Global
“Renee sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time. You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renee was made of sunshine.”
The words are those of Renee Good’s wife Becca. They cut to our heart – our humanity. She was shot in the face by an ICE agent, who then muttered: “Fuckin’ bitch.” The murder of this 37-year-old mom as she tried to drive around the ICE guys who stopped her is national news, of course. Almost everyone has seen at least one of the many videos of the incident and, you might say, the national dialogue about virtually anything else has been put on hold.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested, detained, deported, and/or imprisoned many people that it has unilaterally determined to be undesirables. At first, they claimed they would deport only criminals, but it has already gone beyond that. We at the Free Press consider every person who has been sent to the Tecoluca (El Salvador prison), Guantanamo naval base, or detained in other prisons throughout the country to be innocent until proven guilty. We will include students who have been expelled for protesting genocide. It appears the government will revoke Visa's to get rid of undesirable students. This article will be updated as long as is necessary.
This is the first sentence of a column I cannot write . . . of a “war” I cannot win. There’s just no way to condense the psycho-spiritual devastation of an unleashed nuclear bomb into words. All I can do is ask a question that has no answer: What is the opposite of Armageddon?
Can a collective human embrace be larger, more intense and powerful than collective suicide? Is “peace” a force in its own right, or just a brief moment of quiet while humanity reloads?
OK, no answers, just a bit of context with which to ponder the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran (and throughout the Middle East). Lawrence Wilkerson – retired U.S. Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell – put it this way in a recent interview with Democracy Now: “This is a war with long legs and I think Trump has completely misinterpreted it. The only one who has interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks right now.”
The origins of chess are contested, but few dispute that while the game began in India, it was the Sassanian Persian Empire that refined it into a recognizable strategic system. It was Persia that codified its language, symbolism and intellectual framework: the shah (king), the rokh (rook), and shatranj, the modern chess game.
This is not a trivial historical detail. It is, in many ways, a metaphor that has returned with force.
Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, 2026, political discourse—across Western, Israeli and alternative media—has repeatedly invoked the analogy of chess to describe Iran’s conduct.
The comparison is seductive. But it is also incomplete.
There’s no question that Trump and his administration, virtually from the top much of the way down just do not like protest or protestors. The whole gang and their larger tribe from Congress to statehouses are lightning quick to label the least resistance as domestic terrorism, deep conspiracy, or Trump’s personal favorite, the illusive antifa. This is true in general and specifically when it comes to their obsession with heavy handed mass deportation of anyone who looks like any immigrant. It’s ironic to read about Trump’s nominee to replace the inept, narcissist South Dakota’s former governor Kristi Noem with the Oklahoma Senator who in his hearing is having to walk back his kneejerk claim that the Minneapolis nurse and citizen observer murdered by ICE was a terrorist.
John Bonifaz:
Yes. No question about it. And look, the other thing they say, right, and this was said by Hakim Jefferies and Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar in their statement as to why they were voting present is impeachment is a complicated process. It requires thousands of hours of investigation. It requires multiple witnesses.
It requires months of hearings. We are not living in a conventional time here. And we are dealing here with in plain sight clear abuses of power that don't require thousands of hours of hearings, multiple witnesses. You know, this unconstitutional attack on Iran, the most recent abuse of power here is plain as day as why Donald Trump needs to be impeached or removed from power.
The latest 2026 report from global democracy watchdogs marks a moment that would have been difficult to imagine only a generation ago. According to the V-Dem Institute, the United States now ranks 51st out of 179 countries in measures of liberal democracy—a sharp fall from its previous position near the top tier, placing United States between Slovakia and Greece. While rankings alone do not tell the whole story, the trajectory is difficult to dismiss. This is not a statistical anomaly, but the visible outcome of long-developing institutional strain.
Democratic erosion in the United States has unfolded gradually over decades. It is reflected not only in the weakening of voting protections and the increasing politicization of the judiciary, but also in the steady degradation of norms surrounding information, accountability, and public discourse. A particularly telling dimension of this decline is the growing pressure placed on the free press and on freedom of expression—core pillars of any functioning democracy.