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Everyone Must Get Droned

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Ted Rall
The Achaemenid Persian Empire. Byzantium. The Ottomans. Ancient Rome. All these regimes wielded immense power relative to their contemporaries. They dominated militarily, economically, culturally and globally in ways comparable to the United States’ current superpower status. All collapsed or were destroyed. We Americans often forget that nothing lasts forever. And we always ignore the playwright Wilson Mizner’s advice to be nice to people on your way up because you’ll meet them on your way down. I am terrified of what will happen to us on the way down. Whether or not you approve of U.S. actions overseas, there’s little dispute that our policymakers routinely flout international norms, violate treaty obligations and ignore the law—our own and those of other countries. We have provided billions in military aid and weapons to Israel despite its documented violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza, making us complicit in war crimes and violating the Leahy Laws, which prohibit aid to entities guilty of gross…
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The Charmed Caste

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Ted Rall
Americans know that they discriminate against one another by race, sex, religion, looks, income, etc. Yet they’re unaware that the United States has a caste system every bit as rigid and objectively odd as India’s—and it’s so subtle that almost no one notices it. None of this is to say that the forms of bigotry that journalists and lawmakers focus upon aren’t real. It’s easier to be able-bodied than not, college-educated rather than not, straight instead of gay, have a clean record as opposed to appearing in a police database of a “gang affiliate.” Those drags on equity form a race-based U.S. caste system, which is bad for human beings and ought to be redressed. But they’re not the whole picture. Missing from every analysis of Otherizing is the caste that walks among us unidentified while in plain sight: the Charmed Ones. Take two people from the same socioeconomic cultural class. Outwardly, they seem to sit exactly at the same…
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The Death of the Landline Will Kill You

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Ted Rall
When you visit Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, you may be told about his telephone. It was one of the first phones in the country, so he could neither call nor be called. He had faith in a phone-ful future. Also, he had invested in AT&T. Someone had to be first. Alexander Graham Bell—Twain’s buddy—was American. The international calling code for the U.S. is 1. The phone was ours. So it was startling to learn recently that, if you want an old-fashioned copper-wire landline phone (also known as POTS—Plain Old Telephone Service) installed in your home in the country that gave the world the telephone, there’s a high chance that you won’t be able to find a telecommunications outfit willing or able to fill your order. AT&T says it will kill off POTS by 2029. New homes are no longer automatically built with the requisite wiring. Networks are getting ripped out. In older houses, the wiring is degrading and, once…
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Shutdown Surrender Is Political Suicide for Democrats

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Ted Rall
Democrats think they run against Republicans. Republicans think they run against Democrats. When swing voters existed as a significant segment of the electorate, that was at least partly true. In our age of polarization, there are too few swing voters to determine the outcome of most races. Elections are won by the party that most motivates its base. When turnout is king, a party’s biggest enemy isn’t the other party. It’s apathy. These days, each of the two parties runs against itself. Every race is an intra-party contest between novelty, which can generate excitement but also fear of the unknown, and establishmentarianism—the tendency of institutions to revert to their historical inertial center. Establishmentarianism makes its strongest case when people feel good about their job, their finances, their communities, and thus institutions like political parties and government. Americans haven’t felt happy about the economy or much else for at least the past decade or two. Which is why every election, even…
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What To Do When Your Country Sucks

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Ted Rall
In a New York Times op-ed titled “How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” M. Gessen asks: “When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you?” I applaud Gessen for raising this question and an otherwise stiflingly establishmentarian newspaper for publishing it. Still, it’s a bummer that the piece is primarily notable for raising an ethical quandary that older Americans believed to have been fully and correctly settled at least as far back as World War II. Gessen is concerned with the current American dilemma. What should we do as the United States “builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions?” There is no explanation for why, but Gessen traveled to Israel to ask Israelis opposed to their…
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I Know Mamdani Is Too Young. I Don’t Care.

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Ted Rall
In every election, the voters choose a candidate to do a job. In some races, they also have an opportunity to send a message. Sometimes, in a change election, voters pass over the best person for the job in favor of making a statement. Although she certainly wasn’t “the most qualified person ever to run for president,” former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was clearly more politically experienced and temperamentally suited to the presidency than Donald Trump, reality star and real-estate grifter, in 2016. But Americans, especially those in the Rust Belt swing states who felt ignored as their communities were ravaged by NAFTA and opioids, were angry—and they wanted Washington to know it. Trump represented a raised middle finger to the establishment, which always expects us to be satisfied with business as usual, even when usual really sucks for a lot of people. Not every election grants you an opportunity to send a message with your vote.…
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Trump Is Every Day. The Resistance Is Every Few Months. Wonder Why He’s Winning?

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Ted Rall
Hundreds of thousands of anti-Trump “No Kings” demonstrators marched on Saturday through the streets of thousands of American cities, to expose general opposition to the ruling Republican Party and to express outrage over their various policies. Like its predecessors, this effort will have zero effect. Performative protests like “No Kings,” the 2017 Women’s March and the Hand’s Off marches this past April—organized by Democratic Party affiliates and allies—cannot accomplish meaningful change because they do not exert political pressure. Because they are nonviolent to the point of self-policing would-be militants in their midst and, occurring on weekends when most businesses and government offices are closed and therefore non-disruptive, the crowds pose no threat to the rich and powerful or their pet politicians. Trump and MAGA world are every day. They work tirelessly to push their radical right agenda. “No Kings” and likeminded exercises in safe, sanitized street displays (“in many places the events looked more like a street party”) meet once…
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Hamas’ Stunning Victory

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Ted Rall
TED RALL HAMAS’S STUNNING VICTORY RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2025 Hamas’s victory over Israel will go down in history as one of the most stunning upsets in the history of modern warfare. It will be studied by future Resistance groups for instructions on how a guerrilla army can achieve its aims despite facing an adversary with seemingly insurmountable advantages in weaponry, technology, funding and international legitimacy. This Islamic group’s achievement was breathtaking. Indicating an astonishing ability to adapt, it pivoted from a ragtag outfit of irregular militants to a full-fledged governing authority with the organizational structure of a nation-state in 2007—ironically, with the support of Israel, which pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy to undermine Fatah’s Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Then, with the Abraham Accords and Arab states moving toward normalization of relations with Israel, Hamas leadership concluded that it needed a radical gamechanger, an incident that would expose the Jewish state as genocidal, scuttle its hopes of regional acceptance…
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What Did You During the Trump Wars, Daddy?

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Ted Rall
My darling daughter gave me two dramatic blinks of her Aryan-blue eyes and flipped back her pure, naturally-blonde pigtails. “What did you do during the Trump Wars, daddy?” It felt like a fever dream. What’s that, evil libtard? I don’t have a “Children of the Corn” daughter? Or any daughter at all? Who are you to say that to me, a Patriot Hero of the Trump Wars? You, who don’t even know the difference between a man and a woman? How would you be able to tell whether a beautiful young girl like my imaginary daughter exists? Back to my story. “Unlike some of my fellow Americans,” I told her—let’s say her name is/was/could have been Stephanie—“I answered my nation’s call at her time of greatest need.” I sunk into my recliner. “As everyone knows, the United States was being horrifically terribly tragically outrageously attacked by domestic terrorist cells of far-left extremists. We were seconds away from Marxism. Gulags, Soviet…
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Israel Is Finished

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Ted Rall
Dying regimes do funny things. Dying superpowers plan for a future that never comes. I have a 1992 Soviet ruble note, redesigned the year before. Considering that the USSR closed shop in 1991, they probably should have focused on something more pressing than their next Five Year Plan. Dying dictatorships bluff and bluster. Despite the obvious facts, Gaddafi claimed to control Libyan cities his forces had fled. “Victory will be ours soon,” Saddam assured Iraqis as U.S. forces closed in on Baghdad. “We are firm as a monkey’s tail,” ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier bragged as he boarded a plane fleeing Haiti. Dying genocidal regimes ramp up the killing. Driven by a combination of ideological fanaticism and a desperate attempt to erase evidence of industrialized mass murder, Nazi Germany intensified the pace of killings at death camps in the final months of World War II, particularly in 1944 and early 1945, as the government faced impending defeat. With the Allies advancing, the…
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