The charge was that I’d claimed Venezuela has never actually been a democratic socialist or communist state, and that US intervention bears significant structural responsibility for the conditions that produced Maduro. Both of those claims, apparently, were too much.

So.…

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A disabled person faces seven months minimum, 65% initial denial, two to three years of appeals, and a documented risk of dying in queue before the government decides if their body counts.

Same government. Opposite design.

This is not metaphor. It is structur…

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This morning, the President of the United States posted on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He has given Iran until 8 p.m. ET tonight to agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or he says he will order the destruction of every power plant and bridge in the country. On Easter Sunday, he…

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On Easter Sunday, I posted a simple question to a local Facebook group in Bemidji, Minnesota: Can local Lutherans explain Luther’s blatant antisemitism?

It wasn’t a trap. It wasn’t a provocation. I’m not Lutheran. I’d on…

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TL;DR + Action Items

For the people who need the point before they’ll read the proof. Full analysis follows.

The 30-second version

In 2008, xenophobic violence killed 62 people and displaced over 100,000 in South Africa. Researchers spent months figuring out why. What they found: the government created the economic crisis, then politicians pointed at immigrants and said they did it. It worked. Poor people attacked their neighbors instead of the system that made them poor.

I’ve carried that research in my briefcase since college. It took me this long to realize it wasn’t about South Africa. It was about us.

The same playbook has been running in the United States for 20 years. The Sensenbrenner Bill. The Minutemen. Arizona SB 1070. Trump’s escalator. The Muslim ban. Family separation. El Paso. “Poisoning the blood.” Mass deportation.

The rhetoric escalated because nobody built the infrastructure to stop it. The full piece breaks down exactly how it happened, and what the research says to do about it.

7 things that could actually prevent the next El Paso, according to researchers who already studied this

1. The actual enemy isn’t who politicians say it is. Here’s the thing researchers found in South Africa: the single biggest predictor of whether a community joined the violence or resisted it? Whether people had a way to understand why they were poor. Not a vague sense of getting screwed. An actual framework. “Immigrants took your job” is the cover story. The private equity firm that bought your employer, loaded it with debt, extracted the value, and left is the truth. Communities that understood that didn’t pick up machetes.

2. Movements keep building alone. It keeps failing. In South Africa, organizations that operated in silos collapsed the second the immediate crisis ended. The ones that had pre-existing relationships across different issues adapted and survived. Immigration rights, labor, disability justice, racial justice, economic justice: these aren’t separate fights happening to overlap. They’re the same fight wearing different hats. They need shared infrastructure. Not showing up to each other’s rallies once a year. Actual shared walls.

3. Xenophobic violence is a disability issue. Almost nobody treats it like one. ICE detention creates and worsens disabilities. Immigration judges routinely fail to recognize how neurological and cognitive disabilities affect testimony. And 32% of the entire direct care workforce in the U.S. is made up of immigrants. So when politicians talk about mass deportation, they’re not just talking about immigration policy. They’re talking about disability policy. They just don’t call it that.

4. The U.S. has opted out of every major international accountability system. On purpose. South Africa joined the International Criminal Court. Ratified the Refugee Convention. Brought a genocide case against Israel at the ICJ. Not perfect, but it submitted to systems that create consequences for state violence. The U.S.? We won’t sign basically any of them: not the treaty that lets the world prosecute war crimes, not the one protecting children’s rights, not the ones on gender discrimination or economic rights. We built a system with no outside check on what the government does to immigrants, then act surprised by what the government does to immigrants.

5. The philanthropy model is broken in a way that matters here. The nonprofit sector can hand out blankets but can’t ask why people are out in the cold. Grants prevent advocacy. Reporting requirements eat capacity. Funding cycles reward compliance over critique. Here’s the part that should make you angry: immigrants in the 1890s built self-governing mutual aid societies funded by their own dues. Democratic. Self-sustaining. We replaced that with a professionalized system that kept the exclusion criteria and dropped the self-governance.

6. The systems we’ve built to help assume everyone’s neurotypical and able-bodied. They’re not. Try navigating an asylum claim with PTSD. Try sitting through an immigration hearing with sensory processing differences. Try following a 47-page legal form when you have a cognitive disability. Every system we’ve built to respond to xenophobic violence assumes a user who processes information in one specific way. When someone doesn’t fit that assumption, they don’t get accommodations. They get lost in the system. That’s not an edge case. That’s a design failure.

7. South Africa already had the conversation we keep avoiding. Fourteen researchers. Fourteen studies. Each one examining a different piece of what went wrong and what to build instead. That’s what South Africa produced after 2008. The United States has produced think pieces and social media threads. We need the equivalent of that report for our own crisis. Not after the next mass shooting. Not after the next El Paso. Now.

Still from Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006).

The full analysis

I’ve carried a paper in my briefcase for over a decade. The briefcase was a graduation gift from my grandmother, and the paper is a collection of executive summaries from researchers who studied what happened after xenophobic violence swept South Africa in May 2008. Sixty-two people killed. Over 100,000 displaced. Entire communities emptied out in weeks, their shops looted and homes burned behind them.

I kept it because something about it felt unfinished. Not the research; the researchers did their jobs. What felt unfinished was the warning. The findings described a set of conditions and political maneuvers so specific, so mechanistic, that I couldn’t shake the sense I was reading a preview of something that hadn’t happened yet. Not in South Africa. Here.

I was wrong about the timing. It had already been happening here for years. I just didn’t have the language for it yet.

Now I do.

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The stated justification: Iran could not be trusted with nuclear weapons.

Here’s the question nobody is asking: which country should the world actually be more worried about?

The United States possesses approximately 5,500 nuclear warheads. Iran possesses zero. Iran had, the day before it was bombed, agreed to never stockpile enriched uranium and to accept full international verification. Oman’s Foreign Minister called it a “breakthrough.”

Then the bombs started falling.

I’ve spent 14 years building a governance measurement framework — the Governance-Based Performance Evaluation (GBPE) — that scores governments and corporations on 11 dimensions of accountability, from rule of law to civil rights to democratic processes. The same rubric. The same scale. Every entity measured the same way.

When I scored the Trump administration and Iran’s government side by side, the results were jarring:

Trump administration (March 2026): 0.9/10 Khamenei’s Iran (1989–2026): 1.4/10

The country with the nuclear arsenal scores lower on governance than the country it just attacked for hypothetically wanting one.

This isn’t just about one man

Let me be clear about something: when I say “the Trump administration scores 0.9/10,” I don’t mean Donald Trump acting alone.

This score reflects a governing apparatus — a collective machinery of authoritarian acceleration that no single person could operate. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth renamed the Pentagon the “Department of War” and blacklisted an American AI company for refusing to build autonomous weapons. Secretary of State Marco Rubio held secret talks with Cuba’s ruling family while publicly threatening regime change. Vice President Vance dismissed Cuban forces killing four people on a Florida speedboat as something he “hoped wasn’t serious.” Speaker Johnson said the administration “should not be forced” to refund $160 billion in illegally collected tariffs after the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

This is not a rogue president. This is an administration — cabinet members, agency heads, congressional allies — that has collectively decided that the Supreme Court can be defied, that Congress doesn’t need to authorize wars, that federal agents can kill US citizens without accountability, and that American companies can be designated national security threats for maintaining ethical standards.

The score of 0.9 belongs to all of them.

What the numbers actually show

The GBPE Framework scores every entity on 11 dimensions, each rated 0–10 for both domestic and global governance. Here’s how the Trump administration and Khamenei’s Iran compare on the dimensions most relevant to the nuclear question:

Rule of Law: Trump 1.0/0.5. Khamenei 1.5/2.0. The Trump administration has now circumvented two of three constitutional branches in a single month — defying the Supreme Court on tariffs and bypassing Congress to launch a war. Khamenei’s Iran, for all its theocratic constraints, at least maintained formal institutional structures that functioned within their own framework.

Democratic Processes: Trump 0.5/0.5. Khamenei 2.0/2.0. Iran’s elections are constrained by the Guardian Council, but they exist, and factional competition within them is real. The Trump administration launched a war during a congressional recess, notifying the Gang of Eight minutes before strikes began. No debate. No vote. No authorization. The Constitution assigns Congress — not the president — the power to declare war.

Foreign Policy: Trump N/A/0.0. Khamenei N/A/2.0. This is where it becomes inescapable. The Trump administration scored a zero — total governance failure — on foreign policy. Two wars of aggression in two months. A head of state assassinated. A girls’ school destroyed, killing 148 people including at least 85 children. Nuclear negotiations sabotaged after a diplomatic breakthrough. Khamenei’s proxy networks caused real harm — but they also functioned as deterrence, and Iran demonstrated consistent willingness to negotiate when offered genuine diplomacy.

The overall pattern: on global governance — the measure of how a government treats populations that cannot hold it electorally accountable — the Trump administration scores 0.6/10. Khamenei’s Iran scored 1.55/10.

The country that just launched a war to “protect the world” governs the world worse than the country it attacked.

Full GBPE scores here.

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Rafiq Badran lost four children in a single airstrike on Bureij refugee camp. No bodies were recovered. No fragments. Just blood spray on the walls.

“Four of my children just evaporated. I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”

Two investigations published in the last two weeks — one by Reuters, one by Al Jazeera — answer different parts of that question.

Reuters revealed that the Biden administration’s own ambassador to Israel blocked five USAID cables documenting Gaza as an “apocalyptic wasteland.” Political appointees considered the humanitarian reports insufficiently “balanced.”

Al Jazeera documented what the weapons the administration continued to supply actually did: 2,842 Palestinians whose bodies were vaporized by US-manufactured bombs generating temperatures exceeding 3,500°C. Not an estimate. A count.

I’ve rescored the Biden administration under the GBPE Framework’s 11-dimension governance methodology. The results place Biden’s Electoral Accountability Gap at +5.0 — Strong domestic governance. 6.9 out of 10 at home. 1.9 out of 10 for populations who couldn’t vote him out of office.

This is not a partisan analysis. It’s a 2,500-year pattern. And accountability benchmarks already exist — Indigenous governance systems have been achieving what modern democracies refuse to for centuries.

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• This article focuses on ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), but under the Trump administration’s 2025-2026 policies, Border Patrol agents are also conducting interior enforcement operations in cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland—far from any border. Border Patrol shot two people in Portland the same wee…

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Nicole Daniels as Nonprofit Boss on TikTok.

In Part 1, I laid out the paralysis: a “low-hire, low-fire” market where everyone’s frozen, plus what government and employers need to change to build a labor market where people can actually choose their own adventure.

But there are two more players in this story. One is an entire sector sitting on $1.68 trillion while its workers can’t afford rent. The other is you.

Since Part 1, the numbers have gotten worse.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy is now tracking nonprofit layoffs—at least 22,000 jobs lost since January, likely closer to 40,000. One in three nonprofits serving communities lost government funding in the first half of 2025. Among those hit, 21% were already serving fewer people within months, and 29% had reduced staff. Candid estimates 2.8 million jobs are at risk if federal cuts continue.

Which makes the math I’m about to share even harder to stomach.

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## A real-time case study in what happens when establishment endorsements meet grassroots fury—and the money follows the fury

By December 2025, Representative Jasmine Crockett had become one of the most recognizable Democrats in America. Her viral takedowns of Republicans—particularly her memorable “bleach blonde bad built butch body” clapback—had made her a fundraising juggernaut and social media sensation. She’d raised $3.8 million in six months, making her the fifth-best fundraiser among House Democrats. When she announced her Texas Senate run, conventional wisdom said she’d cleared the Democratic primary field.

Then something unexpected happened. State Representative James Talarico, a 35-year-old Presbyterian seminarian from Austin, raised $6.2 million in his first three weeks as a candidate. That’s $295,000 per day—fourteen times faster than Crockett’s pace—almost entirely from small-dollar donors giving $5, $10, or $15 at a time.

The question wasn’t just how Talarico did it. It was why Crockett—with all her celebrity, all her name recognition, all her viral moments—couldn’t.

The answer reveals something fundamental about the fracturing Democratic coalition, the limits of performative politics, and what happens when you try to satisfy both party establishment and party voters on the one issue where they fundamentally disagree: Gaza.

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Between 70% and 87% of AI projects fail to reach production—with over 80% of AI projects failing overall, twice the failure rate of traditional IT projects—with poor data quality identified as the primary culprit. According to the 2024 Wavestone Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey (formerly NewV…

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An Interview with Claude, Anthropic AI as a Political Analyst

By Tiff Ryan, Adult Education Correspondent

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8AGduut/

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**TIFF RYAN:** Thanks for sitting down with me today. Let’s start simple. What are the “No Kings” protests actually about?

**CLAUDE, AI ANALYST FROM ANTHROPIC:** It’s right there in the name. Millions of American…

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This report examines wealth and income inequality in the United States through multiple interconnected lenses: the concentration of wealth among the top 1%, effective tax rates versus statutory rates, racial wealth disparities rooted in historical injustice, disability-related barriers to wealth accumulation, healthcare access inequitie…

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