Category: 2026

curated news excerpts & citations

Jennifer Rubin: Hard Truths

A movement is more than one man
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The news shocked and stunned millions of people who had long considered Chávez a hero, including all of us at The Contrarian. We fully associate with the comments from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, LULAC, the UFW, and The Feminist Majority, as well as innumerable progressive politicians and organizations who have denounced his behavior while expressing support for and solidarity with the survivors. We agree with calls to remove Chavez’s name from commemorations, streets, buildings, etc.

However, the farmworkers movement is not defined by an individual — and never has been. As Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi noted, “A movement is about the people — not any one person — and its strength lies in the values it upholds. We can honor the farmworker movement — and the generations who sacrificed to build it — while also confronting painful truths. No legacy is above accountability.” While we are shaken to our core, we continue to honor the tens of thousands of farm labor activists.
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AP: Top counterterrorism official Kent resigns over Trump’s Iran war, says Iran posed no imminent threat

Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation on Tuesday, saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the Trump administration’s war in Iran.

Kent said on social media Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Kent, a former political candidate with connections to right-wing extremists, was confirmed to his post last July on a 52-44 vote.

As head of the National Counterterrorism Center, Kent was in charge of an agency tasked with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats.
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WSJ: If Seizing Iran’s Nuclear Material Is the Endgame, Here’s What It Would Take

President Trump has said preventing Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons is a central aim of the war he is waging. In the absence of regime change—or at least a deal to hand over its enriched uranium by Tehran’s leaders—that could mean seizing the country’s fissile material.

Accomplishing that in the face of resistance from Iranian forces would be a complex military operation that could require the deployment of hundreds of troops at one or more sites for days, former U.S. military officers and experts said.

The U.S. military has elite teams specially trained to remove radioactive material from a conflict zone. But locating and seizing the hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium that Iran possesses would require an intricate choreography and could be fraught with risk.
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NY Times: To Address Farm Labor Shortage, Trump Administration Turns to Migrant Workers

As the president’s immigration policies squeeze an already tight supply of farm labor, the Trump administration is making it cheaper to hire foreign farmworkers.

For years, the agricultural sector has faced a tight labor market as farmworkers age and fewer new immigrants and younger Americans are willing to toil in the fields. Top Trump administration officials vowed that mass deportations would help, leading to “higher wages with better benefits” and a “100 percent American work force.”

But the administration has quietly acknowledged in recent months that its immigration raids and crackdown on the border have aggravated the issue. So it has instead turned to an alternative source, making it cheaper for farmers to hire immigrant farmworkers on temporary visas.
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Matt Johnson @ Bulwark: Trump Is Repeating Putin’s Blunder

Both men thought they could start easy, quick regime-change wars at minimal cost.

THE IDEA THAT INDIVIDUAL PERSONALITIES are major drivers of world history is often dismissed as overly simplistic. …

In fact, without taking into account the particular personalities of two major world leaders, it’s hard to explain two of the most important international events of the last five years: Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Donald Trump’s recent attacks against Iran.

The CIA doesn’t know exactly when Vladimir Putin decided to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but it was likely sometime in the first half of 2020. According to a recent Guardian report on how U.S. and British intelligence exposed Putin’s war plans, “During those months, Putin passed constitutional amendments to ensure he could stay in power beyond 2024. Then, locked away in isolation for months during Covid, he devoured books on Russian history and pondered his own place in it.” In the summer of 2021, Putin published a long essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which made the case that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia.

This partially explains why Putin thought the war in Ukraine would be easy—he believed many Ukrainians would accept Russian control of their country. …
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Lisa Needham: How Trump hacked the judiciary

His fake “emergencies” are pushing the country toward autocracy.

There’s no question that the Department of Justice is an absolute shambles under Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Trump, given that the latter basically dictates what the DOJ does now, and he’s a crumbling mess of capriciousness and id. However, whether by accident or design, the DOJ has hit on one strategy that works: exploiting little-known, sometimes even never-before-used laws as the basis for Trump’s constant states of emergency.
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Broadly speaking, Trump’s (mis)use of the law falls into four categories. Distressingly, at root, all of these excesses are about this administration’s abiding, unwarranted hatred for immigrants and for other countries, even when there are spillover effects for everyone else.

First, the administration has invoked a mishmash of domestic law to justify its international crimes in bombing boats in the Caribbean (and the country of Iran). Next, existing immigration laws have been cobbled together in a sort of unholy patchwork, an ever-shifting mess that allows the administration to pretend there’s some legal authority for what is nothing but xenophobia-fueled cruelty. Third, Trump relies on never- or seldom-used laws about presidential authority to deploy active-duty troops domestically, warping beyond reason any conception of state sovereignty. Finally, of course, there was the use of emergency powers to justify his sweeping, random, and retaliatory tariffs, which is where Trump received the biggest setback.
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Paul Krugman: The Billionaires’ War

The ultrawealthy put Trump in power but other people will pay the price

It becomes clearer with each passing day that the people who took us to war with Iran had and have no idea what they’re doing — that they’re adolescents who think they’re playing video games while thousands die and the world careens toward economic crisis. The New York Times reports that Trump officials dismissed warnings that attacking Iran could disrupt world oil supplies. Among other things, the Times reports that Mr. Trump, both publicly and privately, has been arguing that Venezuelan oil could help solve any shocks coming from the Iran war. In 2024 Venezuela produced 900,000 barrels of oil per day; normally 20 million barrels a day transit the Strait of Hormuz.
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – March 11, 2026

In a brief call with Barak Ravid of Axios today, President Donald J. Trump said “The war is going great. …

In fact, according to Patrick Wintour of The Guardian, Iranian officials have rejected two messages from Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff calling for a ceasefire. Wintour writes that Iran’s leaders “sense it is not losing the war and the US president is at the minimum feeling the political pressure.” Iranian officials intend to make the economic, political, and military costs of the war so high that Trump will not attack Iran again.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)

Independent: Iran-US war latest: Multiple ships attacked in Strait of Hormuz as Tehran threatens to send price of oil soaring

Iran threatened to launch its most “intense strikes” of the conflict so far overnight, after the US promised the same on Tuesday
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Tehran’s feared Revolutionary Guards claimed responsibility for an attack on a Thai-flagged vessel, after unknown projectiles hit a Japan-flagged container ship and a Marshall Islands-flagged bulk carrier in the narrow channel early this morning.
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Judd Legum: Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor: what we know and what’s still being hidden

President Trump allegedly sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl who was trafficked to him by Jeffrey Epstein, according to documents released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) last Thursday. …
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Since the initial release of the documents, two important developments have bolstered the credibility of the alleged victim. This new information has received little national media attention.

First, the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown, the nation’s premier journalist on the Epstein scandal, has revealed new information about how the FBI assessed the victim. …

Second, the Post and Courier, a media outlet based in Charleston, South Carolina, verified key aspects of the victim’s story around the time of the alleged Trump assault. …

Smaller details also checked out. …

Three key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor were withheld
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Other key documents about Trump’s alleged sexual assault of a minor continue to be withheld
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Steven Beschloss: The Threat of Retaliation in America

The Trump regime’s actions are making America less safe. They are exploiting fear to seize more power. We should not be intimidated.

So many of the Trump regime’s actions can break your brain. Launch a war against Iran …

… this massive military assault comes in the wake of FBI Director Kash Patel firing a dozen counterintelligence agents and staff whose responsibilities included monitoring possible threats from Iran on American soil.

CNN reported that this gutting was motivated by “a simple reason”: Trump wanted the removal of agents investigating him for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the story by reporter Hannah Rabinowitz also noted that these firings “have added to concern inside the Justice Department and FBI that counterterrorism and intelligence investigations in the wake of the military operation in Iran could be hampered by a mass exodus of national security experts,” removing “decades of combined experience in identifying the types of threats that sources say could appear” because of the Iran attack.

How foolish is that? Well, extremely foolish if you think that the Trump regime should be committed to keeping America safe.

According to Miles Taylor, former counterterrorism operations lead at the Department of Homeland Security, his old department wasn’t in the room when the bombing started and doesn’t appear to have been involved in the defensive planning. Taylor, who now write the valuable Defiance newsletter, notes that “thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts and officials have been moved to ‘immigration’ enforcement.”
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I think it’s important to hear from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder, who just published a Substack piece entitled “The Desire for Terror.” He talks about “self-terrorism,” which involves “allowing things to fall apart, and then grabbing opportunely at a bit of the falling wreckage, which is something that Trump does well.” Snyder explicitly states:“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States.” …
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