US obliteration of Caribbean boat was a clear violation of international ‘right to life’ laws – no matter who was on board

Trump claims the US has the right to destroy boats and kill passengers on the high seas if he suspects they are doing something bad

Mary Ellen O'Connell, University of Notre Dame

The moment before an alleged drug boat was hit in a
targeted U.S. strike. @realDonaldTrump/Truth Social

The U.S. government is justifying its lethal destruction of a boat suspected of transporting illegal drugs in the Caribbean as an attack on “narco-terrorists.”

But as an expert on international law, I know that line of argument goes nowhere. 

Even if, as the U.S. claims, the 11 people killed in the Sept. 2, 2025, U.S. Naval strike were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, it would make no difference under the laws that govern the use of force by state actors.

Nor does the fact that protests from other nations in the region are unlikely, due in large part to Washington’s diplomatic and economic power – and Donald Trump’s willingness to wield it.

Protest is not what proves the law. Unlawful killing is unlawful regardless of who does it, why, or the reaction to it. And in regard to the U.S. strike on the alleged Venezuelan drug boat, the deaths were unlawful.

Domestic U.S. legal issues aside – and concerns have been raised on those grounds, too – the killings in the Caribbean violated the human right to life, an ancient principle codified today in leading human rights treaties.

Killing in war and peacetime

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is one such treaty to which the United States is a party. Article 6 of the covenant holds: “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”

Through rulings of human rights and other courts, it has been well established that determining when a killing has been arbitrary depends on whether the killing occurred in the context of peace or armed conflict.

Peace is the norm. And in times of peace, government agents are only permitted to use lethal force to save a life immediately. The United Nations’ Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials reinforce this peacetime right-to-life standard, noting “intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.”

The principle is also supported by the fact the U.S. has bilateral treaties regarding cooperation in drug interdiction. The Coast Guard has a series of successful Maritime Law Enforcement Agreements – known as Shiprider Agreements – with nations in the Caribbean and elsewhere. They commit U.S. authorities to respecting fundamental due process rights of criminal suspects. Such rights obviously do not include summary execution at sea.

Bypassing these bilateral and international treaties to dramatically blow up a ship not only violates law, but it will, I believe, further undermine trust and confidence in these or any other agreements the U.S. makes.

Elect a felon, expect crime

The conman in chief remakes the government in his own image.

Paul Waldman

In almost every way imaginable, Donald Trump’s second term is a purer expression of his personality and preferences than his first term was. 

Not only is he far less constrained — by the courts, by the law, by Congress, or by aides who might suffer an unfortunate attack of conscience — he has created a system in which his desires and predilections are translated into policy far more smoothly than before.

So it should not be surprising that a man who built a career on scams, cons, grifts, and swindles has fundamentally reoriented the US government’s approach to corruption. 

It isn’t just that Trump has ramped up his own personal self-dealing (though he most certainly has), or that his administration is tolerant of conflicts of interest in other officials (though it is). Just as important, Trump is enacting a sweeping set of policy changes that will make it more likely that Americans will themselves be the victims of all kinds of scams.

This is less a single strategy than the accumulation of many policy decisions pushing in the same direction: to make America a place where citizens can no longer expect that the government will be there to protect them when they’re being taken advantage of.

There are few better examples than the demise of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), one of the key progressive achievements of recent years. Arising out of the 2008 financial crash, it was based on a simple premise: Americans ought to be protected from financial scams and exploitation. 

And it was extraordinarily successful: According to the Bureau’s data (which for some reason the Trump administration hasn’t gotten around to removing from the web), its actions have returned over $21 billion to consumers and imposed billions in fines on wrongdoers. 

Just as important, it sent a message to anyone contemplating financial exploitation of consumers that there is an agency that will aggressively investigate illegal activity, and there will be consequences for those who break the law.

So when Trump took office, he sought to shut the CFPB down. Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, the dark lord of the effort to dismantle the government, told its employees to stay home and “stand down from performing any work task.” 

Under its new management, the agency then began dropping lawsuits it had brought against banks, mortgage companies, car dealers, and others it had found were defrauding or mistreating customers. The administration is hoping to fire 1,500 of the agency’s 1,700 employees (that move has been temporarily halted by a judge).

Doing their part, congressional Republicans sought to eliminate the agency entirely in their budget bill. Fortunately, that provision was struck down by the parliamentarian as being inconsistent with the rules of budget reconciliation. Nevertheless, the CFPB has all but ceased to function, which means that the kind of financial abuse it was established to prevent will likely go unpunished.

You’re on your own

The administration is taking a similar approach in area after area, sending a clear message to consumers that you’re on your own, and a message to those who exploit them that they’re free to do pretty much whatever they like.

Trump’s attempts to fire Democrat-appointed members of independent commissions have been described mostly as an effort to consolidate power, which is true, but those moves also mean removing restraints on scams and abuse. 

In other words, he is dismantling the government’s ability to rectify exploitation based on power imbalances. If he succeeds, the Consumer Product Safety Commission will do far less to protect consumers, the National Labor Relations Board will cease protecting workers, and the Merit Systems Protection Board will no longer protect government employees.

If the Department of Education is dismantled, it will no longer police the for-profit colleges that saddled millions with crushing debt and useless degrees (or no degrees at all). With long-awaited reforms at the Internal Revenue Service being quickly reversed — the administration is planning to cut its workforce in half — tax cheats know that they stand a good chance of getting away with their crimes. 

At times it almost seems as though administration officials are searching frantically for anything the federal government does that might be useful or helpful to regular people, and quashing it. They’re even eliminating the Energy Star program, which does nothing but inform consumers about which appliances are energy efficient, saving them tens of billions of dollars in utility costs every year.

There may be no area with more reckless dismantling going on than finance, where the system of regulation and law enforcement now reflects Trump’s personal views. He himself was repeatedly investigated by the federal government for various financial misdeeds, and he obviously believes that finance is and ought to be an arena where rules are for suckers and succeeding at the con game just means you’re smart.

To understand how and why, Trump’s reversal on the crypto industry is the key piece of context. In years past he had described crypto as “a scam,” but at some point he had a realization: If crypto is a scam, the scammer-in-chief surely ought to be in on it. 

The then-unprecedented corruption of Trump’s first term pales in comparison to what his family is now doing, building a crypto empire — stablecoins, meme coins, bitcoin mining — with ample opportunities for criminals, foreign governments, or anyone else who might want something from the president to put money right in his pocket.

And since crypto is becoming so central to his own wealth, Trump very much wants to ensure that the industry is regulated as little as possible, if at all. To that end, his Justice Department disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and told prosecutors to stop investigating certain kinds of crypto crimes. 

Under the leadership of Paul Atkins, the crypto advocate Trump made chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency has dropped a dozen pending enforcement actions against crypto firms for various kinds of alleged violations, including some involving major donors to Trump. 

Few were happier about the policy about-face than Justin Sun, the Chinese-born crypto billionaire who was charged by the SEC in 2023 with various forms of fraud. After Sun bought $75 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a firm controlled by the Trump family, the SEC halted the investigation and asked a judge to set the case aside.

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, enforcement of laws against all kinds of white-collar crime is atrophying and “in some cases, the administration is effectively redefining what business conduct constitutes a crime.”

It’s only getting started

It can be a shock to remind oneself that we’re still less than six months into Trump’s term, so when it comes to changing the government’s position on scams and cons, he may just be getting started. Though most people probably weren’t aware of it, the Biden administration amassed an impressive record of regulation aimed at preventing consumers from being misled and manipulated — all of which could be vulnerable to the current administration’s regulatory rollback.

For example, the FTC under Biden created a “click-to-cancel” rule, which requires companies to make it no more difficult to cancel a subscription or a service than it is to sign up in the first place; if you’ve ever tried to cancel a gym membership, you know why this was necessary. 

But the Trump administration has delayed implementation of the rule, and it’s unclear as of yet whether they’ll try to kill it entirely. Will they reverse the regulation cracking down on junk fees in hotels and concert tickets, or the one banning fake online reviews? They certainly might.

Why, one might ask, would Donald Trump want Americans to live in Scamville? The answer is that it’s the place that made him, where he thrived by preying on those with less money and power than he had. 

When he sees that America has a law that bans our companies from paying bribes overseas, he recoils in disgust and tells the Justice Department to stop enforcing it; after all, that’s just how things work. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

Corruption and scams are not the same thing, but they are close cousins. They add a note of tension and uncertainty to life — the knowledge that rules are not necessarily followed, fair treatment is not the default, and we’re more vulnerable than we ought to be. All of which is fine with Trump and the administration he leads. 

America ought to be a place where everyone is expected to act with integrity and the government protects people from abuse and exploitation. But in the phrase the Trump administration uses so often, that would be “not consistent with the president’s priorities.”

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How Foreign Scammers Use U.S. Banks to Fleece Americans

They call it "pig-butchering" where YOU are the pig

By Cezary Podkul for ProPublica

Reporting Highlights

• Struggling Gatekeepers: In the face of some $44 billion a year in pig-butchering scams conducted by Asian crime syndicates, U.S. banks have failed to prevent mass scale money laundering.
• Black Market Bank Accounts: Chinese-language Telegram channels offer to rent U.S. bank accounts to pig-butchering scammers, who use the accounts to move victims’ cash into crypto.
• One Address, 176 Clients: Bank of America allowed hundreds of unverified customers to open accounts, prosecutors alleged, including 176 who claimed the same small home as their address.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

Brian Maloney Jr. was flummoxed when he was served with a lawsuit against his family’s business, Middlesex Truck and Coach, in January. Maloney and his father, also named Brian, run the operation, located in Boston, which boasts that it can repair anything “from two axles to ten.” A burly man in his mid-50s who wears short-sleeved polo shirts emblazoned with the company name, Maloney Jr. has been around his dad’s shop since he was 8. The garage briefly surfaced in the media in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a campaign stop there and the Boston Herald featured Maloney Sr. talking about how he had built the business from nothing in a neighborhood he described as having been a “war zone.”

Now Middlesex was being sued by a New Jersey man who claimed he had been defrauded of $133,565 in a cryptocurrency scheme. The suit claimed Middlesex “controlled and maintained” a bank account at Chase that had been used to collect the fraudulent payment. The purported victim wanted his money back.

None of this made any sense to Maloney Jr. His company did not have an account at Chase, and he barely knew what crypto was. “For God’s sake, we fix trucks and still have AOL,” he would later say.

It was only after Maloney went to Chase to investigate that he was able to piece together at least part of the explanation. It turned out that Chase had allowed an unknown individual, who applied online with no identification, to open an account under Middlesex’s name, according to information Chase provided to Maloney. The account was then used to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraud victims, including the $133,565 from the man who was now trying to reclaim his funds.

Middlesex’s experience, as bizarre as it seems, is part of a global problem that plagues the banking industry. The account falsely opened in Middlesex’s name, and many others like it, are way stations in a sophisticated multistep money laundering process that transports cash from U.S. scam victims to crime syndicate bosses in Asia.

There’s been an explosion in international online fraud in recent years. Particularly widespread are “pig-butchering” schemes, as ProPublica reported in 2022. 

The macabre name derives from the process of methodically “fattening” victims by getting them to contribute more and more money to an investment scheme that seems to be succeeding, before eventually “butchering” them by taking all their deposits. Often operated by Chinese gangs out of prison-like compounds in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, pig-butchering in that region has reached a staggering $44 billion per year, according to a report by the United States Institute of Peace, and it likely involves millions of victims worldwide. The report called the Southeast Asian scam syndicates the “most powerful criminal network of the modern era.”

A felon in the White House is making crime legal

Who could have foreseen putting a convicted felon in the White House would turn out like this?

David R. Lurie

After the Supreme Court declared Donald Trump largely immune from prosecution for turning the office of the presidency into a criminal enterprise, and the nation’s voters then chose to reinstall the freshly convicted felon in the White House, who could have predicted he would use his office to punish the law abiding and protect the corrupt?

In fact, both the scale and audaciousness of Trump’s corruption, and of his regime’s assault on the criminal justice system, was eminently predictable.

As House Speaker Mike Johnson recently pointed out, Trump’s corruption is “out in the open.” The same is true of his use of criminal justice system and other levers of government as weapons against his ever-growing list of enemies.

But even the most cynical have been surprised by the Trumpist effort to portray the provision of healthcare to children, veterans, and the elderly as “waste” and “fraud,” as well as Trump’s effort to render those who follow the laws into criminals.

The most vulnerable among us, including immigrants and the sick, are currently among Trump’s primary victims. But the entire nation will soon pay a heavy price for his systematic assault on the rule of law in service of his bottomless desire for corrupt wealth and self-aggrandizement.

Retroactive criminalization

During the campaign, Trump and his cronies declared they would deport the allegedly massive numbers of “criminal aliens.” When Trump came into office, however, he faced a problem: The vast majority of undocumented immigrants are law abiding.

Trumpists, however, came up with an answer: Create fake crimes and thereby turn the law abiding into criminals.

Trump announced the US is “under invasion” by a foreign power in order to invoke the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and justify the summary deportation of supposed gang members to foreign prisons, this despite a US intelligence report concluding there is no such invasion. Then, when courts caught the administration deporting migrants who are not gang members, or in violation of existing immigration laws, Trumpists have prevaricated and outright lied, transforming their purported law enforcement initiative into a fraud.

The administration has also attacked judges and elected officials who have the temerity to question their illegal conduct.

Alina Habba (the parking garage lawyer Trump installed as New Jersey’s acting US attorney) ordered the arrest of Ras Baraka, the Mayor of Newark, on bogus charges arising from his participation in a protest at a private DHS jail, leading to what a federal magistrate judge called an “embarrassing retraction.” After that gambit failed, Habba brought equally flimsy charges against a member of Congress who accompanied Baraka at the protest, asserting that she “assaulted” armed ICE thugs.

Similarly, last month in New York City, an ICE gangster terrorized and handcuffed a crying staffer of Rep. Jerry Nadler after armed agents invaded his office without a warrant.

Trumpists have resorted to inventing new offenses so as to transform law-abiding immigrants into criminals. For example, Trump has declared slivers of land along the border to be “military zones” for the sole purpose of charging migrants with trespassing. The administration has also declared that undocumented immigrants have an obligation to “register” with the government so they can be indicted for failing to do so. They’re jailing immigrants who legally entered the United States under a Biden-era asylum law by retroactively declaring the program to be “illegal.”

Most tellingly, and insidiously, ICE agents desperate to meet the increasing quotas the White House has set for deporting “illegals” have taken to targeting the most vulnerable immigrants: Those intent on following the law and engaging in productive work.

The Trump Coalition Wants to End Democracy as We Know It

Breakdown of four groups who want a few billionaires and certain religious zealots to consolidate their political power.

Peter Montague for Common Dreams

The Trump coalition includes four groups of people:

1. The MAGA (“make America great again”) base, mostly rural white men and women;
2. A group of Silicon Valley billionaires known as the PayPal Mafia;
3. A separate political movement called “religious nationalists”; and
4. The Trump crime family itself.

All four groups share one basic aim: to degrade our one-person-one-vote election system so a few billionaires and certain religious zealots can consolidate their political power to eliminate free and fair elections to become even more controlling and richer than they already are.

Here are brief descriptions of the four groups.

1: The MAGA Base: Who Are They?

The hardcore, mostly rural MAGA base can be understood as an echo of the Confederacy. Philosophically, many of them are the same people who tried to destroy the United States to preserve slavery via the Civil War (1861-1865). In their view, the basic ideas that inspired the founding of the U.S. (1776-1788) are wrong: All humans are not created equal and should not have equal rights under law. In 2022, MAGA believers included about 15% of the U.S. adult population, or about 39 million out of 258 million adults.

DISCLOSURE: Peter is a valued old friend. We collaborated often when I was organizing director at the organization now known as the Center for Health and Environmental Justice especially on issues that involving fighting corporate crime.

Aaron Regunberg: Have the courage to stand strong against Trump’s mafia-style threats

Trump Is Trying to Spook States out of Suing Big Oil—Why They Shouldn’t Back Down

Aaron Regunberg for Common Dreams

As U.S. President Donald Trump continues to threaten any institutions that could check his administration’s ongoing drive toward authoritarianism, there’s been a stark contrast in responses to his mob boss-style attacks. Some targets—like Harvard, which vowed to fight Trump’s assault on universities, or the law firm Perkins Coie, which recently scored a judicial win holding Trump’s actions against the firm unconstitutional—have seen their stature in their respective fields skyrocket. 

Others—like Columbia University or the law firm Paul Weiss, which both immediately folded at the first sign of aggression from Trump—have been publicly, and perhaps permanently, tarred as feckless cowards.

This contrast between courage and gutlessness appeared once again earlier this month in response to Trump’s latest dictatorial salvo: an all-out assault on behalf of the fossil fuel industry against state and local efforts to hold Big Oil companies accountable for deceiving the public about climate change.

Right now, 1 in 4 Americans live in a jurisdiction that is fighting to put Big Oil companies on trial for their climate lies and make them pay for the catastrophic damage they knew decades ago that their products would cause. 

The fossil fuel industry concedes that it faces “massive monetary liability” in these cases and has been growing more and more desperate to stop plaintiff communities from having their day in court. In the last few years Big Oil has asked the Supreme Court to block these cases on five separate occasions. Recently, industry front groups tied to Leonard Leo ran a pressure campaign pushing the court to take up the issue.

MAGAs Want to Spread Hate, Fascism and Disease. Don’t Let Them

We are all on the edge

By Frank Carini / ecoRI News columnist

A racist thug who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection confronted a trio of police officers last weekend who defended the Capitol during that violent attack and accused them of being cowards.

The day before Enrique Tarrio was brazenly harassing the officers — Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn, and Aquilino Gonell — through the lobby of a D.C. hotel that was hosting the Principles First conference where one of the officers received a “Profile in Courage” award, the 21st-century Nazi had been arrested again, this time for assault. (The next day, Feb. 23, conference attendees and hotel guests were forced to evacuate because of a bomb threat.)

“You were brave on Twitter,” Tarrio, a member of a hate group that promotes and engages in political violence and terrorizes immigrants, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community, told the officers. “You guys were brave at my sentencing when you sat there and laughed when I got 22 fucking years. Now you don’t want to look in my eyes, you fucking cowards.”

Gonell, a Dominican-American, was the officer honored. Dunn is Black. Tarrio is deplorable.

Jeffrey Epstein’s good friend who spews a firestorm of hate and lies from the Oval Office pardoned Tarrio and roughly 1,500 other insurrectionists soon after taking office.

This is who MAGA is. Goons and their admirers, such as Rhode Island senators Jessica de la Cruz, Gordon Rogers, Elaine Morgan, and Thomas Paolino, who support the thuggery. EDITOR'S NOTE: Elaine Morgan "represents" the northern half of Charlestown. - Will Collette

The Trump administration’s disastrous tax law paved the way for corporate America’s “mink coats and Cadillacs” moment.

What Mob Movies Teach Us About GOP Tax Policy

Bilal Baydoun for Common Dreams

In one of the more memorable scenes from the Scorsese mob classic Goodfellas, Jimmy scolds his co-conspirators for flaunting the spoils of their infamous Lufthansa Heist—the 1978 theft of $6 million in cash and jewels from New York’s JFK Airport.

“Didn’t I tell you not to get anything?” Jimmy snaps at Johnny, who had arrived at the Christmas party in a new pink Cadillac. Moments later, Frank walks in alongside a date donning a new mink coat, and Jimmy is incensed. “In two days, one guy gets a Caddy and one guy gets a $20,000 mink!”

The mob logic portrayed here—that when you hit a major lick, it’s best to lay low and not attract attention—seems innocent by the standards of the Trump administration’s signature heist: the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). That law paved the way for corporate America’s “mink coats and Cadillacs” moment by slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%—robbing the public of roughly $1.3 trillion and further enriching billionaires and top executives. 

In Goodfellas terms, that’s equal to 46,428 inflation-adjusted Lufthansa heists. And like Johnny and Frank, the corporations who scored the biggest windfalls have since done the opposite of lay low. They have instead gone on a years-long profiteering binge, rolling out some of the most egregious tactics to cash in even further.

In typical trickle-down fashion, the corporate rate cut was sold as a boon to workers and ordinary families. The Trump administration said the TCJA’s most expensive provision would boost wages to the tune of $4,000 per year. That promise, it turns out, was a fraud. According to a recent study, 90% of American workers received zero dollars from the TCJA’s corporate rate cut. Meanwhile, executive pay soared, and stock buybacks hit a record high $1 trillion in the year after it passed.

So what did the typical American family get if not a major boost in income? Junk fees, deceptive scams at the grocery store, price gouging, and major collusion scandals in everything from meatpacking to rentals to oil and gas. It can be said that the TCJA unleashed a greatest hits of predatory tactics by rewarding otherwise too-risky pricing schemes that push consumer loyalty to the brink. 

What Donald Trump’s Criminal Trial Reveals About a Potential Second Trump Administration

Trump crime family hopes for 2nd term

By Andrea Bernstein for Propublica

There’s a tape that both the defense and the prosecution played in summations in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial. In it, you can hear the chaos of Trump’s office at Trump Tower in September of 2016: Trump seems to be having multiple conversations almost simultaneously. He talks to an unidentified person on the phone. 

He discusses polls with Michael Cohen, his executive vice-president at the time. Trump and Cohen talk about a diversity initiative and stopping the media from unsealing the records of Trump’s first divorce. His executive assistant pops in with word of a call from a developer. Trump calls for a Coke.

And then, very clearly, you can hear Cohen saying, “I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend, David, you know, so that — I’m going to do that right away. I’ve actually come up and I’ve spoken … I’ve spoken to Allen Weisselberg” — then the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer — “about how to set the whole thing up.”

Trump interrupts and says, “So, what do we got to pay for this, 150?” Then he says, “Cash?”

“No, no, no, no no,” Cohen says. “I got it.”

On the most literal level, the tape showed Trump discussing the logistics of paying off a woman who said she had an affair with him. This was key evidence for the jury’s ultimate finding that he had intended to alter the outcome of the 2016 election by making unlawful hush money payments.

The projector

Is Trump ordering assassinations?

Rhode Island journalism, past and future

INTERVIEW: Q & A with professor and author Mike Stanton

 By G. Wayne Miller in Ocean State Stories

Shana Novak

Mike, let’s start with today. You live in Rhode Island and are a journalism professor at the University of Connecticut. Tell us about your responsibilities and the courses you teach.

Having lived in Rhode Island for three decades, I didn’t want to move when UConn hired me in 2013. I grew up in Connecticut, but love Providence. So now I keep one foot in each state, which is interesting when UConn plays Providence College in basketball – I have season tickets to the Huskies and the Friars, who I used to cover for the ProJo!

I teach a range of courses, from our introductory Press in America and Newswriting I classes to more advanced courses like Investigative Reporting, Sports Journalism and Feature Writing. 

My investigative class last year published a project about housing evictions and the affordable housing crisis in southeastern Connecticut in The Day of New London. It won a national award for investigative reporting in the Hearst student journalism competition. It’s a great example of the hands-on learning that we stress.

What attracts your students to journalism?

Two things – storytelling and making a difference.

Since prehistoric cave paintings, humans have told stories and that appetite continues, even as the platforms change. Students are very excited to tell stories – through words, pictures, video, podcasts, etc. I tell them that newspapers may be dying, but not the public’s hunger for stories – and that they’re going to help invent the future.

Secondly, students are passionate about making a difference. Since the rise of disinformation and our fractured politics, we’ve seen an increase in students – even non-majors – who take Press in America because of a heightened awareness of the importance of a free press in a democratic society. 

Some have changed their major to journalism or added it as a second major. They want to do stories that hold the powerful accountable – that afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

Jan. 6 insurrection was an example of networked incitement

Will Trump do it again this year - or has he already begun?

Joan Donovan, Boston University

The shocking events of Jan. 6, 2021, signaled a major break from the nonviolent rallies that categorized most major protests over the past few decades.

What set Jan. 6 apart was the defeated president of the United States using his cellphone to direct an attack on the Capitol, and those who stormed the Capitol being wired and ready for insurrection.

My co-authors and I, a media and disinformation scholar, call this networked incitement: influential figures inciting large-scale political violence via social media. Networked incitement involves insurgents communicating across multiple platforms to command and coordinate mobilized social movements in the moment of action.

The reason there was not more bloodshed on Jan. 6 emerged through investigation into the Oath Keepers, a vigilante organization composed mostly of former military and police. During their trials for seditious conspiracy, members of the Oath Keepers testified about weapons caches in hotels and vans, stashed near Washington, D.C. As one member described it, “I had not seen that many weapons in one location since I was in the military.”

Tapes emerge of attempted bribe by Trump

 

Trump’s violent rhetoric echoes the fascist commitment to a destructive and bloody rebirth of society

By his words and deeds, Trump IS a fascist and wants to spawn a fascist movement

Mark R. Reiff, University of California, Davis

Donald Trump attends his civil fraud trial in New York City
on Oct. 25, 2023. Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan.
6, 2021. Brent Stirton via Getty Images News

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.

Spyware can infect your phone or computer via the ads you see online

The scary world of cyberspying on individuals 

 Claire Seungeun Lee, UMass Lowell

A new type of spyware means those online ads could go
 from annoying to menacing. AP Photo/Julio Cortez

Each day, you leave digital traces of what you did, where you went, who you communicated with, what you bought, what you’re thinking of buying, and much more. 

This mass of data serves as a library of clues for personalized ads, which are sent to you by a sophisticated network – an automated marketplace of advertisers, publishers and ad brokers that operates at lightning speed.

The ad networks are designed to shield your identity, but companies and governments are able to combine that information with other data, particularly phone location, to identify you and track your movements and online activity. 

More invasive yet is spyware – malicious software that a government agent, private investigator or criminal installs on someone’s phone or computer without their knowledge or consent. 

Spyware lets the user see the contents of the target’s device, including calls, texts, email and voicemail. Some forms of spyware can take control of a phone, including turning on its microphone and camera.

Now, according to an investigative report by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, an Israeli technology company called Insanet has developed the means of delivering spyware via online ad networks, turning some targeted ads into Trojan horses. 

According to the report, there’s no defense against the spyware, and the Israeli government has given Insanet approval to sell the technology.

Lock him up

By Bill Bramhall

 

Expert analysis

 

What a mug!

For more cartoons by Ruben Bolling, CLICK HERE