Dr. Paul Offit is a medical doctor who specializes in children’s infectious diseases. He is appalled by the actions and policies of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because they endanger the health of our nation, especially children.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a disgrace to his family name. He should not have been put in charge of public health. Not only is he totally unqualified, but his beliefs about medicine are dangerous.
Dr. Offit writes:
On April 15, 2025, Dr. Fiona Havers, an epidemiologist at the CDC, presented data on the impact of COVID-19 on children the previous year. She found that COVID-19 had caused thousands of children to be hospitalized; 20 percent of whom were admitted to the intensive care unit. Virtually all were unvaccinated, half were previously healthy, and 152 had died, most less than 4 years of age. The conclusion was clear; young children in the United States who had never been vaccinated will still benefit from a COVID-19 vaccine. Although the pandemic was over, the virus wasn’t.
Six weeks later, on May 27, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), in a video posted on X, said that COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for young, healthy children. When asked to provide evidence for this unilateral, behind-closed-doors decision, he couldn’t. This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released its own recommendations. Consistent with the CDC’s findings—and in direct contrast to Kennedy’s edict—the AAP stated, “Infants and children 6 to 23 months of age are at high risk for severe COVID-19…All infants and children in this age group [should] receive the 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccine…Those who are previously unvaccinated should receive an initial series.”
Hours after the AAP released its statement, Kennedy fired back, posting on X that the AAP was engaging in a “pay-to-play scheme to promote commercial ambitions of AAP’s Big Pharma benefactors.” Kennedy linked to a page showing that the AAP’s Friends of Children Fund, a charity that focuses on adolescent mental health and suicide prevention, had received donations from several vaccine makers. Kennedy also claimed that the medical journal that published the AAP’s recommendations, Pediatrics, was part of this same “pay-to-play scheme.” Kennedy’s actions were a tiresome rerun of his many accusations over the past 20 years. Whenever scientists, doctors, public health officials, academic institutions, scientific journals, or medical or professional societies claim that a vaccine is safe, effective, or valuable, he says that they are all in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. No one is to be trusted, except him.
Kennedy’s conflict-of-interest gambit is a misdirection game. If he can get the press and the public to talk about conflicts-of-interest, he can distract from his decision to recommend against COVID-19 vaccines for children that wasn’t supported by the evidence.
Then Kennedy made a veiled threat, posting on X that the “AAP should be candid with doctors and hospitals that recommendations that diverge from the CDC’s official list are not shielded from liability under the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act.” Defy me, argued Kennedy, and I will make sure that doctors and hospitals that recommend COVID-19 vaccines for young children could be sued. It was an empty threat. Doctors and hospitals are protected from liability related to COVID-19 vaccines by the PREP Act. Kennedy’s threat was yet another mean-spirited attempt at misdirection.
Pediatricians, parents, and public health officials are confused by these conflicting recommendations. Epidemiological evidence says one thing, Kennedy another. This confusion will likely result in some young children failing to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. It is also likely that some of these children will be admitted to the hospital, or intensive care unit, or die as a result. And when that happens, we won’t have to look any further than the man who for the past 20 years has been an anti-vaccine propagandist, science denialist, and conspiracy theorist to understand why.
W.H. Auden, a British American poet, wrote, “When all the mass and majesty of this world, when all that carried weight and always weighed the same, lay in the hands of others. They were small and could not hope for help and no help came.” How many children will have to suffer needlessly at the hands of RFK Jr. before someone, anyone steps up to save them?
I’m reminded that protestors against the war in Vietnam used to chant,
What happens when government data are politicized? What happens when a President fires the professionals who report the data and replace them with his loyalists?
Jack Hassard, a retired professor of science education at Georgia State University, knows what happens. Hassard followed Trump’s behavior in his first term and wrote a book called The Trump Files.
The problem with Trump has accelerated now that he is surrounded by a well-organized cabal of far-right extremists who are turning him into a dictator.
Every Friday, my mother would check the Bureau of Labor Statistics dashboard. She did this the way some families checked the weather. She was quiet and anxious, with a hand on the mouse and a furrow in her brow. The numbers told her how many people had lost work that week. They showed how fast prices were rising. The data revealed whether the rent hikes were outpacing wages again. It was her way of listening for distant thunder. Today, nevertheless, the BLS dashboard is not updating information because of the Republican led government shutdown.
The dashboard went dark the spring Trump returned to power. At first we thought it was just another funding fight, like the ones that had knocked websites offline before. But weeks passed, and the updates never came back. My mother kept refreshing the page for months, like a ritual for a ghost.
By the end of that summer, more pages were vanishing. Climate dashboards froze mid-storm season. Food insecurity surveys were “postponed indefinitely.” Vaccine data disappeared without explanation. By winter, it was as if the country had decided to stop looking at itself in the mirror.
They called it austerity. They said it was about cutting “red tape” and “freeing the agencies from bloated bureaucracy.” But everyone could feel the chill. It wasn’t just numbers that were being cut. It was the nerves that told us where the pain was.
We didn’t realize it at the time. This was how the silence began. It began not with censorship in the usual sense but with a subtraction of knowledge.
When the data stopped, arguments stopped making sense. People clung to whatever numbers their preferred networks fed them, like castaways grabbing driftwood. One station would say unemployment was rising; another insisted we were in a “golden age.” Both cited “official sources,” but the sources were gone, hollowed out or replaced by Trump’s loyalists.
At school, the teachers tried to explain inflation, but the charts they used were months out of date. Some parents started printing memes as evidence. Others stopped trusting the schools entirely.
Looking back, it’s astonishing how quickly civic discourse disintegrated once the shared factual floor cracked. We had thought democracy died in coups or riots. Instead, it died in data voids—quiet gaps that widened into abysses.
My father used to call it “the silence before the storm.” Storms were his touchstone for everything. He said the scariest part wasn’t the wind or the rain. It was the moment the air went unnaturally still. You realized the warning systems had failed.
That silence descended over our public life. When pollution monitoring sites shut down, a chemical spill in Savannah went undetected for weeks. By the time the numbers surfaced through a university backchannel, children were already sick. When the food insecurity survey was cut, hunger surged invisibly. Relief programs couldn’t track where the need was worst.
And when climate data went dark, the storms didn’t stop. They just stopped being predictable. The year the NOAA dashboards froze was the year the Atlantic hurricanes changed course mid-season. Thousands died inland, where no one expected them.
The silence didn’t come from ignorance. It came from a deliberate decision to turn off the lights.
I know you study this era, Jack, so you know the official explanations: budget cuts, “efficiency reforms,” sovereignty rhetoric. But those were just alibis. Trump understood something that too many defenders of democracy underestimated: data is power. Whoever controls the ability to measure reality controls the terms of debate.
His war on data wasn’t chaotic—it was methodical. Fire the agency heads who produce inconvenient statistics. Defund the surveys that expose inequality. Gut the climate monitors that contradict your conspiracies. Let loyal media amplify your alternate “facts.” Over time, the shared reality collapses, and the strongman narrative becomes the only stable frame left.
Our reader Christine Langhoff discovered an excellent analysis of the “compact” that the Trump administration has offered to several universities. A “compact” usually refers to an equitable agreement between two parties. The Trump “compact” is a harsh threat: sign or die.
Christine writes:
Here’s UCLA Law professor Joseph Fishkin on the so-called compact the administration want universities to accept.
Any lawyer—really, any careful reader—who makes it through even the first paragraph of the document can see that this is incorrect. The “compact” is quite explicit: Universities that do not sign on to this thing thereby “elect[] to forego federal benefits.” What benefits? Well, that same first paragraph lists quite a few specific “benefits”: “(i) access to student loans, grant programs, and federal contracts; (ii) funding for research directly or indirectly; (iii) approval of student and other visas in connection with university matriculation and instruction; and (iv) preferential treatment under the tax code,” which means 501(c)(3) status. This compact is a “reward” in exactly the same sense that it is “rewarding” to purchase protection from the Mafia. The compact is an open, explicit threat.
It nonetheless does represent a tactical shift on the part of the Trump Administration. The Trump team’s goal has not changed. They want an unprecedented—and flagrantly unconstitutional—degree of government oversight and control over American universities. So far they are having some trouble obtaining it. Their initial strategy, to roll up the sector from the top, starting with Harvard, through bespoke negotiated dealmaking with individual schools, has turned out to be slower going—and I suspect, simply more labor-intensive—than I am guessing they expected. (I use the rollup metaphor to evoke how a monopolist takes over a sector by buying out one firm after another, gaining more leverage over holdouts as they go. So far it has not worked.) Meanwhile, federal district courts have dealt a series of significant blows to the government’s ability to, for example, arbitrarily withdraw federal scientific research grants. So the administration is pivoting to a new tactic, which seems to be to roll up the higher ed sector from what you might call the upper middle. Instead of starting at the very top with the high-stakes confrontation with Harvard and working their way down, the new tactical approach is to start with whichever prestigious schools seem likeliest—for various reasons—to be amenable to the government’s overtures. It is no accident that many of the schools May Mailman’s team first approached about this “compact” have interim presidents, who are inherently weak, sometimes because a prior president was successfully forced out through political agitation by the right.
If you read only one article about what happened to the students, teachers and schools in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this is the one. Ashana Bigard is a parent of students in New Orleans. Elizabeth K. Jeffers taught in the NOLA district.
Turning New Orleans into an all-charter district may have raised test scores–although New Orleans is still a low-performing district in one of the nation’s lowest performing states–but as you will learn by reading this article, the transformation was a disaster for students, their families, their communities, and their teachers.
This article was produced by Our Schools. Ashana Bigard is the director of Amplify Justice, an educational advocate, and author of Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20. A dedicated mother of three, she serves as an education fellow for the Progressive magazine’s Public Schools Advocate project and is a director-producer of numerous video and audio productions. Follow her on Bluesky @AshanaBigard. Elizabeth K. Jeffers, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans who began teaching in pre-Katrina New Orleans public schools. Her scholarship focuses on school choice and community-based inquiry. Her research has been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Educational Policy, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and other scholarly journals. Follow her on Bluesky @ekjeffersphd.
To mark the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, numerous articles and opinion pieces have appeared in prominent media outlets touting the supposed improvement of the city’s public school system since the storm.
Katrina’s immediate aftermath saw the state of Louisiana disempower the democratically elected school board by taking over the management of 107 out of 128 schools. This led to the termination of 7,600—mainly Black and women—teachers, paraprofessionals, cafeteria workers, clerical workers, principals, and other permanent employees, and the eventual conversion of all of the city’s public schools into privately managed charters.
A Washington Post column, “‘Never Seen Before:’ How Katrina Set off an Education Revolution,” by British journalist Ian Birrell, proclaimed the transformation a “miracle.” Another opinion piece in The 74, “The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools” by Ravi Gupta, the founder and former CEOof a charter school network, stated that the New Orleans school system shaped by Katrina was “a model that should theoretically appeal to both sides of America’s education debates. It delivered the academic results that reformers promised while addressing the equity and community concerns that critics raised.”
As proof of their arguments, both authors pointed to a June 2025 report, “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons” by Douglas N. Harris and Jamie M. Carroll of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. Pulling from the data presented in that study, Birrell said the case for declaring New Orleans-style education reform a “remarkable success” is “pretty definitive,” and Gupta called this supposed success an “unequivocal conclusion.” As a longtime youth advocate and community leader and an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, who was a public school teacher in the city, we invite you to consider whether this data alone proves that New Orleans public schools and the families they serve are better off after 20 years of “reform.”
Although Gupta warns against “[falling] into the tyranny of the anecdote when reporting on fraught education debates like those over the meaning of the New Orleans reforms,” we’d like to tell you about Rio, whose last name has been withheld for privacy reasons. Rio attended 12 different schools in New Orleans, many of which were shut down suddenly, before he finally graduated from a school that is now also closed. Rio’s story is not atypical of the human costs of the New Orleans school system, where closures are a defining feature and evidence that the disaster Katrina wrought on the schools is still happening.
Forced to traverse the fragmented charter system that has replaced the public system of neighborhood schools, New Orleans students are often traumatized bymultiple school closures. Decades of researchattest to the academic, emotional, and economic harms that result from severing social connections that families, faculty, and staff have had with schools and with one another.
For instance, obtaining a job reference letter from a former teacher should be simple for students to do, but that task becomes an obstacle course for many young adults from New Orleans, like Rio. Black Man Rising, a national group providing outreach and mentorship for Black youth, had to intervene to help him obtain the letter that made the difference between him being able to financially support himself and being just another addition to the statistics of Black youth who are unemployed and incarcerated.
Rio’s story illustrates a central paradox of the New Orleans system: Black families and communities continue to be severed and displaced as a result of failed leadership at the federal, local, and state levels. While the storm may be over, the disaster continues. On the other hand, white children in New Orleans rarely experience school closures.
The near obliteration of democratic public schooling
In addition to severing families from their neighborhood schools and educators, Katrina reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation in ways that would shock most Americans.
New York University professor Domingo Morel contends in his bookTakeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy that state takeovers do not generally improve test scores or graduation rates; instead, they are about removing political power, as Black school boards have historically functioned as entryways for Black political leaders.
In a similar vein, Louisiana legislators, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, passed Act 35 in November 2005, which expanded the state-run Recovery School District’s (RSD) jurisdiction over New Orleans public schools during an emergency session when voters were dispersed across the country and many were still searching for their loved ones. The new laws removed the parent and teacher approvals required for charter conversions.
State legislation also enabled the termination of the majority Black teaching force, gutting the teachers’ collective bargaining unit, United Teachers of New Orleans (American Federation of Teachers, Local 527), and further removing obstacles for top-down reform. Research conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Kevin L. Henry and his co-author has shown how the “charter school authorization and application process” used in post-Katrina New Orleans “reproduces white dominance.” While another study published in the journal Urban Education points to how charter schools consolidate power “in ways that limit local Black political power.”
Consider the example of Kira Orange Jones, whose case perfectly illustrates how educational democracy has been dismantled. In 2011, Jones raised $478,000for her Board of Elementary and Secondary Education campaign—much of it from out-of-state donors connected to Democrats for Education Reform and charter school advocacy groups. Her opponent raised just $19,000, creating a 25-to-1 spending disadvantage. But the campaign money was just the beginning. Jones simultaneously served as executive director of Teach For America’s (TFA) Greater New Orleans chapter while sitting on the board that approved TFA’s $1 million state contract with Louisiana. When ethics complaints were filed in 2012, the Louisiana Ethics Board overruled its own staff’s recommendation that Jones choose between her TFA position and her board seat.
While NOLA Public Schools mandates charter school governance boards to include an alumnus or a parent, legal guardian, or grandparent, who is either elected or appointed, Katrina school reforms have nearly obliterated democratic participation. Parents often don’t find out when school board meetings are happening, let alone have access to board members’ email addresses or phone numbers to voice concerns. Even local reporters who tried to obtain basic contact information for charter school board members have been stonewalled. There is no state requirement that charter school boards meet at times that are convenient for working parents to attend.
The absence of neighborhood schools is an additional obstacle for parents who rely on public transportation. And although charter schools seemingly returned to an elected school board in 2018, the public has virtually no control over individual charter schools, which maintain complete autonomy over curricula, calendars, certification requirements, contracts, and daily operations.
Shadow suspensions and ‘behavior problems’
Louisiana has long been among the states with the highest rates of student suspensions and expulsions, and Black students are more than twice as likely to be suspended compared to white students and receive longer suspensions for identical infractions, according to an analysis of 2001to 2014 figures by Education Research Alliance for New Orleans. In New Orleans, suspension and expulsion rates rose sharply after the storm but then stabilized. Nevertheless, some charter schools continued to suspend and expel high percentages of students.
But that’s just the official data. More recently, several parents have reported that their children are being sent home from school without receiving official suspension papers. Elizabeth’s field notes attest to students’ reports of one charter school network sending students to “the RC room” (restorative center) where they are forced to sit in cubicles, complete detention assignments, and write apology letters in a secluded room. This shadow suspension system allows schools to push out Black students without creating the paper trail that might trigger oversight or intervention. Children lose days or weeks of education in bureaucratic limbo, with no formal process and no recourse. And large numbers of students, often labeled as “behavior problems,” remain enrolled in alternative schools, rather than mainstream degree programs, according to state data.
Community-rooted educators replaced by managers
New Orleans teachers once lived in their communities. Most were career educators who taught generations of children, creating lasting bonds that extended far beyond the classroom.
Ashana experienced this personally at a small school called New Orleans Free School. As someone who is extremely dyslexic, she felt inadequate throughout most of her educational life until she encountered teachers like Woody, Janice, Jeanette, and Jim—two of whom, Jeanette and Jim, have since passed away. Woody still leaves encouraging comments under articles she has published, telling her he is proud of her. He, along with the others, encouraged her and insisted she could be brilliant despite her spelling difficulties. They told her she could be a writer. They emphasized that we all have different skill sets that we can develop, and that none of us is perfect, but that we can practice and grow.
This encouragement didn’t end when Ashana left Free School. The advice and support continue today. That’s what it means to have authentic relationships with your teachers. That’s what it means to be rooted in your community. Unfortunately, Ashana didn’t have the opportunity to send her children to that school to be educated by those incredible educators. The school that gave her a love of learning shut down.
The structure of charter schools severs critical bonds between schools and families. For instance, in her book Beyond Resilience: Katrina 20 Ashana recounts a teacher reaching out to her for resources to help with one of her students years before the storm. The child’s mother, who worked two jobs as a housekeeper and restaurant server, struggled to care for her seven children.
Her nine-year-old son often arrived at school dirty and disheveled because their washing machine had broken, and despite the mother’s instructions, the children didn’t wash their uniforms in the tub while she worked overnight shifts. Although the mother worked tirelessly, her extremely low reading level meant she was unaware of how to apply for assistance programs that could have helped her family. Most importantly, she probably didn’t believe she qualified for help. This teacher understood the family’s circumstances and worked to connect them with resources rather than simply reporting the situation to authorities.
This kind of close relationship between educators and families has become increasingly rare in the Katrina experiment. For instance, Ashana encountered a similar situation that ended differently. A family facing tough times was reported to the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS) multiple times for neglect. When OCFS attempted to provide services, the mother, terrified that her children would be taken and placed in foster care as she had been, and having suffered abuse in that system, fled Orleans Parish with her children. She moved them to a motel in St. Bernard Parish, leaving everything behind. The children weren’t enrolled in school for almost a year until someone tracked them down and helped them return to the city and reintegrate into the school.
Somehow, punitive measures for Black parents and children have been equated with success—which raises the question: What exactly is the reform proponents’ definition of success, and what was the goal from the outset?
The current system has replaced community-based educators with a top-heavy administrative structure. New Orleans charter schools spend significantly more money on administration, even as teacher shortages remain high. For instance, InspireNola Charter Schools, which only manages seven schools, paid three executives a total of $667,000 for the fiscal year 2023.
Meanwhile, the constant “churning” of schools and the absence of a collective bargaining agreement have led to a larger system that dehumanizes teachers. In fact, the RSD required certified teachers who chose to return to their pre-Katrina schools to complete a “basic skills test” (akin to a literacy test).
But that was only the beginning of the disaster for New Orleans educators. One Black veteran explained to Elizabeth: “The RSD was bouncing teachers around like balls.” That is, the state takeover district issued letters labeling numerous experienced teachers as “surplus” when their schools transformed into charters. Many of these schools recruited inexperienced teachers who were expendable, accepted lower salaries, and could be programmed to adhere to the ideology of reform. The absence of collective bargaining power, arbitrary closures, and charter takeovers eventually led many career teachers to “choose” between commuting several hours a day to schools in outlying parishes and changing careers. Twenty years after the district’s purging of its unionized teachers (the United Teachers of New Orleans), only five of the city’s 90 charter schools are unionized.
In another example, Ashana recounts in her book about how a teacher whom she advocated for brought a doctor’s note to her school’s chief financial officer to document a urinary tract infection and request restroom breaks. The administrators emailed her to offer reimbursement for adult diapers. This example of denying teachers basic respect and humanity illustrates what is seen as a continual disaster. If educators are treated this way, imagine the conditions students face.
The cruel reality of ‘choice’
The current “choice” system has created impossible decisions for families. Consider the mother in New Orleans East who must choose each morning which of her two children to accompany to their bus stop, because the system doesn’t allow siblings to attend the same school. She would have to explain to her young daughter, who is clutching a bright orange whistle for safety, “Today I’m going to stand with your brother, but tomorrow it’ll be your turn.” The little girl, frightened at the prospect of standing alone, pleads with her mother, but is told, “I’m sorry, you know this is just the way it is for right now.”
This mother, with tears in her eyes as her children clung to her legs, captured the cruel reality. With this new choice system, she doesn’t get to choose to have both of her children sent to the same school. She gets to choose which one she can stand with every morning. That’s no choice at all.
I often see stories online about ICE acting like thugs, brutalizing people; releasing tear gas at a traffic stop in a quiet neighborhood; storming an apartment building at 1 a.m., sending everyone into the street, zip-tying the children together; ICE smashing car windows and dragging out the occupants; ICE agents beating up women, throwing them to the floor; ICE detaining people who then disappear.
This is another example of ICE acting as Trump’s Gestapo. George Reyes is an American citizen and a veteran. He was arrested by ICE and held incommunicado for three days. His story appears on a blog called Home of the Brave.
He wrote:
Credit: George Retes / Institute for Justice
By George Retes
Civil rights in America have always been about one thing: holding power accountable when it strips people of their dignity and freedom. They are not privileges that government agents get to decide whether to honor. What happened to me wasn’t just a mistake—it was a violation of the very protections that our Constitution guarantees.
On July 10, I was on my way to work when ICE agents engulfed my car in tear gas, smashed my driver-side window, and pepper-sprayed my face. They dragged me out, threw me to the ground, and even while I was complying, one agent kneeled on my neck and another kneeled on my back as others stood by and watched.
I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney. I was placed on suicide watch and missed my daughter’s third birthday. No explanation. No charges. No apology. One day, I was just told, “you’re free to go.”
For me as a veteran, this is more than just a personal injustice—it’s a constitutional affront. We are taught that America stands apart because of its rule of law and protection of rights. If the government can strip those rights from us without consequence, it undermines the very system we claim makes our country stand apart.
As of now, I have submitted claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) to federal agencies related to my wrongful detention by federal officers. These claims describe my unlawful detention, including the officers’ use of excessive force, the denial of a hearing with a judge, the denial of access to legal counsel and any other contact with the outside world, and the denial of basic necessities.
While the claims are under review by the relevant federal authorities, I am continuing to speak out. I do it for two reasons. First, because I believe that Americans of all ideological stripes would agree that the government can’t just make people disappear without any process or explanation. Second, because I want to give the government a chance to admit that they were wrong.
So far the government has not done so. Instead, in response to an op-ed I published in the San Francisco Chronicle, DHS claimed that during the July 10 operation in Camarillo, CA, I “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement,” blocked their route, and was arrested for assault. They stated that US citizens are not being “wrongfully” arrested by ICE, that their enforcement operations are highly targeted, and that their personnel conduct due diligence to know who they are targeting. DHS also framed criticisms of the operation as “smears” against ICE officers, alleging such claims have contributed to an increase in assaults on law enforcement.
DHS’s statement ignores reality and is designed to demonize and villainize people who don’t let the government trample over their rights, and aren’t afraid to speak the truth. First, I was not violent, I simply asked the officers to let me pass through because I needed to get to work; and I also complied with ICE’s demands by backing up my car. Second, the statement ignores the three days I spent in federal custody with no charges, no phone call to my family, no access to a judge or an attorney, no shower, and no explanation for their actions. It is deeply troubling that a government agency would publicly deny these facts while portraying my experience as a threat or attack on officers. The truth is that I am a US citizen and a veteran, and I will continue to pursue accountability for the rights that were violated that day.
This fight is not just about my case—it’s about ensuring that there is recourse when people are silenced, detained, or dehumanized by the very government meant to protect us. The legal system must allow accountability when government agencies overstep their authority.
Incidents like this are proof that civil rights protections in America are only as strong as our willingness to enforce them. What happens when government agencies act as though the Constitution doesn’t apply to them? Agencies like ICE cannot be allowed to operate in the shadows, unchecked and unaccountable. Civil rights mean nothing if those in power face no consequences for violating them. Accountability is the only way forward.
George Retes is a US citizen and Army veteran who served in Iraq and was jailed by ICE and held for three days without an explanation.
Greg Olear implores us not to allow Trump’s militarized violence against our fellow citizens to become normalized. Trump and Kristi Noem have organized a lawless army of thugs to terrorize us on the streets, in our workplaces, in our homes. This is not normal!
I’m excerpting his long article. Open the link and read it.
He writes:
I. #FTK, Origin Story: The ICE Gestapo Invades Chicago
I first heard about the ICE Gestapo’s military-style raid on the five-story apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore at 9:21 am on October 2, the morning after it happened. A concerned Chicago resident was kind enough to send me an email, alerting me to this disturbing development. He wrote:
ICE Agents Rappel From Black Hawk Helicopters Into Chicago for Major Raid
Trump has officially started “using” our own cities as “training grounds for the US Military.”
Federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter onto the rooftops of Chicago residential buildings, launching a sweeping immigration enforcement operation targeting suspected Tren de Aragua gang members, according to NewsNation.
The FBI confirmed on Tuesday morning that they were helping U.S. Border Patrol, under the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
It was hardly a “surprise raid”. This was for show—for intimidation—for TERROR. A large helicopter makes a LOT of noise—and many people ran. But those who stayed, because they had no reason to fear authorities, were given the criminal treatment instead.
My first instinct was to not believe it. I mean, Black Hawk helicopters? Over Chicago? In the middle of the night? Surely this must be one of those “fake news” stories designed to “trigger” the libs—a prank originating from some troll farm in Minsk. It can’tbe authentic, I assured myself. No no no.
Even after I searched the headline he’d sent, and found the story in Newsweek, I remained skeptical; that magazine is not what it used to be. But the second part of the email contained a lot more detail—way too much to invent. I verified the story, which came from ABC7, the local news affiliate in Chicago:
“My building is shaking. So, I’m like, ‘What is that?’ Then I look out the window, it’s a Blackhawk helicopter,” witness Dr. Alii Muhammad told ABC7 News.
Building resident Alicia Brooks said, “As I got to my unit to stick my key in the door, I was grabbed by an officer. And, I said, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ He never actually told me. He said I was being detained.”
Neighbors like Eboni Watson say they ducked for cover as they heard several flash bangs.
“They was terrified. The kids was crying. People was screaming. They looked very distraught. I was out there crying when I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip tied to each other,” Watson said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’”
I sat at my laptop, dumbfounded, as both my blood and my coffee went cold. I knew it was real, but couldn’t quite believe it was real. So many horrific things have happened since January 20th that I’ve lost count, but nothing so far has affected me quite like this. I mean, “Fuck them kids?”
Watson said trucks and military-style vans were used to separate parents from their children. Other neighbors said agents destroyed property to get in the building.
Marlee Sanders said, “They had the Black people in one van, and the immigrants in another van.” Her boyfriend was taken in the raid. Officials have not released the number of arrests there were made, but witnesses estimate 30 to 40 people were taken.
ABC7 spoke to Pertissue Fisher, a woman who lives in the building. She said ICE agents took everyone in the building, including her, and asked questions later.
“They just treated us like we were nothing,” Fisher said.
Fisher said she came out to the hallway of her apartment complex on the corner of 75th and South Shore Drive in her nightgown around 10 p.m. Monday only to find armed ICE agents yelling “Police.”
“It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face,” Fisher said. “They asked my name and my date of birth and asked me, did I have any warrants? And I told them, ‘No,’ I didn’t.”
Fisher said she was handcuffed before being released around 3 a.m., and she was told that if anyone had any kind of warrant out for them, even if it was unrelated to immigration, they would not be released.
Destruction was left behind inside the apartment complex, with doors blown off their hinges and holes left in the wall.
“They had a big, 15-inch chainsaw with round blade on it, cutting this fence down,” said witness Darrell Ballard. “We’re under siege. We’re being invaded by our own military.”
When I ran a Google search,1 I found that no one else seemed to have picked up the story. The big legacy-media outlets were yammering about God knows what, none of it remotely as important as this illegal operation.
Make no mistake: The ICE Gestapo raid was nothing less than an act of state-sanctioned terror—a loud-and-clear announcement that democracy, as we knew it, was officially over.
And still—still—I didn’t want to believe it.
But it really happened. Not only did it really happen, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, didn’t even have the common decency to deny it. On the contrary, DHS produced a slick video clip bragging about it, making it seem cinematic, heroic, cool—like a video game come to life. Dog-killing fascist Kristi Noem, who tweeted out the abominable thing, was clearly proud of this. Her post was ominous:
“Chicago,” she wrote, “we’re here for you.”
Here are some screenshots of the raid, which I encourage you to look at carefully:
It was all true: the Black Hawk helicopters, the dudes in military gear rappelling down, the mass arrests, the doors being broken down, the zip-ties, the public humiliation. In the video, DHS shows the faces of the men the ICE agents arrested, which no doubt will help their defense attorneys (assuming they are granted access to defense attorneys—no longer a safe assumption with Stephen Miller in charge).
But the damage has already been done.
I mean, little children were among those herded out of the apartments. Some of those children had theirhands zip-tied, too—by grown men decked out in enough military gear to occupy Fallujah.
And when a woman—an American citizen, not in any way affiliated with a gang, guilty of nothing more than living in Chicago, a city Trump hates because Obama’s from there—called out the ICE agents on their egregious lack of humanity, she was given the dismissive three-word response:
Fuck them kids.
The Trump regime has crossed yet another Rubicon. Now, the government can break down the front door of your house, drag you out of bed, zip-tie your hands behind your back, herd you into a van, and leave you there for hours and hours, without cause, without Miranda rights, without charge.
This is not fear-mongering. This is not speculation about what the Trump regime might do. This is happening. This has already happened. Here, in America. Nine months into the Trump Redux, and right on schedule, the fascist baby has been born.
Reading about this expression of brutal state tyranny, I was reminded of a passage in Defying Hitler, the Sebastian Haffner memoir about 1933 Germany:
The internal process was repressive terror: cold, calculated, official orders, directed by the state and carried out under the full protection of the police and the armed forces. It did not take place in the excitement following a victorious battle or danger successfully overcome — nothing of the kind had happened. Nor was it an act of revenge for atrocities committed by the other side — there had been none. What happened was a nightmarish reversal of normal circumstances: robbers and murderers acting as the police force, enjoying the full panoply of state power, their victims treated as criminals, proscribed and condemned to death in advance.
What we are seeing in Chicago the past 24 hours is a mere prelude. The official numbers of agents is nothing compared to the prisoners private contractors are releasing to kidnap, disappear and kill their fellow Americans. This suggests the covered faces are less about protecting the contractors and more about hiding from the public that prisoners are being used for this. Armed and set loose upon their fellow denizens on our streets.
This has yet to be confirmed by other news sources—but are other news sources, all of them owned by MAGA oligarchs, even interested at this point?
Plus, I mean, does it seem implausible? It’s clear ICE is staffed by poorly-trained, undisciplined, out-of-shape dipshits who barely know how to use their weapons. These losers have to come from somewhere.
But back to 1933 Germany. Haffner continues:
An example that became public knowledge because of its scale occurred some months later in the Cöpenick area of Berlin, where a Social Democratic trade unionist defended himself, with the help of his sons, against an SA patrol that broke into his home at night to “arrest” him. In obvious self-defense he shot two SA men. As a result, he and his sons were overcome by a larger troop of SA men and hanged in a shed in the yard that same night. The next day, the SA patrols appeared in Cöpenick, in disciplined order, entered the homes of every known Social Democrat, and killed them on the spot. The exact number of deaths was never made public.
Reading about masked men breaking down doors in the middle of the night and terrorizing an entire apartment complex, the Nazi-executed Social Democratic trade unionist is what sprung to mind.
Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist
This is the path we’re headed down—and it is paved with the skulls of the dead.
Fuck them kids.
It occurred to me that those three words perfectly sum up the priorities of Donald Trump and the soulless ghouls running his administration: RFK, Jr., Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Russ Vought, and so on. Indeed, FUCK THEM KIDS might as well be Trump’s 2028 campaign slogan.
Those three words will, I hope, be (figuratively) seared onto the forehead of every member of this MAGA Nazi administration, like Aldo Raine carving up swastikas in Inglorious Basterds.
Herd immunity means that enough people in a group or area have achieved immunity (protection) against a virus or other infectious agent to make it very difficult for the infection to spread. Immunity happens in multiple ways: through natural infection, vaccination or passive transfer. Vaccination is the best way.
Every person who has immunity makes it harder for the infection to spread to other people. If you’re vaccinated, it’ll be harder for the virus to use you to infect other people or to mutate into a new variant. Higher numbers of immune people are needed to stop the spread if a virus is very infectious.
To achieve herd immunity, studies show, 95 percent of a given population must be vaccinated. But since Trump’s first term, vax rates have been declining.
“During the 2024-2025 school year, vaccination coverage among kindergartners in the U.S. decreased for all reported vaccines from the year before,” reads a report by the CDC, “ranging from 92.1% for diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis vaccine (DTaP) to 92.5% for measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) and polio vaccine.”
Ninety-two seems like a high number—but it’s not high enough for herd immunity. In many communities, especially in rural areas and in red states, where MAGA disinformation is most effective, communities are no longer protected from the scourge of long-conquered childhood diseases.
And that was before Trump put the deranged, whale-beheading gourd husk known as RFK, Jr. in charge of the country’s public health policy.
Bobby is an antivaxxer. He’s already contributed to the 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa, where 83 people, most of them young children, died (in a country with a population of 200,000 people), when he traveled there and stoked antivax hysteria, with his prestigious Kennedy name and his noxious Kremlin talking points.
In a related story, Donald and Bobby have Made Measles Great Again. Per the CDC:
As of September 30, 2025, there have been a total of 1,544 confirmed measles cases reported in the United States. Among these, 1,523 measles cases were reported by 42 jurisdictions: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, New York State, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. A total of 21 measles cases were reported among international visitors to the U.S.
There have been 42 outbreaks reported in 2025, and 86% of confirmed cases (1,333 of 1,544) are outbreak-associated. For comparison, 16 outbreaks were reported during 2024 and 69% of cases (198 of 285) were outbreak-associated.
These outbreaks will only get worse, as the federal government continues to adopt antivax positions. South Carolina is only the latest state to have a measles outbreak.
This is a lot of data, I realize. A lot of statistics and numbers. But all you really need to know is this: In 2000, the World Health Organization declared that measles was eliminated in the United States—because of the success of the vaccines. Twenty-five years later, little children are once again dying of it.
Curtis Yarvin is the guru for a number of major political figures on the right, including Vice President Vance and tech billionaire Peter Thiel. He is hostile to democracy and holds racist views. Yarvin’s anti-democratic views demonstrate how extremist key members of the Republican Party have become.
Yale is demonstrating its commitment to free speech.
A far-right political blogger who has espoused anti-democratic views is set to debate at Yale on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Curtis Yarvin — who has sparked controversy for advocating for a form of American monarchy and for his writings on race, slavery and apartheid — is set to participate in two debates this week, one hosted by the Yale Political Union and the other by the Yale Federalist Society.
“A smart critic like Yarvin can force people to sharpen the case for their views, especially when those views have gotten sloppy over time,” Garett Jones, a professor at George Mason University who will debate Yarvin Wednesday on “for-profit governance” at the Federalist Society’s event, wrote to the News. “And the case for democracy has certainly gotten sloppy over time. Democracy’s defenders, which I count myself among, need to do a better job.”
At the YPU debate Tuesday evening, Yarvin will argue for the resolution “end the democratic experiment” against Jed Rubenfeld, a professor at Yale Law School.
Jones wrote that he believes the debate will be a helpful way to draw out distinctions between his position, which he describes as “10% less democracy” in reference to the title of his published book, and Yarvin’s, which he calls “100% less democracy.”
Neither Rubenfeld nor YPU President Brennan Columbia-Walsh ’26 responded to the News’ request for comment.
Both debate topics land on familiar turf for Yarvin, who has consistently expressed anti-democratic beliefs. Yarvin, who is also known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, has written about his distrust of the federal bureaucracy and his desire to institute a program called RAGE — retire all government employees.
Ilani Nurick LAW ’27 and Elizabeth Bailey LAW ’27, co-presidents of the Yale Law Democrats, criticized the Yale Federalist Society for sponsoring the event. Yarvin could not be reached for comment.
“We all believe strongly in free speech, but what is the Federalist Society hoping to learn from someone who thinks white people are genetically predisposed to be smarter than other races?” Nurick and Bailey wrote in a joint statement to the News. “Yale Law students are smart enough to know that for-profit governance is not the solution to the problems facing our country without hearing from Curtis Yarvin on the subject.”
Yarvin asserts that American democracy is a failed experiment and that America should instead run like a company with a chief executive officer, which The New York Times characterized as “his friendlier term for a dictator.”
In Yarvin’s view, the U.S. government should be run by a CEO-esque figure. In his 2008 articletitled “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” Yarvin proposed the “liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law, and the transfer of absolute power” to that CEO-esque figure.
Yarvin’s 2008 article furthered that this process would end the press, dismantle universities and transform the nation’s capital into a “heavily armed” version of a “corporation.”
Additionally, Yarvin has sought to downplay the outcome of the American Civil War. The Times noted that he has previously written, “It is very difficult to argue that the War of Succession made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.”
The new conditions for federal funding the Trump administrationoffered to MIT put the school in a no-win situation, people on the Cambridge campus and throughout academia said Friday: Agree to the federal government’s terms and surrender some academic freedom, or refuse and risk further punishment.
The White House’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” — sent to MIT and eight other top-tier universitiesthis week — ties access to federal moneyto a string of conditions that, if agreed to,would effectuate the most substantial changes MIT has seen to dateand fundamentally transform an economic powerhouse of Greater Boston.
The 10-point document asks the list of schools — which also includes Brown and Dartmouth — to cap international student enrollment, freeze domestic tuition rates for five years, and commit to strict definitions of gender.Some of those requests, such as reducing tuition and the number of international students, are popular with many Americans. But others, including one to limit the speech of university employees, strike at the heart of freedom and independence that universities have long prized.
While MIT declined to comment, on campus and in academia, there doesn’t appear to be much inclination to make a deal with the White House.
The offer amounts to “a loyalty oath to the federal government,” said Catherine D’Ignazio, an MIT professor of urban studies and planning.
“They’re asking us to sacrifice science. They’re asking us to sacrifice international students. They’re asking us to sacrifice our trans students. They’re asking us to sacrifice our whole idea of shared governance,” D’Ignazio said. “No amount of money is worth that great long list.”
The mandate also says that universities should transform or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” That’s troubling, said Tyler Coward lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, because it conflates allowing speech with condoning violence.
“This mandate basically forces these institutions to remain silent in order to secure some government benefit,” Coward said. “I think that is a problem, a First Amendment problem.”
MIT is the birthplace for countless startup companies, forms the backbone of Kendall Square, and serves as a first landing place for many students — roughly 30 percent of whom come from abroad — who stay and build careers in Massachusetts.
Federal money plays a key role in seeding all that. Last year, MIT collected $648 million in government funding for sponsored activities, including research, which federal agenciescould simply choose to award elsewhere.
The provisions in the compact, said Sandy Baum, a higher education finance expert with the think tank The Urban Institute, amount to “dramatic requests” of MIT from a dollars-and-cents perspective.
MIT is already bracing for a $300 million reduction in its central budget from the newfound 8 percent tax on its endowment and potential losses of federal science funding that powers much of its massive research arm, university administrators said in a September staff forum. (A recording of the meeting was reviewed by the Globe.)
In the spring, MIT saved roughly $100 million by freezing hiring and instituting a 5 percent cut to department budgets. It plans to close the remaining $200 million gap by terminating some real estate leases and seeking outside private funding for some academic priorities, including climate change, life sciences, and artificial intelligence, according to details shared at the staff forum. Administrators said that they may also withhold merit raises for employees next year.
“We do need to treat the $300 million amount as a permanent burden on the central budget that requires a permanent budgetary solution,” Glen Shor, MIT’s executive vice president and treasurer said at the September meeting. “Even if power at some point changes hands in Washington, we can’t count on these policies being reversed.”
Meanwhile, signing onto the compact could impact the number of international students at MIT, who make up around 10 percent of its undergraduate population — less than the limit set in the agreement. (Around 40 percent of MIT graduate students are from abroad.) Many international students pay full price to attend MIT, which can cost nearly $90,000 between tuition, housing, and other expenses. MIT would also pledge to cover the cost of attendance for all students studying hard sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology.
“If [MIT] had to freeze tuition and limit [the] number of international students, that would be a huge hit,” said Baum, the university finance expert.
Multiple MIT student organizations signed a letter Friday asking MIT to “firmly refuse” to sign the document, claiming that “accepting such a compact would effectively destroy the institutional culture of MIT as we know it.”
Nadia Zaragova, a material sciences PhD student and vice president of the graduate student union, said it would give the federal government “undue oversight over what we do here at the university, including our classrooms, what we study, what we research.”
And Governor Maura Healey, who has proposed $400 million in state funding to help make up for lost federal funds to Massachusetts universities, urged MIT to stand strong, describing the White House offer as “yet another attempt by President Trump to silence speech.”
MIT supporters note the university has already taken up some measures pushed by the Trump administration, including winding down its Institute Community and Equity Office and taking disciplinary actions against students — including a commencement speaker — who participate in pro-Palestinian protests.
Indeed, MIT was chosen among the schools who received the compact because they are seen as “good actors,” according to May Mailman, senior adviser for special projects at the White House.
“They have a president who is a reformer or a board that has really indicated they are committed to a higher-quality education,” she said to The Wall Street Journal.
But Ian Hutchinson, an MIT emeritus professor and co-president of its Council of Academic Freedom, said that even those in favor of those moves have sour feelings about the new offer from the administration.
“Many of us on the council think that the modern academy needs to reform and [is] beginning to do so and that the compact has the risk of alienating a large fraction of the faculty,” he said.
Others fear that some professors could leave entirely, should the school sign onto the compact.
A better approach, Hutchinson added, would be if “the government makes clear what it is interested in funding in the way of research and what it is not interested in funding.”
The compact also frames preserving “single-sex spaces” such as bathrooms and locker rooms as necessary for “women’s equality” and stipulates institutions must commit to defining gender “according to reproductive function and biological processes.”
Mila Halgren, an MIT postdoctoral associate, said including such language is an affront to what the values of American higher education should be.
“In a personal capacity, every moment MIT even considers this compact is a betrayal of every marginalized group on campus,” she said. “That MIT did not immediately reject a proposal which defines trans people out of existence is shameful.”
In the post at 9 a.m. today, two scholars of racism and equity explained that Trump’s scrubbing of museums, national parks, and other federal facilities is an attempt to capture control of the culture and erase the place of Blacks, women, and anyone else who is not a straight white male.
But, as scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig writes here, Trump and his commissariat cannot control the popular culture. In time, we can hope, his mean-spirited efforts to revise history will become a bad joke, a cruel joke, a stupid joke. He and all those who carry out his orders will become a public laughing stock.
Vasquez Heilig writes on his blog Cloaking Inequity:
The Super Bowl has always been more than football. It is a ritual, a spectacle, a national performance. It’s where America tells the world who it thinks it is, and who it wants to be. Which is why the announcement that Bad Bunny will host the halftime show is far more significant than a musical lineup change. It’s a cultural earthquake.
I remember the first time I heard Bad Bunny. It was December 6, 2019, at La Concha Hotel in San Juan. In the downstairs lounge, the beat of reggaetón was shaking the walls, and I pulled out Shazam to figure out what it was. The song was Vete. The room was electric, filled with Puerto Ricans singing every word in Spanish, unapologetically themselves. That night, it hit me: Bad Bunny was not just making music in San Juan, he was celebrating culture. He wasn’t crossing over into the mainstream by adapting; he was dragging the mainstream toward him. He refused to translate, refused to dilute, and now he is everywhere—on playlists, on charts, SNL, in crowded places from San Juan to New York to Madrid.
That’s why his Super Bowl moment matters so much. It is not just a performance, it is the culmination of a global movement that began in places like that basement lounge in Puerto Rico. What felt local then is now universal. Bad Bunny’s rise shows how culture flows upward, from the margins to the center, from overlooked communities to the biggest stage in the world. For millions of us, this is affirmation. For the right wing, it is destabilization. Because when the halftime show belongs to Bad Bunny, it proves that America is no longer just what they imagine it to be. It is bigger, louder, and more diverse than great again nostalgia can contain.
Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and the New Halftime Era
The NFL’s halftime choices haven’t shifted by accident. When the league came under fire for its treatment of Colin Kaepernick and broader criticisms about racial injustice, it needed credibility. Enter Jay-Z and Roc Nation. The NFL tapped him to advise and help curate halftime shows.
The results have been undeniable. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance last year was a watershed moment—unapologetically Black, politically charged, and culturally defining. That performance sparked widespread discussion, and even a blog post I wrote about it entitled “TV Off”: What Kendrick Lamar Was Really Saying at the Super Bowl drew more than 100,000 readers in just a few days. Clearly, the hunger to talk about representation and ownership of the halftime stage is real.
Now with Bad Bunny taking the baton, the NFL is making another cultural statement, whether it fully realizes it or not (I think it does). The league’s biggest platform is no longer reserved for the safe, predictable acts of yesterday. It’s becoming a stage where hip hop, reggaeton, and the voices of communities once marginalized are front and center.
Bad Bunny and the Right’s Panic
For decades, the halftime show was dominated by choices that reinforced a narrow image of America: classic rock icons, country stars, or pop acts who wouldn’t ruffle feathers but had wardrobe malfunctions. Bad Bunny shatters that mold. His performance won’t be a side act, it is the show. Spanish won’t be a novelty; it will be central.
This is exactly why the right wing panics. To them, football Sundays and Super Bowls have long been “their” cultural territory. They’ve wrapped the game in patriotic rituals, military flyovers, and moments of silence for conservative heroes. When someone like Bad Bunny steps into the spotlight, it disrupts their monopoly. It forces a new definition of America—one that is multilingual, multicultural, and undeniably Latino. That’s what makes his halftime role so radical: after focusing on the Black experience with Kendrick, this year signals that Latino identity is no longer peripheral. It’s woven into the fabric of America’s biggest stage.
Why ICE Wants to Loom Over the Moment
It might sound absurd that ICE wants to connect itself to the Super Bowl halftime show, but immigration enforcement has always thrived in the shadows of visibility. When Latino joy and success are celebrated so publicly, ICE apparently feels the need to remind America of its terrorizing power.
Bad Bunny performing at the Super Bowl is a triumph of belonging. But ICE’s assaults, raids, arrests, kangaroo courts, and deportations are constant reminders that belonging is conditional on politics. While millions watch a Puerto Rican superstar, ICE agents are throwing mothers and journalists to the ground, spraying pepper liquid into the eyes of Americans who dare to ask questions, arresting elected politicians at the behest of Washington politicians after turning off their body cameras, and authorized by the Supreme Court to detain people simply for looking Latino and poor.
The contradiction is sharp: on the world’s stage, Latino identity is being widely celebrated; on America’s streets, it’s criminalized. ICE doesn’t need to show up at the stadium—it already shows up in our daily life. Its existence ensures that even at moments of cultural triumph, there’s a purposeful shadow of fear and terroristic threats.
Danica Patrick’s Tone-Deaf Criticism
And then, inevitably, a silly critic emerges from the sidelines. This time it’s Danica Patrick, who dismissed Bad Bunny’s hosting role. Her comments were more than unhelpful, they were stupid.
Patrick should know better. She carved her own career by getting along in a male-dominated sport, where every step forward was a battle for representation. She knows the symbolic weight of breaking barriers. For her to turn around and mock or diminish Bad Bunny’s presence is hypocritical at best, willfully ignorant at worst.
Bad Bunny isn’t there to tick a diversity box, he’s there because he is one of the most influential artists alive— maybe THE most. The incredible success of his shows that he did for his most recent album this past summer ONLY in Puerto Rico is proof that the center of American culture is shifting. Criticizing that isn’t just a matter of taste. It’s a refusal to accept reality.
The Lions, Charlie Kirk, and Who Gets Tribute
The battle over cultural ownership in America doesn’t stop at the Super Bowl. It plays out every Sunday on the NFL field. When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the league encouraged teams to hold moments of silence in his honor. Most complied. But the Detroit Lions, along with a few other teams, did not.
That decision matters. It was a quiet but deliberate act of boundary-setting, a refusal to let every NFL broadcast become a political ritual sanctifying right-wing political ideology. By declining the tribute, the Lions reminded us that not every form of patriotism must come prepackaged with conservative allegiance. It wasn’t loud or defiant. It was subtle and deeply symbolic. Sometimes resistance isn’t what you do, it’s what you decline to perform and participate.
The Lions’ restraint connects to the same cultural realignment symbolized by Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance. Both moments reject the idea that American culture belongs to a single tribe. They push back against the notion that sports, music, or patriotism must orbit one political pole. They insist, instead, that culture belongs to everyone, not just the loudest or the angriest voices claiming to defend it.
The Double Standard of Protest
Of course, this tension between culture, power, and dissent has long been visible in the NFL. When Colin Kaepernick knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality, he was branded a traitor by many of the same voices now demanding “respect” for Charlie Kirk. His silent, dignified act of conscience was recast as an attack on America itself.
The outrage was never really about the flag. It was about control. It was about who is allowed to define what counts as “patriotic.” Kaepernick’s kneeling was an act of moral courage, but it exposed how fragile America’s cultural gatekeepers truly are when confronted with truth. They could not tolerate a protest that revealed their own comfort with injustice and brutality.
Meanwhile, state violence continues daily without the same moral outrage from the right-wing. ICE officers violently throw mothers and journalists to the ground without cause. They pepper-spray citizens in their eyeballs for daring to ask questions in a conversation. They arrest and detain American citizens in raids not for crimes but for looking poor, brown, or foreign. These acts have not provoked right-wing primetime outrage or public boycotts. Their hypocrisy is staggering.
A man kneeling quietly for justice was vilified. Agents brutalizing families are ignored. The problem has never been the method of protest, it has always been their morality. Silence in the face of injustice is acceptable; silence against injustice is not. The Lions’ quiet refusal and Kaepernick’s quiet protest share something profound: both disrupted the script of cultural obedience. Both reminded us that resistance isn’t always loud. Sometimes it’s the refusal to play along.
The Supreme Court’s Enabling Role
And looming behind all of this is the judiciary. Recent Supreme Court rulings have expanded law enforcement’s power, narrowing protections under the Fourth Amendment and giving politicians more leeway to persecute immigrants using federal data. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has been the lead in the right-wing judicial majorities that have handed law enforcement broad authority to stop, question, and detain anyone with minimal cause. Its new rulings have created the legal cover that now makes racial profiling essentially legal.
Racial profiling has happen illegally before and the new legal result empowered by the Supreme Court is the same: citizens living under suspicion, families living in fear, communities targeted not for what they’ve done but for how they look. The Supreme Court has enabled ICE brutality in the same way NFL owners enabled the blackballing of dissent, by creating structures that justify exclusion and violence while insisting neutrality.
The Bigger Picture: Who Owns the Stage?
So what do Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, Danica Patrick, ICE, the Lions, Charlie Kirk, and Brett Kavanaugh all have in common? They are all part of the “fight, fight, fight” (see new Trump $1 coin) over who gets to define American culture.
The right wing has long claimed the NFL as its territory: its rituals, its tributes, its symbols of patriotism. But culture evolves. It cannot be contained. From Detroit to San Juan to Los Angeles, new voices are shaping the narrative. Bad Bunny’s halftime show, Kendrick’s explosive performance, and even the Lions’ silent refusal all tell the same story: football does not belong exclusively to one political ideology. Neither does America.
The real question is whether we are willing to see that America’s identity is bigger than its old rituals. Are we willing to admit that inclusion is not a threat but a fact? Because culture doesn’t wait for permission. It claims the stage. And this year, that stage will belong to Bad Bunny.
Julian Vasquez Heilig is a professor, writer, and a legit lifelong Detroit Lions fan since 1981. He attended the NFC Championship in San Jose two years ago to support his Cardiac Cats and last year’s playoff loss to the Washington Commanders at Ford Field. He was also at the official Lions partners party during the NFL Draft in Detroit, where he met Robert Porcher and Jason Hanson. Over the years he’s spotted Billy Sims in Times Square, endured the heartbreak of the Lions’ 0–16 season, and treasures his personally autographed Barry Sanders helmet. Beyond education and equity, Julian dabbles in writing about sports, culture, and society.
Two scholars–Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley–explain why Trump is censoring exhibits at the Smithsonian. He has also imposed censorship of signage and exhibits at other federal sites, including national parks. He has enlisted the U.S. Department of Educatuon to organize rightwing groups to create a “patriotic” civics course.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues
Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future
Trump and his far-right cabal are l trying to revise history and memory. Unless he abolishes or rigs future elections, all this tinhorn fascist censorship will be swept away by his successors. He will rightly be judged, when that day comes, as the closest thing this country has ever seen to having a dictator. He will be portrayed in the Smithsonian and the textbooks as a buffoon and a tyrant.
In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12 August, the Trump administration announced its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive” or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and “constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project. Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights racist voter suppression measures, among others.
The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every day. The federal occupation of Washington DC, the crackdown on free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents, the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack on American museums, education and memory, along with his weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial conditions of possibility.
Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on the construction of a mythic past. The mythic past is central to fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on democracy.
From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed, as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a kind of treason.
The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact, the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.
It is no coincidence that this ‘proper’ ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism
It is clear that the Trump administration understands this relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban “improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a human invention”.
The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?
The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project. A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.
Diane Ravitch's blog 