Harrison’s case is emblematic of a pattern in the witch-hunts of colonial New England. In an analysis of the trials, the US historian Carol F Karlsen found that, although it was rare for women to inherit property, when they did, they were more susceptible to witchcraft allegations. Women from families without male heirs (Harrison had three daughters) made up 64% of the females prosecuted, 76% of those who were found guilty, and 89% of those who were executed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9036162

The Trump Administration’s War on Disabled People Continues to Escalate | Truthout

Janine Jackson: The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 addressed the rights of people with disabilities in their interactions with the federal government, including entities that receive certain federal contracts. Section 504 of that act prohibits organizations and employers from excluding or denying individuals with disabilities an equal opportunity to receive program benefits and services.

The hard-won Americans with Disabilities Act, passed into law in July of 1990, and specifically Title II of the ADA, emphasized disabled people’s access to civic life.

These laws have been interpreted for decades as meaning that our shared societal goal is to have disabled people live in community, with family, with friends. A new thing, a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department, now says: “or maybe not.”

A professor at George Washington University — cited on NPR, one of few outlets to take this seriously — says, “It is now the position of the United States government that people with disabilities don’t have a right to be part of their communities,” adding, “I can’t overstate how significant this change in position is.”

Here to help us understand the meaning of this particular shift, and how it fits within a broader engagement, is Mia Ives-Rublee. She’s senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, and she joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mia Ives-Rublee.

Mia Ives-Rublee: Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be here.

JJ: This is a story about law, but we all know it’s not about just what’s legal to do or to not do. After the Rehabilitation Act, after the ADA, in 1999 we have Olmstead v. L.C. This is two women suing the state of Georgia, and the Supreme Court agrees, with reference to that existing legal underpinning, that states have a legal responsibility to provide services that integrate people into communities, that that integration is the goal; it’s the best way forward.

So now this person who wrote, this deputy assistant attorney general, says, “We recognize this view of Olmstead‘s import is out of step with a common understanding of that decision with the federal courts.” So this new memo, what does it mean? What could it mean? Why is it important?

MI-R: So this memo doesn’t change the current laws, or the decision that the Supreme Court made in 1999. What it does is provide specific avenue for states to try to challenge these laws and the Supreme Court decision, in hopes of getting it overturned by the Supreme Court. So people still have basic protections that emphasize their right to live in the community, but it provides this sort of crack in the armor that will probably be utilized by certain states to try to reduce the amount of money that they’re spending on things like home- and community-based services, and long-term support services.

JJ: Yeah. I see folks hearing “it opens a window.” It doesn’t require anything, but it’s offering something that we know that a lot of folks are going to take up.

I want to say, I’m creeped out by the memo saying that Olmstead “held only that a state cannot institutionalize such patients” — they’re talking about people with disabilities — “without justification,” and then adds, “What counts as adequate justification remains an open question.” That reads like a line from a horror movie to me, frankly. Talk about who and what could be affected by this.

MI-R: I think that the two communities that I’m extremely concerned about are individuals with significant mental health issues. So individuals who may be diagnosed as bipolar, or diagnosed with schizophrenia, individuals who have significant mental health issues and are more likely to be very vulnerable. These are individuals that need significant support to continue living in the community, often. And so that’s one portion of the population.

I think the other portion of the population is individuals with developmental disabilities. So we’re looking at people who have been diagnosed as autistic. This could include individuals who have different intellectual disabilities. It includes a wide variety of people, but these are individuals that are already significantly at risk of being institutionalized.

The thing that worries me is this comes after a lot of the conversation that Secretary RFK Jr. has had about creating camps and work farms that, I’m not being over-dramatic in saying these sound similar to the “work camps” and concentration camps that happened in Nazi Germany. And the irony is that Nazi Germany got a lot of its eugenic policy ideas from the United States.

JJ: Which I think a lot of folks don’t know.

And I do think there’s popular misunderstanding. If you see someone on the street who seems to be in mental health crisis, I think, absent a coherent understanding of what could happen, what social supports might mean, there’s a feeling of, “Well, just get them away from me.” And I feel like that’s what they’re playing on, and that’s what they’re hoping will work in the popular imagination.

MI-R: Yeah. And we’ve seen support for that across the political spectrum. And so some of these things, unfortunately, are popular amongst the general public. And I think without understanding the well-researched interventions that actually help people rather than incarcerate them, I’m worried about the direction that we are taking, because we have made so much progress towards ensuring disabled people have similar rights that nondisabled people have. To see it getting reversed is really, really concerning. And to tell you the truth, as a person with a disability, it’s kind of scary to me.

JJ: I want to bring it into some broader context because, as I stated, this particular memo is not getting much attention, and it’s now almost a week old, so now it’s an “old story.”

It’s unclear what’s going to happen, but you wrote with Casey Doherty an overarching account of the Trump administration’s war on disability. So I would ask you to talk about how this newest thing really just fits; it’s not an aberration. It fits with an all-out war on disabled people, and on the laws that have been created to address and encourage the ability of people with disabilities to live in community. So what else do folks need to know? It’s not just this Trump administration, it’s a coherent attack.

MI-R: Yeah. You can go all the way back to Project 2025, right, where they literally lay out what they plan to do, and they are being quite successful in making progress on that plan. So there is this need, which you look at a lot of the quotes and memos from people like Stephen Miller, there is this push from this administration to get rid of anybody that they do not like, or do not want to be in society. And so that means cutting rights and services to some of the most vulnerable populations in the country, and that, in particular, includes disabled people, particularly disabled people of color.

We see that through a number of actions that have been taken, whether it’s attacks on DEIA, saying that we shouldn’t try to ensure that laws that were created to disenfranchise and discriminate against specific populations don’t get addressed in particular. And then we look at things like the OBBBA, which strips things like SNAP and strips Medicaid. These are all programs that, in particular, disabled people are disproportionately reliant on.

And what I found interesting, because I went to a couple of the hearings around some of these issues in the Senate and the House, was the continual statement by representatives and senators saying that this would not impact disabled people, but it was very clear that it would impact disabled people. It would impact everybody, but disproportionately, it would impact disabled people.

What I say in my piece around the “war on disability” is that Medicaid provides so much support for all communities, and is one of the pillars of our current healthcare system, and covers a lot of the costs that everybody gets to benefit from, because it’s not paying one specific provider, it is paying for a group of services and supports that an individual receives, and helps to pay for things like rent of a building or land. It pays for physicians’ wages, it pays for equipment, it pays for all of these things.

And when you take out one of the pillars, or significantly decrease one of the pillars that helps pay for our healthcare system, it collapses the system, right? And so we’re looking at decreasing the support that much of the disability community relies on to be able to survive. By doing that, you cause more deaths, more fatalities, and an increase in disability, an increase in the severity of disabilities.

JJ: I always wonder about media coverage of disabled people, given that it is a community that anyone could join at any moment, and that anyone who has a child could join at any moment. It seems almost like crossing your fingers: “It’s not going to happen to me. I’m going to make policy that doesn’t involve that.” It’s weird. I’m just going to say it’s weird.

And then when media do do their occasional story about disabled people — very much reads as a “very special episode” — they think that means they cover disability. And what I hear you saying, and what we’re both saying, is disabled people are part of the story when you’re reporting on air travel, and when you’re reporting on housing costs, and when you’re reporting on college scholarships. It’s not a once a year, do a deep dive, “What do disabled people care about?” It seems to me a major failing of news reporting that they can’t somehow integrate people with disabilities into every story that they cover.

MI-R: Yeah. I think people don’t realize how much disability impacts the United States, and the world. And it’s been something that we at the Center for American Progress, and particularly the Disability Justice Initiative team, have been really trying to hammer home on, is that disability impacts every single policy that we create, and that every single policy impacts disabled people.

And one of the interesting things is that Rep. Tom Kean Jr. just recently put out a public apology on why he was absent from work, and then discusses his severe depression, which is a disability. And yet, at the same time, he voted to cut a significant amount of Medicaid. And so I think there’s this disconnect of understanding how disability impacts different policies, and how much it impacts every single one of us.

JJ: Absolutely. And there is, and you’re noting it, a kind of overarching storyline from corporate news media — and it’s an unspoken backdrop to any individual story on a number of issues — that the government is generously offering things, and some bad people take advantage, and that’s starving other worthy people of benefits, and there’s a whole problem with… It’s not a coherent argument. It’s like a zero sum thing, that some people are faking a need, and probably that’s why you’re struggling. But this still shapes media narrative around disability, that it’s somehow a grift. Somehow, if you look into it differently, it’s a grift.

And I just want to ask you what — I mean, there is good journalism. I’m not saying there isn’t, but what would be the ingredients of journalism that could shift this narrative?

MI-R: That’s a great question. I think that, one, we need more disabled journalists. We have a couple that are currently doing a wonderful job reporting on disability, but they’re few and far between. And I think that being able to train up the next generation of journalists to understand how disability impacts so many people is going to be essential.

And the thing that I try to emphasize is that the disability community is just going to continue to grow. It’s been growing exponentially since the beginning of the pandemic. And part of that is due to infectious diseases causing specific disabilities. Some of it is due to our crumbling healthcare system. And then some of it is due to the aging baby boomers.

And us not understanding the intersection of policy and disability is going to be a real problem in the near future. I mean, it’s already a problem, but it’s going to be even higher a problem coming up, because the AARP actually did a survey of folks that are coming up towards retirement, or are already retired. And their survey asked them where they would like to retire and live out the rest of their lives. A majority of them said they wanted to live in their communities.

And with that being said, we have a major crisis on our hands, because we don’t have enough caregivers to be able to support that effort. And by stating that, “Oh, states can now ignore Supreme Court legal precedents and ignore law,” it’s going to ensure that states don’t actually put money, and invest money and infrastructure, around an aging population that is going to need the support.

So what’s going to happen is a lot of folks may be languishing in hospitals; emergency rooms will continue to get significantly congested, and we’re going to see a worsening of our healthcare overall, and we will see more people either homeless or incarcerated or dead.

JJ: Which only leads me to say, finally, that I wish that media would connect issues of incarcerated people, of disabled people, of deporting Haitians who, come on, who’s taking care of your grandmother?, healthcare workers. We’re saying the failure of media to connect the dots of the social support networks that exist in this country, to me, seems like a major failing. And I’m not trying to rant at you, but if you have thoughts about that and what media could do, I’d love to hear them.

MI-R: Yeah. Part of this is due to those who hold power are very good at separating people, and pitting them against each other, and that gets reflected in media coverage as well. I think that a lot of times, it’s like, “I’m going to cover this one issue, but I don’t actually give it context.”

And I think a lot of people don’t realize that policies don’t live in a vacuum. What I often talk about, when I’m talking about policy and the work that I do, is I’m literally sitting there with a three-dimensional puzzle that I’m having to try and figure out how different things fit together, or don’t fit together, and how I can get them to actually fit together.

And one example of this would be during the height of the pandemic, when they were giving out checks to everyday citizens, what we saw was that Congress didn’t realize how that would impact disabled people who were on SSI. And that resulted in a number of people on SSI losing their eligibility status. And so they actually had to go back and write up new policies that basically stated, “Hey, you can ignore this payment and this asset for a couple years.”

JJ: Do you have any final thoughts about what we should know about this particular…. You know, it’s a memo, it’s not a law, but maybe media are going to cover it. What should they ask as they cover this particular iteration? Any thoughts?

MI-R: Yeah. I think, one, that this isn’t new, and that this is part of a general plan overall. And that it actually provides us a trajectory of where this administration is thinking on going, and will help advocates and lawyers see how the administration plans to argue around this issue. So I think them releasing this actually provides us some information that we may not have had previously. While it does open the door to states, it also provides us a roadmap in understanding what they plan to do.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mia Ives-Rublee. She’s senior director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress. They’re online at AmericanProgress.org. Thank you, Mia Ives-Rublee, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MI-R: Oh, thank you so much. I really appreciate you all covering this.

An appendix to the letter cited U.S. laws and Administration policies that prohibited the transferring of weapons likely to be used in war crimes, and Spoljaric urged Biden to withhold weapons “that should not be used in densely populated areas, in light of their devastating humanitarian impacts.” She warned Biden that failing to “uphold minimum standards of humanity” would be a “moral defeat” that “future generations are unlikely to forgive us for failing to avert.”

...

Two years after Spoljaric’s letter, President Donald J. Trump ordered the U.S. military to join Israel in attacking Iran. Some former senior officials in the Biden Administration told me that, in certain ways, the war in Iran was an extension of the Gaza conflict. Iran had been central to Biden’s thinking about the Middle East, several top advisers said. He’d feared that any public pressure the U.S. put on Israel—any “daylight” between the allies—could invite attacks by Iran or its Lebanese client, Hezbollah. The U.S. would then be compelled to defend Israel in a regional conflagration. Brett McGurk, Biden’s White House coördinator for the Middle East and probably his most influential adviser, championed this position, arguing that rock-solid support for Israel would help contain Iran, whose proxies killed three U.S. soldiers in the region during the first months of the Gaza conflict.

At the same time, the Biden Administration’s staunch public backing of Israel during the Gaza war had created what Philip Gordon, the national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, described to me as a “moral hazard”—it had invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to expand the battle into a regional one. Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that: a January, 2024, strike on Damascus killed five senior Iranian military advisers; an April, 2024, strike on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria killed more than a dozen; a July, 2024, strike in Tehran assassinated a top Hamas political leader; a September, 2024, operation in Lebanon detonated explosives planted in thousands of walkie-talkies and pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters; a subsequent air strike killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

The key here is to just take the bad apples out and the rest of the apples will be fine!

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9010450

The Bipartisan War on Marine Mammals

Whether it’s Donald Trump or Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, our ruling class keeps trying to kill whales, dolphins, and sea lions. This can’t be allowed to go on.

You’d have to be a special kind of loser to wake up in the morning, look at yourself in the mirror, and say “today, I’m going to have beef with sea lions.” Or dolphins, or whales, or any marine mammal, for that matter. None of them, after all, have ever done anything to harm humans. Whales are like ancient, wise wizards of the sea, who spend their days floating around hoovering up plankton and singing to each other. Dolphins are out there doing backflips and, sure, occasionally getting too friendly, but are still generally a good time. Sea lions mostly just slap their tails and go “bork bork.” The idea of going out and deliberately killing any of them is inherently repulsive.

And yet, if you check in with the class of politicians and pundits who run this country, a lot of them seem to share a common train of thought: what if we just started whacking the sea life? In fact, if you’re an aquatic mammal in the United States’ territorial waters, there’s a pretty good chance some powerful people want you dead. And best of all, they’re completely bipartisan about it.

As with most things that are cruel and stupid in this country, you can find Donald J. Trump at the heart of this agenda. When he took office for the second time in 2025, Trump also appointed all of the new members of the Endangered Species Committee. Overnight, he transformed the institution from one tasked with protecting rare animals to a death panel aimed at exterminating them—and no creature is in his crosshairs more than Rice’s Whale.

Nicknamed the “God Squad” because it holds the power of life and death over animal species, the Committee consists of six people: the secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture, and the Army, plus the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers and the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). There’s also a rotating seat for a representative of whichever state the animal in question lives in, also selected by the president. Together, the “Squad” decides which animals will continue to get full protection under the Endangered Species Act, and which will have their protections chipped away by various “major exemptions,” granted for corporations who want to burn, chop, drill, dig, and otherwise ruin their habitats.

Now, this is already a compromised system, because even under liberal administrations, the board consists of people with opposing interests: both those who want to protect animals, and those who want to conduct business that harms them. By including representatives of the Economic Advisers and the Army, it treats profit and war-making as equally important concerns to the preservation of animal life, which they just aren’t. Really, only the EPA and NOAA have any business weighing in. The current status quo is like having a Board of Directors at a bank where half the seats are reserved for bank robbers.

But even in the context of the already-suspect Committee system, Trump’s new version is a bad joke. Just look at the lineup, and each of its members is worse for nature than the last. Take the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, who thinks wind power is “bad for everybody,” promotes the coal industry using a cartoon mascot called “Coalie,” and has directed the Bureau of Land Management to stop allocating federal land for buffalo to graze. He’s not exactly a trustworthy steward of the environment. Or then there’s Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, whose signature decision is speeding up the conveyor belts in slaughterhouses so more pigs can be gutted per hour. Even the new head of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, has mostly been dismantling the agency from the inside out, while loosening restrictions on things like mercury and arsenic in drinking water. These people are like villains Captain Planet would fight in a cheesy after-school special, and now they hold the fate of North America’s whales in their hands.

Those whales are unique, irreplaceable, and rapidly vanishing. Marine biologists estimate there could be as few as 50 Rice’s whales left alive in the wild, and because of their size and unique diet, they can’t live in captivity. If anything happens to those 50 individuals, that’s curtains for the species. The whales are about 40 feet long, a little smaller than humpbacks, and they dive incredibly deep, almost to the ocean floor, to feed. Exactly what they’re eating down there is still a mystery, but small hatchetfish and lanternfish are the most likely candidate. Rice’s whales were first identified by scientist Dale Rice in 1965—hence the name—but they’ve been swimming around the Gulf of Mexico for around 3 million years, longer than homo sapiens has existed. And now, thanks to one man, their millennia of life on Earth could come to an end.

The problem is, Rice’s whales are extremely vulnerable to the fossil-fuel drilling industry. The sheer noise of oil and gas drilling disrupts their ability to sing out and communicate to each other, so they get confused and lost. They get struck and killed by ships coming to and from the oil rigs, too, their flesh ripped apart by the propellers. They accidentally eat humans’ plastic waste, and die that way. And when there’s an oil spill, their population is decimated—or to be technical about the Latin, quintimated: by one estimate, 22 percent of the whales died during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident alone. If they’re going to have a chance at survival, the oil industry should be forbidden from going anywhere near them.

And yet, predictably, Trump’s “God Squad” has moved in exactly the opposite direction. At the end of March, they voted unanimously to give oil and gas producers a sweeping exemption from the few Endangered Species Act restrictions they had, like “not discarding trash into the Gulf and suspending their use of loud technology when they spot whales.” Reportedly, they did so at the urging of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who is not a member of the Committee but lobbied it heavily, using “national security as a pretext for giving the oil industry a free pass.” Now, wildlife advocates are warning that unless the decision is reversed, it could essentially be an “extinction notice” for Rice’s whale. The only good news is that decisions by the Committee are subject to judicial review, and the nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife has already filed a lawsuit, arguing that both Hegseth’s intervention and the secrecy that surrounded the process was illegal. Then again, by the time a court case plays out, the whales could already have been poisoned by oil slicks—and it’s not like the Supreme Court particularly cares about marine mammals, either.

This might as well be a real Trump Administration policy, at this point.

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But don’t let them fool you: when it comes to our blubbery friends, Democrats are capable of being just as vicious as Republicans, and nobody exemplifies that fact more than Washington state’s Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (“Gluey” to her friends, if any.) We’ve written about Perez’s bizarre and disturbing political choices before, from making up non-existent regulations about bananas in an attempt to discredit state health officials to her embrace of a far-right evangelical pastor. But even by those standards, her recent crusade against sea lions is something else.

“These big boys are driving up food costs for families by gorging on salmon. I’m doing something about it,” reads a recent tweet by the Representative, accompanied by a photo of a sea lion with its mouth open. According to Perez, sea lions are simply “overeating” the fish from the Columbia River, consuming “four times as many salmon as our fishermen and Tribes have harvested” in a given year. And so, according to her, Washington needs to “remove these Corolla-sized vermin from our rivers and tributaries” in order to protect “our salmon and steelhead runs.” Perez has written to Howard Lutnick, the Trump administration’s Secretary of Commerce, with that agenda in mind, urging him to change federal regulations and allow “pinniped removals—including direct, lethal removal,” citing “impacts on local fishermen and the regional economy.” If she’s successful, and there’s no reason to think Lutnick would balk at the request, the killing will commence.

This is a depraved set of values and priorities. The underlying assumption is that the natural world, and the animals within it, inherently belong to humans, to use as they see fit: they’re “our rivers,” “our salmon.” Thus, if sea lions eat fish that humans also want to eat, they’re stealing, and their “predation” and “gorging” (ie, eating food) is a problem. In the nation’s worst magazine, the Atlantic, we can find this argument laid out explicitly. According to staff writer Katherine J. Wu, killing the “protected” sea lions “may be the only way to stop them from eating too many of the Pacific Northwest’s endangered salmon.” But what is “too many,” and who decides? Bizarrely, Wu writes that “to preserve the region’s salmon, more sea lions must go,” then admits that the salmon in question would actually not be preserved, but caught and consumed by humans instead: “if salmon levels rebound, we can and will eat more of them.” She even says outright that “the sea lions’ greatest crime is indulging in salmon that humans would rather be feasting on,” and still manages to conclude that killing the sea lions is the right move. That’s Representative Perez’s logic, too.

But that’s exactly the opposite of the truth! To point out the stunningly obvious, sea lions have to eat salmon. They’re obligate carnivores, and the two species have a natural predator-prey relationship going back millions of years. Humans, on the other hand, can eat pretty much anything; for us, salmon is just one of hundreds of menu options. So if there’s a conflict between humans’ desire to eat the fish and sea lions’, the sea lions should win, ten times out of ten. It’s their food source, not ours, and there’s no universe in which they should lose their lives so we can have cheap lox for our breakfast bagels.

Even then, it’s perfectly possible for humans and sea lions to share the fish. Indigenous people did that for thousands of years, before modern industrial and commercial fishing. It’s only in the last 50 years or so that overfishing became a problem, together with human-caused climate change and hydroelectric dams. The dams, in particular, are what has really wiped out salmon populations, as studies show: when there’s a big turbine in the river, the fish can’t get upstream to spawn the way they used to, and lots of them die in the attempt. It’s so much of a problem, in fact, that conservationists have created vacuum-powered “salmon cannons” to help them get around dams. But these facts are completely absent from Perez’s account of the situation, because the solutions they imply are inconvenient.

Really, the proper thing would be to dismantle some or all of the dams, return the rivers to the stewardship of the local tribes, and clamp down on humans’ “predation.” But that isn’t even considered an option. There’s a cult-like belief in capitalist societies that people’s consumption can’t be checked in any way, whether it’s for fish sandwiches or cheap electricity. If there’s a demand, there must be a supply, no matter the consequence. So instead, Perez chooses to scapegoat a marine mammal that can’t defend itself for a problem humans caused, and she wants people to just go out and shoot sea lions, Mafia execution style: her “preferred alternative is firearms,” per the Atlantic. It’s a discredit to our entire species that someone like that is considered a leader among us, and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’ contention that Perez is among the “sanity caucus” that Democrats should be listening to will only become more ironic with each shotgun blast.

But even Perez seems like a beacon of normality compared to the bloggers at the Free Press. It’s unfortunate that we even have to mention this wretched website, but because the Trump-aligned Ellison family recently bought it for $150 million, and have even put its vastly unqualified editors in charge of news networks like CBS, it’s currently an influential part of the overall MAGA project. In a recent article for the Press, writer Madeleine Rowley presented her proposal for how to resolve the administration’s ongoing dilemma about getting oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Not by negotiating with Iran and coming to a mutually agreeable deal, of course; that would be silly. No, the plan is to have dolphins get rid of all the explosive mines.

Yes, that’s actually the proposal. “Send in the Mine-Clearing Dolphins,” urges the headline, and it only gets weirder from there. “Since 1959,” Rowley informs us, the U.S. Navy “has trained bottlenose dolphins to find and mark the locations of mines that could endanger military and civilian ships,” and they’re reasonably good at using their echolocation to find metal objects. So, naturally, we should take dolphins from San Diego, dump them in the waters off Iran, and tell them to get to work. Now, it’s true that the military has a trained-dolphin program, and they’ve even successfully cleared mines in places like Umm Qasr harbor in Iraq. But Rowley is missing the point rather spectacularly, and this is a horrible idea.

In the first place, there’s no way to guarantee that any dolphins the U.S. deploys to find underwater mines wouldn’t also be blown up by them. All it would take is one firm bump, and suddenly chunks of grey blubber would be raining down across the Strait. But even worse, every other dolphin in the region would also be under threat. As animal trainer Ric O’Barry, who worked with the Navy at the San Diego dolphin facility, wrote in 2000, “the enemy simply kills every dolphin that they come across” once they know trained ones have been deployed. Even by suggesting it, Rowley may have doomed some innocent dolphins to death, since the Iranian military has no way of telling whether her advice is being heeded. And O’Barry also reports that the dolphins aren’t even very reliable, since they’re “controlled by food” and don’t understand the significance of what they’re doing. To keep them under control at all, the Navy has to fit them with an “anti-foraging device”—in other words, a “simple strip of orange Velcro that is attached around the snout.” This muzzle “prevents the dolphin from opening its mouth, which is necessary for the dolphin to catch fish, eat and hydrate itself.” In other words, the dolphins are tortured. They only get fed if they complete their task, so they have no option but to hunt mines or starve. All this important context is left out of the Free Press’s breathless cheerleading, since if people knew what “sending in the dolphins” actually involves, nobody in their right mind would support it.

There’s a common thread in these three cases, and it’s sheer, bloody-minded human arrogance. Whether they’re government officials or just denizens of the murkier regions of the press, none of these people seem to have any concept that animals are important in their own right. They never question that we humans have the right to kill them, if we see fit. There’s no respect for nature, beauty, or even life itself to be found here. All Trump or Perez, or the Atlantic and the Free Press, can think about is crude, short-term benefit for humans. They’ve failed abysmally at the task 19th-century naturalist John Burroughs wrote about: of “keeping the iron from our souls” in the modern industrial world, avoiding becoming consumed by narrow self-interest and destructiveness. It’s frankly terrifying that people like that are in charge of the world, because if they’re willing to kill whales and sea lions for the sake of an economic gain, or get dolphins blown to bits to further their geopolitical goals, there’s not much preventing them from doing the same to us, either. They say cruelty to animals is the first sign of psychopathy. And once the marine mammals are gone, there’s no bringing them back. This kind of thing just can’t be allowed to be the basis our world runs on. A single hungry sea lion is worth more than any politician alive, any day.

President Trump, who for years has sowed doubt about the security of American elections, is scheduled to give a primetime address Thursday night about election integrity. Trump has long contended, without evidence, that he won the 2020 election

WASHINGTON—President Trump is leaning toward expanding U.S. military operations in Iran after days of briefings from top aides, U.S. officials said. Options include stepping up airstrikes, sending ground forces to seize Iranian islands near the Strait of Hormuz and bombing a fortified site that could be used for covert nuclear work.

Trump hosted a Situation Room meeting Tuesday evening to discuss the potential seizure of Kharg Island and other territory along the Strait of Hormuz using U.S. troops, as well as the potential bombing of a tunnel complex at Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear-linked site the U.S. has yet to target. Expanding airstrikes against more targets in Iran, including energy sites, also remains a possibility.

The discussion was one of multiple formal and informal conversations Trump has held in recent days with senior officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the officials said.

The U.S. military said it launched two waves of airstrikes against Iran on Wednesday, targeting Iran’s ability to threaten vessels transiting the strait. “We’ll find out whether or not we settle with them, or we just finish it off,” Trump said at an industry event shortly after the second wave of attacks began.

The military also has been enforcing a U.S. blockade of Iranian ports, turning away several ships from the coast on Wednesday. In one case, the military said it fired hellfire missiles at the smokestake of a Curacao-flagged ship that was trying to sail to Kharg Island. The military said the ship ignored its warnings to turn around, so it was disabled.

The president hasn’t made a final decision on next steps in the war, officials said, and he insists privately and publicly that he would prefer resolving his dispute with Iran diplomatically. But Iran hasn’t capitulated to Trump’s demands that it surrender its nuclear stockpile after weeks of military strikes and an interim deal that would have allowed Tehran to make billions of dollars selling oil on the open market. The diplomatic gridlock has prompted Trump to ask aides for new, escalatory options that could force Iran to surrender, or at least promise to stop attacking commercial vessels in the strait.

Some U.S. officials said Trump is reluctant to commit ground forces. He has repeatedly walked back his biggest public threats, including taking Kharg Island and Iran’s oil industry. But if Trump were to approve of the plans, it would usher in the most dangerous phase of the nearly five-month war and drag the U.S. deeper into a growing Middle East conflict, one that would likely lead to higher gas prices and complicate Republicans’ plans for the midterms.

Trump has made candid statements about the war in recent days, confirming that he is considering new military options. While officials say he is leaning toward expanded operations, he could change his mind. And his open discussion of options also could be used to try to scare Iran back to the negotiating table. “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt this week. On Tuesday, shortly before the Situation Room meeting, Trump told Fox News that seizing Kharg Island was unlikely but not ruled out. “If we degrade them far enough and deep enough back, I would do that,” he added. Axios reported earlier on the Situation Room discussions.

The strikes Wednesday marked the fifth-straight day of attacks on Iran, following the collapse of an interim peace agreement that had lifted the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports and paused sanctions on Tehran’s oil sales. But Trump declared the ceasefire over after Iran attacked ships in the strait, reimposing the blockade and authorizing fresh strikes.

In an interview that aired Wednesday, Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan the strikes were aimed at forcing Iran back to the negotiating table.

“We’re not just going to bomb and bomb and bomb. We’re going to try to use our military force as one of the many tools that we have to solve the problem,” Vance said.

A green light on either a Pickaxe Mountain or Kharg Island operation would be Trump’s riskiest bet of the conflict.

Pickaxe is a heavily fortified underground site consisting of tunnels built into granite some 300- to 475-feet beneath the surface of a mountain peak—far deeper than Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, which the U.S. and Israel bombed last summer. The site is believed to be incomplete.

The depth of the Pickaxe tunnels means they might not be vulnerable to direct hits from the U.S. military’s bunker-buster bombs. Whereas U.S. attacks on Fordow in 2025 targeted ventilation shafts that went straight down to the halls of the site, publicly available satellite imagery hasn’t exposed the definite locations of any ventilation sites at Pickaxe.

That doesn’t mean Pickaxe has no vulnerabilities. Construction at the site means it depends upon power supplies, equipment deliveries and construction personnel that could be sabotaged.

“If they make any move” toward turning Pickaxe into a functioning nuclear site, “we immediately go and do whatever we have to do, but they haven’t,” Trump said Tuesday on Fox News. “Nobody knows if they even are doing anything at Pickaxe, it’s just something that comes up.” Trump added that U.S. bunker-buster bombs “can go deep.”

Attempting to seize Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil-export hub, would harm the country’s oil industry but it also would put American forces directly in harm’s way. Troops would be easy targets for Iranian missiles and drones, U.S. officials and analysts say.

Retired Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie said the U.S. should still consider a Kharg Island operation. “That’s something we should think about doing because possession of Iranian soil would be a significant factor in future negotiations with Iran,” he said Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”

Trump is also discussing ideas to occupy other islands along the Strait to assist with shipping and to destroy heavily militarized territory, with analysts pointing to Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb as the likeliest targets. U.S. troops would also be vulnerable in those locations, according to the officials and analysts.

Last week, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, published a report titled "Title IX's Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity." As its title suggests, the report---which came only days after the Supreme Court upheld laws banning trans women from women's sports---takes aim at Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bars sex discrimination in schools receiving federal funds and was directly responsible for the creation of women's sports programs in K-12 schools.

Its author, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow and Boise State University political science professor Scott Yenor, chooses to introduce the topic in a familiar way: transphobia. Here, he opens with a nod to the right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding Imane Khelif, writing that "in 2024, a Tunisian man defeated a Chinese woman for the Olympic women's boxing gold medal." Already, he gets the facts wrong: Imane Khelif is Algerian, and she isn't transgender, but regardless, he presses on and uses Khelif to call for laws that "define and uphold the physical differences between men and women."

However, Yenor is merely using the topic of trans athletes---one that right-wing groups have manufactured as a way to get many Americans comfortable with discriminatory policies---as a springboard for his true target: women's sports, and more specifically, "the deeper feminist settlement that has governed athletics for decades." This feminism, he writes, aimed to make women "more independent and even dominant and less deferential and less oriented toward motherhood and traditional female graces," and as a result, "Title IX evolved from a seemingly modest anti-discrimination statute into a powerful engine of feminist social engineering, complete with proportionality mandates."

His central argument is simple: Title IX has created "a prejudice in favor of a male-normed competitive model for women's sports and a prejudice against men's non-revenue programs," and these prejudices "rest on [the] false premise that differences in competitiveness and interest between the sexes are stereotypes to be engineered away." As he clarifies later, he believes that women, when compared to men, are naturally less 'aggressive, assertive, and dominant' and less interested in sports, and therefore, giving men more sporting opportunities isn't discriminatory. Rather, according to Yenor, the discrimination lies in giving women equality, as Title IX's mandates of equal spending and parity in competitive opportunity meant "colleges learned that the safest (and often cheapest) path to compliance was cutting men's non-revenue programs rather than adding women's teams or controlling costs in football and men's basketball."

Interestingly, his entire argument essentially reverses the rhetoric that Republicans have employed when banning trans athletes. There, they argue that trans athletes should get fewer opportunities because they are more competitive and aggressive and that every trans woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a cis woman. But here, it's now cis women who should get fewer opportunities for being less competitive and aggressive and that every cis woman who wants to compete is unfairly taking an opportunity away from a man.

And the irony continues Yenor takes issue with the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Virginia, a 1996 landmark case that struck down policies barring women from US military schools, for 'furthering the war on stereotypes.' Meanwhile, that ruling---and its finding that there are "inherent differences between men and women"---has been used to support anti-trans laws going back to the very first line of the very first anti-trans sports law in the US, Idaho House Bill 500 (2020).

Nevertheless, to account for these purported differences between genders, Yenor proposes that Title IX should instead 'accommodate nature' by doing away with many competitive women's sporting programs and instead "supporting a wide range of non-competitive and lower-intensity activities." And in this final section, he writes the following:

"History and the nature-denying extremism of today's Title IX enforcement compel us to consider basic questions: What goods do women themselves get from sports and physical activity? What goods do men get? What goods does society derive from women's participation? From male participation? Podiums, scholarships, or the cultivation of a conquering spirit are hardly the main concerns for most female athletes. Much less of a concern is having a career in professional sports."

As for the 'goods' in question, Yenor is unequivocal: children. In fact, he spends two-thirds of his answer to these questions on fertility alone:

"Of course, many women enjoy the thrill of competition, as the joy on faces of victorious female athletes shows. Women also benefit from activities that build health, good habits, vigor, bodily toughness, grace, confidence, social connection of teamwork, and beauty. Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes. Between 26 percent and nearly 50 percent of women who exercise intensely stopped having regular menstrual cycles according to several studies. As one recent review of the literature holds, "evidence demonstrates higher rates of menstrual disturbance in elite athletes." High-intensity exercise increases infertility; moderate exercise assists fertility more than any other approach to exercise assists it."

Through this paragraph, Yenor reveals his hand---as well as the fact that the rest of the reasoning he presents may very well be entirely ad hoc. After all, according to his bio on the Heritage Foundation's page, Yenor "writes primarily on the family." Quotes from other conservative figures about him that are listed on the page characterize him as "a student of the hostile forces of feminism and liberals that rip the family apart or prevent families from forming" and as "one of the leading pro-family intellectuals in the country."

Title IX and college sports policy should therefore sit comfortably outside of his area of expertise---unless, of course, he believes this issue concerns family policy. Viewing the report through this lens, his emphasis on replacing the 'high-intensity, elite model of sports' with opportunities that promote 'moderate exercise' (which he defines as including "group fitness classes, dance, yoga, recreational intramurals, hiking clubs, and the like") starts to make more sense, as do his repeated references to the idea that competitive sports make women "less oriented towards motherhood" that are present throughout the report.

As Yenor's report shows, right-wing attacks on women's participation in sports will not remain limited to trans women for much longer. That discourse, ostensibly about 'fairness' and 'safety,' has served to normalize the idea that laws can and should be passed that regulate who qualifies as a woman and what opportunities she has access to. Now, armed with a recent victory at the Supreme Court that upheld those laws, men like Scott Yenor are looking to cash in.

Will America's women let them?

This story was originally published by Source New Mexico.

Joshua Bowling
Source New Mexico

The New Mexico Department of Justice recently published the results of a yearslong investigation into Gallup-McKinley County Schools and found that the district disproportionately disciplines Native American and Hispanic students, causing them to miss exponentially more instructional time than other students across the state.

Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s report, published Thursday, July 2, found that the district’s students lose “at least twice as many” instructional days as those in other New Mexico districts to out-of-school suspensions. It’s even higher for Native American and Hispanic students, who lose “roughly eight to 10 times” and three to four times as many school days as their white peers, according to the report.

Teachers in the district impose harsher penalties on Native and Hispanic students than on white students, the report says.

Torrez’s office launched this investigation in 2023 following news reports that the district drove New Mexico’s outsized rates of expelling Native students.

In the agency’s new report, titled “Forced Out: How Exclusionary and Disparate Disciplinary Practices at Gallup-McKinley County Schools Rob Students of Instructional Time,” NMDOJ officials wrote that the district “appears to have made progress” in some areas, including reducing its number of expulsions and referrals to law enforcement agencies.

The Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission in March also issued a report that called on district leaders to adopt a new, culturally appropriate disciplinary system in light of these longstanding allegations.

A district spokesperson in a statement to Source NM wrote that under Superintendent Jvanna Hanks’ leadership, district leaders created an Equity Council, which will include positions “designated for members of the Native American community.”

“Gallup-McKinley County Schools is aware of and has been reviewing the New Mexico Department of Justice report and appreciates NMDOJ’s work to help ensure all students are treated fairly, supported appropriately and able to remain engaged in learning,” the statement said.

Broadly, the issue of lost instructional time has been a focus for state lawmakers in recent months. A June Legislative Finance Committee report found that a $2.6 billion investment aimed in large part at complying with the state’s landmark Yazzie/Martinez educational equity lawsuit had done little to rectify the issue of kids missing out on learning time.

Students across the state are required to annually attend a minimum of 1,140 instruction hours. The average absentee student in New Mexico missed about 215 hours in the 2024-25 school year — nearly one-fifth of the total required learning time, according to that report.

However, Kevin Mitchell, president of the Gallup-McKinley County Schools Board of Education, pushed back on the NMDOJ findings. Native American students will comprise the majority of the district’s disciplinary actions because the majority of its students are Native, he said.

The sprawling district sits in the Four Corners region and includes portions of the Navajo Nation. In fact, nearly 54 percent of Gallup’s population is Indigenous, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest data.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out we’re talking about 89% Native American population throughout the whole district…it could be a little higher,” Mitchell told Source NM. “‘You guys are disciplining Native Americans more than other students.’ Well, of course — it’s all we have.”

Mitchell added that many of his district’s schools serve small, rural communities, meaning a handful of chronic offenders in the classroom can skew overall disciplinary rates.

In a follow-up statement to Source NM, Mitchell wrote that he and his elected colleagues on the Board of Education have “consistently fought for quality education for all students,” citing the new Equity Council and the re-establishment of an Indian Education Committee.

“This work does not end with one report or meeting,” Mitchell wrote.

US President Donald Trump on Sunday twice told journalists to stop asking him about the status of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran once again closed after the president declared an end to the ceasefire deal between the two countries.

The first instance came during an interview with NBC News' Kristen Welker, who pointed to conflicting statements from the Iranian government and US Central Command about the status of the strait, which is an essential shipping lane for global petroleum supplies.

Trump replied that "it's open, and I don't want to talk about it because I want to honor the life" of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who died on Saturday from what his office described as "a brief and sudden illness."

"So I don't want to talk about it," Trump continued. "I told you that before the call."

WELKER: Iran says the Strait of Hormuz is closed. CENTCOM says it's open. Which is it?

TRUMP: It's open, and I don't want to talk about because I want to honor the life of Lindsey Graham, so I don't want to talk about it. I told you that before the call. pic.twitter.com/3ed7dN1bhK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2026

Shortly after, during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, Trump was again asked whether the strait was still open.

"It's open as far as we're concerned," Trump told Tapper. "Don't talk about it. Talk about the reason you asked me to speak."

"Okay," Tapper replied. "We appreciate your time, sir."

TAPPER: Iran has declared the Strait of Hormuz closed. Is that true?

TRUMP: It's open as far as we're concerned. Don't talk about it. Talk about the reason you asked me to speak. pic.twitter.com/TwssTycQdF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2026

Iran shut down shipping traffic in the strait after Trump launched an illegal war against the country in late February. The strait's closure resulted in spiking oil and gasoline prices, which coincided with further erosion in Trump's approval ratings.

Although traffic through the strait initially picked up in the wake of a June memorandum of understanding signed by the US and Iran, it has since slumped as the ceasefire between the two nations has fallen apart.

Ana Marie Cox, contributing editor at The New Republic, bashed both Welker and Tapper for heeding the president's requests and not pushing him to answer questions about the war he unlawfully started.

"Frankly astonished that supposed news sources agreed to terms to interview Trump and appeared to be deferential to them," Cox wrote in a social media post, "enough that they were apologetic in brining up other topics."

Cox's sentiment was echoed by Kai Ryssdal, host of NPR's Marketplace, who remarked that "the guy being interviewed doesn’t get to pick the questions."

Journalist Helen Kennedy challenged Trump's assertion that asking about the status of the Iran war was irrelevant when talking about Lindsey Graham.

"Making war with Iran was Lindsey Graham's favorite thing," Kennedy observed. "It's not like it's unrelated."

The Horrifying Lessons of 250 Years of American History

In his typical understated fashion, President Donald Trump has billed his Fourth of July rally in Washington, D.C., as the culmination of the “most unforgettable birthday party any country has ever seen.” It’s hard to argue any different. From brutal bloodsport on the White House lawn to the great emptiness of the “Great American State Fair” to his filthy, fenced-in reflecting pool on the National Mall, Trump has offered up semiquincentennial spectacles destined to be etched into the minds of Americans for a generation.

In the lead-up to this sordid circus, Trump has also raced to erase the ignoble aspects of U.S. history. But if you’ve had enough of Trump’s revelry this Independence Day, let me offer a counterpoint to the president’s vision of America: a clear-eyed look at a country that should live in infamy and the prescription of a Founding Father who might offer us all a way out.

– Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch

A History of Violence

I’ve lived through the last 51 of America’s 250 years. For much of it, I’ve believed that the United States was sick beyond salvation. And yet, I never quite imagined the U.S. would be where it is today. That was a failure of vision because America at 250 is, in my estimation, exactly where it deserves to be. It’s a nation gone rancid, a country polluted by its past, and more so, by the abject failure to reckon with it.

Once, it seemed open to question. Would America be the land defined by Jim Crow? Or by the civil rights movement? The country that made war on innocent people half a world away? Or one that owned up to the criminality of that slaughter and turned swords into ploughshares? A nation that jailed women for sending information about birth control through the mail? Or a country that gave people autonomy over their bodies? The odds were always stacked against the U.S., poisoned at the root as it is by twin original sins: settler colonialism and chattel slavery. From these evils, so many other offenses to humanity have flowed. Maybe no country could overcome such a legacy.

Still, many Americans broke their bodies and laid down their lives trying to atone for the sins of the founders and those that followed them. Ordinary people pressed and struggled to gain some measure of the liberties, equality, and the chance at happiness promised, but not delivered, at America’s birth. In return, they faced terror, truncheons, and tear gas. Year after year, people denied supposedly inalienable rights faced down, for themselves and their neighbors, white-hooded nightriders and bayonet-bearing troops and robber barons and monied interests and hateful bigots and vicious police and craven politicians and foolish experts and infinite hordes of functionaries and good-German-type neighbors willing to do the bidding of oppressors or just look the other way. But because of all these shattered skulls and cracked ribs, endless abuse and arrests and incarcerations, there was a chance for redemption.

You could almost see it if you squinted hard enough. That fleeting moment when a panoply of rights movements appeared ascendant, and that long arc of the moral universe was straining hard toward justice, and the volunteers of America — an unarmed army of the better angels of our nature — were on the march. For an instant, it was there: a shining wave of promise about to swamp the forces of America’s decrepit order. Maybe you glimpsed it in the raucous joy of an occupied campus or park or city block, on a graffiti-scribbled wall, in the smoke of a burning tire, in the frenzied talk of a comrade, in the pages of a banned book, wherever; you sure knew it if you saw it.

But that shimmering wonder crested, collapsed, and consumed itself. Now you need to crane your neck and strain your eyes to see the bare trace of that high-water mark — the cruel evidence of the last, best hope for America’s redemption just before it was swept back into the depths. We’ve been drifting ever further from it since.

If the question of which America would prevail hadn’t been settled earlier, the reelection of a megalomaniacal, racist, war-mongering, bigoted, vulgar, anti-democratic, authoritarian, inveterate liar, and would-be tyrant to preside over America’s semiquincentennial seemingly resolved it.

America is the “greatest, strongest, and most exceptional nation the world has ever known,” said President Donald Trump recently in celebrating the country’s 250th birthday with a rally on the National Mall. He added that it was “superior to any nation that’s ever been built no matter how many years it took.”

While Trump’s demented, deteriorating mind might not recall George Orwell’s warning in 1984 — “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — he or his minions certainly understand the concept on some level. Immediately upon taking office last year, Trump began efforts to whitewash — quite literally — American history to match his boasts. An executive order issued last March took aim at a supposed “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history” to “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

It’s Trump, however, who has been rewriting history to comport with his claims. For months, to take one example, Trump has fought a pitched battle to censor the history of his presidential predecessor George Washington, whom he calls “our foremost American hero.” For his exploits at Trenton and Valley Forge, for his leadership in the turbulence of the Revolution’s wake, the capital bears Washington’s name and in it a giant obelisk stands in his honor. Most Americans have literally, if not figuratively, long embraced his visage since his face adorns the quarter and the dollar bill.

In January 2026, crowbar-wielding workmen descended on the President’s House site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall, where Washington and his wife Martha lived in the 1790s — when the city was briefly the nation’s capital — with nine of their slaves. On orders from the Trump administration, the workers pried off panels discussing the ownership of people by our foremost American hero™, details about the lives of those enslaved men and women, and information about the broader history of slavery. Recently, a federal appeals court discarded an injunction ordering the National Park Service to restore the site, allowing the Trump administration to replace the slavery exhibit. “It is an attempt to sanitize history and present a version of the past that is more comfortable, but far less truthful,” wrote the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, which led the movement to craft the original display.

No country can be great, much less the “greatest,” if it’s afraid of its own people knowing the story of their nation. Trump looks at America and sees an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” according to that executive order. He claims that malevolent forces have “reconstructed” America’s past as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed,” fostering “a sense of national shame.” But no one need rewrite U.S. history to foster a sense of unrelenting disgrace. It’s everywhere, if we have the courage to call it out.

In 1779, for example, Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against native peoples, to bring about the “total ruin” of the so-called Six Nations across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania and New York. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements,” he told Maj. Gen. John Sullivan. When the operation was over, Sullivan’s army had destroyed more than 40 villages.

Such sins of America are legion. Given the time and space, one could name 250 or 250,000 or 2.5 million of them. On this Fourth of July, it’s worth recalling some of those inconvenient truths that Trump would rather you forget and future generations never know.

• Col. John Chivington, the head of the Colorado military district led more than 700 troops to attack Cheyenne and Arapaho groups at dawn on November 29, 1864. In what he called “an act of duty to ourselves and to civilization,” his men unleashed gunfire and artillery on a sleeping village at Sand Creek. For almost four hours, they slaughtered the camp’s inhabitants, two-thirds of them women and children. Many Native women were alsoremovedd, and Native American scalps, breasts, and genitalia were taken as souvenirs. In a letter to Maj. Gen. Samuel Curtis, Chivington stated: “It may, perhaps, be unnecessary for me to state that I captured no prisoners. Between five and six hundred Indians were left dead upon the field.”
• In 1914, striking miners in Ludlow, Colorado, were celebrating Greek Easter when the Colorado National Guard and a private security company opened fire on their camp with a machine-gun-equipped armored car that the miners called “the Death Special.” Those miners fought the National Guard for 10 days before President Woodrow Wilson ordered in federal troops. Almost 200 people were killed, according to some estimates.
• A two-day attack by white mobs on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood district in 1921 began after Black Tulsans attempted to prevent a man’s lynching. Rioting white people, in response, killed hundreds, and more than 30 city blocks were destroyed, including a community known as Black Wall Street. Viola Ford Fletcher, a survivor, recalled piles of bodies in the streets and watched a white man execute a Black man and then shoot at her family.
• During the 20th century, coerced and forced sterilization became a method of controlling “undesirable” populations: disabled people, immigrants, people of color, the poor, unmarried mothers, those with mental illness, and others. This included federally funded sterilization programs in 32 states. Over 70 years in California, for example, approximately 20,000 men and women were sterilized in state institutions, often without their full consent.
• From 1932 to 1972, 399 black men, many of them sharecroppers and poor, in Alabama were denied treatment for syphilis and deceived by doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service as part of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Despite the availability of penicillin beginning in the 1940s and the fact that syphilis can damage the heart, brain, and other organs, government officials ensured the men received no medical care while telling them they were being treated for “bad blood.” 128 of the men are estimated to have died from syphilis and related complications.
• In a horrifying echo of the Tuskegee syphilis study, U.S. government and Guatemalan doctors in the 1940s intentionally infected more than 1,300 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, hospital patients, and sex workers with three sexually-transmitted infections — chancroid, gonorrhea, and syphilis — to study potential treatments. The researchers also paid sex workers to transmit the diseases. Left untreated, all three can be fatal.
• The U.S. government conducted thousands of radiation experiments on Americans, including children, from 1944 to 1974. They included the injection of plutonium into people’s bodies, marching troops into the wake of a nuclear explosion, and releasing radioactive substances into the air to track their movement or effects.
• U.S. troops from the “Greatest Generation” committed tens if not hundreds of thousands ofremoveds in Europe during and after World War II. Around 190,000 German women alone wereremovedd between the U.S invasion of Nazi Germany and 1955, when West Germany regained its sovereignty, according to one estimate. In reports compiled by Bavarian priests in the summer of 1945, the youngest victim mentioned was a 7-year-old child. The oldest was a woman in her 60s.
• On August 6, 1945, the U.S. launched the world’s first nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Around 70,000 people, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. As many as 280,000 were dead, many of radiation sickness, by the end of the year. An atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki, three days later, is thought to have killed as many as 70,000.
• The FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program targeted the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among others in the 1960s and 1970s. According to a 1976 Senate report, it “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.
• On March 15, 1968 in South Vietnam, U.S. troops were briefed by their commanding officer, Capt. Ernest Medina. The Americans were told they would find enemy troops in the village of My Lai and, as one unit member recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the village.’” When the troops arrived, they encountered only civilians: women, children, and old men. Nonetheless, Medina’s order was carried out. More than 500 civilians were slaughtered over the course of four hours. The soldiers even took a break to eat lunch amid the carnage. Along the way, they alsoremovedd women and young girls, mutilated the dead, and systematically burned homes.

There is no way not to view these “historical milestones in a negative light.” Nor the sins of the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, the global war on terror and the countless crimes they spawned. In the five-plus years Trump has been in the White House, alone, the U.S. has been embroiled in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars. We’ve also watched as Black women and men were murdered in cavalier fashion and anti-ICE protesters were gunned down in the streets. We’ve seen immigrants deported to foreign prisons, war zones, and human rights-violating pariah states for spite, and rights disappeared as if they were panels detailing historical truths.

I recommend reading “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” by Ibram X. Kendi Available on Bookshop.org

“There has never been anything like the United States of America,” Trump said recently. It’s lucky for the world. Because for every landing at Normandy, there is a massacre at Bear River or Sand Creek or Samar or No Gun Ri or My Lai or Le Bac 2 many times over. I’ve spoken with hundreds of survivors of these types of atrocities. I know the story of America’s impact abroad better than most.

Trump believes that he resuscitated the U.S. “A short time ago we were a dead country,” he said during semiquincentennial festivities. “We were dead.” Those comments about America’s death resonated with me — even if I don’t think they’re true — because the other side of that coin is rebirth. While I don’t believe this country can be redeemed, that doesn’t mean it can’t be reborn.

Washington isn’t the only predecessor Trump loves. He’s also besotted with, as he put it, “the late, great Thomas Jefferson, one of our most important Founding Fathers.” Although in Trump’s version of history, Jefferson was a “principal writer of the Constitution.” (He actually authored the Declaration of Independence — the anniversary Trump is celebrating these days.) Perhaps if Trump knew what Jefferson, another slaveholder, actually wrote, he would be less enamored. Whatever his grave fa