In 1991 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was rocked to its core and settled on a trajectory that over 40 years later is causing reverberations around the world. The cataclysmic event did not come from within China, in fact its reverberations materially benefited China significantly, but in closed party circles it was viewed as the herald of something existential. This was the collapse of the Soviet Union, a government the CCP considered its “principal contradiction” ^[1]. That begs the question of why would the collapse of what the CCP considered its “principal contradiction” be treated as a near-death experience? The dissolution of the Soviet state was perceived by the party elite as a harbinger of what was to come for them if they did not act quickly. The party promptly embarked on what very well may be the longest political autopsy in history. From 1993 to 2004 the Soviet dissolution was dissected and studied, culminating in the Party charting a course that metamorphosed the Chinese state into the 21st century’s archetype of Fascism. 

The Change in Course

The 1993 to 2004 period was a task of immense strategic significance as the party sought to understand what caused the Soviet Union to collapse and how a similar fate could be avoided by the CCP. This was an effort that brought the bulk of the Chinese institutions to bear and resulted in the development of two major schools of thought, The Ideological Betrayal and the Structural Realists. The Structural Realists paid attention to fundamental issues with the Soviet system. Things like overcentralization, failure of economic institutional reform, and the brittleness of the centralized decision making apparatus were what they focused on in their root-cause analysis ^[2]. The Structural Realist school of thought identified problems that the solutions necessitated diffusion of state power. This reality in their analysis and the scope of their prescriptions shifted influence to the other major school of thought, The Ideological Betrayal. That the Soviet collapse was not due to the structural deficiencies of single party authoritarianism, but from its leaders' betrayal of ideological purity and corrupting the system from within. 

The Ideological Betrayal stipulated that each Soviet leader since Khrushchev had progressively bleed-off Marxist-Leninist principles which dismantled the very foundations of the system. Li Shenming described the relationship between ideological purity and success as follows: 

“The painful lessons of the Soviet Union show that firm ideals and beliefs are of great significance to a Marxist party and to a socialist state. In a certain sense, whether the ideals and beliefs are firm or not is directly related to the life and death of the party and the state, and we must consistently uphold and strengthen the party’s ideals and beliefs education. Ideals and beliefs are the political soul and spiritual pillar of Communists, and the ideological guarantee for overcoming all difficulties and securing all achievements” /^[3].

The failure of the leadership from this school of thought extended to safeguarding its mythology. The idea of "Historical Nihilism” emerged as the practice of current leadership repudiating past leadership and narratives. The allowance of the media and the public to question party narratives starting with Khrushchev and exacerbated by Gorbachev was seen as a fatal error by leadership ^[4]. In more recent times this fear of "Historical Nihilism" has manifested itself with actions like the 2018 law which “criticizing revolutionary heroes and martyrs illegal” ^[5]. The final betrayal culminated in the leadership losing touch with the people through their corruption. This is also viewed as a post Stalin problem and stipulates that the party “had disengaged from the people and indulged in formalism, bureaucracy, hedonism, and extravagance, which corrupted party conduct, the political climate, and social morality, and ultimately led the party to be abandoned by its people” ^[6]. Also key to the Ideological Betrayal school of thought is that of a western “Fifth Column” that through cultural exchanges, economic activities, and personnel exchanges subversive ideas and culture were planted and sustained up to the highest levels of government. This idea is so pervasive it is a common belief in academic circles that Gorbachev was a product of United States “Fifth Column” operations ^[3]. The prescription precipitating from this school of thought is that the system was not the problem, it must be preserved and ideological purity must be enforced at all costs.

What makes the simplistic and puritanical Ideological Betrayal school of thought so intriguing is that it was not done in a vacuum. The Structural Realists were not the only alternative being explored in the 1990s, at senior party levels there was serious interest in exploring a pluralist Westernized social democracy. Trusted foreigners, such as Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, were allowed to participate in secretive studies to see if the party could survive liberalizing instead of calculating in a single-party system ^[7]. These studies were always kept small in scope and were never allowed to enter open debate. What little possibility this initiative had on growing ended in 2004 with the Central Committee’s Decision on Strengthening the Party’s Governing Capacity. The policy document doubled down on single party rule and focused on purging corruption from the party, ideological cohesion, and building trust with the people ^[8]. The hard pivot in the early 2000s ended the more open experimentation of the 1990s and the more simplistic and less self-reflective path of the single party absolutists became the only frame from which to view China’s future. Dr. Martin Dimitrov in 2023 commented on the termination of other schools of thought with the following: 

“The end of communist rule in the Soviet Union is seen as a single case that has a single explanation. The complexity of a historical phenomenon has been reduced so that a clear message about the lessons to be drawn from it can be transmitted to domestic audiences.” ^[9].

The deliberateness of this direction cannot be overstated. The 2004 declaration marked an official "closing of doors” on self-reflection and reform. It served as a reshuffling of priorities so that all actions are subordinated to the survival of the party. The decision to simplify the failures of the Soviet Union and to infantilize its corrections meant a shift from building communism to preserving the party-state. 

The Foundations of Fascism

Fascism at its simplest, stripped down to its core, is the absolute supremacy of the State. The individual only exists insomuch as they align to the interests of the state. Mussolini and Gentile’s The Doctrine of Fascism they outline that supremacy as follows:

“The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people” ^[10]. 

The State, in the Fascist world view, is what creates the nation and imbues it with a political, moral and spiritual unity. Xi Jinping’s model and vision of China embodies this essentialization of the State. Xi seeks “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, to, through totalitarian control of the state, restore the nation to its central role in world affairs it had held for “five thousand years of continuous history” ^[7]. This vision of the Chinese nation, the Zhonghua Minzu, is a state manufactured construct to subsume all ethnic, cultural, and individual identities into a monolithic Zhonghua Minzu. 

On the front of rejuvenation Mussolini describes that the “... Fascist doctrine is that best suited to the tendencies and feelings of a people which, like the Italian, after lying fallow during centuries of foreign servitude, are now reasserting itself in the world” ^[10]. The mythos of China’s "Century of Humiliation” is used to create a need for a resurgence, or a rebirth. Roger Griffin describes this as “palingenetic ultranationalism”, the idea that the enforcement of “... a homogeneous national identity within a reborn national community and integrated national culture, wipe away decadence and weakness however it is conceived, and make the nation or race “strong” again by marginalizing, excluding or exterminating those forces alleged to be undermining national, ethnic, or racial strength” ^[11]. Under Xi, the Great Rejuvenation, the Century of Humiliation, and the sacred reunification of Taiwan is palingenetic ultranationalism, even as Marxist-Leninist vocabulary is retained as institutional scaffolding. The 2018 constitutional amendment embedding CCP leadership as the “most essential feature” of Chinese socialism completed this doctrinal migration. The Party no longer exists to build communism, it exists to achieve national rebirth.

The anomaly of self-proclaimed Marxist-Lenninists displaying Fascist attributes can be a confusing concept but that is true of all Fascist ideologies. They are extremely unique and depend on their “host” nation’s existing mythologies and proclivities. In Umberto Eco’s essay Ur-Fascism he describes 20th century Italian Fascism as follows: 

“Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones” ^[12]. 

He further goes on to describe it as “philosophically out of joint”. Fascism, per eco, is not a strict orthodoxy, but exists as a “family of resemblances". The CCP merger of dialectical materialism and a Confusian hierarchy while deploying cutting edge AI surveillance networks to enforce entho-nationalist blood myths encapsulates the Fascist syncretic collage Eco describes. What Umberto Eco is most known for is his “14 traits” to describe Fascism. These traits are caveated by Eco as a list of features that are typical for things that fit the Fascist “family of ideas”. He further clarifies that these “... features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it” ^[12]. What is distinguishing about the CCP is it clearly exhibits all 14 of Eco’s fascistic features.

The Seduction of the Short Victorious War

War Aims Without Strategy

On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve is often credited, perhaps apocryphally, with the assertion that Russia required “a short victorious war,” a phrase that captures the enduring temptation to treat conflict as a mechanism for political consolidation rather than a problem of strategic design ^[1]. The ensuing war exposed administrative fragility and strategic errors, culminating in Russia’s defeat and the upheavals that produced the First Russian Revolution. The desire for a brief, quick conflict has surfaced repeatedly throughout the history of war and warfare, from Sphacteria and the Sicilian Expedition to Napoleon and his Hundred Days to Nasiriyah and the fall of Baghdad, where initial battlefield success obscured the absence of a viable postwar order. The current American and Israeli campaign against Iran appears to reflect a similar logic, and risks concealing a more consequential ambiguity regarding its political purpose, where operational achievement is mistaken for strategic coherence even as the mechanisms linking military action to lasting outcomes remain uncertain ^[2]. 

American and Israeli officials have articulated a cluster of objectives that include the destruction of nuclear infrastructure, the degradation of missile capabilities, the destruction of Iran’s conventional military capabilities, and in more oblique terms, the inducement of regime change or transformation. Yet these aims correspond to distinct and often incompatible strategic logics. Coercion presumes the availability of calibrated force and credible off-ramps. Containment requires sustained pressure without escalation beyond defined thresholds. Regime change, by contrast, entails prolonged engagement and the willingness to assume responsibility for political succession. Reporting and analysis from various institutions ^[3][4]underscore that these frameworks are not merely different in degree but divergent in kind. Their simultaneous invocation suggests not a layered strategy but an accumulation of aspirations that resist operational coherence.

​

This disjunction is further compounded by inconsistencies in public justification and operational emphasis. Statements attributed to Donald Trump ^[5] and senior officials oscillate between claims of imminent threat, assertions of preemptive necessity, and suggestions of political transformation within Iran. On the battlefield, these ambiguities manifest in differentiated targeting patterns between the United States and Israel, with the latter prioritizing leadership decapitation and the former concentrating on infrastructure and military assets. The result is a coalition effort that appears synchronized at the tactical and operational level yet disaggregated at the strategic one. As experts and scholars have noted, wars rarely founder solely on battlefield reversals ^[6]; they more often deteriorate when political objectives remain indeterminate or internally contradictory. In this case, the aspiration for a rapid and decisive outcome coexists uneasily with the absence of a clearly articulated end state, producing a campaign that advances kinetically while drifting conceptually.

The evolution of targeting priorities throughout the conflict further illustrates the absence of a stable objective hierarchy. Initial strikes focused on senior leadership and regime nodes, actions consistent with a decapitation framework that implies either coercive bargaining through shock or a more ambitious attempt at political rupture. Within weeks, however, attention shifted toward the security of the Strait of Hormuz and the management of escalation pathways tied to global energy flows ^[7]. Such a shift is not inherently irrational, but does suggest that strategic direction is being revised under the pressure of unfolding events rather than executed according to a preexisting design. Analyses suggest that when objectives migrate in this manner, the relationship between means and ends becomes increasingly tenuous ^[8].

U.S. Military Posture 

Force Deployment and Strategic Ambiguity

To add to this is the evolving American military posture, which reveals a pattern that is at once substantial in appearance but almost ambiguous in purpose. Current reporting ^[9]indicates the deployment of elements  ^[10] (either one or two brigades) from the 82nd Airborne Division ^[11], yet the scale and composition of these forces do not correspond to any coherent invasion framework. The configuration suggests a hybrid posture calibrated for deterrence and contingency response without committing to a definitive operational trajectory. The result is a force that conveys capability without clarifying intent, an arrangement that may deter adversaries in the short term while simultaneously obscuring the political logic guiding its employment.

Parallel to this ground posture is the deployment of amphibious/expeditionary forces from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit ^[12] and 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit ^[13], embarked within two Amphibious Ready Groups one of which reached the region on 29 March. These formations, doctrinally structured as air-ground-task forces ^[14], are optimized for rapid crisis response, limited objective raids, and noncombatant evacuation operations. They are not on their own, configured for sustained ground combat against a state of Iran’s size and complexity. Their presence thus reinforces the impression of a force designed for flexibility rather than decisiveness, capable of reacting to escalation but ill-suited to impose a terminal military outcome. In this sense, the deployment underscores the broader theme of a campaign oriented toward immediacy rather than culmination.

More revealing are the absences within the American force posture. There is no visible concentration of heavy armored formations, no substantial logistical infrastructure for prolonged land operations, and limited evidence of specialized capabilities required to secure maritime chokepoints under contested conditions, such as robust mine countermeasures forces. These omissions are not incidental. They delimit the range of feasible military options and, by extension, the political objectives that can be credibly pursued. A strategy that contemplates regime transformation or the permanent neutralization of Iran’s military capacity would necessitate a different constellation of forces, one oriented toward occupation, stabilization, and sustained control. The current posture, by contrast, appears designed to avoid precisely those commitments.

At the operational level, the tempo of strikes and the reliance on standoff munitions and air defense interceptors introduce a further layer of constraint ^[15]. High expenditure rates, particularly in precision-guided munitions, impose logistical and industrial pressures that are difficult to sustain over extended periods without corresponding strategic gains. And while there are signs that the US and Israel have moved to utilizing stand-in weapons ^[16] munitions of which there are plenty, the dynamic produces a paradox in which the United States possesses the capacity to inflict significant damage yet lacks a clear mechanism to translate that damage into durable political outcomes.

 Iran’s Strategy 

Defeating the Short War

Rather than contesting the United States and Israel in a symmetrical contest of attrition or maneuver, Tehran has structured its response around endurance and dispersion. Iran has unquestionably suffered numerous tactical setbacks, from the killing of its supreme leader Ali Khamenei ^[17] to the destruction of hundreds of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders and infrastructure ^[18][19]. In spite of these blows, Iran’s operational logic is not calibrated restraint but controlled escalation, in which pressure is applied across multiple domains without inviting a singular conclusive confrontation. This approach transforms vulnerability into a strategic asset by elongating the conflict’s timeline and diffusing the locus of decision, thereby undermining any expectation of a swift resolution imposed from above.

The most visible manifestation of this strategy lies in Iran’s sustained missile and drone campaigns, which operate less as instruments of decisive destruction than as mechanisms of persistent disruption. Data compiled by the Institute for the Study of War details strikes against Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman, as well as at US bases in the region ^[20][21][22]. They illustrate a pattern of regularized, distributed attacks that impose continuous defensive costs while preserving Iran’s own operational depth. These systems ^[23], relatively inexpensive and scalable, enable Tehran to maintain pressure across a broad geographic arc without committing to escalation pathways that would expose it to overwhelming retaliation. In effect, the battlefield stretches outward, converting discrete engagements into an ongoing state of insecurity.

Equally consequential is Iran’s reliance on an asymmetric toolkit that extends beyond its immediate territorial boundaries. Proxy networks and aligned non-state actors introduce additional vectors of pressure, as seen in Houthi missile launches and other regionally dispersed actions in Iraq and Lebanon ^[24][25][26]. These actors function not merely as auxiliaries but as force multipliers, complicating attribution and diluting the coherence of any retaliatory strategy directed at Iran itself. Maritime harassment and infrastructure targeting of regional assets further reinforce this architecture, creating a layered system of deterrence that operates through ambiguity and redundancy rather than concentration.

Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz and targeting of energy infrastructure exploit what analysts describe as “easy targets” across the Gulf and introduce a persistent threat environment that resists easy containment ^[27]. In this context, victory is not defined by territorial control or battlefield dominance but by denying the opposing coalition of a decisive outcome. Iran does not need to prevail in conventional terms; it needs only ensure that the conflict cannot be concluded on the terms sought by its adversaries, thereby converting their pursuit of a short war into an extended exercise in strategic exhaustion.

The emergence of energy warfare situates the Strait of Hormuz as the principal center of gravity, not merely in a regional sense but within the architecture of the global economy. Roughly one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil transits this narrow corridor, rendering it less a geographic feature than a systemic hinge upon which industrial output, commodity pricing, and financial stability precariously depend ^[28]. Modeling by institutions such as the Kiel Institute and Yale’s Budget Lab indicates that even partial disruption induces cascading effects that extend well beyond hydrocarbons into food supply chains, manufacturing inputs, and sovereign debt markets ^[29][30][31]. In this sense, the operational environment has undergone a quiet but consequential transformation, shifting from contests over territory to contests over interconnected systems whose fragility magnifies the strategic utility of limited acts of disruption.

The Wages of Destruction

Asymmetric Pressure and the Limits of Resolve

Iran’s approach reflects an acute awareness of this systemic vulnerability, privileging leverage over decisive confrontation. Rather than seeking to contest air or maritime superiority in conventional terms, Tehran has cultivated an escalatory repertoire centered on deniability and dispersion. Reporting and analysis emphasize the extent to which infrastructure nodes such as tanker traffic, desalination facilities, and export terminals constitute accessible pressure points ^[32]. This strategy evokes the tanker war of the 1980s, yet it operates within a far more interdependent economic order in which localized disruption radiates outward with disproportionate intensity. The implication is stark. Iran does not need secure battlefield dominance but only to render the global system sufficiently unstable that the pursuit of a short and decisive war becomes economically and politically untenable for its adversaries.

Notably, the regional response to the conflict reveals not a cohesive coalition but rather a set of actors navigating distinct, often competing risk calculations. The Gulf states, while aligned in their concern over Iranian power, remain acutely exposed to retaliation against critical infrastructure, particularly energy facilities and desalination systems that sustain urban populations ^[33]. This vulnerability constrains their willingness to fully endorse or materially support an expansive campaign, even as they quietly benefit from efforts to degrade Iranian capabilities ^[34][35]. The result is a form of strategic hedging in which public alignment is tempered by private caution, reflecting an understanding that escalation could impose disproportionate costs on states whose economic and social stability rests on uninterrupted flows of energy and water.

Domestically, the political dynamic has both shaped and constrained the conduct of the war, producing a tension between rhetorical ambition and material commitment. Polling data from Ipsos, conducted in partnership with the Quincy Institute, indicates that even among core Republican constituencies, support for sustained military escalation remains qualified rather than emphatic, suggesting that the political foundation for a protracted campaign is neither deep nor stable ^[36]. Within this environment, Donald Trump has advanced a narrative that gestures toward decisive action while avoiding explicit articulation of the costs and duration such action would entail. The result is a political discourse that privileges immediacy and perceived strength, while deferring the more difficult task of defining an attainable and durable end state.

What Is the War Supposed to Achieve? 

Strategic Purpose and the Illusion of Control

This ambiguity is compounded by a persistent civil-military disjunction in which political leaders articulate expansive aims that exceed the practical reach of the instruments employed ^[37]. The expectation of a rapid and contained operation reflects not only strategic calculation but also domestic incentive structures that reward the appearance of control without requiring the acknowledgment of risk. Yet military operations, particularly against a state capable of layered and asymmetric response, resist such compression. The attempt to reconcile public aversion to prolonged conflict with the pursuit of consequential strategic outcomes yields a policy that is neither fully restrained nor fully committed.

At a minimum, the United States seeks to arrest or degrade Iran’s nuclear program, reinforce a regional deterrent posture, and preserve the uninterrupted flow of energy through critical maritime corridors. Yet the operationalization of these aims through sustained air and missile strikes raises a persistent question: can such instruments secure durable political outcomes or merely impose transient constraints? While kinetic action can disrupt facilities and impose costs, it rarely produces compliance absent a broader political architecture. Competing interpretations sharpen this ambiguity, with the Cato Institute framing the campaign as strategically incoherent, while the Heritage Foundation advances a more affirmative, though possibly delusional, reading of its coercive efficacy ^[38][39]. The divergence is not merely ideological but diagnostic, reflecting fundamentally different assessments of what military force can plausibly accomplish against a state structured for resilience and retaliation.

The reliance on airpower as the principal instrument of coercion reveals a deeper paradox at the center of the campaign. Precision strikes, however tactically effective, operate within a bounded logic that privileges degradation over transformation, attrition over resolution. They can delay enrichment, degrade delivery systems, and signal resolve, yet they do not, in isolation, furnish a mechanism for altering the strategic calculus of the Iranian state. This disjunction between means and ends produces a condition in which military activity accumulates without necessarily converging on a coherent political settlement. As observers have noted, the campaign risks becoming an exercise in iterative escalation rather than decisive action, particularly in the absence of a clearly articulated end state or negotiated off-ramp ^[40]. The result is a war designed, at least rhetorically, for brevity, yet structured in practice for duration, as each successive strike extends rather than resolves the underlying strategic 

Conclusion 

The persistence of the “short victorious war” as a governing assumption in Washington and Jerusalem reflects less a misreading of battlefield capability than a recurrent failure to align political purpose with operational design. Despite early successes in degrading selected targets, the absence of a coherent end state has produced a campaign characterized by sequential improvisation rather than cumulative strategy, a pattern long identified in civil-military scholarship and underscored by recent history. The expectation that concentrated force can compel rapid behavioral change in Tehran rests on a questionable premise, namely that the adversary shares the same temporal logic or sensitivity to escalation costs.

Yet Iran’s conduct suggests an opposing theory of conflict, one that privileges endurance and systemic disruption over decisive engagement. In this context, the war’s trajectory is shaped not by the efficiency of strikes but by the widening gap between intended outcomes and feasible instruments, a divergence that converts what was conceived as a limited operation into an open-ended contest of leverage and political will.

How resignations are expanding the map

This April, Digital Ground Game is using our monthly Midterms Report to shine a light on some promising districts whose incumbents are among the growing number of retiring Republicans.

With polls worsening for republicans, many elected officials are determining that their midterm prospects are insurmountable and would rather retire than risk defeat. The loss of incumbent advantage, in addition to the trends of democratic swings in special elections, brings many previously ignored congressional districts into potential viability. 

The sheer number of races in the midterms can be overwhelming for the casual observer, so we want to present some interesting races to watch that have been affected by a retiring Republican incumbent. While the likelihood of the Democratic candidate winning in these districts varies, they all have a feasible pathway to victory and will be worth monitoring this election season. 

Montana 1

While much of the reporting on this race is fairly negative, recent moves by state officials, paired with new polling, suggest a much less certain outlook for Republicans. Incumbent congressman Ryan Zinke announced at the beginning of March that he would be retiring in order to address injuries he sustained during his time as a Navy Seal ^[1], but some political experts suspect internal polling contributed to the decision ^[2]. Following Zinke’s retirement press release, his former state director and ‘Montana Talks’ radio host, Aaron Flint, announced he would be running for the seat. This move led to a swift circling of the Republican wagons, from state congressmen to Trump himself, endorsing Flint for the role ^[3]. 

Montana 1’s population is generally fairly red, with Democrats not having seen a win in the district since the mid 90’s: however, it’s first congressional district contains some notable bluer population centers like Missoula and Bozeman, leading to much closer races. During the 2022 congressional race, the democratic candidate, Monica Tranel, lost to Zinke by less than a ten thousand vote margin ^[4]. Considering the sizable leftward swings we are seeing in special election trends, it isn't unreasonable to conclude that this seat is within reach, given some coaxing from the Democratic Party.  

With primaries looming at the beginning of June, the roster of Democratic candidates looks quite promising.

U.S. Army veteran Matt Rains continues his family’s long history of ranching in Montana and  even opened the first rancher owned meat packaging co-op; Rains wants to enter Congress with a focus on strengthening veterans’ rights, protecting public lands, and expanding rural infrastructure ^[5].

After his time in the Navy, Russell Cleveland has had a wide variety of careers from banking to building multi-family affordable housing, to helping launch a universal pre-k program; driven by his late daughter, Cleveland takes a more progressive platform around Medicare for all and touts the fact he doesn't take corporate PAC money noting that he is “loyal to the people not a party” ^[6].

Despite his loss in the governor's race, former firearms executive Ryan Busse’s name recognition could prove useful in his run for this seat; Busse takes an aggressive stance against big business meddling in Montana’s public lands and has notably been one of the most directly outspoken about incumbent Ryan Zinke’s time in Congress ^[7].

While this race is still considered a long shot, the coalescing of events occurring here leads us to see it as an underdog with a navigable path to victory given a savvy candidate and a little luck.  If you prefer a less optimistic view, in the worst case scenario, Montana 1 is a low investment race that forces the GOP to spend more than they otherwise would to hold a seat in one of their “safe” states.

Texas 23

Keeping up with this race has been chaotic and nothing if not entertaining, but hiding beneath the scandals and headlines lies an underappreciated shot at a seat. After the reveal of his affair with a staffer that ended in her suicide, incumbent Tony Gonzales finally announced he would be dropping out of the race. The process of getting Gonzales to this announcement was anything but simple, his participation in the republican primary ended in the need for a run-off election, which had already occurred before congressional leadership expediting an ethics investigation appeared to push the sitting representative over the edge ^[8]. The remaining GOP candidate, gun YouTuber Brandon Herrera, released a statement thanking Gonzales for “making the appropriate decision”. Despite republican sighs of relief at the long overdue resignation, a recent DCCC press release delightedly highlights the over half a million dollars invested into Gonzales’s primary campaign ^[9]. While Herrera received less funding from the GOP so far, his notoriety as a YouTuber has largely made up for this as his donations have vastly outpaced his democratic party counterpart. Incoming stories to watch team Herrera’s response to are the controversies surrounding multiple resurfacing videos of the candidate; while the severity of these videos varies, whether or not democrats can effectively raise the salience of these issues with voters could turn out to be a real factor in this race^[10].

Texas 23 has become notably more challenging, having been redistricted to be redder since its most recent Democratic win in 2012, when it was considered a purple district. The trends in the margin of victory here are certainly daunting, as they seem to double in vote count each election since 2018, but the recent primaries ahead of this year’s midterm race saw Democrats with a lead of about 10,000 votes ^[11]. The scandals surrounding Republicans of Texas 23, in addition to the population hubs of suburban San Antonio and El Paso, the path to victory here could just be energizing the base. 

The democratic nominee for this race is deceptively strong and hasn't been getting nearly the credit she should be if we want to put her strengths as a candidate to full effect. Katy Padilla Stout came from humble beginnings in a single parent household. She began her professional career as a teacher, later returning to school to earn her law degree, which she now uses to advocate for children and families at her family law firm. Padilla Stout’s policy platform is reasonably pragmatic and largely stems from her strong family values as a mother of four. Her gun policies are likely to be attacked by Herrera once the race really kicks off but the reality of them is quite moderate. Her strong message around family combined with her reasonable  policy line has a good chance to win back the large Latino population in the district. ^[12]

Texas 23 is a race that will require more investment than has been offered so far if we want to win it but this is by no means a lost cause. Herrera is something of a chaos agent in this race as many elements of his biography could turn out to be either a major boon or an iceberg waiting to sink his campaign. Representative Gonzales’ popularity within the district is something many credit to his position as a more moderate voice in the republican party ^[13], assuming that holds true this fall, Katy Padilla Stout may be the more appealing candidate to many.

California 48 

California’s 48th is one of the districts more aggressively altered by the Prop 50 ballot measure passed last fall to counter Texas’s redistricting ^[14]. Although he previously asserted he would be running to retain his seat, Republican incumbent Darrell Issa seemingly had a change of heart, announcing shortly after the registration deadline that he wouldn't be running ^[15]. Representative Issa has a sizable history in elected office, but notably announced his retirement before the 2018 blue wave when it seemed clear he would lose his seat. Since his return Issa has been seemingly uninterested in running outside of safe seats ^[16]; with this pattern in mind, his heel turn announcing retirement isn't exactly shocking. The replacement candidate now holding Issa’s endorsement is San Diego County supervisor Jim Desmond ^[17]. While Desmond has some degree of name recognition due to his previous public office positions, it's unclear to what degree that will help his race in Cal 48 this fall.

The changes to the district as a result of Prop 50 are leading many to feel optimistic about California 48; a two pronged approach was taken, cutting out some of the more rural areas in the southwest while expanding north in order to include more portions of San Diego and Palm Springs ^[18]. The inclusion of more urban areas within the district makes it an even more appealing and cost effective choice for canvassing. For those interested, we’ll include a link to a slider map that shows the changes made by Prop 50 ^[19].

While California’s primary system consists of a non-partisan free for all where the top two candidates, regardless of affiliation, move on to the general election. District 48’s makeup makes the event of a double democrat general unlikely. With the early June primary approaching, it’ll be important to get a feel for the democratic roster on offer here.

Former Obama administration official and the current democratic front runner in the polls, Ammar Campa-Najjar, has decent local name recognition and an impressive resume working in government and as a U.S. Navy Reserve officer; His policy platform is mostly the standard democratic party line with some emphasis on supporting veterans, but his website isn't overly specific about his plans in Congress ^[20].

As a highly educated, trained economist, Brandon Riker touts his credentials as something underrepresented in a congressional body oversaturated with lawyers; with a Ro Khanna endorsement combined with his career history, it’s no surprise that Riker’s policy line takes a progressive flavor with an economic focus, and the ‘issues’ tab of his campaign website is quite detailed ^[21].

San Diego City councilmember and attorney, Marni von Wilpert’s experience in policy writing specifically serves as a strong resume for a congressional run; found on her campaign site is a list of the ordinances and projects von Wilpert has worked on in city council and a plan to bring similar ideas to Congress ^[22].

The major changes made to California’s 48th last fall have made us quite optimistic about the chances of this being a relatively simple democratic pickup. The primary candidates on offer allow the district’s voters choices that span the Democratic Party’s ideological spectrum, all of whom are eminently qualified for the role, and the Republicans clearly recognize that as a threat to their hold over the seat.

Nebraska 2

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska’s second district, in many ways, could be called a man left behind by his party; although his public image isn't especially antagonistic to the Trump administration, his legislative record shows a man grasping tightly to many pre-MAGA conservative ideals. The press release announcing Bacon’s retirement last June ^[23] was a bog-standard “I’ve served long enough” line but the increasing pressure applied to those who buck the administration, paired with a worsening chance of retaining his seat, couldn't have made staying in the race appealing. The lone Republican now vying to fill the seat is Omaha city council VP Brinker Harding, who appears to be running on a fairly hard line immigration message ^[24]. Harding has the endorsement of Rep. Bacon, but it seems unlikely such a message will really resonate with the people of Nebraska’s “blue dot” district.

It’s no surprise that Nebraska 2 is the state’s “blue dot”, with a population distribution of nearly 98% urban residents ^[25]. While Rep. Bacon has held the district as a moderate republican since 2018, NE 2 otherwise votes democrat by around a 3 point margin. The thrust of the population comes from the inclusion of the majority of the Omaha Council Bluffs metropolitan area. Although Digital Ground Game isn't currently planning one, the heavily urban nature of the district makes Nebraska 2 a strong choice for a canvassing operation.

The increasing prospect of a blue wave and Don Bacon finally stepping down has resulted in a chumming effect, creating a democratic primary race saturated with candidates ^[26]. Although they all certainly have much to offer, for the sake of readability, I’m keeping our candidate roundup to the 3 frontrunners consistently shown in the polls^[27].

Front runner and Nebraska state legislator, John Cavanaugh has a record in state congress to run on and a masters degree in environmental policy to back up his expertise; Cavanaugh is running on the “affordability” playbook that's been popular recently but in his ‘issues’ tab (labeled “fighting for the next gen” on his site) he gets into much more specific plans than I've seen other candidates present while running this strategy ^[28]. It’s unclear whether this will be a factor, but his father served as the representative for NE 2 in the 70s and 80s, which could support his bona fides given his  history in the district.

Boasting 20 years of public service primarily in elected offices, Crystal Rhoades is the more progressive option on the democratic roster; Rhoades lists her accomplishments in previous offices with an intention to bring similar aims to the U.S. Congress, she’s confident in her ability to operate with the establishment as necessary without relying on them ^[29].

Fed up with corporate America, former communications and PR executive Denise Powell returned home to Nebraska, determined to make a difference for everyday Americans. Powell co-founded Women Who Run Nebraska, a non-profit that recruits and supports women who run for office in Nebraska. Her website displays an extensive policy platform that comes across as pragmatic but determined to push back against the Trump administration ^[30].

Nebraska 2 is the district on our list most likely to flip to democrats by a landslide. The constituents’ existing proclivity for the Democratic Party, despite holding on to Don Bacon, makes it a pretty extreme uphill battle for Brinker Harding, the republican candidate. Adding to the existing circumstances, the extreme clustering of the district’s population make it an easy target for canvassing groups to give the race an extra push to err on the side of caution.

Closing Thoughts and Call to Action

Hopefully, we at the digital ground game research team have given you some new races to watch. We will be holding a fundraising stream with Destiny on April 10th from 1pm to 9pm EST So, be sure to tune in. If you are interested in helping out to fight back in these midterms visit our website and join our Discord, where you’ll be able to see upcoming events in your area. Keep an eye out for future midterm reports as we plan to provide exciting event updates in future editions.

Ever since Linda McMahon entered the ring as the US Department of Education (Department) Secretary, it has been exceedingly clear that the Department was on the chopping block. With little knowledge of the education sphere, including fumbling the name of the key special education legislation on national television^[1], Secretary McMahon could do little else but follow through on the Project 2025 agenda on public education. This means the organization that enforces civil rights laws in schools, manages student loans, provides funding to school districts, organizes nationwide data collection, and more is barely functioning. Moreover, this is the goal of the administration.

Impact

What began as rhetoric quickly translated into structural change. Staffing reductions hollowed out key offices within the Department, particularly those responsible for oversight, research, and civil rights enforcement. When experienced personnel are removed, institutional knowledge disappears with them. These cuts do not simply make the Department smaller; they make it less functional.^[2] 

In particular, cuts to the Office for Civil Rights have historically resulted in large caseloads and delays, leaving discrimination complaints unresolved for extended periods.^[3] Many cases are being dismissed outright with little explanation ^[2]. Although pet cases from the Trump administration get addressed, cases of racial discrimination go unanswered. In particular, one school found liable for discrimination and harassment of Black students hasn’t heard back from the Department on their remediation plan ^[4]. As staffing shrinks, processes slow down, backlogs grow, and responsiveness declines. Schools and districts that once relied on timely federal guidance are left to interpret complex legal requirements on their own, and some states are going to try to pick up the slack ^[5]. When that enforcement capacity weakens, complaints are delayed or left unresolved, and schools receive less oversight. This creates inconsistency in how laws are applied, despite the fact that these protections are rooted in major federal statutes like Title VI, Title IX, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ^[6]. If there is no clear enforcement of these statutes, are students in schools really protected?

Once these waves of staffing changes came through, next came funding disruptions of both grant funding and monies for local school districts. Grants serving a variety of needs, from recruiting and retaining school mental health professionals ^[7], programming for school staff to learn more about deaf-blind students ^[8], to research on helping students with disabilities plan for life after graduation ^[9], were gutted. These grants left holes in service delivery for students across the country. In terms of regular school funding, the federal government provides a relatively small share of overall funding but plays a targeted role in supporting low-income students, students with disabilities, and under-resourced districts ^[10]. These funds are designed specifically to reduce inequities—meaning disruptions or mismanagement disproportionately affect the most vulnerable students. In 2025, these funds were withheld from districts, causing mayhem as they had to predict whether the funding would come or if they would have to cut staff ^[11]. Some school districts had already begun to serve students before the funds were disbursed. The chaos these funding disruptions have caused can’t be understated for many already cash-strapped districts. 

Data collection, often overlooked, is another casualty. The Department oversees large-scale national datasets, including the Civil Rights Data Collection, which tracks access to courses, discipline, and school resources across the country ^[12]. Impacts of cuts in these areas may not be felt until this year and the next. Many of these data collection systems collect data in one year and release results in the next, creating a lagging effect. For example, the National Assessment of Educational Progress measures nationwide reading and math outcomes, a key metric to understand how education policy is working or not working. They now run on a skeleton crew of three staff members who are responsible for developing and evaluating national tests and data ^[13]. Conveniently, this difficulty in data collection and analysis comes at a time when educators hypothesize that these federal level decisions will negatively impact student outcomes. Without consistent data, it becomes significantly harder to identify inequities or evaluate whether policies are working.

Redistribution

As the Department’s capacity shrinks, its responsibilities are being redistributed to other organizations. This creates fractured service delivery, loss of institutional knowledge, and staff strain across organizations. Project 2025 suggested where to send many of these offices to, and the current administration is working on making the plan a reality. The Department of Education Office of Civil Rights is supposed to join the Department of Justice, and Secretary McMahon has supported this idea ^[14]. However, increasing the Department of Justice Office of Civil Rights staff has not been discussed to fill the gaps that over 500 staff used to fill in the Department of Education. The Office of Indian Education, which coordinates K-12 and college education for tribal groups, has been relegated to the Department of the Interior ^[15]. These changes were not done in consultation with Indigenous groups. Elementary and secondary education and higher education programs are headed to the Department of Labor, and some grant programs within them will be discontinued after the move ^[16]. Student loan administration is being transferred to the Treasury Department, and Health and Human Services will be in charge of childcare ^[17]. These changes go on and on until the Department is no more, and are in various stages of implementation.

While redistribution may appear efficient, the functions of each separate office are deeply interconnected. The Department was designed to coordinate funding, enforcement, and research in a unified system aimed at improving access and outcomes. This fragmentation increases the likelihood of duplication, gaps in oversight, or inconsistent implementation, particularly when different federal agencies operate under different missions and timelines. Not only will this cause chaos and confusion as these services are moved, but local school districts and state departments of education will now have to coordinate with a myriad of agencies to secure the funding they are due or to follow up on school services. Although there are clear complaints about the Department of Education bureaucracy, having schools interact with several bureaucracies instead is a worse outcome. 

Why does this matter?

In the end, what is happening to the Department of Education is not a simple bureaucratic reshuffling; it’s a systematic unraveling of the federal infrastructure that has long supported equity, accountability, and coherence in American education. Stripping staff, stalling funding, weakening civil rights enforcement, and dispersing core functions across disconnected agencies does not streamline; it erodes the government's capacity to serve students effectively. The consequences will not be immediate for everyone, but they will be profound and uneven, falling hardest on students who rely most on federal protections and targeted resources, and on local school districts already bogged down with bureaucracy. Without a centralized body to enforce laws, distribute funds reliably, and collect meaningful data, the education system risks becoming more fragmented, less transparent, and more inequitable. The question is no longer whether the Department will function as it once did, but whether anything meaningful will replace the stability, oversight, and protections it provided and at great cost to the nation’s most vulnerable learners.

However, we are not without hope. Lobbying by multiple groups and lawsuits from states brought back mental health grant dollars ^[18]. Employees have been rehired in the Office of Civil Rights ^[19]. The Institute for Education Sciences was gutted and is now being reintroduced with some positive changes ^[20]. Part of this picture is collective action by focused groups who care deeply for public education. We can work with local schools, parent organizations, school boards, teacher unions, and state education organizations to demand that the Department of Education continue serving students in its full capacity. This is a call to action: call now, organize now, before this portion of Project 2025 can be completed.

In trying to analyze Nick Fuentes, Big Joel reveals the limits of a format built for a different kind of opponent.

Big Joel occupies an interesting space in the left-wing YouTube ecosystem. Since beginning his channel in 2017, he has grown to over 700,000 subscribers, producing videos that blend media criticism, philosophy, and analysis of political figures. His work follows a recognizable format: taking a public figure, examining their arguments and presentation, and placing them within a broader ideological context.

This approach has been especially effective in his videos on figures like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Phil, and Dennis Prager, which are among his most viewed. They speak to an audience already broadly aligned with Joel’s politics, but still interested in understanding how these figures operate and why their ideas resonate.

On March 21, 2026, Big Joel released “Nick Fuentes Destroyed My Life.”^[1] At first glance, it appears to fit neatly within this tradition. But Nick Fuentes presents a different kind of challenge—one this format, and the audience it was built for, are not equipped to handle.

A format without a framework

The video is at its strongest when Joel identifies how Fuentes’s willingness to contradict himself works in his favor. He presents this insight in contrast to what he describes as the tendency of mainstream outlets (i.e. The Atlantic^[2], The New York Times^[3], The New Yorker^[4], NPR^[5], and Vox^[6]) to frame Fuentes through “big ideas”: his significance for the Republican Party, his appeal to young men, or what he represents for the future of conservatism.

Joel shifts focus. He moves away from interpretation and toward observation, emphasizing how Fuentes operates across contexts. By contrasting his appearances in interviews and debates with his livestreams on Rumble, he shows that Fuentes’s contradictions are central to his appeal and not incidental. But this shift does not so much move beyond the earlier framing as leave its underlying problem unresolved. The “big ideas” approach he critiques is not best understood as simply reductive, but as functional; translating Fuentes into forms that are legible to specific audiences. Joel rejects this move; his alternative replaces one mode of interpretation without establishing another.

That gap has consequences. Fuentes is acutely aware of how legitimacy is produced, and he exploits it. Through interviews, debates, and sustained attention, he normalizes his presence. And while Joel critiques the ways mainstream outlets frame Fuentes, his own project operates within a similar dynamic: a 90-minute analysis that treats Fuentes as a subject worthy of extended attention.

This is not simply a flaw in Joel’s approach; it is a feature of the conditions under which it operates, conditions that make even careful analysis difficult to separate from amplification.

This tension between analysis and amplification is visible in Joel’s own reflections. At one point, he admits that he “wanted Nick to be this nuanced figure… someone who made tons of novel points,” and even considered scrapping the video when that expectation fell apart. The subject he was looking for never quite materializes; one whose appeal could be located in arguments and therefore meaningfully analyzed.

This expectation reflects an earlier moment in online political content. That moment shaped both the format and audience it produced. Left-wing YouTube largely emerged in response to the online right of the mid-2010s, defined by Gamergate, debate culture, and figures like Ben Shapiro. In that context, videos functioned as counter-programming: identifying bad arguments, exposing contradictions, and giving viewers a clearer set of positions.

The legacy primes viewers to look for conclusions, “wins,” decisive arguments, and moments that can be extracted and reused in the broader discourse. But this video resists that structure. Instead of offering clear argumentative outputs, it observes Fuentes.

How the audience watches

The mismatch helps explain the strange texture of the response: a flood of detailed objections, nitpicks, and attempts to turn individual points, particularly on highly contested political topics, into sites of contention. Alongside these are jokes that treat the video as familiar content to riff on, and hostile or trolling responses that engage only superficially. What’s largely absent is sustained engagement with the analysis itself; a consequence of the culture, not a failure of attention. 

Viewers are accustomed to extracting positions, evaluating claims, and responding accordingly. Even when the video refuses to offer clear “takes,” it is still treated as though it should. The result is an experience that feels oddly passive, not because viewers are disengaged, but because they are searching for something the video is no longer structured to provide.

A shift from persuasion to positioning

If this format no longer works, what does?

That question becomes clearer in the context of a broader shift. While this change had been developing for years, it became far more visible after October 7 and the war in Gaza. In the months that followed, online political discourse centered increasingly on questions that resist clean resolution: the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the role of imperialism, and the limits of historical and moral analogy.

These are not questions that lend themselves easily to the argument-driven analysis that defined earlier phases of online political content. They are contested at the level of framing, not just in what conclusions are reached. As a result, discussion moves away from persuasion and toward positioning, clarifying where one stands rather than resolving disagreement.

Joel himself describes this shift. In a post following the video^[7], he notes that Israel and Gaza have become the primary issue audiences want creators to address, often with the assumption that creators are avoiding the controversy. What is being demanded is not simple analysis, but declaration. Creators are expected to locate themselves clearly within an already contested set of assumptions. In that sense, the pressure Joel identifies is not just about topic selection; it is about where a creator places themselves in the debate.

The response to his own video reflects this dynamic. Joel attempts to establish baseline claims about Israel and Zionism, framing them as “uncomfortable facts” that can be acknowledged without endorsing figures like Fuentes. This attempt quickly collapses. The claims themselves become the primary site of contention, generating detailed objections, reinterpretations, and extended corrections. These often take the form of disputes over whether his characterization of Zionism was accurate, or whether his framing minimized or overstated certain positions. The baseline fails not because the claims are unclear, but because the video never establishes who that baseline is for.

The precision of these objections is not incidental. The goal is not simply to refine a claim, but to contest its framing and locate the speaker within a broader ideological landscape. Even a passing statement becomes a point of scrutiny, not because it is central to the argument, but because it functions as a signal of affiliation.

This pattern extends beyond the discussion of Israel. Moments peripheral to the video’s central argument can quickly become focal points for response. A brief mention of Destiny, who occupies a highly contested position within these spaces, generates a disproportionate reaction. Rather than engaging the analysis itself, viewers interpret the reference as a signal, producing strong judgments about Joel’s stance and its implications. More broadly, this is how the content is consumed: audiences follow the argument less than they scan for moments that can be extracted and responded to.

A hot take economy

The result resembles a “hot take” economy, where the most valuable parts of a video are not its sustained arguments, but moments that can be isolated, circulated, and built around. As Joel himself notes, he is “sensitive to the fact that the video doesn't contain many bold hot takes.”^[8] The argument is not followed so much as it is mined. In that environment, the stability of an argument depends less on its coherence than on whether it can anchor interpretation for a specific audience.

What emerges is not just polarization, but instability. The boundaries between mainstream and fringe, between argument and alignment, are less clearly defined. Discourse can appear stable at the level of position while remaining unsettled at the level of interpretation. What appears as agreement often masks deeper disagreements about meaning, framing, and implication.

In commentary following the video^[9], Joel acknowledges this shift, suggesting that strong positions on Israel and Gaza already exist within his audience and that figures like Fuentes simply channel that energy. This captures something real about the apparent consensus. However, it also reflects a retrospective framing that smooths over what the video itself reveals: what looks settled at the level of position is far less stable in how it’s interpreted.

This same instability appears within the analysis itself. At several points, Joel advances claims and then qualifies them, narrowing their scope, acknowledging uncertainty, and anticipating objections. The result is not a fully developed counter-argument, but a managed position that avoids overcommitment in a discourse where even small claims can become sites of intense contestation and where no shared audience baseline exists to stabilize them.

The audience problem

This pattern is not simply stylistic. It reflects a structural problem the video does not resolve: the absence of a clearly defined audience. Joel rejects the frameworks used by mainstream outlets without replacing them with one of his own. As a result, his analysis operates without shared assumptions, and every claim must anticipate multiple, conflicting interpretations. What appears as caution or nuance instead functions as a way of managing an audience that is no longer coherent.

If the earlier model of political content was built around argument, the current one operates through alignment. In that environment, someone like Nick Fuentes is not disadvantaged by his contradictions, but benefits from them. His ability to shift tone, contradict himself, and move between different registers is not a weakness to be exposed. It is a feature that allows him to remain legible to multiple audiences at once.

In this environment, attempts to pin him down often fail. The goal is not to arrive at a stable position that can be evaluated; instead it’s to maintain a sense of connection with his audience. Whether in a hostile interview or a friendly podcast, Fuentes consistently signals that connection, even when his words are inconsistent.

Those same appearances serve as points of entry. Where confrontation once aimed to expose weakness and reduce influence, it now often has the opposite effect. Being debated, criticized, or platformed signals relevance and legitimacy. It creates moments for new viewers to encounter him, not necessarily to be persuaded by his arguments, but to register his confidence, his refusal to concede, or the perceived weakness of his interlocutors. This dynamic is visible in how the content is received. In the comment section, critical attention often functions as promotion, while responses from Fuentes’s supporters treat the video as validation. The distinction between critique and amplification begins to blur.

The Piers Morgan interview, as presented in the video, brings this dynamic into focus. At a surface level, the exchange follows a familiar script: Morgan presses Fuentes on his past statements, highlights contradictions, and attempts to force him into defensible positions. By the standards of traditional debate, Fuentes performs poorly ,but that is not how the interaction is experienced by his audience. As Joel notes, they read the exchange differently. They don’t see a failure of argument, just a refusal to concede. His unwillingness to back down registers as strength.

The interview also serves as a point of expansion. Fuentes is platformed, positioned as a figure worth engaging, and given the opportunity to perform in a high-visibility setting. In the aftermath, his audience frames the appearance as a victory. This disconnect is not only between interviewer and audience. By Joel’s account, Fuentes himself acknowledged that he had been cornered and that the exchange did not play out in his favor. This self-assessment has little bearing on how the interaction is received. His audience reframes the performance as a win regardless, suggesting that success is not determined by the speaker’s own evaluation. What would otherwise be a flawed performance becomes a moment of affirmation and growth when interpreted through a different logic.

This reveals not simply a disagreement over who “won,” but a deeper mismatch in how the interaction is understood. Morgan attempts to resolve contradictions; Joel analyzes them; Fuentes uses them. If “winning” is defined not by coherence, but by the ability to maintain alignment and refuse concession, then success becomes structural. The exchange is no longer a test of ideas, but a stage for signaling. This points to a shift in the conditions under which these videos operate. The model that once analyzed arguments and exposed contradictions was built for a different kind of opponent, and a different kind of audience.

This tension is visible even in how the video ends. Joel closes with an exaggerated, absurd skit featuring characters like Shadow the Hedgehog, Goku, and Shrek in a parody “beatdown.” Rather than returning to the analysis, viewers fixate on the spectacle itself, treating it as a moment to riff on, quote, and remix. The video is pulled back into a familiar mode of engagement, one that produces a symbolic “win.”

In that sense, the video reveals something deeper about the left-wing YouTube ecosystem. It exposes the limits of a format built on the assumption that political influence can be understood through argument, contradictions can be exposed, and clarity will follow. In an environment now defined less by persuasion than by alignment, visibility, and performance, those assumptions no longer hold. The problem is no longer simply how to respond to figures like Fuentes, but what kind of response is possible in a system where being argued against is not a liability. It’s part of the mechanism.

Addressing that problem requires more than sharper arguments or more thorough analysis. It requires a different understanding of how influence operates in this environment, one that accounts for instability, for alignment, and for the ways attention itself can function as amplification. Without that shift, the existing tools will continue to produce the same result: analysis that is absorbed, reframed, and repurposed within the very dynamics it seeks to challenge. It is not simply that Joel cannot fully account for Fuentes, but that the framework he uses can no longer stabilize the kind of analysis he is attempting to sustain for his audience.

The title suggests a personal crisis. What the video reveals is a structural one.

“If a leader doesn’t change the rules, he can’t fix the system.” — Nayib Bukele, 2018

There is nothing new about a young man with ambition, or even a rich one who wants to "give back." What is rare, and far more dangerous, is a man who learns early that affection can be bought, loyalty manufactured, and truth made elastic. Before Nayib Bukele ever draped himself in presidential sashes, he was already rehearsing power. Just not the kind you get from votes. The kind you get from controlling the story.

His rise wasn’t meteoric. It was engineered. And the illusion was not just that he represented something different, but that he believed in anything at all.

The Prince of Nuevo Cuscatlán

Born in 1981, Nayib Bukele entered the world on the edge of a nation ripping itself apart. El Salvador’s civil war was just beginning, and while tens of thousands would die over the next decade, Bukele’s childhood was sheltered from the bloodshed. His father, Armando Bukele Kattán, was a businessman, imam, and polymath who built a fortune through media, advertising, and printing ventures. The Bukeles were not merely well-off; they were part of the country’s rarefied elite. Above the common people – Cosmopolitan, connected, and comfortably above the fray.

That distance from violence may explain part of Nayib’s political detachment. He didn’t grow up with the ideological scars that defined the older generation. No allegiance to the guerrilla struggle or military counterinsurgency. His upbringing was not marked by factionalism, but by marketing. He learned not how to fight for causes, but how to sell them. His first steps into professional life weren’t as a community organizer or political theorist. He was a college dropout who turned his attention to branding. It’s there where the true foundation of Bukele’s politics was laid.

In 2006, Bukele took over as director of Obermet S.A. de C.V., an advertising and communications firm founded by his father. Under Nayib’s leadership, the company pivoted from basic print media into sleek, full-service brand strategy. Obermet’s clients included major companies in energy, finance, and telecommunications, but more significantly, it became a quiet fixture in Salvadoran political messaging. When the FMLN sought to modernize its image ahead of the 2009 presidential campaign, they turned to Obermet. Bukele, then in his late twenties, helped craft the image of Mauricio Funes — a former CNN journalist turned candidate — as a man of the people.

Obermet produced ads that were emotive, high contrast, and focused more on identity than substance. Bukele didn’t write policy. He designed feelings. He understood early that Salvadorans, who were disillusioned by decades of corruption and violence, weren’t looking for ideology. They were looking for someone to believe in. His job was to create that belief, whether or not it was true. He was, in the purest sense, an architect of illusion.

This period taught him more than any political apprenticeship could. He learned the anatomy of public perception. He learned how to flatten complex issues into digestible slogans, how to manipulate color and light to shape emotional response, how to bury criticism in noise, and how to use emerging platforms like Facebook and Twitter to bypass media gatekeepers altogether. Obermet wasn’t just his business. It was his laboratory.

It also made him cynical. Branding teaches that everything is flexible. Names, values, loyalties, all fair game, so long as the narrative works. Bukele saw firsthand how easily Salvadoran politicians could be rebranded, how the same hands that waved revolutionary flags in the ’90s could now shake those of businessmen and oligarchs, so long as the messaging matched the moment. This convinced him that ideology was performative, and that success didn’t require belief, only consistency in image.

So when he launched his own political career as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012, he brought with him the tools of the trade. Campaign posters looked like Apple product launches. Videos were tightly edited, background music swelled emotionally, and every speech was choreographed to feel spontaneous. His social media presence wasn’t just strong; it was surgical. Followers received a carefully maintained illusion of access, humor, and relatability. He wasn’t selling policies. He was selling a personality.

And Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small suburb of fewer than 10,000 residents, provided the perfect test market. Here, his background in ad psychology and image control gave him an overwhelming advantage. He promised transparency, progress, and a break from traditional politics. With the town being so small, the spectacle itself could substitute for substance. Few cared whether the reforms were deep. They looked different, and that was enough.

Bukele had found his method: emotional storytelling, weaponized aesthetics, and the erasure of ideology in favor of identity. Politics, to him, was not a calling. It was a product. And like any good ad man, he would spend the rest of his career making sure people kept buying it.

Scholarships for the Faithful

When Nayib Bukele was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán in 2012, it was not a major political victory. It was a strategic rehearsal. The town, with a population of fewer than 10,000 at the time, sits just outside San Salvador’s urban sprawl, quiet, small, and easy to control. For a man without governing experience but with a background in advertising, it offered a blank slate. Not to test policy, but to craft narrative. Bukele’s time as mayor was not a political awakening. It was a branding exercise.

One of the more famous products of this phase was his scholarship program. Launched early in his term, the initiative covered tuition and expenses for low-income students to attend university. The program was, on the surface, progressive and deeply humanistic: a young mayor lifting the poor through education. He made sure the cameras were there when families received the news. Testimonials followed. Social media was flooded with smiling students and grateful parents, all thanking one man. Not the government. Nayib.

But as with much in Bukele’s career, the gesture was louder than the substance. The scholarship program was limited in scale and scope, benefiting fewer than 100 students in a municipality with thousands living under the poverty line. It lacked oversight, formal evaluation, or integration with national education policy. It was disconnected from structural improvements. There was no investment in public schools, no teacher training, no curriculum reform. This hasn’t changed, even with Bukele’s complete control over the political system. Education wasn’t being transformed. The message was.

Bukele’s philanthropy wasn’t systemic. It was personal, and that was the point. The mayor's office was turned into a kind of patronage machine. Residents began to associate access to services with loyalty to the figure of Bukele himself, rather than with institutions or civic processes. He had no party machinery to rely on and didn’t need one. What he created instead was a form of political dependence. Gratitude became political currency. Visibility became proof of virtue.

This approach echoed familiar tactics from Latin American strongmen throughout history, but it was especially reminiscent of the methods used by Pablo Escobar in Colombia. Escobar, the infamous drug lord, also paid for scholarships, built soccer fields, funded housing projects, all with the explicit aim of manufacturing goodwill among the poor. He didn’t need to change the system. He just needed to make people believe he was their only hope. Bukele, while not a criminal, operated on a strikingly similar logic. He didn’t reform the state; he replaced it with his image.

Other policies during his mayoral term followed this same template: symbolic, isolated, and designed for maximum visual impact. He planted trees and opened a small library—photographed, of course, in high definition. He boasted about modernizing the town with LED lighting and surveillance cameras, signaling an interest in “smart city” aesthetics that would later metastasize into full-blown digital authoritarianism. Meanwhile, critics noted that public works tended to benefit specific neighborhoods tied to his support base, while others languished.

Despite projecting an image of youthful transparency, Bukele governed Nuevo Cuscatlán with tight control. Public records were sparse, budgets were often opaque, and his relationship with the city council was marked by unilateralism. He rarely engaged in debate or consensus-building; instead, decisions were announced through social media as if they had already happened. His administration wasn’t participatory. It was performative. He didn’t practice politics. He curated it.

All of this helped develop the most important narrative in his eventual national rise: Bukele as the benevolent outsider, the good king who delivers when the republic fails. But behind the carefully chosen hashtags and photo ops, the foundation was already being laid for a political model that substituted loyalty for law and spectacle for policy. Nuevo Cuscatlán was not a success story in governance. It was a proof-of-concept for control.

It worked. By the end of his term, Bukele had a cultlike following in the town, with many residents openly declaring they would support him no matter what office he sought next. That loyalty had nothing to do with ideology or party. It was personal, emotional, and uncritical. And it was entirely by design.

The Left That Never Held Him

Nayib Bukele often speaks as if he emerged from nothing. No ideology, no party, no past. But this is not quite true. His rise was incubated by the Salvadoran left. It was the FMLN. Born from the guerrilla movements of the civil war that gave him his first mayoral post and platform. They handed him a flag, a voter base, and a lineage of struggle to drape around himself. And in return, he gave them what he gives most alliances: a smile, a speech, and eventually, a knife.

The FMLN’s decision to back Bukele in 2012 was more desperation than inspiration. After years of internal fracturing, generational fatigue, and the political compromises of governance, the party had lost its revolutionary glow. It needed a facelift. Bukele was young, wealthy, photogenic, and media-savvy. He was an opportunity. He could attract voters the old guard never could. What they didn’t realize was that he wasn’t trying to reform the party from within. Bukele was borrowing it, briefly, to enter the room. Then he would burn it behind him.

From the start, his relationship with the FMLN was more parasitic than principled. He rarely participated in internal meetings, ignored party discipline, and openly criticized leadership while still wearing the party’s colors. His campaigns were personalist, not ideological. His face dwarfed the FMLN logo on posters. His social media presence focused almost exclusively on himself. In a movement that once prided itself on collective struggle, Bukele made it all about one man. And he sold the narrative brilliantly.

The left, too fractured and nostalgic to recognize the threat, let it happen. They tolerated his transgressions in the name of electability. But Bukele wasn’t building a bridge for the FMLN to the next generation, he was building an exit for himself. In 2017, the party finally expelled him after he insulted a city councilwoman and repeatedly violated internal codes. Bukele, true to form, painted himself as a victim. He claimed the party had abandoned its values. In reality, he had never held them.

His expulsion was not a moment of political rebirth. It was a moment of political liberation. Without the burden of ideology or party hierarchy, Bukele was free to recast himself entirely. He declared himself the only “real” anti-corruption candidate, launched Nuevas Ideas, and began railing against the very leftist movement that had elevated him. His language morphed from social justice to “cleaning house,” from class struggle to populist rage. The revolution was rebranded, hollowed out, and sold back to the public with better lighting.

His betrayal of the left was not ideological, it was aesthetic. Bukele understood that in a country exhausted by polarization, ideology was a liability. People didn’t want theory; they wanted action, or at least the appearance of it. They wanted someone who looked like he had answers. So Bukele gave them performance: jackets instead of suits, iPads instead of briefings, tweets instead of press conferences. And in doing so, he made both left and right obsolete.

But the left was the first to collapse. It had spent years in power compromising with neoliberal policy, failing to hold its own accountable, and losing the moral clarity that had once made it a symbol of resistance. When Bukele arrived, it saw in him not a threat, but a chance. That mistake cost them everything. His movement cannibalized the very voters the FMLN once mobilized, the young, urban, disillusioned, and poor. And it did so by offering not ideology, but vengeance.

He never needed to beat the left in debate. He only needed to wear its face long enough to discredit it. What remains now of El Salvador’s left is a husk. Distrusted, scattered, they are unable to reclaim the narrative. Bukele stole its language, turned its grievances into his slogans, and then used his power to erase the memory of what that movement once stood for.

The tragedy is not just that Bukele abandoned the left. It’s that the left, in its desperation, handed him the keys.

A New Party for a New Man

When Nayib Bukele launched Nuevas Ideas in 2018, he was not offering a political alternative. He was offering an exorcism. The party (if one can even call it that) did not emerge from a collective platform, grassroots pressure, or ideological necessity. It emerged from a single premise: that all existing parties were irredeemably corrupt, and only Bukele could fix them. He was no longer merely the candidate. He was now the movement.

The name itself, “New Ideas”, was vague by design. It promised transformation without specifying direction. Was it left? Right? Reformist? Revolutionary? It didn’t matter. In a country where faith in political institutions had collapsed, ambiguity was a feature, not a bug. Bukele’s message was simple: trust me, not the system. And people did. Within months, Nuevas Ideas gathered over 200,000 signatures, an unprecedented surge in a nation known for apathy. But what those supporters signed onto wasn’t a platform. It was a personality cult with a blue checkmark.

This was the moment Bukele transcended traditional politics. He had already worn the left like a mask and abandoned it. Now he would transcend the party system itself. He told supporters that Nuevas Ideas would be a citizen-led movement, untainted by ideology. He branded himself as a post-political savior, the rare leader unowned by history. But that narrative collapsed almost immediately when, due to bureaucratic timing, Nuevas Ideas couldn’t register in time for the 2019 elections. Bukele needed a party. Fast.

He found one in GANA, the Grand Alliance for National Unity, is a center-right party founded by defectors from ARENA, the very party once associated with death squads, corporate impunity, and military dictatorship. It was, in many ways, the embodiment of everything Bukele claimed to oppose. And yet, with no hesitation, he accepted their platform as a temporary host. Once again, principle was irrelevant. The move wasn’t ideological. It was parasitic.

GANA, desperate for relevance, handed Bukele the nomination without a primary. In doing so, they ceased to be a party and became a shell, a legal vehicle for a man who had no use for their history or their beliefs. With their history being one of dictators and oppression, however, strongman Bukele respects their history by disrespecting it, and taking it for himself.

The irony was staggering: Bukele had gone from leftist reformer to right-wing opportunist in a matter of months. But his followers didn’t flinch. He told them it was just a technicality. The end justifies the means. The same narrative Escobar once used when running for office as an “independent reformer” while bankrolling old guard politicians.

With GANA’s ballot line and Nuevas Ideas’ mythos, Bukele ran—and won. In doing so, he proved something more dangerous than the power of populism. He proved that in a country exhausted by betrayal, identity could be erased and rewritten at will. That truth didn’t matter if it came with good lighting. That if you destroyed enough bridges behind you, people would forget there was ever a path to begin with.

Nuevas Ideas soon absorbed the state like fog rolling in. It functioned less like a party and more like an app; slick, efficient, centralized. Internal democracy was nonexistent. Dissenters were purged, candidates were handpicked, and Bukele’s family and inner circle consolidated control behind the scenes. The party's candidates were mostly unknowns, loyalists, influencers, or bureaucrats selected for obedience over vision. Once in the Assembly, they passed laws like users accepting terms of service: instantly, without question.

The myth of political independence became a mask for absolute control. Bukele wasn’t building a new democracy. He was building a new loyalty machine. The party was not a platform. It was a spotlight. It didn’t carry a worldview. It carried a man. Every function, every speech, every campaign image revolved around his personal mythology: the president in a backwards cap, the rebel in the palace, the savior with no past.

And like every strongman before him, Bukele claimed that he had been forced to break the rules because the rules were broken. That Nuevas Ideas was the only possible future for a country at war with its past. That ideology is obsolete, and that the people should vote not for policies, but for purity.

It worked. But the implications are chilling. A nation desperate for change handed its institutions to a man who promised everything and defined nothing. A party that claimed to be new became the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: the illusion of choice under the shadow of one man’s design.

Politics as Performance

By the time Nayib Bukele stepped into the presidential palace in 2019, it was no longer clear whether he was a politician or an actor playing one. His campaign had never really been about policy, nor even about ideology, it was about mood. Aesthetics. Storytelling. He wasn’t elected to govern; he was elected to perform. And the stage had been set perfectly.

Bukele understood early on that Salvadoran politics was not a contest of plans, but of narratives. In a country where both the left and right had burned through their moral capital; embroiled in scandals, corruption, and hypocrisy, truth had become secondary to the feeling of truth. And Bukele, with a decade in advertising and a career spent controlling optics, knew exactly how to produce that feeling.

His greatest political skill isn’t rhetoric, it’s editing. He curated his persona the way one curates a brand: the backwards snapback, the leather jacket, the staged visits to crime-ridden neighborhoods flanked by cameras and drones. His speeches were short, often streamed directly on Facebook Live, designed less to inform and more to be shared. Even his silences were strategic. He rarely submitted to interviews, preferring instead to speak unfiltered to the public through his tightly managed social media accounts; where criticism was often deleted, blocked, or drowned under waves of fan replies. He didn’t need journalists. He had followers.

This was not democracy in any meaningful sense. It was image management. And Bukele was its central product.

From his time as mayor, he treated public office as a stage set. He announced infrastructure projects with cinematographic flair and often without legislative approval. He installed LED light shows in San Salvador, declared “smart city” initiatives, and posed with garbage trucks like a campaign model. In Nuevo Cuscatlán, his first mayorship, his administration emphasized beautification, public art, and selective social spending like student scholarships. Programs that looked good on camera and earned applause, even as more structural reforms remained elusive.

And just like the narco barons who handed out housing in exchange for silence, Bukele's generosity came with strings: loyalty, optics, and erasure of dissent. His projects were not built for permanence; they were built for applause. When policy clashed with spectacle, spectacle always won.

In this new model of governance, traditional markers of credibility: Experience, institutional backing, and ideological consistency, no longer mattered. Bukele’s entire rise was predicated on rejecting those values. He did not care to debate his opponents; he discredited them. He did not build coalitions; he overwhelmed them. And rather than present a coherent agenda, he offered a singular, intoxicating message: trust me.

What followed was not a campaign, but a movement of projection. Supporters saw in him whatever they wanted to see: a rebel, a technocrat, a nationalist, a reformer, a messiah. He never contradicted them. Instead, he floated above the contradictions. A man of the left who ran with the right. A critic of caudillismo who tweeted like a generalissimo. An anti-corruption crusader who never explained his own opaque financing. Each paradox became part of the myth. Bukele was the mirror, not the image.

And so, on June 1, 2019, as he stood with his trademark smirk and took the presidential oath, there was no doubt whose victory it was. Not the people’s, not Nuevas Ideas’, but his alone. He had maneuvered through three parties, discarded ideology like old clothes, and emerged with near-total control of the national narrative. He had entered office not as the leader of a republic, but as the protagonist of a story only he could write and only he was allowed to end.

What would come next could not be predicted by party platforms or policy papers. Bukele had left all that behind. What came next would be something else entirely.

Over the weekend, tensions between Donald Trump and California, the world’s 4th largest economy, have come to a head. On Friday, reports came out that the Trump admin was mulling over the cancellation of federal funding for the University of California and California State University systems. These cuts, which would affect schools like UCLA and San Diego State University, would be due to the school’s “antisemitism” according to sources at CNN. The Trump admin has done similar moves with other schools such as Harvard and are facing lawsuits as a result. Universities in the UC and CSU systems are public however, so they may be more susceptible to the federal action on speech and civil rights than a private university like Harvard would be. The UC system itself is California’s 3rd largest employer and conducts 8% of all academic research in the country. The Trump admin has already frozen funding to the UC system, among others in California. And while lawsuits are already underway for those particular cuts, this could continue to freeze funds for months longer. Gavin Newsom and other California democrats have floated the idea of withholding California’s federal taxes, but logistically this may be impossible so don’t count on it. It’s important to note that this round of cuts has not been officially announced by the Trump administration, but after the events that followed it may be inevitable.

Beginning at 9:15 am on Friday, ICE began conducting raids across Los Angeles. Between the Los Angeles Fashion District, a Home Depot parking lot, and a clothing store they arrested anywhere from 40 to 100 immigrants, but the large raids would not go unnoticed. Demonstrators began to gather at several locations in the afternoon; the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A, a Home Depot in the Westlake District, and at an “Ambiance Apparel” in the fashion district as well. At the Metropolitan Detention Center, where immigrants were being held overnight, hundreds of protestors gathered peacefully according to multiple outlets, until roughly 7:00pm when LAPD declared an unlawful assembly and used riot gear to disperse the crowd. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass released a statement condemning the immigration raids, saying, "these tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city” as did Governor Gavin Newsom. “Continued chaotic federal sweeps, across California, to meet an arbitrary arrest quota are as reckless as they are cruel.”

On June 7th, things didn't get better. In Paramount, things began to boil over as demonstrators confronted DHS officers near a Home Depot, drawing a crowd of roughly 1,000. Federal agents responded with flash-bang grenades and pepper balls after protesters blocked roads. At least two people were injured. Law enforcement issued a dispersal order by mid-afternoon. Tear gas was deployed, and one ICE agent was injured by a thrown rock going through a windshield (probably the one shown in the link above). A car was later set on fire, along with American flags according to reports.

Demonstrations intensified downtown as protesters gathered outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, prompting police to establish a skirmish line. By nightfall, the protests had spread to Compton, where demonstrators threw bottles containing a substance that smelled like gasoline. Earlier, two individuals were arrested on suspicion of assaulting policemen. One had allegedly thrown a Molotov cocktail, which caused minor injuries to three sheriff’s deputies.

Later that day, in an evening interview on Fox News, White House official and “border czar” Tom Homan announced that the National Guard would be deployed to Los Angeles. Later that night, President Donald Trump signed a memorandum ordering 2,000 members of the California National Guard into the city. Invoking 10 U.S.C. § 12406, Trump bypassed the usual requirement for state approval—marking the first time a president had deployed a state’s National Guard without gubernatorial consent since the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. Gavin Newsom would state his intent to sue the Trump administration over this move on Sunday. He has criticized the move as “needlessly inflammatory” and it “would only escalate tensions” while at the same time urging protests to remain peaceful. Trump would also state the protests were started by “paid instigators” and declare a mask ban at protests on Truth Social later Saturday night.

On Sunday, Roughly 300 National Guard troops were stationed at federal sites throughout the city, with 500 Marines on standby at Twentynine Palms, under orders from Pete Hegseth. Outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, federal forces used smoke and pepper spray to clear protestors and secure access for DHS and Border Patrol vehicles. By mid-afternoon, LAPD issued a tactical alert. Police authorized less-lethal munitions and labeled the gathering an unlawful assembly. Multiple arrests occurred near the Civic Center, and two officers were injured when motorcyclists broke through a skirmish line.

Tensions escalated further when protesters blocked the US 101 freeway, prompting a full closure. In the chaos, several Waymo driverless vehicles were vandalized and torched. That evening, the LAPD declared Downtown Los Angeles an unlawful assembly zone, urging the public to leave the area immediately. At a Sunday evening press conference, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell reported a total of 39 arrests tied to the protests—29 on Saturday and 10 more on Sunday—as the weekend came to a close. Not to be outdone, San Francisco had its own protests and SFPD announced 60 arrests were made Sunday night.

This is an overview of an ongoing story, and therefore is not complete. Journalists have been caught in the fray, a union leader arrested, and uncertainty over whether or not the protests will continue persists. One thing is for certain, we’ve definitely got the worst guy for the job. Click here for updates from NBC News, and thanks for reading.

Our team is expanding! Two new editors have joined the team including editor-in-chief Cara and staff editor Stumbling. We hope this can increase the consistency of our releases and production of content. If you are interested in joining the team, please reach out through our discord.

What is EFID? How does it work?

Technological integration has expanded throughout virtually every facet of modern society, and while many of our utilities have kept pace, some stubbornly remain analog. The physical ID systems we use in the United States present many challenges, from theft to locale to the durability of the ID itself. Addressing these should be as simple as establishing an electronic federal ID system (EFID) in the form of a two-factor verification app connected to a person's social security number (SSN). Despite the fact social security numbers aren't meant to be used as a form of ID, they already fill that role in various areas of our society; until a better system of federal ID is established, it's likely the best option available to build the EFID program from. An EFID can be acquired anywhere with cell service and cannot be physically stolen like a legacy ID; this sort of system allows for a level of real time fraud protection not possible with current models. In the event that a person’s ID is used from an unfamiliar device, a warning notification could be sent to a linked security email. Maintaining data siloing standards would be easy as such a program would only require someone’s SSN and date of birth to be stored, this is already the case with our social security administration. The physical infrastructure necessary to instate this policy is limited to server space to maintain code generation and the phone app that would be used to verify an ID. Having a rapidly verifiable and secure form of identification in place opens up the opportunity to address a wide variety of issues plaguing our political environment currently.

Removing the political roadblock of voter ID

Due to the consistent push from republicans, favorability for voter ID has risen on a relatively bipartisan line ^[1]. The policy of voter ID, when proposed simply, is an appealing concept in line with the MAGA “common sense” mantra, this makes it something that democrats cannot afford to ignore. In reality voter ID solves a problem that doesn't meaningfully exist and only serves to reduce the total number of eligible voters. While most Americans have a valid form of ID, physical ID can be expensive, sometimes requires a restrictive degree of travel to the nearest DMV, and for people in the working class with less flexible working schedules can present issues taking time off. Electronic federal ID would ideally be distributed for free to anyone with a smartphone and a cell signal; while not a perfect solution, EFID effectively addresses most downsides of a voter ID law. Assuming a federal ID system of this sort were enacted, the strategy of the democrats would just be to enact a federal law mandating that all voter ID laws accept EFID as valid identification. With the downsides of voter ID accounted for, the democratic party can move into a more aggressive stance combatting misinformation on voter fraud itself.

Social media verification and combatting foreign interference 

Though the infestation of autonomous profiles or “bots” has long been a problem in online spaces, the advent of artificial intelligence has made the accessibility of bot creation significantly more widespread. No platform has had a more visible problem with this than X under Elon Musk; estimates vary widely but generally fall in the range of 20% - 60% of activity being attributable to bots^[2]. The problem of unreliability of information found on social media is much broader than just bot accounts however, the clarity of this was solidified in late 2025 when a feature rollout on X made it possible to view the country accounts are operated from. Community sleuthing quickly uncovered that a large number of pro-Trump accounts were run by foreigners pretending to live within the United States^[3]. Cultivating a healthy information environment for our political system to operate within requires radical transparency of sources and EFID could allow us to take a large step in that direction. Using a two factor code allows for verification of citizenship without putting personal data at risk by sending an image of a physical ID, a social media company could confirm the validity of a profile by submitting a code and receiving a simple yes or no from the government. Once integrated, verification of this kind might look as simple as a citizen badge on a user’s profile or as broad as altering the algorithm to prioritize verified accounts. The best way to implement this in a pragmatic way would be to forcibly apply a badge system paired with a pop up message that informs users of a settings toggle to prioritize ID verified accounts. This plan ensures that users of the platform are made aware of the foreign interference problem without making them feel forced to use the new feature. Despite my personal skepticism of the efficacy in the Australian policy, EFID could be used to age gate social media in the United States by requiring verification to create an account. 

Opening the door to addressing age gated products

The issue of ID verification for access to age gated products and spaces is something that, with some logistical tinkering, could be attacked with the use of an EFID system. Studies vary but generally find that the number of college age adults who have used a fake ID falls in the mid 40% range. ^[4] While policy has been enacted around the country attempting to disincentivize use of fake IDs, demand for the product remains high. Use of technology in the form of ID scanners have improved over time but are still not always reliable and can be tricked by higher quality fakes. The EFID program has potential to circumvent this issue by offering the ability for vendors to instantly verify the authenticity of an ID directly with the government. Utilizing an interface specially designed for businesses with a license to sell age gated products, cashiers would input the customer’s two factor code and be returned a yes or no for eligibility to purchase. Vendor logins could be customized by business to service varying age restrictions such as nightclubs that utilize alcohol wristbands or the sale of tobacco. The tinkering required for this use case would be addressing an underage customer borrowing the phone of an adult to make the purchase as the current outline for EFID does not include photo verification.

Closing thoughts

 Electronic federal ID as I’ve laid out should not be viewed as a comprehensive solution to federal ID. My policy was designed with the goal of supplementing the existing system to address modern shortcomings without requiring the creation of a new governmental body or large-scale reform of existing systems. While this policy could raise privacy concerns, well written language in the law barring tracking of individual IDs should ease these worries. 

Contact the author at sstonewrite@gmail.com

This March Digital Ground Game is kicking off our monthly Midterms Report by taking a look at one of the states that interests us most for 2026: Iowa.

The combination of growing disdain for MAGA’s policies and the quantity and type of elections in 2026 makes Iowa a compelling state to dedicate canvassing resources. Sentiment in Iowa is bleak on the Trump administration due to pressure on agriculture from the Trump tariffs. This does not just extend to the farmers themselves but to the local manufacturing and services sector that supports Iowa agriculture. Iowa is also interesting due to it not only having a contested Senate seat with Joini Ernst retiring but also a competitive gubernatorial race and three competitive House races for this year. As the 2026 Midterms nears Digital Ground Game is analyzing the best places to position our limited canvassing operations and Iowa makes a compelling case to be on the list.

Iowa’s Economy Under Trump 2.0

The core of Iowa’s economy is agriculture. Across the nation, agriculture has seen a massive markup in production costs while seeing a decline in sales. This has led to farmers entering 2026, after receiving over $11 Billion in aid, seeing increased losses and compounding layover debt from previous seasons. On top of that, tariffs have increased the costs of fertilizer, MAGA immigration policies have increased labor costs, and losses starting in Trump’s first term have caused compounding runaway debt ^[1]. Additionally, Tariffs caused domestic oversupply, particularly in rice and soybeans, leading to price reductions in U.S commodities causing a catastrophic situation forming in the Iowa farming industry. In 2025, Iowa had the second highest number of farm bankruptcies and is projected to have a 24% contraction in revenues in 2026 ^[2]. On a pure agricultural standpoint the economics look bleak, and the state and national slump on agriculture, mixed with tariffs, are beginning to cripple Iowa’s manufacturing industry.

Table 1: Table showing Iowa's decrease in manufactured imports and exports. Whirlpool’s manufacturing center in Iowa has been bleeding jobs since 2020 and there was net job loss in 2025^[3][4].

Due to Iowa’s location near the Great Lakes, far upstream on the Mississippi river, and close to the Chicago rail nexus; Iowa has not only become a hub for appliance manufacturing, but also a massive leader in agricultural equipment manufacturing. Due to the fall-off in agricultural revenue and the Trump tariffs, manufacturing exports are down 9.3% from 2025 and are projected to see a continued downward trend in 2026 ^[3]. Layoffs like what have happened at Whirlpool are happening across the state as manufacturing shrinks leading to a shrinking consumer pool that affects the State’s services industries ^[4]. The Trump admin has doubled down on his tariffs, which were shut down by the Supreme Court in February, by raising the global tariff from 10% to 15% using Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 as justification. This has led to farm groups in Iowa to publicly challenge the Trump admin on the tariff policy as they are dependent on imported fertilizer and other goods. It has escalated to the point where even the Iowa farmers union is calling for congressional oversight on Trump’s policies ^[5]. The downstream effects from Trump's policies and economic failures nationwide have bled into the broader Iowa economy making everyone feel it.

Iowa’s competitive races

The economic fallout in Iowa has created an electoral environment for 2026 that opens up previously locked in MAGA GOP seats. The most consequential is the Senate seat that Joini Ernst is vacating. Ernst was already suffering a low WAR score of -4.3, and, as she leaves, her GOP successor Ashley Hinson is left supporting the tariffs and other Trump policies that have caused so much anger in the Iowa electorate ^[5]. Challenging Hinson is a competitive batch of Democrats Zach Wahls, J.D. Scholten, and Jackie Norris leading the pack going into the primaries. Of those, Zach Wahls is currently the presumed favorite of the Democratic contenders as seen in various polls ^[6]. They have an easy avenue of attack using the possibility of flipping the balance in the senate to stop, and potentially roll back, Trump’s more destructive policies for Iowa. Iowa House races are also shaping up to be competitive as IA-1, IA-2, and IA-3 candidates are all having to vocally support the Trump Tariff policies and other practices that are so unpopular with their constituents. Democrat challengers benefit from attacking those practices and promising to be part of a coalition in the House and Senate to provide oversight to the Trump Admin.

The Iowa’s current Governor Kim Reynolds is not running for 2026 opening an incumbent free challenge to the gubernatorial this November. The race is looking like a showdown between Democratic candidate Rob Sand and the Republican candidate. The latter is still in the air as frontrunner Randy Feenstra if facing strong opposition by four challengers: MAGA sycophant Adam Steen, the libertarian leaning Eddie Andrews, Tea party remnant Zach Lahn, and evangelical head case Brad Sherman^[7]. The Republican primary is causing a heavy amount of discord and division in the Iowan Republican party, coupled with Trump not endorsing any of the candidates, only making this race harder. Rob Sand was one of the few Democrats to survive the 2022 red wave and has built a reputation for government transparency and anti-corruption practices during his time as auditor of the state. To capitalize on the situation in Iowa, he is running a campaign for an “Iowa that isn’t redder or bluer, but better and truer… For the next year, Rob will keep his foot on the gas and continue meeting Iowa voters where they are to talk about his plans to lower costs, strengthen public education, and help Iowans live better, healthier lives” ^[8]. Sands’ campaign draws a lot of similarities with Spanberger’s Virginia campaign, which is a very encouraging thought.

 Implications for the 2026 midterms

Due to the economic hardships caused by Trump’s policies and the frustration of Iowa’s most influential demographics, Democratic candidates have a competitive edge in a state that was considered deep Trump country. This compounded by it having a Senate, a gubernatorial, and 3 House races this November makes it a “multiple birds with one stone” situation for Digital Ground Game’s canvassing program for 2026. As demonstrated in other states (California, Minnesota, Virginia and Georgia as examples), having a Governor that will stand up to Trump makes a huge difference and winning a majority in the Senate can allow actual oversight to occur. Not only would canvassing in Iowa touch a lot of races, it is also one of the most cost effective states to canvas in. Des Moines is centrally located and the heart of Iowa’s transportation infrastructure. On top of that, Iowa has one of the lowest rent costs in the country, paired with lowest national cost of living, making it a much easier task to fund a full time canvassing operation. The combination of low incumbency elections, elections in the Senate, House and Governorship, strong anger towards Trump’s GOP, and low operational costs make Iowa a strong contender for canvassing operations by Digital Ground Game.

It’s Dark Money, the name itself tells you that it’s not good, and from there, you might never investigate what it really means. Dark money is a slippery term that has ramifications for our politics. In the Wired article A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers, by Taylor Lorenz (^[1]), the organization Chorus is accused of accepting Dark Money, being secretive, and controlling what influencers create. In June of 2025, Chorus offered a selection of progressive influencers the opportunity to participate in an incubator program that could provide financial support, training, and networking to help them grow their platforms and gain insider access to lawmakers. The article's wording throughout frames the actions of anyone accepting the offer to participate in the incubator program as accepting the nefarious Dark Money. The truth is more complicated than the easy, black-and-white version the article attempts to portray. MAGA stream media has a loud and resounding voice in US politics. Can the left really leave the financial support on the table? The facts shed light on the possibility of bias at play. Taking a dive into the facts and assumptions presented will help us understand Dark Money, a bad-faith article, and the fight against an administration that holds no punches to get what it wants.

Dark money refers to money spent on electoral and political advocacy groups that don’t have to disclose their donors. (^[2]) There are two groups: nonprofits and Limited Liability Companies (LLCs). The groups that are legal nonprofit entities, including 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, 501(c)(5) labor organizations, and 501(c)(6) trade associations, are allowed to spend money on electoral advocacy, but it can’t be their sole purpose. The FEC sets the maximum limit that a 501(c)(4) can spend on election outcomes at about 49.9% of total money spent that year. OpenSecrets, a well-respected nonprofit, tracks this funding and lumps ALL these entities as Dark Money and not legally required to disclose donors when these organizations can donate to PACs/Super PACs. The fear is that a corporation or a billionaire might use their wealth to support a politician now and get a favor later. Or finance a large initiative that benefits them, which is on the ballot in an upcoming election. Or provide information that isn’t false but is framed in the way they want citizens to vote. Or use these nonprofits to hide the amount they really spent. Although, these donations are not tax-deductible but can still be influential. The most concerning would be foreign agents seeking to cause chaos or unrest in the US, funding issues that might otherwise not gain traction. Dark Money is seen as a way for nefarious donors to interfere in US elections, since disclosing donors is not required.

 It’s often alluded to that these groups outspend other groups during elections, and we should be suspicious of them. In the 2024 election spending, when combining both congressional and presidential races, it was a total of $14.8 Billion. Looking at the chart on OpenSecerets.org shows the amount of Dark Money 501 (c)’s spent was 170.2 million for the election cycle. Even that is an unclear number as it includes all of these nonprofit groups, even those that provided full disclosure of their donors, which was 24.27% of the 170.2 million spent. (^[3]). When discussing these groups, this context is hardly ever provided. Yet, compared to overall election spending, it is a very small percentage. Unlike nonprofits, OpenSecrets doesn’t track the overall spending from LLC’s so we can only guess based of comparing the 501c’s spending to that of the overall cost of the 2024 election which would suggest LLCs or shell companies outspend these nonprofits/Dark Money groups by a significant amount.

The Wired article title says Chorus was secretly funding a group of Democratic influencers. This “secret” label was deceptive when, in late 2024, Brian Tyler Cohen announced he had created Chorus. The purpose of which was to create an ecosystem similar to the one the Republicans have on social media. There was even a New York Times article about it (^[4] ). In April of 2025, Lorenz published an earlier article about Chorus that included statements from Cohen and Allie O’Brien about a trip to Washington, D.C. for influencers. The article's tone is similar to that of the Wired article, negatively portraying the nonprofit as inept and failing to fulfill its purpose. The use of the statements provided can easily be seen as bad faith by Chorus. (^[5]) This could explain why, months later, when Lorenz reached out to Chorus for the next article and the associated influencers, they decided not to respond, because they might have feared the response would not be presented fairly. A reporter must understand that if they choose to present information in a biased light like one might do on social media, it will reduce others' desire to work with them or provide context to a story.

​

Additionally, a major critique was that the contract required secrecy from the influencers who participated. We the readers weren’t given access to any of the supposed contracts that had been leaked. When viewed as restraining content creators, the quotes from the contract seem odious. Taking a step back and recognizing what legal obligations a 501(c)(4) has, the requests are logical and pragmatic. Even if the legalese used was confusing to someone not experienced in contracts involving nonprofits, 501(c)(4) organizations have an obligation to report on any money used to fund an elected official or other political action. While Chorus is providing financial compensation, as part of the scholarship program, influencers need to be aware of what political activities they engage in to ensure they can report accurately to the FEC. That’s not villainous, that's following the law. After the Wired article came out, Allie O’Brien posted a TikTok going over a segment of the contract and basically explained that the Chorus group wasn’t in control of content.

​

The Wired article then presents the newly formed nonprofit Chorus as funded by Dark Money. In the article, it was clearly stated that the Chorus was funded by the Sixteen-Thirty Fund. Chorus founder Brian Tyler Cohen has publicly stated that the group Sixteen-Thirty Fund was their fiscal sponsor. (^[6]) That could sound like a financial relationship in which the nonprofit group provides funds to Chorus, but it could be only an administrative one. Fiscal sponsorship is when a 501 (c)’s organization creates a relationship with another nonprofit, usually newly formed, before they apply or are granted an IRS nonprofit status. The benefits of such a relationship to an organization, depending on the contract terms, can range from the fiscal sponsor accepting donations to covering all administrative work, such as HR, legal, and accounting. Starting a nonprofit is like starting a small business, with all the work that entails. By having a fiscal sponsor, someone can test the nonprofit idea before fully committing to the endeavor. (^[7]) The fiscal sponsor usually charges a percentage of the donations the new nonprofit is receiving as compensation. This would explain why a fund like Sixteen-Thirty would agree to sponsor a new nonprofit.

These 501(c)(4) nonprofits that accept donations don’t have to disclose donors' identities in FEC public filings. Why would an individual want to remain anonymous? Shouldn’t they want to let the world know the type of causes they support? It’s not that simple. Sometimes the donor wants to remain anonymous because they don’t want the fanfare that comes with disclosure. The other reasons are a bit more concerning. In a recent report, the Guardian quoted the CEO of the WHO Foundation (a 501(c)(4)) as saying that some donors don’t want the trouble of being solicited for donations or otherwise targeted. (^[8]) In September 2025, a week after Wired’s article, Hasan Piker live-streamed the public FEC filings of Progressive Victory while watching a video by another creator, Bad Empanada. The information included names and addresses for the influencers associated with Progressive Victory. (^[9]) Each name was of a streamer/influencer who was clearly alarmed and concerned by this event. The reason a public person would want to maintain privacy about their exact location is that there are real risks to the public knowing where to find content creators in the real world. Risks like swatting, stalking, violence, and other forms of harassment can create fear. In one notable incident, a federal judge's son was murdered when a guy posing as a pizza delivery driver shot him and his father, killing the son. Now, other judges have started being sent pizzas under the dead son’s name, seen as a way to intimidate these judges. (^[10]) It’s important to balance the need of disclosure with the need for safety.

​

There are pop-up 501 (c)’s that are created with bad intentions, it should be noted that those orgs are easy to spot and should be seen as suspicious if they are not designed to last longer than an election cycle. Recently, it was reported that a 501(c)(4), Democracy Unmuted, offered $1500 to influencers to make content that included certain phrases that could be seen as politically neutral, but clearly targeted a specific Democratic candidate. The influencer, Amandainformed, leaked the pay-for-content request, stating it was clear that the organization intended to target the candidate Kat Abughazaleh.  When reporters dug into the request for content, the nonprofit was new and hard to trace. (^[10])These are the bad Dark Money groups, created solely to hide who would fund such a marketing campaign. When discovered, they should be highlighted and pointed to as bad actors. However, it’s not the same as established organizations that fight for our values and rights.

​

Corporations' unlimited spending is a bigger concern in politics than a nonprofit seeking to give progressive influencers knowledge to improve their content and other opportunities. Framing it as a shadowy, nefarious organization connected to the DNC that controls the participants is bad faith and misleading to readers. Using a nonprofit model as a 501(c)(4) allows Chorus to build a creator ecosystem that puts progressive issues and messages in front of social media users. There’s definitely a learning curve to running such a program, but spending time decrying such activities is basically rage-bait journalism. Until election reforms are made a reality, using the 501(c)(4) nonprofit model to fight back is pragmatic and logical. The success of California's Prop 50 shows that fighting fire with fire is successful. Principally, being against gerrymandering is good; ignoring what Republicans were doing to create a larger Republican majority in the House would have been disastrous. We should wholeheartedly approve of using every legal means that is available. It’s discombobulating that people who want to see the left be more cohesive would harass creators trying to participate in such a program. This is a time for collaboration and fighting fire with fire. 

Going Forward: State of Global Minimum Tax

Under the Biden Administration and leadership of the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, ^[1] the world came together to turn around the “race-to-the-bottom” of corporate tax competition.

The most common first thought in response to this goal is:

Did they think about what will happen when tax havens just don’t agree?

Your second thought should be:

Certainly, the financial experts of the world putting forward a proposal know this is the critical problem to solve and are not dumb enough to have overlooked it.

And, in fact, if you review the details of the global minimum tax framework, mechanisms to address it are at its core. Let’s skip over that mechanism for now.

The important thing to understand is that the Global Minimum Tax, or Pillar II, has withstood its first test of remaining alive through negotiations with the Trump administration with 140 countries signed on to Pillar II and a large share of developed countries has codified into law all elements of the agreement. ^[2] Unless something significant changes, it now applies to corporations with revenues approaching 1 billion dollars.

However, the Republican Party has pressured the world into recognizing the United States’ minimum corporate tax framework passed under the Biden Administration as a substitute for Pillar II. This agreement has been formalized in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) "Side by Side Package" ^[3] where there are two sets of rules for corporations based in the United States and another for the rest of the world. This will preserve the United States as a corporate home for tax avoidance for the time being. However, the deal struck through the leadership of Janet Yellen still survives a newly hostile United States and we will have the power to greatly increase its strength in a future Democratic administration.

Why are corporate taxes good?

First, why should we consider any tax good? There are three qualities a “good” tax has, in descending order of importance.

• It raises a lot of revenue for the government to support societal goals
• It is administrable and collected without significant evasion
• It does not introduce many incentives to change economic behavior in an undesired way

From these three qualities, there is no law of the universe that any specific tax mechanism is currently superior because the current state of society can change. The way to evaluate a good tax will remain the same.

Tariffs were the best tax before the 20th century to fund large nations by this measuring stick. The challenge for large nations was the diffuseness of economic transactions through their nation, making it economically unworkable to administer. The one place where a sufficient volume of taxable transactions occurred to raise a lot of government revenue without much evasion was through ports of entry. These practical advantages overcame the bad incentives to reduce imports.

Corporate taxes are excellent in the modern era. Because a significant share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is made up of corporate profits, they generate significant revenue. They are also one of the easiest taxes to collect without evasion (although there can be tax avoidance), and as an income tax it is the best taxation method to avoid incentives to change economic behavior

While from the investor standpoint, the corporate tax seems like the most blatant example of double taxation, if you flip it around and view it from a government’s perspective, it is suddenly understandable. The whole point of a corporation is to make it unnecessary to know who owns a business. The corporation is a legal entity you can regulate, tax, and punish without the bureaucratic burden of forming enforceable agreements with their owners.

Within the borders of a country in the modern day, this is not a big issue because you could simply eliminate the corporate income tax and increase income taxes on realizing capital gains and dividends. However, the personal income could be generated abroad by foreign owners and if not taxed at the corporate level, you may lose any opportunity to tax a significant share of the GDP of your economy. Trying to force every stockholder of the Coca Cola company to pay their share of German income tax on their German income is not feasible. When compounded across all combinations of owners, corporations, and countries, it is apparent that corporations provide substantial administrative simplification.

How did we get the need for a global minimum tax?

While one of the boogeymen in critiques of the capitalist, neoliberal order, corporate tax avoidance as a problem is a symptom of progress and one of the greatest successes of an international rules based order.

It’s a modern truism that there is little economic benefit to a national government to conquer or threaten other nations. This truism is because generally even if you are successful, it may expand your national income, resources, and tax base, but also increases your population and obligations, resulting in less of a net gain. However, this is only true because of the international rules based order that we have inhabited after WW2.

Taxation conflicts originate because there are two legitimate taxing authorities on corporations operating internationally. There is the government where the business activity occurs which is granting permission to a corporation to operate and there is the country whose laws govern the corporation itself, where it is incorporated.

In the pre-WW2 period, this conflict over taxation interests was left to a state of nature, resulting in negotiations of treaties on taxation that reflected the leverage each country had if it came down to open conflict. When taxation disputes were alive, corporations could be severely taxed by both countries, with neither willing to relinquish their taxation claims, and if resolved then it could be extractive of the national income of one of the parties.

After WW1 in the League of Nations, the resolution to this problem was proposed, and was ultimately adopted globally after WW2 under the leadership of the United States. A precedent of taxation was introduced where income would be taxed first where a business is operating and then the country where a business is incorporated could levy taxes. This understanding is baked into global taxation treaties around the world. This is a more natural arrangement where no country loses access to a portion of their gross domestic product that is not taxable.

While providing a more stable international tax environment for corporations and removing a major source of international conflict, it introduced a modest but consistent incentive to compete for a lower corporate tax rate.

While every government has an incentive to have a significant corporate tax rate, competition among taxing jurisdictions has slowly reduced the rate overall in a “race-to-the-bottom”, a net change that has harmed every nation’s tax base. While these incentives only apply to international corporations, they have downstream effects as it introduces the need to lower taxes on domestic businesses to not be at a relative disadvantage.

So how does the global minimum tax work?

The global minimum tax, or Pillar II, solves the following problem. If Germany were to declare that every business operating in Germany cannot utilize tax havens and must pay a 15% minimum tax for instance everywhere or pay it as a penalty to Germany, then that would be instantly disastrous for economic activity in Germany. That would increase the tax burden to operate in Germany by a substantial amount for companies operating in low tax jurisdictions.

While it would be disastrous for a single country to implement the rule to require companies operating in their country to pay a 15% tax everywhere, it is possible with a large bloc of countries coordinating their efforts. The Undertaxed Profit Rule (UTPR), does exactly that. If a company operates in Canada, the UK, almost all of the EU, Australia or South Korea, along with a few others, then the UTPR will be collected, bringing corporate tax up to a 15% minimum everywhere that corporation operates globally.

By dividing the burden across much of the global economy to enforce the global minimum tax, it is far more expensive to avoid and less extreme for each country to enforce. This is the mechanism mentioned at the start of this piece for what to do if tax havens do not agree. A corporation is then left with a free choice: either stop operating in much of the developed world or pay up.

Along with the UTPR, Pillar II has two other taxes far more countries around the world have adopted. To avoid losing any tax revenue to a UTPR enforcing country, tax precedence rules are preserved. The country where profits are earned can adopt a local top-up tax which will bring corporation’s tax liabilities up to the global minimum tax level. The jurisdiction of incorporation can adopt a top-up tax for any uncollected taxes abroad that would be taken through the UTPR. The UTPR is not called a tax but instead is a “rule” because through the design of the system it should never be collected. The incentives are in place where taxing jurisdictions with more of a claim to the tax revenue should want to collect it themselves instead of giving it up, leaving no benefit for operating in their tax haven.

A path to funding more robust public services

While the Republican Party has temporarily weakened Pillar II, it is strong enough to survive. The difference in the U.S. minimum corporate tax is that it requires a 15% minimum tax overall, rather than a 15% minimum tax in every jurisdiction. This means that corporations can use low tax jurisdictions to lower their tax liability to balance out their operations in higher tax jurisdictions up to the point their overall tax burden is 15%. Unlike Pillar II, this does not stop the “race-to-the-bottom” of corporate taxation.

While 15% may seem minor (although its projected to collect hundreds of billions in global taxes^[4]), it can establish a legal framework to build upon.

A future democratic administration can finish what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen started. We can recommit to the international goal of all developed countries to reverse the “race to the bottom”. In fact, we can go further and put it in reverse.

Once every country has a 15% corporate tax rate, the same mechanism could far more easily push it up to 20% and the tax rate for smaller corporations can increase as well with competition that is being taxed at a higher rate. This offers a pathway to put the “race-to-the-bottom” in reverse and return corporate taxation to a level that can help fund robust public services.

In December of last year the Trump administration set a target for a crewed Lunar landing by the end of 2028 and outlining policy goals for a re-working of the Artemis program ^[1]. As the Artemis program has been a wild ride since its inception an overview of its history and evolution is warranted. 

At the close of 2017 the White House Space Policy Directive 1 was signed with the intent of a “... U.S.-led, integrated program with private sector partners for a human return to the Moon, followed by missions to Mars and beyond” ^[2]. This was a widely supported policy direction that was meant to refocus US space development efforts to a staged development program (Moon -> Mars -> Beyond). This led to the creation of the Artemis program in 2020. The Artemis program was a broad and ambitious roadmap to develop a new commercial and international space ecosystem, a focus on developing a permanent and sustainable Lunar presence, and a timeline for returning humans to the moon in 2024 ^[3]. The proposed plan would use legacy Space Shuttle hardware (most prominently the RS-25 engines) integrated into the Space Launch System (SLS), built by Boeing, for the initial Artemis missions. SpaceX was chosen to conduct the human landing in Artemis 3 with a joint system where the SLS would launch the crew in the Orion capsule to rendezvous with the SpaceX transporter and lander in orbit for transit and landing on the moon by 2024 ^[4].  Key to Artemis was the international push with the Artemis Accords. Signed by the founding nations in Oct 2020 and currently have 61 participating nations ^[5], the Artemis accords set out to create a base co-operative framework for in-space activity for the international community ^[6]. Artemis Accords signatories have the obligation to the following for in-space activity:

• Peaceful purpose for in-space activities
• Transparency of plans and policy
• Interoperability of systems with other signatories
• Providing emergency assistance
• Registration of space objects
• Release of scientific data
• The preservation of historically significant sites and artifacts
• Space recourse extraction is compliant with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty 
• Deconfliction of space activities through notification and schedule sharing. 
• Commitment to managing, reducing, and removing orbital debris

The Artemis Program set a high bar and tight timeline for lunar operations, and, as some commentators predicted ^[7], the complex roadmap began to experience heavy delays. 

Front and center to the public are the delays of Artemis is the SLS rocket and Orion capsule. The SLS rocket has been plagued with delays and increased costs. According to an Office of Inspector General report the program showed a $6 billion increase in development costs in 2023 and a $700 million increase alone for the rocket for the Artemis III flight ^[8]. Alongside the SLS itself the infrastructure used to assemble, transport, and launch SLS, the Mobile Launcher (ML-1), experienced damage from the Artemis I launch and required an upgrade to the heavier ML-2. An Office of Inspector General investigation showed the initial $383 million cost of the program would balloon to $1.8 billion by its delayed 2027 target date which they concluded as unsustainable ^[9]. Following the Artemis I mission the Orion space capsule suffered some key failures in its operation in its complex re-entry maneuver. The Orion capsule first conducts a “skip” off the atmosphere to slow down before recommitting to re-entry. The ablative coating meant to burn and carry away heat performed differently at the lower heating rates in the maneuver than ground testing showed, leading to cracking in the ablative layer ^[10]. This, alongside delays in SLS integration, pushed off Artemis II from an already delayed 2024 target to an 2026 target and has yet to launch. Delays and poor implementation do not only exist in the traditional “cost-plus” sphere as Artemis’s private partners are also experiencing issues.

SpaceX also has been massively delayed with their plan to use up to a dozen Starship Human Landing System (HLS) launches to refuel their Lunar Lander and transporter. The plan for Artemis III was to fill a “depot” tank in orbit that is filled with cryogenic propellants from tanker Starship launches. The Lunar lander would then rendezvous with the depot to fill its propellant tanks before docking with Orion and going to the moon (see Figure 3) ^[11]. Besides the orbital complexities, cryogenic propellant (in SpaceX’s case Liquid Oxygen [LOx] and Liquid Natural Gas [LNG]) transfer in space has not been done before, making it a key blocker to an already complex and resource intensive plan ^[12]. In 2023, to add redundancy to the landing program, Blue Origin was awarded a contract to develop a lander for Artemis V. Its lander uses a LOx and Liquid Hydrogen (LH2) engine and also needs to develop cryocooling capabilities to keep the hydrogen from boiling off in space ^[13]. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin are opting to use cryogenic propellants and while they have difficulties (particularly LH2 as it needs to be kept at or below 20 Kelvin to avoid boiling off in space) there are good reasons why they are using them. The two main reasons are permanence and efficiency. For lunar permanence to be a reality, propellant costs need to decrease, and one way to do that is making fuel from lunar ice by decomposing it to LOx and LH2. While it raises the difficulty in the short term, it is a vital technology for all long term goals, but, as of early 2026, these are still technologies that need to be demonstrated. 

The Artemis rework 

In December of 2025 Jared Isaacman was confirmed as NASA administrator after almost a year of the role being vacant. His team would implement an overhaul of the Artemis program. Artemis II would continue as planned for a crewed test flight of the Orion capsule, but Artemis III would no longer target a lunar landing. Instead, it would focus on testing the Orion capsule docking with either or both SpaceX’s and Blue Origin's Lunar Lander in Earth's orbit to demonstrate and test the technologies before use on a landing ^[13]. The target would be mid-2027 and would require significantly less complexity than SpaceX’s original plan which would have necessitated all the untested technologies working right on their first try. Artemis IV would become the landing mission targeting early 2028 with a second landing mission (Artemis V) targeting the end of 2028. This new plan increases the reliance on SpaceX and Blue Origin while also canceling SLS, Orion, and Gateway (a lunar orbital station for crew transfers). The long delays and ballooning budgets for these programs are cited as the core reasons as well as their intent to leverage fixed contracts with private space as cheaper and faster solutions ^[14]]. This is a large pivot, and, while more incremental and clear, they are not without their challenges. First and foremost is time. There is less than a year and a half to meet Artremis III’s 2027 target and that is going to require some serious restructuring and pivoting by all parties involved. This is already being seen as Blue Origin recently shuttered its New Shepard program to transfer resources and over 500 of its personnel to its Blue Moon project ^[15]. And while ambitious the current roadmap is more clear, focused, realizable than the previous delay pile-up. 

This current pivot in Artemis feels like a breath of fresh air in an America that seems to be making the worst decisions at every step. In last year’s Redshift analysis we reported on last year, an American return to the moon is still generally approved of (67% in a YouGov poll) and 73% respond the Space program contributed either some or a lot of national pride and patriotism ^[16]. And while not ranked highest, opinion of NASA showed the lowest difference between Republicans and Democrats of all US Federal agencies ^[17]. The Artemis program is something we can all hope to succeed. Due to the scope, complexity, and timescales involved, major space programs like Artemis offer something that has the ability to outlast and transcend the political divisions that grip America currently. The current crisis gripping the United States can best be encapsulated as a lack of faith and trust in our leaders, institutions, and future outlook. There is a massive effort currently to get Artemis back on track and this program will far exceed this current administration’s tenure. In a time without many national wins, the success of Artemis is something we could all celebrate. 

Hasan Piker sat down with Adam Mockler last week after the uproar he caused when he said that he would vote third party in a hypothetical election between Gavin Newsom and JD Vance. Unlike his more cavalier approach in earlier discussions, Hasan framed himself here as a committed Democratic supporter who puts significant effort into electing Democrats, even as he argues that the party repeatedly sabotages itself by clinging to center-left politics and tolerating corporate candidates.

That matters, because Hasan doesn’t merely claim that Democrats are ineffectual, but that liberal democracy itself is an obstacle to meaningful change.

In Hasan’s world, Democrats are losing because they capitulate. Kamala lost because she said she would have signed Lankford’s bipartisan immigration bill. Democrats allow 70,000 people to die through the ACA when they fail to implement socialized medicine. Newsom got too chummy with Ben Shapiro. Per Hasan, there isn’t anything he could possibly do to “outflank” the DNC if they constantly run on a moderate, center-left policy agenda and how bad Trump is. 

However, Hasan is running the same game. In his debate with Mockler, he said that socialist movements are more likely to rise from an illiberal regime, and he isn’t wrong. History has plenty of examples of authoritarian excess leading to revolution, but what happened next and who suffered first? If the Democrats are accused of running a negative-motivated strategy, what do you call letting things degrade in hopes of a collapse that forces transformation? At least Democrats are trying to save people; to Hasan, those people become collateral.

Democrats are seeking harm reduction and to protect people now. Hasan appears to prefer allowing a Trump government to force a break, only those pesky Democrats aren’t letting things get bad enough for his revolution to happen.

Hasan’s hypocrisy carried through the whole debate, and while I think Adam Mockler did a fine job trying to get Hasan to explain his dual messaging, there is an overarching hypocrisy in Hasan’s ideology that he didn’t hammer home. Hasan acknowledges that Democrats are better but then calls them the uni-party with Republicans. Hasan describes the policy differences between Democrats and Republicans as marginal, then tries to qualify that claim by conceding that those same differences can have major impacts on marginalized groups. That qualification undermines the original claim. Differences that materially affect people’s lives are not marginal, and calling them so functions as justification for disengagement rather than serious analysis.

So what if a core motivation to vote Democratic in elections is often harm reduction, or “voting for the lesser of two evils”. Hasan often focused on the people that didn’t get help under Democratic policies compared to his socialist dream policies. Hasan claims that socialized medicine would have saved 100,000 people, while the ACA only saved 30,000 people, compared to the insurance system before the ACA. That framing is revealing, because it treats partial success as moral failure. He acknowledges that Democrats are better, but then refers to the Democrats and Republicans as the uni-party, implying they are the same. He claims that the Democrats are leaving 70,000 people to die without socialized medicine, but that only works if the Democrats could have passed Medicare for All and refused. Democrats enacted what they could with the votes they had through the ACA and saved 30,000 people who would have died. When people like Hasan undermine that, or advocate in ways that don’t encourage people to support the Democrats so we can move toward that socialist dream, he is saying those 30,000 people are an acceptable sacrifice until people are desperate enough to vote in a way that saves the other 70,000. 

Same with trans people. Their access to healthcare, identity, and rights get thrown on the poker table for the all in bet so trans people also get access to sports. They are treated as leverage rather than protections. You know, that thing that affects like 10 people in the country.

Sorry, but these things aren’t marginal, and Hasan’s weird attempt to sane-wash his rhetoric doesn’t change that. Hasan and his ilk struggle to win through democratic processes, which makes illiberal routes feel more attractive as a means to enact their agenda. Since anger and fear are so beneficial, the leftists are banking on the idea that if they accelerate the Trump agenda, people’s anger and fear will create the conditions needed for their socialist agenda. 

History has plenty of examples where the left failed to coalesce and this has never led to a socialist utopia. The failure to coalesce and defeat Hitler is the most obvious example, and let me tell you, those leopards ate so good. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) argued that the Social Democrats were “social fascists” and that liberal democracy was already a sham. Some party leaders believed that a Nazi victory would expose capitalism’s contradictions and radicalize the working class leftward. 

They thought Hitler would be the match that ignited their cause, until he outlawed them, destroyed unions, ended elections, and executed their leadership.

In examples where the socialists do get power, they didn’t rule a democratic paradise. In Russia, when the Bolshevik Party was able to take over, they didn’t bother to put one in place once they got the reins. They ruled as a one-party state where they purged citizens, and filled the gulags with former revolutionaries and political opponents.

Reform is messy, but movements that treat democracy as an obstacle don’t suddenly restore it once they have power.

Bernie Sanders-style social democracies don’t come from allowing conditions to degrade and treating marginalized groups as bargaining chips. They grow from things like Bernie Sanders actually does; consensus building, working with liberals in government, compromising to enact more progressive policies, maintaining power by not losing elections and building on these progressive policies once people realize they benefit from them and are comfortable with taking another step.

Harm reduction isn’t sexy, it’s pragmatic. It doesn’t promise a socialist utopia, but it protects more people now while showing others a better way. Using accelerationism to worsen conditions now in hopes of better outcomes later is like betting against the house after you give the casino to your enemy. History shows that method doesn’t have a good track record, and the people who pay first are the most vulnerable. 

If influential voices argue that preventing authoritarianism is less important than accelerating collapse as a political strategy, they share responsibility for the risks that follow. 

In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great began his invasion and conquest of the Persian Empire, casting his campaign as both retribution for Xerxes’ earlier assault on Greece and liberation for the Greek cities of Asia Minor. Unlike the border skirmishes that preceded it, Alexander's campaign was designed for absolute finality; the decapitation of leadership and the dismantling of the state. That fusion of grievance, ambition, and ultimate destruction has echoed across centuries, including in the modern trajectory of U.S./Iran relations. Over the past three decades, the relationship was marked by alternating cycles of negotiation, coercion, and proxy confrontation. From the sanctions regimes of the 1990s to the 2015 nuclear accord and its subsequent unraveling, Washington and Tehran have engaged one another through a language that was at once strategic and civilizational. However, the events of February 28th, 2026, marked a definitive rupture in this cycle. With the launch of Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, Washington and Jerusalem abandoned decades of shadow-boxing in order to strike directly at the heart of the Islamic Republic.

While the ideological dimension of the rivalry deepened after Hamas' attacks on October 7 and the ensuing regional crisis, the sheer scale of the current offensive has rendered those previous friction points obsolete. The United States previously intensified its support for Israel and reinforced its military posture across the Middle East, while Iran’s network of aligned militias expanded pressure points from Lebanon to Yemen. Much as Greek poleis and Persian satrapies maneuvered across contested frontier zones rather than committing immediately to decisive battle, Washington and Tehran historically tended to clash indirectly through peripheral theaters. Iraq, Syria, and the maritime corridors of the Gulf were long treated as arenas where deterrence was tested without formal declarations of war. That dynamic shattered overnight. The competition is no longer structured by influence or calibrated escalation. By executing daylight decapitation strikes on Tehran's Pasteur Street political district, the U.S. and Israel explicitly discarded peripheral deterrence in favor of total structural collapse.

Domestic politics within Iran complicate any linear reading of this new confrontation. Waves of anti regime protest have revealed persistent dissatisfaction with economic stagnation and political constraint, yet they have not produced systemic collapse as of yet. Now, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have explicitly framed this unprecedented attack as an opportunity for the Iranian people to overthrow their government. With the confirmed death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic faces an existential test. It differs fundamentally from the Achaemenid Empire that Alexander dismantled; it is not a loose imperial federation but a nation state whose revolutionary ideology and national identity are intertwined. The ultimate question of this new war is whether this massive external shock will trigger the systemic collapse Washington is betting on, or if it will provoke the exact fierce, unifying nationalist mobilization that historically occurs when sovereignty appears threatened.

The structural parallels between antiquity and the present lie less in tactical detail than in recurring patterns of power and perception. A dominant maritime power projecting force across distance confronts a continental actor defending depth and interior lines. Each frames the contest as a defense of order against destabilization, and hardliners argue that decisive action will resolve chronic insecurity. Yet history cautions that conquest and coercion rarely yield tidy outcomes. Alexander’s triumph produced fragmentation after his death, and Persian invasions once consolidated Greek unity rather than dissolving it. In the contemporary Middle East, the interplay of ideology, proxy warfare, and regional ambition suggests that this severe escalation may transform the strategic landscape in ways neither capital fully intends.

U.S. Force Posture: From Deterrence to Decapitation 

The present American force posture in the Middle East, as reflected in recent deployments catalogued by open source reporting, reveals a configuration optimized for rapid punitive action rather than territorial occupation. The USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is already operating in or near the Persian Gulf region, positioned within operational reach of Iranian territory and key maritime chokepoints, while the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group is presently transiting the Mediterranean, en route to reinforce the theater, a dual carrier posture that materially enhances capability. Carrier strike groups provide sustained sortie generation, electronic warfare capability, and deep strike reach, while guided missile cruisers and destroyers furnish layered air defense and precision strike options through cruise missiles. Forward based assets at Al Udeid in Qatar and Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates extend ISR coverage across the Gulf and into Iranian airspace, supported by aerial refueling platforms that lengthen the operational radius of strike aircraft. The architecture is coherent and scalable, capable of delivering concentrated blows against nuclear facilities, missile depots, and command nodes without requiring immediate ground commitment. We now know that rather than mere coercive signaling, these assets formed the architecture of a massive decapitation strike. This configuration reveals an enormous strategic gamble: Washington is relying entirely on air supremacy and precision strikes to shatter the regime, effectively betting that the Iranian populace will finish the job on the ground since there is no U.S. occupation force to secure the country.

The forces also convey limits. Absent are the heavy armored divisions, vast logistics trains, and mass troop prepositioning that characterized the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Amphibious readiness groups and Marine expeditionary units may provide contingency flexibility, yet they are not invasion armies poised for sustained occupation of a country with Iran’s demographic and geographic depth. Instead of using this posture as a form of strategic communication calibrated to deter escalation, the U.S. has weaponized it for an all-out air campaign. The lack of ground forces highlights the immense risk of this strategy: initiating regime change from the sky without the capacity to manage the aftermath on the ground.

Technically, the United States retains overwhelming advantages in suppression of enemy air defenses and precision targeting. Stealth aircraft and stand-off munitions have heavily degraded Iran’s integrated air defense network, while cyber and electronic warfare assets have disrupted command and control infrastructure. However, Iranian systems are dispersed, redundant, and embedded within hardened or subterranean facilities, complicating any expectation of decisive neutralization in a single wave. The geography of Iran, with mountainous terrain and extensive interior lines, imposes operational friction that tempers assumptions of swift strategic paralysis, meaning the U.S. must sustain these strikes over an extended period.

Ultimately, the present American military alignment in the region was long assumed to be designed to sustain deterrence through credible force while stopping short of the massive mobilization that would signal imminent invasion. Instead, it has been used to execute a sweeping offensive. The strategic logic has shifted violently from escalation control to total war. The gamble relies less on technical superiority than on the assumption that extreme, concentrated punishment will cause the Iranian state to fracture before it can inflict unbearable costs on the region.

The Activation of Iran's Arsenal

Facing this unprecedented assault, Iran’s capacity to resist an American strike rests less on parity and more on it's activation of layered deterrence. The Islamic Republic cannot contest American air and naval supremacy in open battle, yet it has invested for decades in ballistic missiles, cruise systems, and an expanding drone arsenal designed to inflict catastrophic damage in the event of an intervention. Its deterrent has failed to prevent the strike, and so it has transitioned immediately to execution. Its missile forces, dispersed and hardened, are surviving the initial waves of bombardment and actively retaliating against regional bases, energy infrastructure, and maritime traffic. The objective is not battlefield victory but imposing maximum pain.

Tehran’s conventional limitations have long driven it toward asymmetric design, a principle now being tested to it's absolute limits. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has refined a doctrine that substitutes precision salvos, proxy warfare, cyber operations, and maritime disruption for direct confrontation. With its senior leadership wiped out, the dispersed, decentralized nature of Iran's military means local commanders are likely executing pre-planned "doomsday" protocols. In the confined waters of the Strait of Hormuz, small craft, mines, anti-ship missiles, and unmanned systems provide tools for harassment that can reverberate through global oil markets within hours. Beyond the Gulf, Iran’s relationships with armed groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen furnish it with deniable instruments capable of striking U.S. personnel and allied interests. These networks are no longer theoretical threats; they are actively launching salvos at U.S. bases and Israel, converting geography into a zone of active combat.

The Collapse of the Regional Hedging Strategy

Internally, Iran’s leadership must now weigh domestic considerations in an environment of existential peril. The deadly January protests revealed long standing dissatisfaction with economic mismanagement and political repression, yet external threat often consolidates elite cohesion and narrows space for dissent. While a limited U.S. strike might have been absorbed and reframed as proof of foreign hostility, the current campaign aimed at total decapitation tests the very limits of the regime's cohesion. Rather than generating manageable internal strain, the reported death of Supreme Leader Khamenei has forced the remaining elite to unify for raw survival. The regime’s strategy no longer hinges on calibrated retaliation, but on desperate, overwhelming force to prevent the state from fracturing entirely.

Ultimately, Iran’s response options have shifted from constrained harassment to maximalist warfare. It cannot expel American power from the region through conventional means, yet it can and is actively attempting to impose sustained political and economic costs that complicate Washington’s strategic calculus. Its deterrent architecture is built on dispersion and persistence rather than decisive engagement, which means decentralized commanders are now utilizing that dispersion to wage an all-out counter-offensive. The current conflict environment proves that superiority in American firepower does not guarantee control over escalation, as Iran's asymmetric repertoires transform what was intended as a swift decapitation into a protracted regional conflagration.

As the conflict metastasizes, regional governments across the Middle East are now living their nightmare scenario.Official statements from Gulf capitals often reaffirm the importance of deterrence and opposition to Iranian destabilizing activity, yet diplomatic reporting and policy analysis suggest that many of these governments lobbied Washington against direct military action. Their concern was not rooted in sympathy for Tehran but in a sober assessment of geography and vulnerability. That dual-track hedging strategy has collapsed overnight. Countries like Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE are now caught in the crossfire as Iran strikes the U.S. bases hosted on their soil. In a region where economic diversification and investment stability are central political priorities, this massive exchange is reverberating through financial markets and domestic social contracts.

Israel occupies a distinct position within this regional mosaic. Israeli officials have long framed Iran’s nuclear and missile programs as existential threats and have signaled readiness to act unilaterally if necessary. With Operation Roaring Lion, Israel has achieved its long-sought direct strike on Iran's nuclear and leadership core. However, Israel must now weather the absolute maximum response from whatever remains of Iran's "Axis of Resistance." Jerusalem must weigh the tactical benefit of degrading Iranian capabilities against the reality that this strike has triggered a broader regional confrontation. Israeli calculations therefore intersect with, but do not perfectly mirror, Washington’s

European governments and Turkey view the crisis through yet another prism, one that has instantly shifted from diplomatic abstraction to economic triage. The Strait of Hormuz remains a critical artery for oil shipments, and its disruption is already cascading into inflationary pressure and political instability beyond the Middle East. In Ankara, concerns center on regional spillover into Iraq and Syria, theaters already burdened by militia activity and competing spheres of influence. For these actors, escalation is not an abstraction but a scenario with immediate material consequences.

This new reality confirms that the divergence between stated and actual positions among regional stakeholders reflected a broader structural tension. Public rhetoric often aligned with Washington’s language of deterrence and red lines, yet private diplomacy revealed deep apprehension about uncontrolled escalation. Gulf monarchies had spent the past several years hedging, reopening channels with Tehran while maintaining security partnerships with the United States. That dual track approach underscored a central reality: most regional governments feared a major war more than they feared a constrained Iranian posture. Now, those worst fears have materialized. The U.S. strike, far from being limited in scope, has not unfolded in a vacuum. It is tearing through a dense web of alliances, rivalries, and economic interdependence in a way that has completely obliterated the distinction between punitive action and systemic shock.

The Domestic Political Gamble for the U.S.

Back in Washington, this maximalist approach is colliding with a complex domestic reality. Public opinion data from Quinnipiac and similar surveys suggest that while Americans remain wary of another prolonged Middle Eastern war, there exists conditional support for limited, targeted strikes if framed as preventive or retaliatory. The administration, however, did not take the finite route; they went all-in on regime change. This creates a high-wire act for executive action. A short air campaign designed to degrade nuclear or missile infrastructure might have been politically sustainable; a protracted conflict with mounting casualties and skyrocketing energy prices will likely exhaust bipartisan tolerance. The electorate’s posture is neither isolationist nor interventionist in pure form, but transactional and contingent upon perceived cost, duration, and clarity of purpose.

For Donald Trump and Republican leadership, the calculus is particularly intricate and carries significant political risk. On one hand, confrontation with Iran aligns with longstanding party rhetoric emphasizing deterrence, restoration of credibility, and repudiation of the nuclear deal. On the other, the America First current within the coalition remains skeptical of open-ended military commitments that resemble the Iraq and Afghanistan precedents. If the Iranian regime collapses quickly and the nuclear program is erased, it could be framed as a historic victory. If the regime survives—or if it collapses into a chaotic, protracted regional war that spikes global oil prices and drags on—it will directly violate the core "America First" promise of avoiding new, messy foreign entanglements.

Congressional dynamics further complicate the equation. War Powers debates, funding authorizations, and the broader fatigue with expeditionary warfare constrain the executive branch, even if formal declarations remain unlikely. At the same time, no administration wishes to appear passive in the face of perceived nuclear acceleration or proxy aggression. Now that the rubicon has been crossed, the political risk lies not only in action but in inaction. By choosing the most expansive possible action, the administration has wagered its domestic political capital on a swift resolution. Domestic policy ramifications, therefore, do not merely shadow strategic decision-making. They shape its boundaries, define its tempo, and influence whether this war is pursued through sustained force or devolves into an uneasy quagmire.

The central question confronting policymakers is no longer whether the United States possesses the capacity to strike Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or military assets, but what strategic objective such massive action is ultimately intended to secure. The goal is clearly no longer deterrence restoration or limited strikes calibrated to reestablish credibility. Yet deterrence is relational rather than unilateral. A strike designed to compel submission has instead validated Tehran’s long-standing narrative of encirclement and accelerated precisely the behaviors Washington sought to inhibit. Even with the immediate objective of nuclear rollback, airpower alone has at best degraded facilities while leaving the technical knowledge, dispersed supply chains, and political resolve intact. The destruction of centrifuges is measurable. The recalibration of intent is not.

Before the campaign, a more ambitious objective was structural coercion, what some analysts have termed strategic submission. This presumed that the cumulative weight of sanctions, isolation, and kinetic action could compel Iran’s leadership to renegotiate the foundations of its security doctrine. Yet history suggests that regimes under external pressure often respond by consolidating authority rather than relinquishing it. The Islamic Republic has repeatedly demonstrated a capacity to absorb punishment while shifting costs outward through proxy networks and calibrated retaliation. In the current context, a total military campaign has become an instrument that produces tactical clarity but strategic ambiguity. One can crater runways and strike depots, but reshaping a regime’s threat perception through force has proven to be an unpredictable and violently chaotic undertaking.

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The most expansive objective, regime change, is now the explicit reality, carrying implications that extend beyond operational feasibility into the realm of political transformation. The record of external intervention offers sobering lessons about the distinction between toppling authority and constructing durable order. Even a successful air campaign that fractures the governing apparatus does not resolve the question of succession, territorial control, or national cohesion. Iran is not an artificial polity but a deeply rooted nation-state with a strong identity that has historically rallied in the face of foreign intervention. Thus the debate over these current strikes is less about military capability than about strategic coherence. Without a clearly defined end state and a credible theory of how this overwhelming application of force produces it, the campaign risks substituting motion for progress and spectacle for strategy, leaving behind a catastrophic power vacuum.

The narrow space between deterrence and war has been completely obliterated, replaced by a reality defined less by capability than by severe political consequence. The United States has utilized its ample means to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, missile infrastructure, and command nodes with precision and depth. The more difficult question is whether such action has altered Tehran’s strategic calculus or merely compressed the timeline of confrontation into immediate, maximum-intensity conflict. Air power can degrade enrichment sites and disrupt logistics, but it cannot extinguish the underlying rivalry, which is rooted in regime identity, regional competition, and mutual suspicion reinforced over decades. Tactical success in dismantling the Iranian state, in other words, may coexist with profound strategic ambiguity regarding the region's future.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the events of the past 48 hours dictate that The Islamic Republic’s foundational doctrine of asymmetric deterrence has been fundamentally shattered. Prior to February 28th, Iran’s leadership operated on the premise that it did not need to defeat the United States conventionally, but merely needed to impose economic costs and survive politically. That calculus evaporated with the daylight decapitation strikes on Tehran. With Khamenei's death and the explicit U.S.-Israeli declaration of regime change, the Iranian state is no longer fighting for leverage, it's fighting for its existence. Consequently, retaliation has abandoned the threshold of "calibrated" harassment. By launching direct, symmetrical ballistic missile salvos not only at Israel but at U.S. installations across the Gulf—including the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain—Tehran has acknowledged that the era of proxy mobilization and deniability is over. The strategy is no longer about sustaining instability below the threshold of open war; it is a desperate effort to inflict catastrophic costs in response to an existential threat.

The hazard of miscalculation has therefore been superseded by the reality of a totalizing regional war. Washington and Jerusalem’s decision to bypass limited deterrence in favor of structural decapitation has thrust the Middle East into uncharted territory. Regional actors who privately counseled restraint are now involuntary participants, forced to absorb the immediate material consequences of Iranian retaliation within their borders. Energy markets and global trade corridors are bracing for the exact systemic shocks that European and Gulf diplomats spent years trying to hedge against. The central dilemma is no longer whether Washington can punish Tehran without sparking a wider conflict. The question now is whether the outright destruction of Iran’s ruling apparatus will yield a viable, pro-Western political reality, as envisioned by the current U.S. administration, or simply plunge a deeply rooted nation-state of 88 million people into catastrophic, generational fragmentation. In crossing the threshold from coercion to annihilation, the United States has traded the ambiguities of deterrence for the profound, unpredictable burdens of regime collapse.

Editor's note: DemosthenesRex originally submitted this piece on February 23rd, but due to unforeseen circumstances I was unable to publish it before the US and Israel attacked Iran. I have updated the piece to reflect the current reality, but here's the link to the original. Spoiler alert: he nailed it.

"The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian; while on the other hand, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them...." - Thomas Paine

On January 24 2026, 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was shot dead by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis. As with Rene Good, the Trump administration went on full attack, quick to denigrate the victim and label the death as justified. This response surprised few and perceptions of the shooting fell cleanly along partisan lines.

Pretti, a gun owner with a permit to conceal carry, brought his handgun to the protests against ICE activities in his community. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem claimed he brandished his gun at officers and wanted to “inflict maximum damage on individuals and kill law enforcement”. The claim was completely unfounded by video footage, and she has since walked these statements back, saying that she was using the “best information we had at the time”.

After efforts to label the victim a “domestic terrorist” fell on deaf ears, officials shocked many Second Amendment advocates with their Hail Mary tactic to vilify the lawful carrying of firearms. During a news conference hours after the shooting, Noem said that “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign”. FBI Director Kash Patel mirrored these sentiments on Fox News, saying, “As Kristi said, you cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.”

U.S. attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli shared his opinion on social media, writing “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you. Don’t do it!” Donald Trump himself spoke on the issue, saying “you can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns.”

Gun rights groups, including the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, were quick to inform the administration that they were “completely incorrect.” The NRA replied to Essayli’s statement, noting that it is “dangerous and wrong”, and that “responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

The framing of Pretti carrying a firearm at a protest hit particularly close to home for prominent GOP advocate and Second Amendment defender Kyle Rittenhouse. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Rittenhouse shot three men, killing two, and was later acquitted of all charges. A day after Pretti’s death, he posted on X, “Carry everywhere. It is your right. #ShallNotBeInfringed”.

Aside from a few tepid responses from Republican members in Congress, their collective silence on the Second Amendment as a right belonging to all Americans, regardless of political standing, speaks volumes.

Over the last few decades, the Republican Party has been a stalwart defender of an individual’s unalienable right to own guns. However, these tides are appearing to shift in the wake of an increased interest by leftists and liberals to practice their Second Amendment right.

The Trump administration’s efforts to ban transgender Americans from owning guns directly fly in the face of the very principle they claim to defend. The party of “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun” appears to not be operating in a way in which guns make the world a safer place. Arguably, the only safe world in their eyes is one in which they hold all the weapons, and their opposition does not.

The Black Panthers and the Mulford Act

The Republican party’s selective application of the Second Amendment is not without historical precedent. The Civil Rights era was plagued with polarization fueled by police brutality.

Many found inspiration in the message of Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed the fight for racial equality would be gained through nonviolence and civil disobedience. Others were not won over by this approach, including Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who formed the Black Panther party in 1966 in Oakland California. Their ideology was based on the teachings of the late Malcolm X, who largely rejected King’s message of peaceful defiance.

Newton and Seale were disappointed by the civil rights movement’s inability to improve the condition of black lives. In the face of rampant state sanctioned violence, they lost faith in the idea that nonviolent protests would truly liberate black Americans.

In April of 1967, Denzil Dowell, a 22-year-old black California resident, was shot and killed by the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Department. He was unarmed and shot six to ten times while fleeing the scene of a robbery. This event was just one of many instances of police violence that sparked outrage within the black community.

Shortly after Dowell’s death, 30 Black Panther Party members practiced both their First and Second Amendment rights on the steps of the California statehouse. Armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols, members declared, “The time has come for Black people to arm themselves”.

This caught the attention of Republican California assemblymen Don Mulford. He introduced a bill that would repeal the law that permitted citizens to carry loaded weapons in public spaces. The Mulford Act shortly followed, which was signed into California law by then Governor Ronald Reagan, prohibiting the carrying of loaded firearms in public without a permit. Not dissimilar from the statements given by Kash Patel and Donald Trump, Reagan commented that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”

Contrary to the NRA’s current opposition to gun restriction, they supported the government’s efforts to control gun access in the 1960s, particularly for ex-convicts and mental patients. They viewed gun ownership as a right for “law-abiding, trained, and responsible citizens”. However, their support of the Mulford Act directly contradicted this credo.

The Black Panther Party engaged in the legal, responsible open carrying of firearms in public. They believed that every citizen should utilize their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves from the corrupt government that was brutalizing their communities.

Finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of operating as the oppressive government, Republican leaders saw them as a threat and acted. This move should come as no surprise, nor should the behavior of the current administration. In both instances, the key principle they hold is that of self-preservation. They are behaving as rational actors to defend themselves; not from a tyrannical government, but from those they oppress.

A Right for All, or for None

The right to bear arms is being invoked selectively by the current administration in an effort to preserve power. The Second Amendment was never meant to function as a privilege granted to the politically favored. If arms are to deter tyranny, they must be equally available, or equally restrained. When the right is affirmed for some and denied to others, it ceases to defend liberty. In that world, the Second Amendment is no longer a shield against oppression, but an instrument of it.

Sources

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r4g590wqo
2. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5714611-kristi-noem-alex-pretti-shooting/
3. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2nd-amendment-backlash-portrayal-alex-pretti-trump-administration/story?id=129559823
4. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-you-cant-have-guns-you-cant-walk-in-with-guns-trump-says-of-alex-pretti-killing
5. https://time.com/7358403/nra-trump-clash-gun-carrying-rights-pretti-federal-agents/
6. https://www.newsweek.com/what-kyle-rittenhouse-has-said-about-alex-pretti-ice-shooting-11417690
7. https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/01/us/gun-rights-politics-alex-pretti-killing-cec
8. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/06/trump-gun-ban-pushback-00547529
9. https://www.pbs.org/hueypnewton/actions/actions_capitolmarch.html
10. https://www.history.com/articles/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act
11. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/malcolm-x
12. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/black-panther-party-challenging-police-and-promoting-social-change

PART I

In 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, holding that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions. In doing so, the Court struck down portions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 that had barred corporations and unions from financing independent political advertisements in the weeks leading up to federal elections, sharply narrowing Congress’s authority to regulate such spending.

In the years since, Citizens United has become a central reference point in debates about money in American politics. The growth of independent expenditure groups and the emergence of Super PACs have frequently been linked to the ruling. Many reform advocates and political commentators regard it as accelerating a shift. The case addressed a specific constitutional question within a much larger debate about money and elections. 

The justices were asked whether the federal government possesses the authority to restrict certain forms of independent political spending in order to prevent corruption - or even the appearance of corruption - in federal elections. In answering that question, the Court drew a constitutional boundary that altered the balance between the government’s authority to regulate elections and the First Amendment’s protection of political expression.

PART II

The dispute arose from a specific provision of federal campaign finance law. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 regulated “electioneering communications,” a category that included certain broadcast advertisements mentioning federal candidates shortly before elections. Corporations and unions were barred from financing those communications with general treasury funds, even when acting independently of any candidate’s campaign. The provision was challenged when Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, sought to distribute and promote a documentary critical of then–Senator Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary season. Because the film fell within the statute’s definition of an electioneering communication and was to be financed with corporate funds, it was subject to BCRA’s restrictions. 

Those restrictions rested on a familiar constitutional rationale: that Congress may limit certain forms of political financing in order to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption in federal elections. For decades, beginning with Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Court has understood that interest primarily in terms of quid pro quo exchanges - direct arrangements in which financial support is traded for political favor - and the appearance of such arrangements. 

Hillary: The Movie, released during the 2008 primary season, brought that distinction into focus. The documentary was financed independently of any candidate’s campaign, yet the statute prohibited its distribution within the regulated pre-election window. The question before the Court was whether such a prohibition could be reconciled with a constitutional framework that had treated independent expenditures as less susceptible to quid pro quo corruption. The Majority concluded that it could not.

PART III

Writing for the Court, Justice Kennedy framed the case not as a question of money’s influence, but of constitutional limits on government authority. The majority reaffirmed that the only sufficiently compelling justification for restricting political spending is the prevention of quid pro quo corruption or its appearance. Because independent expenditures are made without coordination with a candidate, the Court concluded that they do not give rise to the type of direct exchange that campaign finance law may permissibly regulate. In the majority’s view, defining corruption to include influence, access, or disproportionate political power would significantly expand the government’s authority to regulate political speech. The First Amendment does not permit such expansion merely because the speaker is a corporation or a union.

In dissent, Justice Stevens argued that the majority’s approach overlooked the distinctive legal and structural characteristics of corporations. Unlike natural persons, corporations are state-created entities endowed with special privileges, including limited liability and perpetual existence, which enable them to amass and deploy significant economic power. The dissent contended that these characteristics may justify differential treatment in the political sphere, particularly when corporate expenditures risk distorting electoral processes even absent explicit quid pro quo arrangements. In Stevens’ view, the Constitution does not require the government to treat corporate-funded political advocacy as indistinguishable from individual speech, nor does it prohibit Congress from taking account of the institutional advantages corporations possess when crafting campaign finance regulations.

The disagreement in Citizens United centered on how corruption should be defined and how much authority the government should possess in attempting to prevent it. A narrow definition constrains regulatory power and protects political speech from expansive government oversight. A broader definition permits greater intervention in the name of democratic integrity, but necessarily grants the state wider discretion over political expression. The constitutional boundary the Court drew reflected a judgment about that tradeoff: whether the risks posed by independent corporate expenditures justified expanding the government’s authority over political expression.

PART IV

In a closely divided 5–4 decision, the Court resolved that tradeoff by concluding that the risks posed by independent corporate expenditures did not justify expanding the government’s authority over political expression. The decision invalidated BCRA’s categorical ban on independent corporate and union expenditures in federal elections, while preserving existing restrictions on direct contributions and coordinated spending.

The ruling opened the door to independent political spending by corporations and unions. In the years that followed, independent expenditure groups known as Super PACs expanded in scale and prominence, operating alongside campaigns while remaining formally uncoordinated with them. Political strategy increasingly adapted to this parallel structure, in which large sums could be raised and deployed outside the official campaign apparatus.

These structural changes became visible to voters in the form of increasingly aggressive independent advertising campaigns - waves of television and digital spots funded by organizations unaffiliated with the candidates they supported. Because such groups operated outside formal campaign control while remaining legally uncoordinated, they were often able to pursue sharper and more adversarial messaging strategies. Campaigns could benefit from these efforts while maintaining formal distance. 

The expansion of independent spending unfolded during a period of intensifying partisan polarization, further entrenching the perception that large-scale outside money was reshaping electoral politics. Over time, Citizens United came to function not merely as a constitutional ruling, but as a shorthand explanation for a wide array of frustrations about money, influence, and polarization in American politics.

PART V

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, debates about economic inequality, corporate influence, and institutional accountability grew more pronounced. As movements like Occupy Wall Street gave voice to concerns about concentrated economic power, Citizens United increasingly came to symbolize a perceived consolidation of wealth and political influence. In subsequent election cycles, the decision became a recurring point of reference in political rhetoric. Candidates pledged to overturn it, advocacy groups organized around it, and proposals for constitutional amendments gained renewed attention. In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama publicly criticized the ruling in the presence of the justices themselves, warning that it would “open the floodgates” to corporate spending in elections. The moment underscored how rapidly the decision had moved from constitutional doctrine into the center of political contestation. 

The name “Citizens United” appeared on protest signs, in campaign advertisements, and in primary debates. It became a recurring touchstone in arguments about money and democratic accountability, invoked as evidence that wealth had gained outsized influence in the political system. What began as the title of a small nonprofit organization became a symbol of democratic imbalance in public debate while remaining, in constitutional doctrine, a specific boundary on governmental authority.

PART VI

Citizens United did not settle the broader debate over money in politics. It defined a constitutional boundary: how narrowly corruption should be understood, and how far the government may go in regulating political expression to prevent it. The Court exercised its authority to draw that line, reshaping the terrain on which campaigns, advocacy groups, and voters would operate. The ruling came to carry meaning far beyond its holding, becoming a focal point for broader anxieties about wealth, power, and democratic accountability. Its legacy lies not only in the boundary it set, but in the interpretive weight that boundary came to bear.

In January, Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric in regards to Greenland. The vague strategic musings evolved into explicit demands that the United States acquire the Arctic territory. “The United States needs Greenland for the purpose of national security” he posted on Truth social.  Unlike earlier, more tentative discussions about purchasing the island, that no one was taking seriously, Trump publicly threatened tariffs against key NATO allies if they don’t acquiesce to his demands. 

In a wave of posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump announced a plan to impose 10% tariffs on imports from eight European countries including Denmark, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These were to begin on February 1, with an increase to 25% in June unless Greenland was turned over to the United States. He repeatedly linked his bullying tactics to geopolitical competition with China and Russia, arguing that “world peace is at stake” if the U.S. does not assert complete control over Greenland’s strategic geography.

But just as quickly as he began his threats, he pulled back, announcing that a deal framework was in place, and the tariffs would evidently not go into effect.

The posts triggered alarm bells among Europe’s political leadership, who are starting to become painfully aware that Trump respects nothing, not even sovereign territory. He pulled back this time, sure, but who is to say the next threat towards Europe won't be acted upon? If the US is willing to attack its own allies, can it truly be trusted?

Why Greenland?

Why Trump decided to target Greenland so aggressively is a mystery, but it is possible that it wasn't simply to posture or appear strong.

Greenland has been significant strategic and economic asset, filled notable if inaccessible natural resources. Trump has previously shown interest in extracting resources from allies, like his plan to continue aid to Ukraine only in exchange for rare earth minerals. It has also always been a strategically important location, hence the 1951 agreement between NATO and Denmark, which affirmed Denmark’s ownership of the island, as well as establishing coordination with US troops on the island. 

Greenland is in a unique position, connecting the shortest routes between North America and Europe. This geography has made the island a cornerstone of early-warning architecture. It allows the US and NATO to monitor air and missile traffic crossing the Arctic. Greenland is the most direct pathway for potential intercontinental ballistic missile launches. As Arctic ice recedes from global warming and sea routes grow more active, Greenland’s relevance has only increased, turning it into a forward sentinel for transatlantic defense and communications.

The U.S. operates Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland, which holds advanced radar systems used for missile warning and space surveillance, allowing NATO to track objects in orbit. It also providing crucial data to NATO allies. It also supports secure satellite communications that link North America with Europe, making it a key node in NATO’s integrated defense posture. It is important to note that these capabilities already function through longstanding agreements with Denmark, obviously showing that the United States enjoys deep strategic access without needing to outright own the island.

Trump highlighted these resources to justify his annexation threats. He attempts to frame control over Greenland as essential to preventing adversaries like Russia, China, and others from exploiting the Arctic. By emphasizing ownership over working together, he undermines the alliance framework that allows these systems to operate effectively in the first place.

Greenland holds vast reserves of rare earth elements and other minerals critical to supply chains. Previously inaccessible due to harsh weather conditions, these resources are increasingly tempting as Western nations seek to reduce dependence on China’s dominant position in rare-earth processing. Extraction is still challenging due to those harsh conditions and environmental concerns, but interest persists. Climate change is rapidly increasing accessibility in the Arctic, due to retreating ice opening new shipping lanes and makes resource extraction more feasible.

Just as likely however, even if frustratingly simplistic, is that Trump wanted Greenland as a result of his being snubbed for the Nobel peace prize. “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace”, he wrote in a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister. Trump may have forgotten that Norway does not own Greenland, and does not have control over the Nobel committee. 

The EU’s response

European governments and institutions have responded to Trump’s pressure campaign with strong condemnation and symbolic deployment of troops to Greenland. These troops are not meant to truly fight off a US invasion, but to show solidarity with the people of Greenland.

On behalf of eight affected NATO countries, European leaders issued a joint warning that tariff threats “undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral.” The statement reaffirmed solidarity with Denmark and Greenland and rejected coercion as a tool among allies.

National leaders took firm positions, with Starmer of Britain calling the tariff threats “completely wrong” and reiterated that Greenland’s future is a matter for the Kingdom of Denmark and its people. French President Emmanuel Macron declared that “no intimidation or threat will influence us” and that such tactics have no place among allies. Other leaders have made similar statements, with none in agreement with Trump. 

Greenland’s people have also soundly rejected the idea of an annexation, with Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen vowing that Greenland will not be pressured. Only 6% of Greenlanders agree with annexation, with a strong 85% opposing the idea of Trump’s rule over their island. 

European ministers have openly discussed using the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, a clause that enables retaliation against economic pressure by third countries, as a method to counter potential U.S. tariffs. Emergency EU summits are under consideration to agree on possible responses.

This willingness to consider countermeasures against the United States is unprecedented in recent diplomatic history, showing building resentment with the President's threats.

Alliance Erosion

The Greenland dispute is adding to the strained way allies perceive U.S. leadership and reliability. Trump’s aggressive posture has caused many European allies that traditionally saw the U.S. as a security anchor to reconsider. Tariffs against NATO members for participating in joint military exercises in Greenland signal to allies that cooperation could lead to economic punishment rather than shared security gains. Even if the members paid the 2%, or double that at 4%, Trump’s original gripe with the EU NATO members, nothing signals that it would change his aggressive messaging towards Europe.

European officials have warned that divisions in the transatlantic alliance benefit geopolitical competitors. EU foreign policy representatives explicitly stated that China and Russia are “having a field day” amid the discord, capitalizing on Western disunity to advance their own influence in global forums. With similar insinuations aimed at Canada, one only needs to look at their recent deal with China to see this playing out in real time. Rivals can, and will, exploit cracks in alliances to strengthen their positions within US allied circles.

European leaders will likely embrace initiatives for European autonomy by strengthening defense capabilities independent of Washington. While not a direct pivot to Russia or China, this defensive hedging reflects diminished trust and a desire to ensure security without relying solely on U.S. support.

Conclusion

Donald Trump’s brief but intense Greenland episode has morphed from an odd policy gambit into a defining moment of diplomatic strain in the early 21st century. Although he has officially backed down from tariffs and threats of force, the impact on international trust and alliance cohesion is already palpable. Trump’s approach has aggravated transatlantic tensions and weakened U.S. soft power for the foreseeable future. America is now untrustworthy, constantly acting tough with their allies, and playing nice with their enemies.

The future of the transatlantic alliance is grim. It is fracturing under the weight of unilateral demands, giving rivals room to expand their influence. The Greenland episode is now a defining moment in early 21st-century diplomacy, but there are still 3 more years of the Trump Administration. Greenland may be in the clear for now, but other territories, especially those not in NATO, may be at risk. If we are willing to threaten our allies and kidnap foreign leaders, what could be next? The President is not known for his moderation. He will push and push to get the most that he can, and when he is gone, he will leave America's reputation in shambles.

Comparisons between contemporary state institutions and fascist paramilitary organisations are often dismissed as inflammatory or historically careless. This quite blatantly ignores the power of comparison lying in finding key overarching similarities, not one-for-one likeness. Yet historians of fascism have long emphasised that authoritarian systems are rarely recognised in their formative stages. One of the key references this article will refer to is the work of Robert O. Paxton. He argues that fascism is best understood not as a static ideology but as a process, identifiable through behaviour, institutional accommodation, and the gradual normalisation of coercion rather than through explicit declarations of intent [9].

This article does not claim that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is equivalent to the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) or Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Instead, it advances a narrower and historically grounded argument: ICE increasingly exhibits structural and behavioural traits that resemble those historically associated with early-stage paramilitary formations, and these similarities warrant careful scrutiny as indicators of institutional trajectory rather than categorical identity.

Using comparative fascist history this article examines origins, evolution, recruitment, use of violence, and power structure to identify warning signs rather than assert equivalence.

The Nazi Brownshirts (SA)

Origins in Crisis and Political Opportunity

The Sturmabteilung emerged in a Germany marked by military defeat, economic collapse, and widespread distrust in parliamentary democracy. Founded in 1921 as the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, the SA initially framed its role as defensive: protecting nationalist speakers, restoring order to chaotic streets, and countering perceived left-wing disorder [1][2].

Socially, the SA drew heavily from men displaced by the postwar settlement, including unemployed veterans and those alienated from liberal institutions. The SA offered belonging, hierarchy, and symbolic purpose through uniforms, ranks, and ritual. Violence was not peripheral to this identity; it was central. Street fighting, intimidation, and public demonstrations of force created momentum and visibility that conventional political activity lacked [3]. Despite how these actions may be viewed today, through the lens of those involved at the time many will have framed them as legitimate actions to bring about order and stability.

Early SA violence operated in a space of selective enforcement. Although formally illegal, assaults and disruptions were often inadequately punished or quietly tolerated, particularly by conservative judges, police, and political elites who viewed the SA as a useful counterweight to socialism. As Paxton stresses, this tolerance did not require ideological commitment to Nazism, it rested on expediency and fear of alternative threats, mostly from the left. Moreover,  He argues that the success of fascist movements depended heavily on complicity from traditional elites who did not necessarily share fascist ideology but accepted or enabled it for expedient reasons, treating it as preferable to feared alternatives [9].

From Street Militancy to Normalised Coercion

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, the SA had matured into a mass organisation operating across Germany. What began as episodic street violence evolved into systematic intimidation, electoral interference, and the harassment of Jews and political opponents [2]. Violence became the norm rather than exceptional, reshaping public space through the constant possibility of coercion.

This phase is often mischaracterised as chaotic. In practice, it reflected a new political equilibrium in which violence increasingly aligned with Nazi electoral strategy. Democratic participation remained formally intact, but the presence of uniformed intimidation distorted its substance. People learned where not to speak, where not to gather, and when silence was safer than dissent. Democracy at this point became superficial as the key pillar of free speech was de facto eroded away by SA intimidation.

Paxton’s process-based analysis is crucial here. The decisive shift was not the formal seizure of power but the normalisation of violence as a political instrument. By the time Hitler became chancellor in 1933, much of the democratic erosion had already occurred. The later purge of SA leadership during the Night of the Long Knives did not negate the SA’s historical role. It confirmed that the organisation had already fulfilled its function in destabilising democratic norms [9].

The Italian Blackshirts

Informal Violence in a Fragmented State

Italy’s Blackshirts arose from a different political tradition but followed a strikingly similar path. In the aftermath of World War I, Italy (as per Germany) experienced economic instability, mass strikes, and widespread fear of socialist revolution. Fascist squadristi formed initially as local, loosely organised groups that targeted trade unions, socialist councils, and political opponents [6][7].

Like the SA, early Blackshirt violence was decentralised and opportunistic. It was framed as restorative rather than revolutionary, claiming to defend national unity and property against chaos. Violence was overt and theatrical, designed to be seen as a signal that authority had shifted away from formal institutions toward those willing to act decisively.

State response was inconsistent and often complicit. Police and courts frequently failed to intervene, while industrialists and conservative politicians increasingly viewed the squads as stabilising forces. Violence thus became politically functional before it was formally legalised. Arguably the inadequate reaction of the authorities could be seen as appeasement.

Institutionalisation and the Absorption of Violence

Following Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922, the Blackshirts were institutionalised as the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale. Earlier extralegal violence was retroactively legitimised, and perpetrators were absorbed into the fascist state apparatus rather than punished [6].

This transition illustrates a central historical insight that paramilitary violence often precedes authoritarian consolidation rather than following it. The Blackshirts did not seize power on behalf of a completed dictatorship. Instead they helped create the conditions under which such a system could plausibly function. As with the SA, coercion moved from the margins to the centre through tolerance, utility, and eventual incorporation.

ICE

Origins and Structural Differences

ICE was established in 2003 under George W Bush as part of the Department of Homeland Security following the September 11 attacks. Its creation was bureaucratic and security-driven, intended to consolidate immigration enforcement and customs functions within a legal framework. Unlike the SA or Blackshirts, ICE did not arise from a mass political movement or street-level militancy.

This distinction matters. The most pertinent comparison must focus not on origin but on institutional evolution and behavioural convergence over time. Despite the origins of ICE having footing in a reaction to a perceived threat from within violence and enforcement methodologies fitted within the norms of the day. One shade of grey in this regard is that post 9/11 norms had indeed shifted though not quite to the degree of post first world war continental Europe.

ICE Before and After Trump: A Shift in Enforcement Logic

For much of its early history, ICE prioritised immigration enforcement within a framework that emphasised due process and the removal of individuals with criminal convictions. This enforcement logic changed markedly during the first Trump administration and intensified in subsequent years.

Interior enforcement expanded, oversight mechanisms weakened, and enforcement adopted a more demonstrative character focused on deterrence and visibility. Operations conducted in major cities, including Minneapolis, marked a qualitative shift toward aggressive street-level enforcement in civilian spaces [4][8].

Collective Violence, and Intimidation

Recent years have seen multiple controversial uses of force by ICE and related federal agents, including fatal shootings of U.S. citizens during enforcement operations in Minneapolis in early 2026 [4][5]. These incidents often involved bystanders or individuals not subject to immigration enforcement, intensifying public scrutiny. Such actions, with such frequency, can simply not be seen as within the legal remit of ICE instead demarcating over-reach, intimidation with a political slant.

Charles Tilly’s analysis in The Politics of Collective Violence provides a useful framework. Tilly demonstrates that violence frequently emerges without explicit orders, as a product of institutional incentives, boundary-drawing between protected and unprotected populations (a growing

us and them mentality), and weak accountability [10]. What matters is not legality in principle, but whether violent outcomes are predictable and tolerated.

From this perspective, repeated violent encounters, slow or ineffective accountability, and post-hoc justification are indicators of structural coercion, not isolated misconduct.

Recruitment, Culture, and Ideological Practice

While ICE lacks an explicit ideological manifesto, organisational ideology need not be articulated to be operative. Recruitment patterns, internal culture, and tolerated behaviour function as mechanisms of ideological reproduction. Paxton’s emphasis on behaviour over doctrine is instructive here [9].

Historical paramilitaries did not begin with explicit exterminatory programs. They began with dehumanisation, boundary-drawing, and the normalisation of aggression. ICE’s increasingly adversarial posture toward migrants, and at times toward observers and critics, raises questions about similar mechanisms operating within a different institutional context.

Hierarchy, Autonomy, and Legal Overstretch

Formally, ICE remains subordinate to civilian authority within DHS. Yet operational autonomy at the field level, combined with political backing and judicial strain, produces a greater de facto authority in enforcement.

Historically, paramilitaries were not initially autonomous either. As Paxton notes, they operated in spaces where enforcement outpaced law and restraint was politically inconvenient [9]. The resemblance lies not in formal structure, but in functional authority and tolerated overreach.

Outlook

This analysis does not assert inevitability. Democracies do not collapse by analogy. But history provides warning signs. Early fascist movements were characterised by selective enforcement, tolerated violence, erosion of oversight, and elite rationalisation of abuse. These were early features, not late ones.

Following Paxton, the question is not whether ICE is fascist today, but whether its institutional practices align with historically dangerous trajectories [9]. Following Tilly, the focus remains on mechanisms rather than intent [10].

ICE differs fundamentally and unquestionably from the Brownshirts and Blackshirts in origin and legal status. This is nevertheless a disraction from the current trajectory. History shows that paramilitarisation is a process, not an event. When violence becomes routine, accountability weakens, and intimidation spreads beyond designated targets, institutions change character before they change name.

The lesson of interwar Europe is not inevitability, but urgency. Unchecked coercion rarely self-corrects with appeasement an irreversible process. The use of ICE beyond its remit is a clear non-cooperative action of the current administration that should be met reciprocally with an equal and opposition acts of non-cooperation.

Across the political landscape it is easy to become fixated upon the die-hard populists cheering on Donald Trump. Yet, history also teaches us that it is the tepid bystanders that wilfully dismiss the threat, appease or disengage with politics, that play a critical role.

Whether ICE’s trajectory continues, stabilises, or reverses will depend on political will, judicial capacity, and institutional restraint. There is of course the hope that Trump and his movement do not continue down the fascist rabbit hole, that the normalisation of violence on the part of ICE as a tool of political intimidation is reined in, recognising the tarnished image this would leave for history to see. This hope, vanishingly small, cannot be relied upon.

Bibliography

[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica, “SA (Sturmabteilung).”
[2] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “The SA.”
[3] Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: Hubris. London: Penguin, 1998.
[4] Reuters, “Federal immigration agents kill another US citizen in Minneapolis,” Jan. 24, 2026.
[5] Al Jazeera, “Minnesota governor wants federal agents out after Pretti killing,” Jan. 25, 2026.
[6] Oxford Reference, “Blackshirts.”
[7] Payne, Stanley G. A History of Fascism, 1914–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
[8] Reuters, “Trump moved to cut funding for ICE body cameras, pared back oversight,” Jan. 25, 2026.
[9] Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
[10] Tilly, Charles. The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
[11] Deportation Data Project, “Immigration Enforcement in the First Nine Months …” (analysis page), published Oct 15, 2025 data release, accessed 2026.
[12] FactCheck.org, “As ICE Arrests Increased, a Higher Portion Had No U.S. Criminal Record,” Jan. 28, 2026.
[13] TRAC Reports, “Immigration Detention Quick Facts,” data current as of Nov. 30, 2025.
[14] Human Rights Watch, “US: ICE Abuses in Los Angeles Set Stage for Other Cities,” Nov. 4, 2025.
[15] Migration Policy Institute, “Unleashing Power in New Ways: Immigration in the First Year of Trump 2.0,” Jan. 13, 2026.
[16] Brookings, “ICE expansion has outpaced accountability. What are the remedies?” Jan. 26, 2026.
[17] Center for American Progress, “The Trump Administration’s ICE and CBP Have Become a Threat to Americans: Congress Must Ensure That DHS Follows the Law and Adopts Commonsense Reforms,” Jan. 28, 2026

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher and historian in the 17th century. In 1651, he published his most notable work, The Leviathan. He described how human beings, left without restraint, would live in a condition he called Warre. Warre is not constant violence or endless bloodshed, but the absence of assurance to the contrary. The knowledge that violence could occur at any moment, and that no higher authority exists to stop it. In that world, planning becomes irrational, trust collapses, and survival dominates every human interaction.

Hobbes’ solution to Warre was the Leviathan. A singular, powerful presence (the state), to which society submits its authority in exchange for order. The Leviathan ends Warre by creating predictability and stability. Its power emerges from perceived legitimacy and, ultimately, from force. Society submits because the alternative is chaos.

Hobbes largely treats the Leviathan as a singular, rational actor whose interests align with social order. What his theory underestimates is the fallibility of the Leviathan. It is staffed by people, shaped by incentives, and insulated by power. Once authority is centralized, the question is no longer how Warre is avoided, but who controls the mechanisms of violence, coercion, and policy. Hobbes explains why societies submit to authority, but he offers few tools for understanding how that authority can rot, harden, or turn inward once submission has occurred.

This is the core pitfall of Hobbes’ theory. The same concentration of power that ends Warre also creates the conditions for domination. The Leviathan that protects can just as easily punish. The Leviathan that resolves conflict can manufacture it. Without sustained pressure from society, the logic that justifies absolute authority in moments of fear becomes the logic that excuses repression in moments of calm.

The Despotic Leviathan

Hobbes imagined a Leviathan that would protect its subjects, resolve disputes fairly, provide public services, and allow economic life to flourish. What history shows us instead is that the Leviathan does not have a single face. Alongside the protective state exists another, darker form. The Despotic Leviathan.

A despotic Leviathan wages war not against external enemies, but against its own people. Nazi Germany stands as an obvious example. So do regimes that pursued catastrophic policies while maintaining absolute authority, such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Stalin’s Holodomor. In these cases, the state retained enormous capacity. It could mobilize resources, enforce obedience, and suppress dissent. But it used that capacity to dominate rather than protect.

The despotic Leviathan silences its citizens and becomes impervious to their wishes. It imprisons, maims, and murders. It steals the fruits of their labor, or enables others to do so. It may still get things done, but what gets done serves repression, not liberty. As has been said of the Chinese Leviathan, much like the Leviathan of the Third Reich, it ends Warre only to replace it with a different nightmare.

Despotism flows from the inability of society to influence the state’s policies and actions. When society loses its leverage, the Janus-faced Leviathan takes hold.

The Absent Leviathan

Not all societies rely on a Leviathan. Stateless societies attempt to avoid Warre through social norms, like customs, traditions, rituals, and shared expectations of behavior. Norms determine what is considered right and wrong, which behaviors are discouraged, and when individuals or families will be ostracized and cut off from communal support.

These norms bond people together, coordinate collective action, and allow communities to respond to serious crimes or external threats. In the absence of a Leviathan, norms are critical to avoiding Warre.

But norms also impose a cage. Adherence to them reduces vulnerability to violence, yet demands conformity. Freedom is surrendered for collective protection, resulting in a form of voluntary servitude. 

Over time, subservient social statuses emerge and are justified by these norms. Beliefs about what is proper harden into custom. Norms are not arbitrary, but have evolved because they once served a function. These norms are often exploited by those in positions of power. In this way, the cage of norms can produce domination comparable to that of a despotic or absent Leviathan.

The Paper Leviathan

Some states occupy an even more precarious position. Common in parts of Latin America and Africa, paper Leviathans combine the worst traits of despotic and absent states. They are unaccountable to society, yet incapable of enforcing laws, resolving conflicts, or providing services. They are repressive while being weak.

Paper Leviathans appear powerful on paper but are too disorganized to rule effectively. They cannot become fully despotic because they lack the capacity to protect themselves from society or external forces. Instead of building institutions, leaders weaponize their incompetence, rewarding access to what should be a functioning bureaucracy to selective compliant individuals.

Citizens under a paper Leviathan have little influence over government decisions, receive minimal protection from Warre, and remain trapped in the cage of social norms. Repression is present, but welfare and security are not.

The Shackled Leviathan

Between despotism and anarchy lies the Shackled Leviathan. This is a state with the capacity to enforce laws, control violence, resolve conflicts, and provide public services, yet one that remains constrained by an assertive, well-organized society.

An effective shackled Leviathan can solve disputes fairly, enforce complex laws, and maintain a large bureaucracy, even if that bureaucracy is imperfect. It maintains a strong military without turning it against its citizens. It collects massive amounts of information but refrains from exploiting it for repression. It responds to public demands and can intervene to loosen the cage of norms, particularly for disadvantaged groups.

Crucially, bureaucrats are subject to oversight, and elected leaders are removed when citizens no longer approve of their actions. A shackled Leviathan creates liberty, but only so long as society remains willing to complain, demonstrate, and rise up when the state oversteps its bounds. These social shackles, not legal ones, are what prevent despotism.

The Red Queen Effect

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Alice meets and runs a race with the Red Queen. Alice noticed that both appeared to be running, only to remain in the same place. The relationship between the state and society resembles this concept of the Red Queen effect. Both the state and society must advance at roughly the same pace to preserve balance. 

If society slows down, becomes apathetic, fearful, or disengaged, the state’s growing capacity turns a shackled Leviathan into a despotic one. If the state slows down, failing to meet new economic, technological, or social challenges, frustration festers, legitimacy erodes, and instability follows.

This competition is not a zero-sum game. The goal is not for society to defeat the state, or for the state to overpower society. Compromise within competition is necessary. A state must expand and advance its role and capacity to meet new challenges, while society becomes more powerful and vigilant. Exhausting as this dynamic may be, it is necessary for the progress of society and liberty.

Defending Liberty

American liberty emerged from persistent social mobilization. Without an assertive society, constitutional protections are worth little more than the paper they are written on. Liberty depends on the shared belief that power remains balanced between state and society. 

If society allows elites and institutions to accumulate unchecked power, the Leviathan becomes despotic. If the state falls behind, it becomes absent. Liberty lives only in the narrow, unstable space between these extremes. It is maintained through constant effort, vigilance, and resistance. The Leviathan can be built, restrained, and rebuilt again, but only so long as society keeps running.

Authors note: The analysis in this article draws heavily from the framework of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty.