URGENT: Floodgates Are Wide Open
TUCSON — Renee Good was the last straw. The snap of that figurative camel's back echoes loudly across every part of the globe.
Democracy is on its last legs when masked goons storm peaceful streets with apparent impunity to open fire on terrified, law-abiding young mothers trying to elude them after taking their kids to school — and then a president blames the victim.
Beyond so many Americans' narrow line of sight, decent people across the world watch Donald Trump with visceral contempt. Dictators, no longer constrained by values America once defended, pop champagne corks and make plans.
Today's headlines say Donald Trump threatens 25 percent tariffs on European allies who won't give him Greenland. Americans would pay more sales tax in exchange for risking a hot war with NATO.
He has mugged a southern neighbor for its oil, allowed Russia to run roughshod in Europe, tossed fuel on Middle East flames, and he continues to chest bump China toward a global war it might win. A "free world" cannot last long like that.
For a decade, he has exploited the gullible with guile, reshaping America in his own despicable image. The Grand Old Party no longer suits its nickname. Greed-driven faithless Republicans fall in line.
Trump thumps a bible he has likely never read. His text is "Mein Kampf." A Kool-Aid cult parrots outrageous Big Lies. An old proverb explains why so many others watch in silence: "There are none so blind as they who will not see."
Fearing a Republican rout in November, he is going for broke. His bogus "insurrections" presage martial law to thwart elections. Stephen Miller, his junkyard-dog deputy chief of staff, is blunt: We're in charge so shut up. Might makes right.
Polls say just over half of Americans believe Renee Good's death was unjustified. What in hell are the rest of them thinking?
As democracy hangs in the balance, a warning echoes from Edmund Burke, an Irish parliamentarian who watched the American revolution take shape: "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing." This is no time for apathy.
It is stunning how many people believe Trump when he blames Joe Biden for the Covid calamity. Epidemiologists estimate his own self-focused denial — thwarting science and politicizing the pandemic —caused close to a million needless deaths.
He left the country in its worst shape since the Great Depression. Biden brought the economy back to what Britain's The Economist called "the envy of the world."
This term, slashed foreign aid is killing millions around the world. Authoritative estimates predict 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, could die by 2030.
For calm reflection on the big picture, I have just revisited Arizona's majestic mountains, now savaged by copper mining and heedless new development in a state running dry. But that is for later, along with thoughts on how to do better.
Now it is time to clang on alarm bells, and the Mort Report needs your help to spike up the volume. The reasons why — and how to help — are detailed below. First, the background.
These dispatches are "non-prophet." Guessing at the future is futile. But in 2016, I warned of a creeping coup d'etat. After reporting all over the map, I know one when I see it. Since then, I've taken Christiane Amanpour's approach: truthful but not neutral.
A reporter's main asset is credibility earned over time. After four decades with the Associated Press and two years as editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, I cherish mine. Still, no story I've covered has only two sides. "Fair" is seldom "balanced."
Since Antiquity, demagogues' priority has been to muzzle the messengers. That is easy in a military takeover. Instead, Trump uses the Steve Bannon approach: "flood the zone with shit." He has declared jihad on the First Amendment.
One example: federal agents raided a Washington Post reporter's home, seizing computers, phones, notes and files in a hunt for government leaks. Journalists need legal backup, security systems, supporting data and skilled factcheckers.
But however much Trump sues, coopts, intimidates or otherwise skews honest news organizations at home, his depredations are plain to see for anyone who takes the trouble to look.
Seasoned correspondents must be out in the real world, free from the constraints of editors and managers who curtail frankness to please profit-obsessed corporate owners. They need languages, cultivated reliable contacts, a clear worldview and survival skills.
Travel expenses are spiraling upwards, devouring even substantial resources. I need a part-time young techie to reach multiple platforms. Please help if you can.
These dispatches began as "Mort Unplugged" emails to family, friends and anyone else who came upon them. Generous people and colleagues have helped this work grow.
For a wide reach, I decided on an emailed list with no paywall. Trusted editors volunteer their time, and I make up shortfalls with funds put aside when I was paid well.
The Report still circulates as it did: notes in a bottle tossed out to sea to pitch up wherever currents take them. That brought surprises.
I began one piece in 2023 with this:
“Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.”
We did. And today a divided nation plunges towards corruption, cruelty, cronyism, warmongering, greed, cultist violence and, most urgently, nearly irreversible ecocide. Voters have only months left to save a world that belongs to our progeny.
Someone sent that Report to Frank Bruni at the New York Times, a master of our trade I've admired since we both covered the first Gulf War from Saudi Arabia. He used it as the kicker in his yearend rubric, "For the Love of Sentences."
Every few weeks, a fresh dispatch bounces around to tens of thousands, more readers than a brisk-selling book. They include top people in governments, news organizations and NGOs in a position to help steer a wayward world back on track
That is peanuts compared to "influencers" who guess at distant reality for profit. But research shows when 3.5 percent of a country's population turns out for nonviolent protests, even an authoritarian government finds it impossible to ignore their demands.
Protests last year were sporadic, heavily skewed toward elders. In 2024, 73.6 percent of eligible Americans registered to vote, and only 65.3 percent bothered to do it.
Consider what we are up against, starting with Minneapolis.
Basic facts in Renee Good's death are beyond dispute. Had courageous citizens not videoed it, as others did in 2020 when police suffocated George Floyd only blocks away from where she died, it would have gone unnoticed as so many atrocities do.
Laws and human decency demand an investigation. Yet despite evidence, Trump, J.D. Vance and Kristi Noem quickly labeled the victim a domestic terrorist. Her wife is under scrutiny for criminal conspiracy. Her three kids face a lifetime of grief, tainted with suspicion that their mother was a traitor.
“At a very minimum," Trump told reporters later, "that woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.” As if that allows for reflexive bullets to the head by an immigration officer who then walks away as if he had put down a disruptive dog.
Her last words were, "I'm not mad at you." Distinct audio picked up his reply: "Fucking bitch." He said that while aiming his cellphone camera at protesters with one hand and, with the other, shooting Renee Good in the face.
She was a devout Christian with no blemish on her record. Videos show her wheels pointed away from officers who tried to yank her out of her car. Local lawmen and bystanders need to testify. Forensics must be examined. The Feds stonewall all of that.
It was no isolated case. An MS Now survey found 14 other times since July when ICE agents in different states fired into vehicles. Authorities routinely blamed the victims. Only four of the shooters faced justice.
But this was Minnesota, in the Midwest heartland I knew in earlier days when I once wrote people are so nice it makes your teeth hurt. Refugees were welcome, as they were in Wisconsin, where my grandparents fled to escape pogroms in Belarus and Ukraine.
Trump targets Somalis who managed to escape unimaginable internecine mayhem, forced starvation and American military folly. Being human, a few likely divert public funds. Chump change in contrast to what is stolen in Washington.
Trump says Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and her ilk are garbage who should "go home." If she were eligible — and had a snowball's chance in the Arizona desert of winning — I'd back her for president. She is a tough survivor who comprehends the world as it is.
Do not miss the four-minute video attached below. At a congressional committee hearing in Minneapolis, Omar began with her habitual cool to explain how $174 billion given to ICE could alleviate underlying social and economic problems. Then she let fly:
"I don't want to curse. But to those of us who escaped places like (Somalia), the one place we thought we would never experience this is the U.S. goddamned States."
Look around at today's world in the hands of partisan zealots who dominate not only the executive branch but also Congress and the Supreme Court.
Trump has resolved none of those eight "wars" despite his boastful litany. He simply claims credit for conflicts and diplomatic standoffs mediated by others. Some have already flared up again.
The real war that risks nuclear High Noon — in Ukraine — is almost entirely of his own making. And by leaning sharply toward Israel at the expense of Palestinians during his first term, he is largely responsible for the Hamas attack from Gaza and what followed.
Vladimir Putin capitalizes on Trump's fanboy obsession, jerking him around like a puppet. Nothing on the table guarantees Ukrainian security. It will likely continue to bleed out with help from Europeans, who see the looming danger to themselves.
Trump faults Biden for Russia's invasion. But intelligence analysts and correspondents close to war attribute that to Trump's attempt to scuttle NATO. Russia expected a quick blitz. Biden warned Ukraine and went public with Putin's plan.
Ever feckless, Trump supports Benjamin Netanyahu, who dodges prison on corruption charges by turning a volatile region into an ungodly time bomb. A humbled Iran, more dangerous than ever, is likely making a dirty nuke that is transportable by land.
Palestinians won't stop fighting for autonomy. Global sympathy for Israel after Hamas attacked has waned with overkill in Gaza and West Bank settler violence. Assaults on Jews are spiking everywhere, even those who support a two-state solution.
Trump's insane demand to own Greenland risks NATO allies fending off an enemy.
And there is Venezuela. Goldman Sachs estimates only a $4 per barrel decrease by 2030 if things go according to plan and raise production to 2 million barrels a day.
After Barack Obama's focus on energy independence, America produces 13 to 14 million barrels daily in a global glut market. Essential new infrastructure for heavy Venezuelan crude would cost billions. But go back to that "according to plan."
Forget comparisons to Panama, a small place where U.S. forces captured a world-class drug lord without any territorial or economic reasons. Venezuela is 12 times larger, with vicious political militias and criminal gangs in high-mountain redoubts.
No amount of security guards can protect oil executives and workaway crews from sabotage, kidnapping and armed attacks.
Yet Pete Hegseth, the self-styled "secretary of war," commits what international law calls war crimes. The latest, disguising a warplane as a civilian aircraft, puts all air travelers near countless combat zones at risk. Geneva conventions no longer apply.
Trump says he chose Delcey Rodriquez, Nicolás Maduro's vice president to take charge in Venezuela because of experience in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's partisans were excluded, triggering chaos. Likening two vastly different situations is preposterous.
His only interest is that oil. And Marco Rubio, his multitasked sidekick, is bent on isolating Cuba across the Caribbean.
Venezuela sheds light on a shameless narcissist who grasps at any honor in reach, however undeserved. After Maria Corina Machado gave him her Nobel Peace Prize, he called her "a very fine woman," reversing his recent criticism of her. But she remains on the sidelines.
In Norway, legislators heaped scathing scorn on Trump. The gist: the prize is personal, not to be shared unless the Nobel committee awarded it that way.
And there is all the rest.
Kristi Noem heightens homeland insecurity. Pam Bondi metes out justice to a selected minority. Karoline Leavitt assails reporters who demand truth. Vance waits for his demented boss to implode so he can deliver America to billionaires.
Voters need to know what they are up against in nuanced detail and broad context. You can help us reach a critical mass across the full range of social media.
It seems that everyone is rattling a tin cup these days, and it is painful to add another. But this is drop-dead urgent.
Contributions can be made via the "Get Involved" tab at mortreport.org. You can escape PayPal's clutches by clicking "Donate with debit or credit card." Checks to Reporting Unlimited can be addressed to me at 2114 W. Grant Road, PMB 38, Tucson, AZ, 85745.
If you don't get a note of thanks, please let me know at mort.rosenblum@gmail.com. If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution, message me at that email. All thoughts and questions will reach me there.
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If you are strapped, as so many people are now that Trump's tariff myth is making its impact, relay Reports to your own lists, with a link so people can sign up for emails.
In any case, remember what an active 3.5 percent can achieve. And anthropologist Margaret Mead's words, now more apt than ever:
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
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