Category: 2026

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Bill McKibben: An El Niño is brewing

And with it the next, pivotal, chapter of the climate fight.

America’s abandonment of the “endangerment finding” undergirding national climate policy is not the most important thing that happened last week. That decision was an act of gross stupidity, but it was also perfectly predictable given the people making it, and since America’s not doing anything good on climate anyway it won’t have deep immediate effect. (As is often the case, humorist Alexandra Petri had the best response). What will matter more, I think, for America and for policy going forward, is the news that we’re likely to see another El Niño soon; take this as your first warning that not only the temperature but the politics of the planet are likely to change dramatically, and soon.

We’re still in a La Niña phase in the Pacific right now—the cooler part of the cycle that meant that 2025’s global temperature was “only” the second or third highest ever, trailing 2023, the last big El Niño year. But that hot phase seems to be returning, and somewhat faster than expected. …
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – February 15, 2026

The Trump administration’s white nationalist project was on full display this weekend at the 62nd Munich Security Conference that took place from February 13 to 15, 2026. …

… officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying “western civilization.” Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.
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[Rubio’s] description of that shared heritage reflected the Trump administration’s fantasy past. It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly “American” identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.

Rubio’s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S., and even though he called out the Rolling Stones, who built their body of work on that of Black American blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as part of “western civilization.” Rubio even ignored his own family’s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.

Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. …
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Kareem Abdul Jabbar: “I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs.” – Muhammad Ali

I still remember the first time I met Muhammad Ali. It was 1966 and I was a freshman at UCLA. I was with a couple of friends walking down Hollywood Boulevard when we happened to see him. He was performing magic tricks on the street. That moment stayed with me. It wasn’t the disappearing coins or the crowd, or even the fact that he was already the heavyweight champion of the world when he stopped to entertain a sidewalk full of passersby. It was the way he carried himself: unafraid, unbothered, unbowed. A force of nature, gentle but unstoppable. That was the first time I not only understood but saw that conviction isn’t something you talk about. It’s something you live. Long before I understood all the stakes, I recognized the thing that made him unforgettable: conviction you could see, not just hear.

Within a year, that same certainty would harden into something costlier when he refused the Vietnam draft and paid for it publicly.
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NY Times: The Transformative Power of the White ‘Race Traitor’

From Schwerner and Goodman to Good and Pretti, white people putting themselves in harm’s way has helped galvanize Americans for justice.
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The first person to be executed for treason in the United States was not a spy or someone who sold secrets to a foreign government. It was not a Confederate general who took up arms against his government. It was an abolitionist named John Brown.

A religious man, Brown had long opposed slavery on moral grounds, becoming a conductor on the Underground Railroad and training Black communities in free states how to arm themselves against slave catchers. But as slavery continued to expand across the West and with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Brown came to believe that the only way to end slavery was to overthrow it by force.

In October 1859, Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what was then Virginia, intending to arm enslaved people to rise up against their enslavers. Brown’s group killed several people before he was captured and charged with murder and conspiracy to incite the revolt. The Commonwealth of Virginia considered a white man’s taking up arms to liberate Black people an act of treason, punishable by death.
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Borowitz: Mark Kelly Records Video Telling Bartenders They Are Allowed to Refuse Hegseth’s Orders

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senator Mark Kelly released a new online video on Thursday reminding the nation’s bartenders that they are allowed to refuse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s orders.

Staring stonily into the camera, the former astronaut warned that, if Hegseth appears to be above the legal blood-alcohol limit, any additional drink request would constitute an illegal order.
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Rev. Mel West: America needs to find its way back to compassion

A well-known ball player said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

It seems that my beloved USA took the fork in the road marked compassion as the country developed, and we did not stray from that lane until lately. Three words that well describe our country were embodied in statues that I call “The Three Sisters.”

In 1886, a statue named “Liberty” was placed on Liberty Island, New York City, and since then has stood with her torch held high to welcome “the teeming mass.” …

The second sister is named “Justice” and appears blindfolded with a balance scale in her right hand. …

The younger is named “Responsibility” aka “The Madonna of the Trail.” As a statue she is seen as a pioneer woman with a baby in her arms and a child at her feet and facing West. …

We have gone well down the trail led by the three Sisters, lost at times along the way, but finding our way back. But now there are those who say we took the wrong trail years ago, and must go back to the fork and take the other trail. We must, they claim, take the trail marked by power, strength, wealth, force and domination. Compassion, we are told, is no longer a mark of good leadership, but of weakness. Our country should be feared more than loved and respected. Truth is what is told by those in power. Loyalty, no matter what, is the mark of citizenship. Wealth is for the taker.
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Paul Waldman: The death of the CIA Factbook and Trump’s war on usefulness

Wherever government does something helpful, the regime wants to kill it.

When the Trump administration closes down public access to yet another worthwhile resource, it doesn’t always make news. But the decision last week to shutter the CIA World Factbook stands out for what it reveals.

This administration has been fighting a sweeping information war meant to distort and suppress facts, ideas, and history that doesn’t “align with the president’s agenda,” in the phrase they so often use. But at the same time, they’re also waging a war on usefulness.

The CIA produced the Factbook, a concise roundup of facts and figures about every country in the world, since the 1960s; it started as an internal resource and then was made public so anyone could access it. If you wanted to know how many square miles Argentina is, or see a list of political parties in Belgium, or find out what the GDP of Cameroon was last year, the Factbook was a handy resource. But not anymore. Not only will the CIA stop producing new iterations, all previous versions have been removed from the web (though they can still be found at the Internet Archive).

It’s the latter part that gives away their intentions. What would the cost be of keeping the old versions of the Factbook online? Essentially zero. So what’s the point of deleting them?
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Andy Borowitz: Trump’s Racism Isn’t News

Donald Trump’s racist meme featuring Barack and Michelle Obama is shocking but utterly unsurprising. Trump has been a racist for decades—following in his father’s footsteps.

In 1971, Trump joined the real estate company founded by daddy Fred, and, in a move that every nepo baby would applaud, assumed the entry-level position of president.

His career as his father’s junior partner got off to an inauspicious but telling start.

In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Trump Management for discriminating against prospective Black tenants, naming both Trumps as codefendants. “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline heralding Donald J. Trump’s first appearance on page one of the New York Times.

Countersuing, the Trumps unleashed their lawyer, Roy Cohn, the disgraced (and, eventually, disbarred) former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn advanced the Trumps’ claim that they were discriminating not against Blacks but against undesirable “welfare recipients.” A judge dismissed the Trumps’ countersuit. (The tradition of judges tossing baseless Trump lawsuits continues to this day.)
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Bulwark: Why Trump’s Attack on Refugees Could Hurt Grandma

Miami, Florida
MARYSE, 56, HAS BEEN A HOME CARE WORKER in the United States ever since she moved here from Haiti sixteen years ago. Over the years, she estimates, she’s cared for more than two dozen people. Most have been seniors in physical or cognitive decline—among them, a Purple Heart recipient who had served in the Army and a former pilot who had flown missions over France and Africa during World War II. She has also cared for younger people with physical disabilities, including one who had cerebral palsy and another who had suffered severe head trauma in a car accident.

It was not the career Maryse once imagined for herself, she told me last week. …

Maryse’s priority at that point was providing for her kids, and her English wasn’t good enough for media work in the states. At her sister’s urging, she says, she enrolled in classes to become a certified nursing assistant, following a well-worn path for Haitian immigrants who knew the high demand for caregivers meant it would lead to reliable employment—and who frequently saw caring for others as a calling, not just a paycheck.
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This is not a case of immigrants taking jobs from Americans, most economists say. It’s a case of immigrants taking jobs Americans don’t want, because there are easier ways to make a living. “There are these other jobs—even fast food sometimes—where you can have more predictability and stable hours, and make similar money,” …
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NY Times: Prosecutors Began Investigating Renee Good’s Killing. Washington Told Them to Stop.

Federal prosecutors had a warrant to collect evidence from Ms. Good’s vehicle, but Trump administration leaders said to drop it. About a dozen prosecutors have departed, leaving the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office in turmoil.
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Cindy Burnham, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Minnesota, declined to comment for this article, as did Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota. Emily Covington, a Justice Department spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment.
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