Televised nationally and internationally, Trump’s assault on the people of Minneapolis has shown without a doubt that the ICE raids are not about immigration, but are about fascist domination of urban America. Several videos have clearly documented the murders of Renee Good and now Alex Pretti. And a great many videos have documented the bravery of the anti-ICE stalwarts of Minneapolis. They are articulate, creative, non-violent, and in solidarity with each other. One hopes that all Americans will do as they are doing when ICE comes to their cities and towns.
For there is little doubt, if certainty is still possible in Trump’s America, that Trump and ICE will double-down on their violence and the chaos they are sowing. Some suggest that this chaos is a feature, not a bug: sending ICE to cities that traditionally vote for Democrats will provide a “reason” for canceling next November’s elections in some/all states. Trump’s threats to “invoke the Insurrection Act,” and thus send the Army into our streets to “restore order,” may be the next stop in this plan. As Hamilton Nolan writes on his interesting website, “We’ll all be Minneapolis soon.”
Ideally, stopping fascism would be a priority for Senate Democrats in Washington, starting with shutting down the government next Friday unless/until funding for the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, is removed from the budget legislation that must be passed for the government to remain open. Please call your elected Senate representatives in Washington to let them know that a zillion of their constituents want action, not just words. Please call Sen. Gillibrand - (202) 224-4451 and Sen. Schumer – (202) 224-6542, Thanks.
Finally, there is likely to be some strong protests in NYC and Westchester in the coming days. Please join/do what you can to make them successful. Thank you
ILLUMINATING THE CIVIL WAR IN MINNEAPOLIS
In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War
By Lydia Polgreen, New York Times [January 19, 2026]
---- As a longtime foreign correspondent, I have covered civil wars in countries across the globe. Not so long ago, I would have rolled my eyes at the notion that one could erupt anywhere in America, much less in my once placid home state of Minnesota. And yet there I was, eyes stinging and throat burning as tear gas wafted over me, watching heavily armed agents of the federal government invade a quiet residential neighborhood five miles as the crow flies from the suburb where I went to middle school. Like many Americans, I had watched the video of the killing of Good by an ICE officer on a residential street in Minneapolis with horror and sorrow. From afar, this tragic and possibly criminal act of violence could plausibly be seen as incidental to President Trump’s mission to deport undocumented people from the country. But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America. [Read More]
Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis
By Charles Homans, New York Times Magazine [January 25, 2026]
---- What I saw, as federal agents stormed the city and residents banded together to protect themselves, was a dark, dystopian future becoming reality. … Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge. [Read More]
State Terror Has Arrived
By M. Gessen, New York Times [January 24, 2026]
---- After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived. … President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror. [Read More]
This Cold Winter, Love Is a Superpower
By Rebecca Solnit, Meditations in an Emergency [January 25, 2026]
---- This is one of our strategic advantages: they routinely fail to comprehend motives that are not selfish, so the idealism, the altruism, the commitment to ideals and principles, that motivates the resistance is seen as a cover-up for the real motives, which helps them cast progressives as criminal or delusional. Empathy is itself an act of imagination, that begins with attention and care: what is it like to be this other being, what are they feeling, what do they need. It arises from and reinforces a sense of non-separation, a sense that we’re all in this together, that everyone is your neighbor and no one is a stranger. … They have made a massive gamble, and I believe they are losing that gamble. One part of it is as I have written before about the nature of power itself: that they have [lost?] most or all of it, because they do not understand the powers of civil society and the power of nonviolent resistance and noncooperation. Another part is about human nature; they seem to assume that most of us are selfish and timid and will not resist once we see their capacity to dominate and do violence, that we do not care about anything much beyond our individual selves, or that we will see them as winners and admire winning so much we’ll come on over. Like Sauron they suffer from failure of imagination. The thing they cannot imagine is us. [Read More]
NEWS NOTES
One of the major forces to stop US gun violence is Everytown for Gun Safety. Check out their informative interactive thing, “Gun Safety Policies Save Lives.” Everytown asks, “Which states have the ideal laws to prevent gun violence? We compared gun policy across the country, scoring every state on the strength of its gun laws and comparing it with its rate of gun violence. In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence. Choose a state to see how it stacks up on 50 key policies, or explore a policy to see how much of the country has adopted it. [Learn More]
At our weekly peace & justice vigils, we are sometimes asked, “Why don’t you protest [fill in the blank – China, Sudan, Iran, etc.]? The answer, of course, is that as American we have a tiny chance to influence our political life, but no chance to influence [fill in the blank]. Also, as Peter Beinart explains eloquently in his short talk about Noam Chomsky’s response to this question, as Americans we have a moral responsibility to monitor and criticize the crimes of our own government. You can see the Beinart talk about Chomsky (7 minutes) here.
MAMDANI AND NEW YORK
Nurses Dig In Against New York’s Hospital Giants
By Prajwal Bhat, The Nation [January 23, 2026]
---- Nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), a union representing more than 42,000 nurses statewide, walked out in protest on January 12 after delivering notices to the hospitals under the Mount Sinai, Montefiore Medical Center, and NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center systems. The nurses in NYSNA who work at these hospitals have been without a contract since December 31, after their demands were not met during negotiations that began in September 2025. The nurses say hospitals have stonewalled bargaining on key issues like healthcare benefits and safer staffing ratios. [Read More]
Here are four ways Zohran Mamdani can end financial support in New York City for Israeli settlements, and he must act soon
By Nerdeen Kiswani, Mondoweiss [January 23, 2026]
---- When Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race of New York City, many believed his election would transform not just municipal policy but how the city confronts injustice, at home and abroad. Many were inspired when, as an assemblyman in May 2023 at the CUNY School of Law, Mamdani introduced the “Not On Our Dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act”, a bill that would have prohibited New York‑registered nonprofits from using tax‑exempt status to fund Israeli settlement expansion and other violations of international law. But despite his pre‑mayoral record and the sustained grassroots pressure, Mamdani’s actions since taking office have disappointed and not matched the urgency of the moment. … Here are four concrete actions Zohran Mamdani can take as mayor to challenge the funding pipeline to Israeli settlements in New York City. [Read More]
CFOW NUTS & BOLTS
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) The Northwest Yonkers Neighbors for Black Lives Matter holds a Monday afternoon vigil at 5:30 pm at the corner of Warburton Ave and Odell. The CFOW newsletter can be read on Substack, and is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook group. Another Facebook group focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a CONTRIBUTION, please make out your check to “Frank Brodhead,” write “CFOW” on the memo line, and send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks.
REWARDS!
In times of fascist insanity and presidential incoherence, satire can be a powerful weapon. This week’s Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers give a shout-out to some of our great satire creators. First up is the recent oeuvre of the Borowitz Report that imagines the cross-species military imaginary of Greenland. A current satire savant is Stephen Colbert. Recently he dissected Trump’s “war on protein.” And perhaps the architect of much modern American satire was George Carlin. One of his best was “Proud to Be An American.” Finally, we must mention Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), who informed us that “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Still true, after all these years.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW WEEKLY READER
FEATURED ARTICLES & ESSAYS
Whose Hemisphere?
By Fintan O’Toole, New York Review of Books [February 12, 2026 issue]
---- The US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reinforces the Trump administration’s capacity to invent any pretext to justify the use of armed force. … At the heart of this anarchic authoritarianism is the fascist doctrine that the strong must prey on the weak. As Trump’s most influential adviser, Stephen Miller, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on January 5, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller was speaking specifically about Trump’s right to seize Greenland, but the timeless and placeless iron laws of the world do not lose their jurisdiction at America’s own borders. The United States itself must, by this logic, be governed by force. [Read More]
Imagining the End of Capitalism
By Walden Bello, Foreign Policy in Focus [January 23, 2026]
---- Ever since the 1990s, when to the longstanding cooptation of the Western working class by social democracy was added the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the saying has been popular among the chattering classes that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” As McKenzie Wark has noted, there was this weird consensus among both its partisans and its critics that “Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence.” Lately, however, there have been attempts to meet the challenge of imagining the end of capitalism. [FB – There follows a user-friendly summary of the ideas of several writers about capitalism’s crisis, artificial intelligence/AI etc. interesting at least imo]. … Thanks to the writers we have surveyed, it is now easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world. But whether we regard the system that imprisons us as terminal capitalist, post-capitalist, or techno-feudal, we are more than ever faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s choice of socialism or barbarism. Unfortunately, barbarism, as Klein, Westra, and others warn us, appears to have had a head start. [Read More]
ALSO OF INTEREST - “As Trump Uses Military to Threaten Democracy, NYT Declares Military Needs More Resources,” by Drew Fayakeh, FAIR [January 23, 2026] [Link]; and “Who are the Kurds?,” by Sarah Shamim, Aljazeera [January 19, 2026] [Link].
THE “BOARD OF PEACE”: A FASCIST INTERNATIONAL?
A World On Its Knees: Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ And The Darkness It Promises
By Craig Mokhiber, Znet [January 24, 2026]
---- Trembling and genuflecting before the global rampage of the US-Israel Axis, a cowardly world has, once again, offered up the Palestinian people for sacrifice, and, with them, the global system of international law itself. … The latest outrage, declared by the empire in the form of an autocratic “Charter of the Board of Peace,” threatens not only the survival of the indigenous Palestinian people, but, in its expansive and unqualified language that includes no limits of territorial jurisdiction, that of the entire world. … Trump’s goal is to replace the law-based UN with an imperial mechanism, the imperial reach of this unaccountable, rogue entity is to be global, and its impunity is to be effectively guaranteed. The ultimately autocratic nature of the new entity is made clear throughout the Charter, with most powers vested not in any accountable, intergovernmental, collaborative, or democratic mechanism, nor even in any single state, but rather in the person of Donald Trump himself. … It is not too late to stop this, if the people of the world will raise a righteous cry for justice and demand that their governments refuse to cooperate with the Board of Peace and Trump’s other nefarious projects, convene a special session of the UNGA to adopt a resolution to reject and mitigate the effects of UNSC resolution 2803, call for an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the illegality of key provisions of that resolution, adopt measures to hold the Israeli regime accountable, and mobilize protection for the Palestinian people. [Read More] ALSO OF INTEREST - “The new mandate: Recolonisation, “peace” boards, and the architecture of erasure,” by Ranjan Solomon, Middle East Monitor [January 18, 2026] [Link].
WAR ON VENEZUELA
A More Pliant Chavista [Venezuela]
By Alma Guillermoprieto, New York Review of Books [February 12, 2026 issue]
---- President Trump’s decision to support Delcy Rodríguez as Venezuela’s new leader makes clear that oil, not democracy, is his main concern. … History sometimes repeats itself out of sheer malice. For example, in 1898 the United States stepped in to help Cuba in its long struggle for independence from Spain, and won. Cubans were grateful but not yet free. American troops were in control of the island, and the US refused to remove them until Cuba accepted eight conditions presented to Congress in 1901 by Senator Orville Platt. … Until last year, those provisions were the baldest formulation of America’s imperialist ambitions, but Donald Trump has refashioned and extended the terms under which subject countries can expect to live. Until last year, those provisions were the baldest formulation of America’s imperialist ambitions, but Donald Trump has refashioned and extended the terms under which subject countries can expect to live. [Read More]
Venezuela, the Revival of Regime Change and the Decline of Empire
By William D. Hartung, TomDispatch [January 23, 2026]
---- The Venezuelan debacle — which is surely what it will be considered once all is said and done — is but another sign that the Trump administration’s tough-guy rhetoric and bullying foreign and economic policies are, in fact, accelerating the decline of American global power. The question is, given the administration’s costly and dangerous military-first foreign policy, how much damage will this country do to people here and abroad on the way down? … In truth, U.S. dominance was always overrated, given fiascos like the interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where the U.S. could not impose its will on much smaller nations with far fewer resources and far less sophisticated weaponry. Those experiences should have taught policymakers of both parties to proceed with caution, but the learning curve has, at best, been slow, painful, and erratic — and in the era of Donald Trump, seemingly nonexistent. [Read More]
THE WAR ON PALESTINE
A Cease-fire for Israelis and a War for Palestinians
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz [Israel] [January 18,2026]
----When Israelis aren’t being killed there’s a cease-fire. When Israelis aren’t being killed but over 400 in Gaza are, including 100 children, that too is called a cease-fire. When Israel demolishes 2,500 houses in Gaza in the middle of a cease-fire, and Defense Minister Israel Katz praises IDF soldiers for their operations, that is still called a cease-fire. When hundreds of thousands of Gazans are freezing to death and wallowing in mud, that comes under the definition of a cease-fire. … When Israelis aren’t being killed, all the rest is of no interest. Why should Gaza interest anyone when Israelis aren’t being killed? When the blare of sirens dies down in Israel, that is a cease-fire. The fact that Gaza is still being bombed, but lacks sirens, is irrelevant. The world too is already showing signs of weariness with regard to Gaza, despite this weekend’s news of the establishment of a “Board of Peace,” which will not save a single dispossessed person in Gaza from their bitter fate. [Read More]
Can Trump Demilitarize Gaza With Night Raids and Death Squads?
By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, Code Pink [January 22, 2026]
---- As Israeli-backed Palestinian militias openly take credit for targeted killings, the United States is reviving a familiar, deadly – and thoroughly discredited – playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which death squads, night raids, and “kill or capture” missions are cynically repackaged as stabilization and peace. Gaza is now being positioned as the next laboratory for this model, under the banner of Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” with consequences that history has already shown to be catastrophic. … The tens of thousands of Americans and others who took part in night raids in Iraq or Afghanistan and special operations in other U.S. wars have created a huge pool of experienced assassins and shock troops that [US Major-General] Jeffers can draw on, with for-profit military and “security” firms serving as cut-outs to shield decision-makers from accountability. More routine functions, such as manning checkpoints, can be delegated to other ISF forces, military police veterans and less specialized mercenaries. [Read More]
WAR ON IRAN?
(Video) Born in Evin Prison, Iranian Author on Protests Against “Authoritarian, Theocratic Regime”
From Democracy Now! [January 22, 2026]
---- Deadly anti-government protests continue to rock Iran in the midst of the country’s spiraling economic crisis. Thousands of civilians are believed to have been shot dead by government forces in the past few weeks. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to threaten military intervention in addition to a harsh new set of economic sanctions that the U.S. introduced this week. Although a government-instituted communications blackout has made it difficult to assess exactly how many people have been killed, we sit down with Iranian author Sahar Delijani to discuss the “working-class uprising” against Iran’s “capitalist regime.” Delijani was born in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison — where her leftist activist parents were detained in the 1980s — just a few years before her uncle was executed during the 1988 massacres of Iranian political prisoners. “This is part of a long struggle of Iranian people to oust this regime, against tyranny, against dictatorship, against an authoritarian, theocratic regime, a military state,” she says. “This has been happening partly due to sanctions, but also partly to this rampant corruption and mismanagement.” [See the Program]
The civilisational shield: Rebutting the architecture of chaos in Iran
By Ranjan Solomon, Middle East Monitor [January 16, 2026
---- In 2026, the global discourse on Iran remains trapped in a binary of “regime” versus “revolt,” a reductionist lens that ignores the profound civilisational and anti-imperialist currents defining the Persian state. Below is an analytical rebuttal of the “architecture of chaos” currently being deployed against Iran, written from a perspective that champions sovereignty over subversion. As we move through the first quarter of 2026, the Islamic Republic of Iran is once again the target of a coordinated campaign – a fusion of economic strangulation, psychological operations, and localised military provocations. To understand the current crisis is to understand that Iran is not merely a political actor; it is a civilisational state resisting the dying gasps of unipolar hegemony. Iran has witnessed multiple cycles of crisis over the past six decades. [Read More]
THE CLIMATE CRISIS
How Wall Street Turned Its Back on Climate Change
By David Gelles, New York Times [January 18, 2026]
---- The alliances — like the Net-Zero Banking Alliance and the Net-Zero Asset Managers initiative — that were meant to steer investments toward clean energy and away from fossil fuels have largely fallen apart. Investors have withdrawn tens of billions of dollars each quarter from E.S.G. funds. While U.S. investment in clean energy has boomed in recent years — reaching $279 billion last year — many large corporations have gone silent on climate change. … Republican politicians joined conservative activists, including groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, to engineer a sweeping pushback at what they saw as corporate America’s attempt to advance liberal policies. Their tactics involved filing lawsuits, passing laws, pulling funds out of Wall Street accounts and using social media to tarnish the reputation of individual executives, including Mr. Fink. In short order, their efforts succeeded in beating back an environmental movement on Wall Street, which from its inception was defined more by idealistic rhetoric than substantive changes to business practices. [Read More]
CIVIL LIBERTIES
New Legal Documents Show Marco Rubio Targeted Students for Op-Eds and Protesting
By Jessica Washington, The Intercept [January 23, 2026]
---- Rubio accused students including Mahmoud Khalil of supporting terrorism, but records unsealed after litigation by The Intercept undermine his claims. … New documents unsealed Thursday as a part of litigation brought by The Intercept and other news outlets reveal a critical discrepancy in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s rationale for attempting to deport five international students and academics last year. While Rubio and the Trump administration claimed in public that they wanted to deport students including Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung for supporting terrorism, internal Department of Homeland Security and State Department documents instead cite their advocacy for Palestinian rights in protests and writings — activities protected by the First Amendment. [Read More]
THE STATE OF THE UNION
Why Ending Republican Control Will Require Overcoming the Democratic Leadership
By Norman Solomon, Informed Comment [January 22, 2026]T
---- The past year has completely discredited any claim that choosing between the Democratic and Republican parties would be merely a matter of “pick your poison” with the same end result. In countless terrible ways, the last 12 months have shown that Donald Trump’s party is bent on methodically inflicting vast cruelty and injustice while aiming to crush what’s left of democracy and the rule of law. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s leadership persists with the kind of elitist political approach that helped Trump win in 2024. Hidebound and unimaginative, Senate leader Chuck Schumer and House leader Hakeem Jeffries have been incapable of inspiring the people whose high-turnout votes will be essential to ending Republican control of Congress and the White House. The Democratic establishment shuns the progressive populism that’s vital to effectively counter bogus right-wing populism. And so, the fight to defeat the fascistic GOP and the fight to overcome the power of corporate Democrats are largely the same fight. [Read More]
OUR HISTORY
The Strange Story of the Famed Anti-Fascist Lament “First They Came…”
By Barry Yourgrau, The Nation [January 20, 2026]
---- In the dire months since Donald Trump’s return to power, you’ve no doubt read a version of the famous mea culpa “First They Came”—perhaps woven into the lines of an essay or op-ed, perhaps thumbed out on social media. Part warning, part exhortation, the short text (it’s often mistaken for a poem) comes to us as tragically earned wisdom from the rise of the Nazis, alas grimly relevant to the America of today. The variation considered the most authoritative (if not the most commonly cited) reads:
First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak
out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak
out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left who
could protest.
In the decades since these words were formulated, they’ve gradually eclipsed the man responsible for them, blocking his presence so thoroughly that they arrive on a page, in some instances, without so much as an attribution. But even on those occasions when Martin Niemöller does get his due, he tends to be credited only vaguely, as a German pastor who ran afoul of Hitler—his story shorn of its most arduous complexities. [Read More]
