as I have, you know that women face many threats to their safety and autonomy, but not one of those threats includes transgender people.

It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court’s decision in Hecox and BPJ will reaffirm what I already know to be true: We women, including transgender women, must be in the fight for liberation together.

© 2023 The Hill

Fatima Goss Graves
Fatima Goss Graves is a nationally recognized leader in the fight for gender justice and an expert in law, policy, and culture change. She is president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, president of the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, and a co-founder of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund.
Full Bio >

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:22:41 +0000

How Do We Reclaim Our Future From War?

Are we stuck with pending war, and actual war, from now on... until we blow up the planet? I don’t believe that at all.

A woman holds up her hands with the words No War written on them as she takes part in an anti-war protest on March 14, 2026 near Habima Square in Tel Aviv, Israel.
(Photo by Erik Marmor/Getty Images)

Robert C. Koehler
Jun 07, 2026

Common Dreams

Is war simply part of human nature? It’s been absurdly “ordinary” throughout my lifetime, and continually expanding its power and psychological reach.

And unless you’re in the middle of it—unless you’re digging for a dead child beneath a bombed building—war is just an abstract horror. It’s necessary. It’s what keeps us safe. Glory, glory hallelujah.

“You ask: What is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer with one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

Hmmm...

We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend.

This is Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, speaking in 1940, just as World War II has opened its jaws. In that context, yes, his words make sense, but the paradox hiding in those words—the speech titled “Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat”—is that with victory there may be no survival either. The Good War gave us, of course, the nuclear bomb. It gave us much of the military hell that’s happened in my lifetime. It also gave us, along with a multitrillion-dollar annual global military budget, a sense of eternal necessity to be ready for the next evil monster who wants to get us.

That’s it? We’re stuck with pending war, and actual war, from now on... until we blow up the planet? I don’t believe that at all, but I started digging back into history to get a fuller sense of what others thought. Who are we?

As Steve Taylor, writing some years ago in Psychology Today, noted:
Our view of human nature determines our view of the human race’s future. If we believe that human beings are innately warlike, then there is no reason for us to believe that our future holds anything else but more of the chaos and conflict that has filled our past. But if we believe that conflict is not innate to us and that our aggression is due to external factors rather than being “hard-wired” into us, then we’re entitled to have a different vision of the future.

There seems to be a consensus among historians that we didn’t start organizing for—and waging—war until about 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic era, when agriculture began replacing hunter-gathering as humanity’s primary source of survival. A key component of agriculture was, and is, possession and development of land, which began sending waves of change through human consciousness: protect, protect, protect! Land turned into property. And thus, for thousands and thousands of years now, people have been collectively re-envisioning their relationship with each other.

Obviously, this is a quickie look at human history. My point is simply to push the idea that war isn’t inevitable, but rather a response to significant change. I now jump ahead to 1895, when New York Journal owner William Randolph Hearst sent a photographer to Cuba to cover the insurrection going on there against Spanish colonial rule. The photographer cabled Hearst that there was no war to cover, to which Hearst responded: “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

And Yellow Journalism was born! And war has remained media’s friend ever since. It’s headline news. There’s fighting, slaughter, and eventual victory—for someone. And the victor controls the narrative.

Well, actually, it’s the media that controls the larger narrative. That is to say, the media creates the context: War is real. It’s what we do. In essence, it’s the bookend of every historical period, the arbiter of social change and, therefore, human evolution. Any questions?

OK, here’s where I start losing my sanity. War may not be part of humanity’s DNA, but it certainly seems to be accepted as though it were. We’ve spent multithousand years now turning war into the building block of civilization. You know: Create an empire. Defend, defend, defend. And ultimately transcend, as a new empire emerges. And then another. Whatever we do in between our wars—live in peace, more or less—may have value, but it’s not all that interesting. It’s just the lull between glorious battle cries.

And thus war starts to seem like who we are. Obviously, it’s part of who we are, because we’ve made it so, but whatever serious value it has in the moment is minimal. Mostly it’s incredibly destructive. It’s an addiction. It’s the lavishly funded antithesis of human connection: with one another, with Planet Earth.

As Rupert Ross writes in his excellent book about Aboriginal wisdom, Returning to the Teachings: “The principle of wholeness thus requires looking for, and responding to, complex interconnections, not single acts of separate individuals. Anything short of that is seen as a naïve response destined to ultimate failure.”

Oh God. Wholeness. Connection. This is the opposite of war. The meaning and complexity of these concepts requires enormous exploration, but for the moment I end with a story about heart-ripping courage and connection—about the nature of peace – that I initially wrote about nine years ago.

This happened in 2017, on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon. A man started screaming racial slurs at—started waging war with—two teenage girls on the train, one of whom was wearing a hajib. He shouted, “Go back to Saudi Arabia!”

Several passengers intervened, standing between the girls and the screamer, pushing him away. The screamer had a knife; he started slashing. Two people were killed, a third was injured. The killer fled the train. He was later arrested. But, oh my God, another act of public horror had occurred. People did what they could. A woman knelt by one of the dying men—Taliesin Namkai-Meche—holding him, comforting him. He said to her, “Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them.”

Those were his last words.

As I hear them again, I realize that this is who we are, even if we don’t know what they mean. They sear the soul with doubt, with cynicism. How can we reclaim them? Do we have it in us to be so deeply loving? The only larger question is this: How do we reclaim—and start creating—our future?

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:12:21 +0000

Mainers Donate to and Rally With Platner After Reporting on Past Relationships

“If Graham Platner and all of you find a way to build that redemption through this campaign,” Congressman Ro Khanna told a Maine crowd, “maybe you would show a way for this country to start to redeem itself.”

Graham Platner, a Democrat running for US Senate in Maine, speaks to a crowd in Bar Harbor on June 5, 2025.
(Photo by Andrew Estey/Graham for Maine)

Jessica Corbett
Jun 07, 2026
COMMON DREAM

Since The New York Times on Thursday published reporting about some of US Senate candidate Graham Platner’s past relationships—including allegations of physical aggression that the Democrat denied—Mainers have continued to rally with and donate to the political newcomer’s disruptive campaign, which has focused on promoting working-class priorities and defeating the oligarchy.

Maine’s primary is on Tuesday, but Platner has been the presumptive Democratic nominee to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November since Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign over a month ago, citing a lack of financial resources.

Calling Attacks on Platner ‘Politics as Usual’, Mainers Say They Have Back of Working-Class Champion

Platner Campaign Says Fundraising Up, Polling Lead Over Collins Holding, Despite Latest Smear Effort

In the wake of the Times reporting, Platner “raised more money than on any day since Gov. Mills’ withdrawal from the race,” according to his campaign. Specifically, as of 7:00 pm ET Friday, the 41-year-old oyster farmer and combat veteran had collected “over $200,000, from over 5,000 donors, with an average contribution of $40.”

A Graham for Maine spokesperson said in a statement that “the people of Maine know what’s on the ballot Tuesday: not Graham Platner’s past, but whether their voice in the Senate works for them—or billionaires and special interests.”

The Times spoke with more than two dozen people, including six women who had been romantically involved with Platner. The interviews arranged by his campaign were with three exes who now support his candidacy. The other three “offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and ‘toxic’ relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.”

Much of the coverage and commentary has focused on Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner from roughly 2013-15. The 40-year-old previously worked for former Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign and right-wing organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Independent Women’s Forum, and Ladies for Kavanaugh—a group she co-founded to support the US Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who faced sexual misconduct allegations but was still confirmed as a justice by a majority of senators, including Collins.

“I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat—it has nothing to do with that,” she told the Times. “If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing.”

Fifield said that Platner’s offensive posts on Reddit—an early controversy in his campaign—“reminded me of just how much he hated women,” and she challenged his insistence that he did not know the skull and crossbones tattoo he got with fellow Marines in Croatia closely resembled a Nazi symbol until last fall, when it became another campaign controversy, and he got it covered up.

According to the Times:
Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders—sometimes hard enough to leave marks—and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”

Platner acknowledged to the newspaper that he had “too often self-medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend” during what he called a “very dark period of my life,” but he also strongly denied any claims of physical intimidation or altercations with past partners or knowing about the tattoo’s Nazi ties.

Phil Proschko, who served with Platner in the Marines and also got the symbol tattooed on him, said in a brief interview with Zeteo on Friday: “No, we did not purposely get hateful fucking shit because we’re racist people... We got matching tattoos because we were in our 20s, drunk in Croatia, and that’s it. That’s all that fucking happened.”

Platner reiterated his responses to the Times during a nearly 25-minute interview with Chris Hayes on MS NOW. After the host read portions of Fifield’s allegations, Platner said that “anything alleging physicality” and “anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was” is “simply not true,” and is coming from “someone who’s politically motivated.”

“I’ve been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” added Platner, a veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Hayes also invited the candidate to discuss reporting by the Times and The Wall Street Journal late last month that during an internal vetting process, Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, told campaign staff that he had exchanged sexual messages with multiple other women early in their marriage, and they had addressed it in counseling—plus Gertner’s video response supporting her husband, which Platner shared on social media.

Since Thursday, some have criticized the Times, with reporters from other outlets saying that the paper “breezed past” the full scope of Fifield’s right-wing work history for an article seen by critics as “a hit job against an anti-oligarchy, anti-Israel populist.”

Fifield also spoke out against the final product, writing in a long social media post on Friday that “it dawned on me that this really was a setup all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign.”

Responding to Fifield’s post, a spokesperson for the Times told Newsweek: “We published accounts provided by several women who were in romantic relationships with Graham Platner. Our story accurately presents each of these accounts as told to our reporters and according to our standards. We stand by our reporting of the accounts from Ms. Fifield and the other women, who provided a revealing look at the behavior of a major candidate for the US Senate.”

After the sexting reports, Mills said that “people have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’ but I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot.” The newer reporting on Platner’s exes has directed fresh attention toward the governor.

As NBC News detailed late Friday:
A source close to Mills told NBC News: “The governor remains on the ballot, and in the wake of this week’s stories, people across Maine are reaching out to tell her they’re voting for her and encouraging her to get fully back into the race.”

One Democrat who had been involved in Mills’ campaign said she would move forward anew only if Platner were to step aside, not to challenge him. The Democrat said losing to him “especially now” would serve as an embarrassment to the outgoing governor.

That person, and others, noted that Tuesday’s primary was not the deadline they are looking at, but rather a mid-July deadline under state law. That’s when Platner would have to step aside to be replaced as the nominee.

Platner made clear during his interview with Hayes that he hasn’t considered stepping aside, and since the Times’ Thursday reporting, MS NOW and Fox News have spoken with various voters on Maine streets who continue to back the candidate:

Platner has stayed on the campaign trail, joining Maine gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson; Matt Dunlap, who is running for the state’s 2nd Congressional District; and Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a potential 2028 presidential candidate, for a “Changing the Tides” rally in Bar Harbor on Friday.

Platner stressed that “we are up against one of the most powerful political systems in the history of the world. It is a system of billionaires and special interests. It is a system of corrupted politicians like Susan Collins... who for years has given us some charade that she’s a moderate, that she stands up against her party, that she cares more about her constituents more than she cares about those that donate money to her. We see through it.”

He also addressed the various controversies throughout his campaign, saying: “Since the beginning, Maine, you had my back. When hurtful things I said on the internet a decade ago came out into the public, as I shared my personal journey through PTSD and darkness, of recovery and accountability and growth, Maine had my back.”

“Now, as every single piece of that past and journey gets dug up, litigated, and weaponized, you have my back,” he told a cheering crowd. “And when politically motivated, serious, and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back. The state of Maine raised me, and the state of Maine saved me. And to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”