Haitians are being singled out as undesirable persons by the Ruling Party. Dehumanizing vitriol directed at Haitians has become boilerplate rhetoric for Republican Party officials. Think of Vice President Vance’s claims that Haitians eat pets or Rep. Clay Higgins’ racist rant against Haitians.

If the image of putting a distinctive marker on individuals to identify them as part of an unwanted, subhuman group evokes historical parallels, you are not alone. Officials in Nazi Germany required Jews to wear yellow stars on their clothing. Not only did dehumanizing a population serve Party ideology, it facilitated state security’s ability to round up and/or deport undesirable Jews – echoing the Republican Party’s plan to round up and deport undesirable Haitians.

To make such parallels is admittedly fraught. We see resistance from Jewish groups who say such comparisons diminish the magnitude and gravity of the Holocaust (but not all! – read to the end). Or from historians who pedantically deconstruct equivalencies.

These parallels invariably invoke debate over the f-word: fascism. Is Trump a fascist? Is the GOP a fascist party?

One the one hand, it is not. Fascism can be defined as unique to a particular setting in Europe in the first half of the 20^th Century. One the other hand, the MAGA movement and the Republican Party that has thoroughly embraced it operationalizes many of the behaviors we use to describe fascism.

There are limitless studies on fascist behaviors one could cite. I always recommend Hannah Arendt. Jason Stanley is a modern scholar on the topic (with a personal history on it). I’ll refer to a concise list of the features of fascism from a lecture by scholar Marci Shore, posted by her husband Timothy Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism.

• A worldview through toxic nationalism

• The nation as quasi-religious entity

• Fetishization of racial hierarchy; equality is deadly to the health of the nation

• Cults of strength and obsession with masculinity

• World of victimization

• Scapegoating the Other

• Cult of the leader

• Mythologization of the past

• Anti-intellectualism

• Worship of violence

We tend to think of fascism in its Nazi end-state with death camps and such. But it didn’t start there. It built up over decades accreting the features listed above. And so while the U.S. isn’t a fascist state today, we do see its features in America right now. Look again at the list above; the embedded links are all examples of fascist behavior from Republican Party leaders.

Which brings us back to yellow stars and ankle monitors. Both were imposed by the Ruling Party on a group deemed a threat to the nation and its heritage. Both were employed in an Otherizing campaign. And both facilitate the state relocating the Others to a place.

Yes, Trump Administration officials make their arguments why ankle monitors serve national security and the Party’s policy goals. Just as Nazi Party officials made their arguments about why yellow stars serve national security and the Party’s policy goals.

An ICE officer reportedly defended the effort to put ankle monitors on Haitians with “We’re just following orders.” Ummm, how much more of a Nazi parallel do you need?

If we’re not yet at fascism, it’s not for lack of want. Here is MAGA influencer Steven Crowder, unambiguously:

Is Crowder an outlier doing it for clicks? Nope. Fasci-philia manifests all through the MAGAsphere and embeds itself in the Republican Party: Greg Bovino’s coat’s Waffen SS aesthetic, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Vance’s defense of Germany’s neo-Nazi party, the young Republican chat group’s praise of Hitler, etc.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

The United States today is not a fascist state, thankfully. But it might become one if the policy-makers engaging in all the precursor behaviors listed above get their way. Historians and political scientists will tell you that authoritarian movements don’t halt themselves. There is no internal moderating influence. It demands external resistance contingent on resilience among sectors of society – labor unions, academia, faith-based institutions, non-governmental organizations, civil society leaders and, most importantly, regular citizens willing to stand up and speak out.

German theologian Martin Niemöller’s “first they came” piece gets attention for good reason.

It is a good sign for democracy and decency that this time people are speaking out. The Ruling Party’s decision to Otherize Haitians with ankle monitors is meeting resistance from regular citizens, community leaders, and even the Republican governor of Ohio.

It is good that others see the dark historical parallel too. Residents of a Jewish senior center in Florida are acting to protect their Haitian caregivers from being deported:

“That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”

Let’s learn from history and not repeat it.

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“If we are to remain true to who we are as a nation, we have to be a place of refuge for persecuted peoples like Hong Kongers and Uyghurs.”

-- Senator Marco Rubio, October 19, 2021

I’ve documented the many ways (see list below) Marco Rubio has thrown people under the bus to remain in the good graces of President Donald Trump. Particularly galling has been his disregard of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and Chinese human rights defenders – people he built his tough-on-China brand when he was in the Senate.

And the most odious is his betrayal of Uyghurs and Hong Kongers seeking safety.

Senator Rubio pronounced himself the champion of Hong Kongers fleeing persecution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): “Assisting Hong Kongers in need of refuge is the morally right thing to do.”

Senator Rubio was sponsor of the Hong Kong Safe Harbor Act in the 116^th and 119^th Congresses. The bill would have ensured that Hong Kongers who peacefully protested the CCP takeover of the city, and thus have a well-founded fear of persecution, are eligible for Priority 2 Refugee status. “The U.S. must do all it can to assist those Hong Kongers who have courageously stood up to defend the city they love from the CCP’s persecution and open our doors to them,” Rubio said.

Senator Rubio was lead Republican cosponsor of the Uyghur Human Rights Protection Act in the 117^th Congress. Similar to the Hong Kong bill, this legislation would have facilitated refugee processing of Uyghurs fleeing persecution in China. “I’m proud to join Senator Coons in introducing this bill to grant Uyghurs with priority refugee status,” Rubio said.

Fast forward to now. Secretary Rubio is part of an Administration singularly focused on deporting people it doesn’t like, regardless of whether they may face danger where they are sent. This mass expulsion campaign is ensnaring people who fled persecution in China, and who would once again face persecution, or torture or worse, if sent back.

It is a fact that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is deporting people to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). To be fair, so did the Biden Administration. What is similar is the lack of transparency about who is on these flights, and whether any are at-risk individuals.

What is different is the evidence that the Trump Administration is rounding up and putting into ICE detention facilities individuals who are clearly would be put in danger if deported (which is the intent for those sent to an ICE detention facility).

One case is Guan Heng, an ethnic Han who documented Chinese mass detention camps in Xinjiang, and sought asylum in the U.S. because PRC authorities don’t like you exposing that sort of thing. He had a pending asylum application, which legally allowed him to be in the United States. No matter; ICE determined that he has entered “illegally” and whisked him away to a detention facility to be processed for deportation. Thanks to intervention by Members of Congress, he was released and subsequently granted asylum. (The cruel irony here is that a man deemed a hero for exposing detention facilities was sent to one himself.)

Another is Wu Shaoping, a Chinese lawyer who fled China after associating with human rights defenders the government was persecuting, including two nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the China human rights commission that Rubio used to chair. Working as an Amazon driver in Pennsylvania while his asylum application was pending, he too was swept up and placed in an ICE facility. Congressional intervention got him out too.

These are just the public cases. There are so many others alluded to, such as Uyghurs in ICE detention. We can only guess how many more are detained by ICE, much less how many have been sent back to the PRC to face a cruel fate.

A Rubio defender might retort that it is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) doing this, not his State Department. But State has a role; it has a responsibility to notify DHS if a person’s deportation would amount to refoulement – sending a person to a country where they would likely face persecution – which is illegal under U.S. and international law. I’ve heard State has done this, but we don’t know how often as they are not public letters. Again, that’s a case-by-case matter, not a policy solution.

The reality is that PRC nationals in the U.S. remain at risk of deportation despite Rubio. The Administration’s new (unlawful) policy of arresting asylum seekers at airports is undoubtably forcing Uyghurs and Hong Kongers (and others) to go to ground rather than risk arrest; I was recently told this by a member of one of those communities.

If there are still people who think that Marco Rubio will save them from deportation because “he’s against the CCP,” they should look at the fate of Cubans and Venezuelans. These exile communities in Florida were the backbone of Senator Rubio’s political coalition. He used to tout the U.S. as refuge from communism. But the Trump Administration has been readily deporting Cubans and Venezuelans. Secretary Rubio has done nothing to stop this. And he won’t for those who fled persecution from the PRC either.

The clearest way to judge Secretary Rubio’s record is by his own standard. Five years ago he said “If we are to remain true to who we are as a nation, we have to be a place of refuge for persecuted peoples like Hong Kongers and Uyghurs.” Under this Administration, in which Secretary Rubio is a senior official, the United States is certainly not.

So if Marco Rubio was so quick to abandon a principle he once openly held, it raises the question whether it was a principle at all in the first place, or rather just another slogan of convenience by a facile-tongued politician looking to build his brand. The more I watch Rubio in action, the more I am convinced it is the latter. If you are someone who still thinks the old Rubio will return to save your cause, I suggest you spend some time considering the evidence at hand.

The Marco Rubio Library:

• Marco Rubio used to oppose transnational repression. Now he helps other governments commit TNR and violate human rights.

• Marco Rubio is not going to save you

• Answering the 10 questions for Marco Rubio

• Marco Rubio never mentions “China” in his Munich speech. Or “human rights.”

• Trump/Rubio are undermining the case for Taiwan

• The capriciousness of “US foreign policy interests” under Trump & Rubio

• Marco Rubio emulates Hillary Clinton on China

• Secretary Rubio is institutionally demoting human rights

• Is Marco Rubio using his China expertise to copy CCP behavior rather than to counter it?

• America needs a Shadow Secretary of State

• The Trump/Rubio anti-“DEI” edict is bad for Uyghurs and Tibetans

• 10 Questions for Marco Rubio

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And here they go again. Republicans are pulling out the COMMUNIST card against their political opponents. Here is Speaker Mike Johnson in his characteristic eloquence:

It’s as tiresome as it is unoriginal. But now they’ve dressed it in a new skin. The State Department issued a 100-page report called “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” purporting to show how Cuba is the root of all evil in the United States, including the monster under your bed. Yeah, the same Cuba that suffers island-wide blackouts and whose people go hungry due to U.S. sanctions somehow has the power of Sauron.

This is projection – the psychological process by which people attribute to others what is in their own minds. Republicans accuse Democrats of engaging in authoritarian behavior because they presume that political parties, including their own, naturally engage in authoritarian behavior to preserve power. But because of another psychological condition – cognitive dissonance – Republicans can’t conceive of themselves acting like communists. The GOP is the anti-commie party right?

Wrong.

Look at the ways that actual communist governments^[1] behave. You will find LOTS of similarities with the way that the U.S. government is behaving under the Republican trifecta. Let’s go through the list:

1. Government owning the means of production

That the government owns things is arguably the core objection of the ardent anti-communist. And yet…

Under President Trump, the U.S. government has acquired ownership in 30 companies, according to a study by the one remaining principled libertarian thought leader, the CATO Institute.

It’s the Republican Party that is giving the masses control over the means of production. As the Reaganite Lincoln Project posted: “Trump is using the government’s power to take ownership in private companies. Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”

2. Loyalty to the Party and the Leader

To be a Party member in good standing, one must give absolute and unquestioned loyalty to the Party Leader. This is true in the Chinese Communist Party and in the U.S. Republican Party.

Running afoul of complete loyalty to Xi Jinping will get you purged from the military. Just ask Generals Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli. Running afoul of complete loyalty to Donald Trump will get you purged from the military. Just ask Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Adm. Lisa Franchetti.

In the Chinese Communist system, to serve in government, workers must pledge loyalty to the Party. In the Republican Party system, to serve in government, workers must now pledge loyalty to President Trump’s agenda, rather than to the Constitution. Republicans are reclassifying previously non-partisan civil servants into a category where they must serve the Party’s interests.

3. Restricting individual liberty

Communist governments almost uniformly restrict civil and political rights. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) limits freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, limits free press, bans books, revises history, attacks academic freedom, attacks lawyers, prosecutes its critics, and uses surveillance technology for social control.

Today’s Republican-led U.S. government is also restricting the civil and political rights. The Republican Party is working to limit Americans’ freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, limits free press, bans books, revises history, attacks academic freedom, attacks lawyers, prosecutes its critics, and uses surveillance technology for social control.

4. Redefining democracy to suit Party ideology

Communist governments’ use of the word “democracy” (think DPRK) doesn’t mean mutli-party competitive elections and individual rights. The CCP refers to “whole process people’s democracy.” When there are elections, the system is stacked so that the Party’s choices always prevail.

The U.S. Republican Party is also redefining democracy away from mutli-party competitive elections and individual rights. Trump is attacking the core principle of genuine democracy: that losers of elections respect the outcome. The Republican Party is implementing a 19-point strategy to take decision-making power away from the voters and tilt election processes so that the Ruling Party doesn’t lose power. This includes mid-census partisan gerrymandering, replacing non-partisan local election boards with partisan ones, restricting voter registration, attempting to put the central government in charge of election processes, considering sending state security forces to intimidate voters, and plotting to prevent Democrats from taking power in Congress even if they win elections.

There are elements in the Republican Party that want to do away with the foundational concept of “one person-one vote” toward systems that favor “voter quality” (code for limiting power of minorities and women), such as the idea of “household voting” where the man would cast a vote for the family.

5. Sphere of influence to promote Party ideology

Many communist parties adopted the idea of global revolution, where communist systems would be spread by coercion or force to other countries, such as the Soviet Union creating client states in Eastern Europe and other areas. While geopolitical power politics were at play, the ideological component was the given justification.

Today, the Republican Party is also engineering an ideologically-motivated sphere of influence. The “Donroe Doctrine” is Trump’s framework for U.S. domination of the Western Hemisphere. Like communists, they package this power play in an ideological framework, namely a defense of “Western Civilization” (code for white, Rightist, and Christian) as expressed by Vice President Vance, Secretary Rubio and others. And similar to the way communists export revolution, Republicans are using the resources of the state to export far-right ideology.

6. Trump’s admiration for Communists

Republican President Trump has repeatedly praised Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping as a “great leader.” Trump said that the United States should be more like Communist China in administering justice free from due process. Trump praised the Communist leadership of China for their strength in cracking down on peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

So the next time you hear a Republican accuse their political opponents of being “communists” ask them to look in the mirror. And to read a history book. Because the behaviors that communist parties employ to exert social control and perpetuate Ruling Party power is very similar to the behaviors that the Republican Party is employing in America to exert social control and perpetuate Ruling Party power.

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^[1] This is where I must pedantically point out that there has NEVER been a communist country by the standard of the theories of Marx and Engels. What we have seen are authoritarian/totalitarian countries that label themselves communist, constructed on the Vanguardism established by Lenin and copied by others.

“I believe in equal rights to peace, dignity, and self-determination, for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.”

This is from El-Sayed’s campaign website:

“We ensure security at home and abroad by standing with our democratic allies and engaging in a foreign policy that centers diplomacy, cooperation, and human rights. When we act in the interest of human rights and democracy ... we find ourselves on the right side of justice.”

You know another politician who employs human rights language? New York mayor Zohran Mamdani:

“The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead this city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights.” (interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”)

“I think the attacks on queer Ugandans are ones that are a complete betrayal of the very foundation of my politics, which is a belief in universal human rights.” source

“And I also believe that we have to follow through on the international human rights, and I know that still today, those are being violated” (from his meeting with President Trump)

What do El-Sayed and Mamdani have in common? Both are Democratic politicians. Both are Muslim. Both defend the rights of Palestinians. Both employ the concept of equality and human rights when talking about Palestinians and Israelis. And both suffer withering criticism for doing so.

This is worth exploring because it tells us a LOT about the state of human rights in our politics. That state is not healthy, but it redounds to a positive message (read to the end).

There is so much ugliness, bigotry and double standards in the way Israel/Gaza/Palestine/West Bank are used in political discussions. El-Sayed and Mamdani get incessantly interrogated on the issue, manifesting a this-identity-only-cares-about-one-issue prejudice that we would reflexively condemn if a Latino-American were repeatedly asked about immigration, or an African-American were presumed to care only about civil rights.

El-Sayed and Mamdani, to their credit, respond and do not avoid. And further to their credit, they each invoke the notion of universal human rights when they do. This is not only the right approach, it is smart politics.

You see, the quaint thing about this position is that it applies to everyone. The first words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” This principle applies equally to Ugandans and Americans. To cis and trans people. To Israelis and Palestinians.

When El-Sayed and Mamdani cite this principle regarding Israel and Palestine, it comes in context of their assertion that Palestinians have rights, and that the government of Israel is violating those rights. This creates a perception that they are using the principle of universal human rights as a political shield.

And herein lies the danger. In a Discourse where the burden is placed on those criticizing the Israeli government rather than on the actual conduct of the Israeli government, this may serve to reposition universal human rights into a negative frame. With the media and most politicians perpetuating an assumption that support for the Israeli government is the norm and defense of Palestinian rights is a perversion, an assertion of universal human rights in that defense may suffer too.

This is precisely why Republicans are trying to unravel the international human rights system. It is intentional that Secretary Marco Rubio uses the word “dismantle” to describe the Administration’s plan to eliminate the International Criminal Court (ICC). President Trump concedes it’s about protecting his friend Benjamin Netanyahu. Senator Tom Cotton admits it’s designed to shield Trump, Rubio and Hegseth from being held accountable for war crimes.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the foundation of institutions and laws by which powerless defend themselves against the powerful, small nations against big nations, the persecuted against persecutors. This is why El-Sayed and Mamdani invoke the concept of universal human rights. And why Trump, Rubio and Netanyahu are working to destroy it.

But there is good news in all this. As I wrote in my last piece, the constituency for human rights is fighting back, as evidenced in the House vote on Israel military aid. Meanwhile, as Al Jazeera reports in “How Netanyahu lost America” (emphasis mine):

“The political consequences [of Netanyahu’s policies] are visible. Within the Democratic Party, unconditional support has given way to demands that military assistance be made conditional on compliance with international humanitarian law. Younger voters discuss the conflict in terms of occupation, apartheid and universal human rights rather than traditional alliances. Members of Congress once reluctant to criticise Israel now openly challenge successive governments. Even Republican support can no longer be assumed to be permanent; younger conservative populists have become sceptical of unconditional foreign commitments. The bipartisan consensus that once protected Israel is steadily giving way to a far more volatile environment.”

A group of academics in Malaysia analyzed Mamdani’s win as “a significant indicator of an undercurrent shift in political narrative that could profoundly impact the struggle for universal human rights and global geopolitical developments” where “his impact on the narrative of universal human rights and the geopolitical landscape is undeniable.”

Since then, Mamdani called for Netanyahu to be arrested pursuant to the ICC arrest warrant with a statement centered on human rights language. Despite being criticized for going outside his lane, Mamdani has done more to drive discourse about accountability as core to universal human rights than any federal politician.

It is welcome to see Americans standing up for a principle that America once championed and helped create the institutions to promote it. And it’s coming from politicians who have a much better pulse on where Americans, especially youth, are on human rights than the lazy pundit class.

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P.S. One not inconsequential demerit for El-Sayed, however, is his embrace of Hasan Piker, with whom he campaigned a day before the election. This Piker guy notoriously went to Xinjiang (presumably as a guest of the Chinese government) and according to one commentator, Piker “has downplayed the genocide in Xinjiang, recasting the concentration camps there as ‘reeducation’ centers. He has described Chinese colonialism in Tibet as a good thing, using arguments reminiscent of ‘civilize the savages’ justifications for Western imperialism. He has deemed the idea of a politically free Hong Kong ‘ridiculous.’” Piker does not embrace the universality of human rights.

In this analogy, the perpetrator is the coalition comprising the right-wing Israeli government and its allies in the U.S. government and Congress, and in civil society, such as AIPAC and the like, CUFI and other Christian Zionist organizations.

The victim is human rights principles and law, and those who value them.

The syndrome is that the perpetrator habitually and repeatedly beats, berates, mocks and abuses the victims for daring to question the perpetrator’s rule-breaking.

This affliction has been around for a long time. Whenever a policymaker would ask a common-sense question – should U.S. aid subsidize military detention of children in occupied territory? Should Americans sell bulldozers used to destroy Palestinian homes? Should IDF units be vetted under the Leahy Law? – they would get mercilessly attacked by political actors and interest groups.

This dynamic went into hyper-drive after October 7, 2023. Anyone who dared question unconditional U.S. support for the Israeli government’s international law-flaunting response to Hamas’ attack (even as they condemned Hamas’ international law-flaunting terrorism) was savagely criticized and accused of being antisemitic.^[2]

With Battered Woman Syndrome, the perpetrator makes the victim feel that she (at times he) is the problem. The burden falls on the aggrieved. Society reinforces this: she should put up with it for sake of the family or her (and the abuser’s) reputation.

In the Israel-Gaza War, the perpetrator portrays the people raising concerns about war crimes and crimes against humanity political as the problem. The political and media ecosystem reinforces this, limiting the framing to whether one is pro-Israel or not.

Inherent in this framing is the perpetrators’ marketed narrative about what Israel is. I explored this in We Stand With Israel – what you mean vs what others mean, posted on October 12. Theirs is an Israel that owns all the land (“Judea and Samaria”) and can do whatever it wants, law be damned, to the people who live there, using whatever means necessary, immune from criticism and accountability.

The perpetrators are people who value hierarchy and power. A key moment was the Knesset’s approval of the Nation-State bill in 2018, which defined Israel’s identity in hierarchical terms, where Jews are given higher status within the state. Human rights groups and many in the Jewish diaspora – aka those who value equality and justice – saw it as codified discrimination if not a path toward apartheid.

The constituency for human rights are people who value equality and justice. It refuses to abandon principles when the political-media ecosystem aligns against them. It refuses to allow human rights principles to be portrayed as the problem. It is fighting back.

The big moment came in the recent House vote on military aid to Israel. For decades, the annual earmark of $3.3 billion for Foreign Military Financing for Israel was a third rail of politics: touch it and you die. It was unthinkable that Members of Congress, even those most inclined to speak in defense of the right of Palestinians, would oppose this aid.

Not any more. On July 15, a majority of House Democrats (103 to 98) voted for an amendment by Rep. Tom Massie (R-KY) to cut this military aid to Israel. Not only that, many of them affirmatively put out statements citing the Israeli government’s law-violating conduct for their vote. Good principle makes good politics.

And still, as evidence that the media remains complicit in the pro-Israeli government coalition’s framing, much coverage portrayed this as a Democratic shift on Israel. I don’t think it’s fair to see it that way.

There has always been a constituency for human rights in America. It manifests in the Declaration Independence, the Constitution, the Reconstruction Amendments, the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Obergefell decision, etc. In foreign policy, it created the human rights bureau in the State Department, its annual human rights reports, human rights conditions in foreign assistance, laws on human trafficking, torture victims, religious freedom.

Its location within the American political system has shifted over time. Today, it is largely within the Democratic Party and, with the ascendance of Trump, has been almost thoroughly excised from the Republican Party – evidenced by the fact that Republicans in the White House and Congress are actively seeking to dismantle the laws and institutions listed in the preceding paragraph.

Thus, this vote against Israel military aid – more accurately against unconditional military aid – should not be seen as a Democratic shift. It should be seen as the constituency for human rights finally re-asserting itself at a time when the constituency is housed almost exclusively in the Democratic Party. But it remains wider than that. A majority of Americans believe Benjamin Netanyahu should be arrested for war crimes; even a quarter of Trump voters think so.

It would be nice if some in the media would take interest in this framing. Where are the questions to Republicans about why they are not demanding human rights conditionality on military aid, as the law requires? About whether American taxpayer money should be subsidizing war crimes? About why Israel is not subject to the same standard of scrutiny over genocide accusations that they make against China and Myanmar? To be fair, there are some reporters who do this. But they are few and far between.

The problem is not that people are criticizing Israel for committing violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. The problem is that the government of Israel is committing them.

The problem is not that Members of Congress voted to cut military aid to Israel. The problem is that Congress and Administrations of both parties for years refused to enforce statutory human rights conditions on that aid.

In Battered Women Syndrome, the perpetrator always denies that he has agency and throws blame to the victim. Look at what Congressman Max Miller (R-Ohio) said today in response to sexual assault allegations, claiming that his (now ex) wife making him dinner was exonerative.

Likewise, the pro-Israeli government coalition acts as if Israel has no agency in any of this. Its actions in Gaza, in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem, are natural, self-evident and beyond reproach. It’s the critics who are wrong.

The constituency for human rights is finally calling bullshit on this. It’s about time. Israel can and should be eligible for U.S. support. Like every other nation. No special considerations. No exemptions. And everyone should recognize that the government of Israel bears the burden for the vote that just happened. It’s their behavior in question. They have agency. The choice is theirs.

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^[1] The term “battered woman syndrome” (BWS) invokes some controversy and has fallen out of favor with some in the social worker community. “Battered person syndrome” acknowledges the fact that men can be victims too, although BWS captures an empirical gender component.

^[2] While some criticism of Israel has been antisemitic, ad hominem attacks rely on a duplicitous conflation of Israel with Judaism, which the pro-Israel government coalition has promoted in order to weaponize against critics, despite the fact that it serves to nurture wider antisemitism.

Yesterday Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) was interviewed about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement that the federal government should execute an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pursuant to the war crimes charge by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Cotton said, “Ultimately, it’s not about Prime Minster Netanyahu and Israel -- it’s about arresting Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio in the future if they ever travel abroad.”

Yep, he admit it.

Many of us have argued that the Republican effort to undermine or destroy institutions of justice is designed to give themselves impunity for the crimes they commit. This is the Impunity Agenda. I made this argument in my piece: ICE reveals the true aim of the conservative project to undermine international law: impunity. Thank you for confirming my point, Senator Cotton.

The target in this case is the ICC. Conservatives wrap their attack in the cloak of “sovereignty.” This sovereignty argument is prevalent in Secretary Marco Rubio’s pronouncement about the Trump Administration dismantling the ICC. It’s full of macho nationalist rhetoric, indignant about foreigners not telling Americans what they cannot do. Rubio is wrong on the policy and politics, and he contradicts what he used to say as a senator; we’ll save that debunking for another time.

It’s important to understand the ICC’s actual role. They key principle is complementarity – international justice mechanisms like the ICC only kick in when national justice systems fail. This gives victims another forum for redress, a place to seek accountability when their own governments fail them.

For example, the Russian judicial system has failed to hold Vladimir Putin accountable for crimes related to the war in Ukraine. So the ICC stepped in and issued arrest warrants. Same with Netanyahu and war crimes in Gaza.

The complementarity principle is key to understanding why Rubio and Republicans are trying to take down the ICC. National justice mechanisms in the United States are failing to hold American leaders accountable for violations of the law. Victims (in the U.S. or abroad) are being denied justice for crimes committed by U.S. leaders.

The reason for this is that Republicans are working to ensure that national justice mechanisms can’t hold their leaders accountable. Among so many examples:

• President Trump granting pardons to nearly 1,600 persons convicted of related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol designed to overturn legitimate election results in order to keep Trump in power;

• Trump v United States, the Supreme Court’s ruling that gives the President absolute immunity from being accountable for any official act – no matter how unlawful;

• The Trump Administration instructing FBI agents not to investigate allegations of abuse of murder by ICE agents; and

• Vice President JD Vance saying that Nixon was wrongly forced out as president in 1974 (this is not a new position for Republicans), retroactively justifying Trump’s assertion of impunity.

And the Republican attack on international justice mechanisms is to deny Americans even the complementary backstop for redress. Impunity for us! No justice for you!

As I wrote, the aim of the conservative project to undermine international human rights law – including the attack on the ICC, defunding the UN, and pulling out of its human rights bodies -- is part of the plan to give a conservative President impunity to continue to murder civilians at home and abroad, and commit war crimes, as President Trump is promising to do.

This is intentional. Ken Roth, former Executive Director at Human Rights Watch, writes that:

“what worries Trump officials most is the prospect that territorial jurisdiction could be used to prosecute them. For example, the court could reach the summary executions of people in suspected drug boats if any of these potential crimes against humanity took place in the territorial waters of Venezuela or Colombia, both ICC members. Trump (as well as Biden) officials could be prosecuted for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza by continuing to provide arms and military aid as it unfolded. And Trump might be prosecuted for obstructing justice (under article 70 of the ICC’s founding Rome Statute) for having imposed sanctions on ICC officials because they pursued the case against Israeli officials in Gaza.”

Roth points out that Secretary Rubio, in his attack on the ICC, cited Roth’s earlier column advocating the possibility that Trump Administration officials might be held accountable for these crimes as a reason to take down the ICC.

See, Rubio admit it too.

The core problem is that Trump Administration officials are committing crimes. Defenders of police and ICE brutality self-rationalize by saying that the victims must have been guilty because innocent people don’t run from the cops. Well, if that’s so, then innocent decision-makers don’t have a reason to dismantle domestic and international institutions of justice. There must be a reason they are. That reason is because they know they are guilty as fuck and are scared of being held accountable.

Indeed, they admit it too.

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There was a time when those fleeing persecution in China could rely on the U.S. asylum system to protect them from being sent back to torture in China. That time is over.

There was a time when those fleeing persecution in China could call on the U.S. government to protect them from the Chinese government’s transnational repression. That time is over.

There was a time when those who fleeing persecution in China could depend on Marco Rubio to defend them. That time is definitely over.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Taken together, several recent developments tell us that, under the Republican trifecta in the federal government, those who fled persecution in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – dissidents, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, Hong Kongers, etc. – are simply not safe in the United States. Let’s look at the evidence.

ICE is coming for you too

Wu Shaoping is a Chinese human rights lawyer who fled China with his family in 2020, after attending a meeting of human rights defenders in Xiamen. The government cracked down, sending the lawyers to jail on convictions of subversion of state power, including Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong, whom Members of Congress nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for their principled rights defense.

Wu filed for asylum in the U.S. and got a work permit. But while doing his job near his Pennsylvania home, ICE agents arrested Wu and sent him to an ICE detention facility. He is now at risk of being sent back to China to face the same fate as Ding and Xu.

A similar thing happened to Guan Heng, who had escaped to the U.S. rightly fearing what Chinese authorities would do to him for his documentation of the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. He was arrested by ICE in 2025 and faced deportation. Only intervention by advocates and Members of Congress saved him from being sent back to be tortured. I heard that he eventually got asylum here.

These are just cases that get public attention. How many more are at risk of return to face torture in the PRC? How many already send back on deportation flights have been persecuted? Apparently DHS does not track this. Several Uyghurs remain in ICE detention and face deportation, as the Campaign for Uyghurs told the New York Times. Imagine what would happen to them if Trump’s ICE gets their way.

U.S. abets transnational repression

Transnational Repression (TNR) has been a hot policy topic in recent years, for good reason. This refers to a government reaching across borders to violate the human rights of people in other countries. China has been identified as the biggest perpetrator, but it’s becoming a popular tool of governments, not just Russia and Iran, but others like Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe and Benin.

China’s Transnational Repression Is Being Met With a Deafening Silence, writes the Council on Foreign Relations’ Joshua Kurlantzick. He assesses that “the Trump administration has done almost nothing to address the broad sweep of China’s [TNR] actions” and writes there “appears to have been no real conversation at the Trump-Xi summit in May about China’s operations against U.S. citizens.”

This might come as a surprise to those who followed Senator Marco Rubio. He was lead co-sponsor of the Transnational Repression Policy Act, bipartisan legislation to strengthen the U.S. policy response to this threat. He often spoke against China’s TNR behavior.

But not Secretary Rubio. While the Department under his command has responded to select acts of TNR, there is no evidence that he is implementing the robust policy response that he once said was needed when he was a senator. Staffing dedicated to this effort within the Department seems small.

But even more alarmingly, Secretary Rubio himself has abetted acts of transnational repression. He is complicit in human rights abuses he once condemned.

Take the case of Beto Coral, Colombian national who was seeking (just like Wu Shaoping) asylum in the U.S. for a good reason. He got tangled in a legal matter with a guy named Abelardo De La Espriella, who illegally recorded a conversation with Coral in Florida, for which Coral filed suit. Well, De La Espriella was running for president of Colombia and was endorsed by Trump. In apparent coordination with De La Espriella, Rubio sent DHS a memo determining that Coral was deportable. Coral was deported to Colombia, and will be at risk of persecution when De La Espriella takes office in a couple weeks.

So a foreign political actor, soon to be government official, was able to violate the human rights (freedom of expression, arbitrary detention, abuse in detention) of a person on the territory of another country. That is transnational repression. And Marco Rubio was complicit in it.

In another case of the U.S. government abetting TNR, the Trump Administration gave the Iranian government confidential information about Iranians seeking asylum in the U.S., according to a federal lawsuit filed this month. In addition to violating confidentiality rights under U.S. law, such disclosure greatly puts them at risk of persecution if they were returned to Iran, and gives information that Iranian authorities could use to transnationally repress their relatives in the U.S., according to the lawsuit.

Un-prioritizing human rights in China

President Trump had no human rights agenda during his visit to Beijing, where he invited Xi to Washington in September. True, Pastor Jin was freed several weeks later, and that is welcome. But it was a one-off, and his fellow church members remain in jail.

Then yesterday, we learned that the Trump Administration made another human rights concession to China, by declining to extend an executive order that suspended Hong Kong’s trade privileges. It resulted in the lifting of individual sanctions on some individuals complicit in the erosion of Hong Kong’s autonomy. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong called it a “textbook case of the appeasement that [people like Rubio] rightly condemned in the past.”

Moreover, the Supreme Court, controlled by the same political faction as the White House and Congress, ruled last month to shield U.S. corporations from complicity in human rights violations overseas, in a case brought by members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement victimized by Chinese authorities using Cisco tech.

Deportation above all

Stephen Miller is the architect and driver of the Administration’s hyper-deportation crusade. He does not care whether people may suffer persecution or torture in the places they are deported to. That might even delight him. As RealClearPolitics reported last year, citing a Financial Times story, Miller is in charge of “ensuring that other federal agencies don’t take action, such as addressing human rights issues that could derail the U.S-China trade truce.”

Miller is double-incentivized to send people back to China – to up the deportation numbers and to serve Trump’s trade deals. He outranks Rubio in Trump world. Rubio can’t overrule Miller. And he won’t, because giving full support to the Trump deportation agenda is what keeps him in the job. If you still think that Marco Rubio might save you, that’s sad. He won’t.

The solution

So what do you do if you don’t want a friend, a relative, or yourself deported to China where they could face persecution? You could appeal to the Executive Branch, but that would be pointless, as they are the people who want to deport them, or you. You could hope for relief from the Supreme Court, but their recent TPS decision shows they are pro-deportation too. You could appeal to Congress, but the Republican majority there is 100 percent loyal to Trump’s deportation agenda. This includes, in a master class of fecklessness and spinelessness, the Republicans who once sponsored bills to provide humanitarian pathways to Hong Kongers and Uyghurs, who are now removing the words “human rights” from legislation,” and are funding the Administration’s human rights-abusing immigrant crackdown.

The only solution is to change the people who are in charge of the government — put people in charge who understand and respect asylum law, international human rights law, respect fundamental human dignity, and don’t think of immigrants as vermin.

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A pure American image from Anytown USA – in Missouri, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Oregon.

But no, this is from a local parade in Washington DC.

Many think of Washington DC as a place of monuments, the Capitol, federal buildings. Others imagine a cesspool of doltish bureaucrats, sinister lobbyists and sold-out politicians.

But Washington DC is home to almost 700,000 people. Including me and my family. We live here, work here, go to school, walk our dogs, shop, go to the park, attend birthday parties. And go to parades. Some of us live in urban apartment buildings. Others in leafy, sidewalk-connected neighborhoods. This is our home.

But some people don’t think of it that way. They treat DC as a colony or sex slave. They claim the right to do whatever they want with DC citizens without our consent, and despite our protestations.

These people are Republicans.

The same politicians who (rightly, along with Democrats), criticize the Chinese government for treating Hong Kong as a colony or sex slave. They condemn the Chinese Communist Party for claiming the right to do whatever they want with Hong Kong citizens without their consent, and despite their protestations.

Here’s a good question – why do Republicans think Hong Kongers are more deserving of their autonomy than Americans who live in DC? – a question they are too chickenshit to answer.

Republicans override our autonomy because they can. The U.S. Constitution created a federal district under federal control. Even though Congress has given DC residents degrees of autonomy – we have our own mayor, city council, etc. – they can take it away on a political whim.

When Republicans run Congress, they habitually use appropriations bills to block the will of DC voters or the council to suit their ideology. Our delegate to Congress (who does not have full voting rights) listed all the riders that the Republican majority used last year to override the sovereign will of DC citizens: on abortion, gun safety, abortion, vehicle emissions, police reform, etc.

(Note: when Democrats are in control, they do not do this. They are consistent: people of DC and Hong Kong both deserve autonomous rights.)

A solution is to make the District of Colombia a state. Republicans oppose this. Their argument is purely political: that it would give the Senate two extra Democrats. They disregard genuine points about the civil and political rights of the people who live here. Their position is without principle. It makes you wonder whether their position on Hong Kong is also purely political, rather than on the principle of the right of autonomy.

Republican disdain for the rights of the people of Washington DC is on full display this weekend. The Mall area has been ravaged and despoiled by President Trump and his sycophantic minions.

Until now, the annual national July 4^th celebration on the Mall was an American event. We DCers are proud to have our city host it. The concert, the fireworks, the attendees with their coolers and their frisbees, the boaters on the Potomac.

But that has been hijacked by one man’s ego. On my drive past the Mall Thursday I saw the place securitized with Humvees, troops in camo, endless fencing, a sign that says “reserved for the military district of Washington.” Trump has turned a civic celebration into martial reverence for himself. Very fashy.

It goes way beyond July 4. Matt Viser in the Atlantic documents how The Capital Is a Mess: “chain-link fences, construction cranes, armed guards, and portable toilets everywhere.” Demolishing the East Wing. Paving the Rose Garden. Killing the South Lawn for a UFC spectacle. Turning the Reflecting Pool into a scummy algae pond. Tearing up the East Potomac gold course. That fucking Mussolini-esque Arch.

“It’s as if there were a natural disaster, and we’re looking at the damage after a hurricane. Or think of Manhattan after the World Trade Center was hit by an act of terrorism,” Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, told me. “If you were just to parachute into Washington, you’d say: Gosh, what happened here?”

Donald Trump is acting like DC is his own personal property. As a DC resident, I am required to get a permit to build a detached garage in the back. But Trump grants himself the kingly right to destroy and construct per his whim. Regardless of the requirements of federal and local planning, zoning and historical boards. Regardless of how it affects the people who actually live in DC.

Today we’ll have to suffer the noise pollution of a military jet flyover every eight minutes (how much does that cost?) We’ll have to suffer the air pollution from 40 minutes of fireworks -- that start after 11:00 pm: more noise pollution after most folks’ bedtime.

Not one GOP Member of Congress is standing up to this Caligula-like behavior. Why would they? They too believe that they can do whatever they want to DC. They don’t give a shit what DC residents think. Or care that their decisions affect people in DC. Don’t believe me, that’s their legislative record.

How do they rationalize defending Hong Kongers’ autonomy while violating DCers’? I once tested this with a Republican colleague whose boss introduced a bill to rename a area outside the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office as “Jimmy Lai Way” in honor of the defender of Hong Kong’s autonomy made a political prisoner by the central government. But the area was DC (not federal) territory, meaning the bill was a federal override of local autonomy. I asked my colleague how he could justify violating my autonomy (as a DC resident) in order to make a point about China violating Hong Kong’s autonomy. He just scoffed and turned his head.

How does someone cognitively process this double standard? The writer A.R. Moxon succinctly explains:

“It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil. It’s not that it’s an unintended side-effect. It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy for yourself the exact thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.”

Last night, I attended the Washington Spirit game at Audi Field. It’s a joyful safe space from the fashy militarization being imposed on the city. And has become habit at their games, in the 51^st minute (to signal the 51^st state), the crowd erupted in the cheer: “Free DC! Free DC! Free DC!.”

Indeed, Free DC, as we would Free Hong Kong, from two authoritarian parties crushing autonomous rights to consolidate their power.

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But you don’t have to. Because the right-wingers are laying out their conspiracy in plain sight.

This past week, the Daily Caller ran a piece pointing out that the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had an intended political purpose: to install far-right candidates in various countries. And it succeeded. And they’re replicating that plan inside the United States.

Like many conspiracy theories, it is grounded in a counter-conspiracy. In this case: that foreign aid is a left-wing plot. The article notes, accurately, that USAID’s “Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) portfolio … funded election support, legislative strengthening, local governance reforms, anti-corruption efforts, independent media, civil society capacity-building, and human rights advocacy.” But it characterizes all this as a “left-leaning social agendas.”

Anyone who operates in the real world knows these activities have been administered by non-partisan bureaucrats with bipartisan support in Congress and across Administrations. This programming is normie stuff.

But now, America’s far-right ruling party considers support for elections, anti-corruption, and independent media as Leftist. Meaning elections, anti-corruption and independent media are bad things.

The piece then quotes a right-wing media guy, who apparently gets paid on how many MAGA buzzwords he can stick in a paragraph, testifying about USAID’s “troubling ties to the Left’s dark money network” which “spent millions propping up the Marxist ideology of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion;’ the unfair and divisive transgender orthodoxy; and the climate alarmist movement.”

Then comes the real kicker:

“Traditionally conservative countries don’t typically elect far-left ideological candidates on their own. The U.S. saw the same thing happen here. In just two generations, the U.S. went from an overwhelmingly conservative nation to throwing PRIDE festivals with stripper poles for kids.” (emphases mine)

“Traditionally conservative” is sooooo revealing. It posits a natural political-social order that just happens to align with their ideological beliefs. It reflects a rigid, absolutist heuristic that legitimizes otherization. It gives license to all means necessary to block out-groups from places of power. And it rejects the notion that society can evolve to accept a broader application of equality.

For a real-world look at what this means, see Colombia. In 2025, the Trump Administration slashed USAID programs in what was at the time the largest recipient of aid in the hemisphere. Programs cut included funded reintegration programs for former rebels, economic projects to employ ex-combatants, land reform, a transitional justice system to sentence combatants for war crimes, projects to help marginalized communities (LGBTQ, Afro-Colombian, etc.) participate in the political process. All of these programs benefitted out-groups – those who didn’t fit the definition of traditionally conservative. Most of these programs were designed to help support the 2016 peace agreement, which Colombian right-wingers opposed. That is why the programs were cut. It was deliberate.

President Trump endorsed the far-right candidate Abelardo De La Espriella. U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno actively campaigned for him. Secretary of State Marco Rubio facilitated the detention and possible deportation of a U.S.-based critic of De La Espriella. These actions all departed from long-standing U.S. principles of non-interference in foreign elections.

Breaking this norm is irrelevant to right-wing actors. To restore Colombia to its traditionally conservative order, the ends justify any means. Democratic integrity is a nuisance if not an impediment. Interfering in an election is not a transgression in service of the traditionally conservative. Neither is election denial in the U.S. Which brings us to the domestic component.

The far-right is also rationalizing destruction of NGOs as a tool for traditionally conservative domination in the United States. It’s intimated in the Daily Caller piece and explicitly stated in this piece by a substacker named DataRepubican who claims endorsements by Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.

Mr. DataRepublican (*if that is your real name!*) lays out an analytical case why aiding foreign NGOs amounts to regime change (as in, the denial of far-right rule of an overwhelmingly conservative nation). I could poke a thousand holes in his argument, but it does provide a comprehensible distillation of their argument.

DataRepublican argues that private foundations that support “election protection,” “civic engagement,” and “local civic journalism” in the United States are playing the same de-legitimizing, corrupting role as USAID-supported NGOs in other countries. He specifically cites groups engaged in defending the First Amendment, defending rule of law, and supporting voter registration and youth engagement in the political process.

And of course he (it has to be a he, right?) lists Open Society, because what right-wing narrative would be complete without a reference to George Soros – the evergreen shibboleth that adheres the antisemitic creed to the far-right coalition.

Bottom line: defending democracy is leftist ideology that denies the essence of America as a traditionally conservative country.

This is not a surprise. Trump and his MAGA movement Republican Party are now hostile to the core tenets of democracy. Election denialism – the belief that elections are only valid if your side wins and are obviously fraudulent if you don’t – is now Party doctrine. Combine this with the framing – including through official channels (like DHS’s consistent Nazi-syle imagery and words) – of the United States as a congenitally white and Christian nation, and you easily see how they view political opposition to the Republican agenda as an existential threat to the nation itself.

And like the dismantling of USAID on the foreign side, the Trump Administration is attacking domestic organizations is considers hostile to its vision of restoring a traditionally conservative America. As DataRepublican writes: “And once you recognize the architecture, you start seeing it everywhere. Even in the United States. Especially in the United States.”

This is the motivation behind the President’s National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) giving law enforcement broad authority to target activist groups, nonprofits, and political opponents the Administration doesn’t like. Among the critics is the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, which sees NSPM-7 as aimed at criminalizing opposition. It is no surprise that DataRepublican specifically names Brennan as part of the malevolent “architecture of regime change.”

It is the motivation behind the Administration’s indictment of civil rights advocacy group the Southern Poverty Law Center. Don’t believe me. This is what Donald Trump himself said, “ When this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them.”

Under the flood the zone strategy, it is hard to latch one’s attention on any one outrage. But the Daily Caller, DataRepublican and their ideological cohort have done us a favor of laying out what their plan is and how they intend to accomplish it. The clarity is helpful to our defense of democracy. Because unlike those chuds, I am among the majority who believe genuine democracy is worth defending.

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Dignity is the quality or state of being worthy of honor or respect. A synonym is self-respect – how a person applies their own inherent dignity to themselves.

In a couple weeks we celebrate the 250^th birthday of the United States of America. July 4^th marks the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. You could call it the Declaration of Dignity.

The Declaration is a bussin’ diss track against the King. It’s a list of grievances for which the Colonies demand satisfaction. Two hundred years later, Peter Finch’s character in the movie Network invokes its signatories’ mood: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!!” Notably, two lines before that, Finch’s character shouts. “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!” He is asserting his right to dignity. Just like the Founding Fathers did.

As we mark the 250^th, the nation the Founding Fathers established is being run by a set of people who do not value dignity, who have no self-respect. The contrast could not be more stark.

Officials of the Executive Branch and Members of Congress are required to forfeit their dignity to remain in good standing with the President. They habitually praise, flatter, and genuflect before Donald Trump. They boast, lie and deceive in order to please Donald Trump. They repeat and amplify Donald Trump’s falsehoods. It’s not optional.

This is a problem for governance. A political system fueled by sycophancy is not healthy. Flattery and lies corrode a republican democracy, which requires public trust and rule of law. Lathered obsequiousness is a feature of a personalist regime, like in China, Russia and Turkey – states in various stages of authoritarian control.

But what troubles me more is the personal dimension. What kind of person spends their entire waking day in a perpetual state of mendacity and toadyism, constantly lying and praising and fawning over another person? What kind of person wakes up in the morning and starts thinking about how to say things that are demonstrably untrue? How do they sleep at night knowing that their role in life is to kiss ass?

As government officials and Members of Congress, their cucking is public. They choose to do this. Their insincerity and lies are there for all to see, recorded for posterity in video and online. They know they will get asked by journalists and their own constituents to defend their own lies and those of the Leader they relentlessly praise. And they go back out there, again and again, and lie some more.

That kind of person is not me. I am no saint. But I do safeguard my own dignity. I value my self-respect. There have been times where I have walked away from something rather than put myself in an embarrassing position. There are times when I have refused on principle. I am not a public figure, so I can’t speak from the perspective of those who are. But I have worked for a LOT of public figures, government officials elected and appointed, who do not make themselves agents of sycophancy. Yes, most of them have had to take a hit for team. That’s politics. But nothing on the scale of the flatterymaxxing we see today from those in thrall of Trump.

And what does this toadying get them? Take Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, known for being one of the more obsequious members of the Cabinet, a group so subservient that one of every six sentences they utter flatter the president, an analysis finds.

Today there’s a report that Trump called Lutnick a “pussy” to his face. That happened last year. Lutnick stayed in is job. Where is his self-respect?

Some do appear to want to save their dignity. A record number of Republicans are leaving the House. They do not say this publicly, but one can guess that Members like Don Bacon and Vern Buchanan are tired of forfeiting their self-respect to stay on the job.

And that fact that some opt out for the sake of dignity says a lot about who do not – those who actively choose to humiliate themselves for the privilege of kissing the Leader’s toes. I’m looking at you Marco Rubio.

I make an effort to try to understand those who don’t think like me. For this I cannot. In no way can I put myself in the shoes of someone who allows themselves to be humiliated and returns for more. I cannot identify with someone who repeatedly flatters and lies in service of another.

This is not just about personal behavior. It affects all of us. A person who cannot respect themselves will not respect others. A person who denies themselves dignity will deny it to others.

This manifests in today’s government policy. The Trump Administration’s extrajudicial killings at home and on the ocean. The arbitrary detentions and abuses of Americans. The cancellation of humanitarian aid that caused half million preventable deaths. These are the actions of people without empathy. People who will not or cannot see the dignity in fellow human beings.

The Founding Fathers who wrote the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago took a brave stand in defense of their own dignity. For their second act, they codified this principle in the Bill of Rights within the Constitution. This document was a major influence for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), with the word “dignity” in in its first sentence.

But today, Republicans are working insidiously to undermine the UDHR. A leaked version of the State Department’s instructions for the Country Reports on Human Rights prohibits the report from referring to the UDHR. They are removing human rights language from documents and considering withdrawing from international human rights treaties.

The people running this country deny themselves dignity. Then they deny it to Americans. And now they’re denying it to the whole world.

What to do?

I believe that to change the world, we need to first change within. So sayeth my philosopher John Lennon:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We’d all love to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free your mind instead

It would be ideal to let the sycophants find self-respect. But waiting gives them time to strip dignity from the rest of us. Better if we remove them from positions where they can use the power of the state to deny us the dignity we deserve.

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And the perniciously controversial: listing the LDS Church as separate from Christian. This sent Utah Senator and Hegseth-confirmer Mike Lee into a righteous tizzy, giving himself a “Member of the Leopards Eating Mormon Faces Party shocked to find a leopard eating his Mormon face” moment.

But there is a deeper, more ideological, more ominous matter here. The Ruling Party in the U.S. is using the regulatory power of the government to classify religions in a way that shapes religion to serve the Ruling Party’s ideology. This is what we see in Communist Party-run China. And now we are seeing the same in America.

The story, first reported in military.com, is that the Pentagon reformed its religious affiliation codes for the first time since 2017, reducing the total number of faiths from 211 to 31. Soooo, why does any part of the federal government maintain a list of religions? Good question. There is a logic. Military chaplains exist for a reason: the need for servicemembers -- given the nature of their business – to have access to spiritual counseling. Chaplains serve people with a wide diversity of faiths (and non-faiths). They need to understand them. The immense bureaucracy that it is, the Pentagon creates codes to guide chaplains.

At first glance, DOD’s reason given for the change seems administratively benign: to “streamline the DoW (sic) collection of religious preferences collection for service members to enhance the delivery of targeted religious support from the Chaplaincy.” But dig a little, and we see its perniciousness.

As Sarah Posner, a chronicler of the Christian Right, explains, Hegseth’s snub of Mormonism is consistent with his personal religious agenda. She explains that Hegseth is is a devotee of “Christian nationalist Doug Wilson who has written that ‘Mormonism is not Christian’ and is ‘a false gospel,’” and concurred that there is a “‘disturbing trend’ of Mormon chaplains in the Corps.”

After Mormon politicians objected, the Pentagon posted an odd revision of the list. But it’s still highly exclusionary. No Wicca, no Unitarian Universalists, no pagan, no atheist, no shaman, etc. DOD says it’s merely trying to make things more efficient for chaplains, rather than make a government-approved list of religions. But in effect, that’s exactly what it’s doing. And this is where the China parallel comes in.

In the People’s Republic of China, there are only five religions officially recognized by the state: Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Taoism and Islam. They are organized into national associations under the control of the State Administration for Religious Affairs.

The Chinese system defines in-groups and out-groups in terms of religion. You can practice as a Catholic, as long as you obey the rules. You an in-group. But if the government considers your faith community an out-group, you are not protected. An example is the recent arrest of Pastor Ezra Jin and others of the Zion Church.

In effect, the Pentagon’s system also defines in-groups and out-groups. The government is categorizing certain “popular” religions as in-groups. They are allowed to have official resources (chaplain services) directed their way. But by cutting down the list, Hegseth is affirmatively designating some faiths as out-groups, not worthy of official acknowledgement. As in China.

I can hear my critics. They will say that the scale, scope and severity of Hegseth’s action is nothing like what the CCP is doing to religion in China. This is true. But this doesn’t mean that the Pentagon’s policy is not contributing to a weakening of religious freedom in the United States, contrary to the First Amendment and international human rights law. In my experience, the scale-scope-severity test has become a go-to weapon for conservatives to cover up or excuse domestic human rights violations.

We have to look at the religious code change in context. Secretary Hegseth has hosted Christian-based prayer services in the Pentagon auditorium with controversial speakers like Wilson. His public statements on ongoing military operation in Iran invoke Scripture. Hegseth’s push to priotitize “religious liberty” and practice in the military by executing a “top-down cultural shift, putting spiritual well-being on the same footing as physical and mental health” (emphasis mine) is seen as part of an effort to push Christian Nationalism through the military.

In turn, this is part of a larger program by the Trump Administration and its allies to use the power of the state to endorse their particular version of Christianity. Under the deceptive guise of “religious liberty,” they are actively tearing down the Constitutionally-established wall between church and state.

This is why I think the China analogy is apt. Under the Community Party’s “Sinicization of religion policy,” Chinese authorities have employed regulations to determine which religious communities are favored and disfavored, and “eradicate religious elements considered contradictory to the CCP’s political and policy agenda with ultranationalist overtones.”

That’s what Hegseth and his Ruling Party are doing too: employing regulations to determine which religious communities are favored and disfavored, and marginalize religious elements considered contradictory to the GOP’s political and policy agenda with ultranationalist overtones.

Here we see the behavioral similarity between the Communist Party and Republican Party: the use of state power to shape religion to suit its ideology and thus help cement its political control.

The reason to make these parallels is not merely academic. If we want our criticism of China’s religious freedom violations to be taken seriously, and to lead to change, we undermine our case if our own government is doing the same thing. If we want to protect religious freedom at home – in the genuine not duplicitous way – then we must hope to convince those who have advocated for the religious freedom of people in China to understand what is happening at home and to also advocate for the religious freedom of people in the United States.

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P.S. If you want a good laugh, check Cosplayer-in-Chief and Manosphere Evangelist Pete Hegseth struggling to meet the military’s fitness standards.

A couple days ago I was chatting with another person about the Administration’s alignment with autocrats. They said they hoped that Rubio could correct things.

This is sad. Really sad.

It is the tyranny of false hope. False hope breeds inaction. Inaction means silence. Silence is complicity. Complicity means the Trump/Rubio policy carries the day.

I told each that I thought it unwise to expect Marco Rubio to come to the rescue. But out of kindness I didn’t lecture. So here let me give the reasons why Marco Rubio is not going to save you.

1. Personal experience with Rubio

I first met Marco Rubio in 2011 as a freshman senator. I was escorting a foreign principal. I was impressed. He said the right things, made the principal feel he was on his side. Rubio is one of those politicians who can draw you into their vortex -- like Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich or Cory Booker – through a combination of charm, charisma, and smarts (real or fake).

The last time I met Rubio he was nominee for Secretary of State making the rounds before his confirmation hearing. The performance was the same: saying the right things, saying he was on your side.

But there was no vortex this time. I had been watching him for 14 years. I had seen him up close, worked with his office on (genuinely good) policy initiatives. This experience did not give me the impression he was driven by deeply-held principles and values.

One does not have to be close to Rubio to observe this. It’s in the public record. Recall that in 2013 he was part of the Gang of Eight that negotiated bipartisan immigration reform. In 2016, his GOP primary opponents attacked him for it. He never spoke of immigration reform again.

On a smaller scale, in 2021-22 Rubio introduced bills to fast-track refugee admissions for Hong Kongers and Uyghurs fleeing repression in China. In 2023-24, as anti-refugee Trump was accelerating his comeback, Rubio reintroduced neither. Now he is part of an Administration that is deporting people to China, an action he once said was an unacceptable risk.

This is Marco Rubio.

2. Rubio’s 16+ months in office

Marco Rubio has been Secretary of State since January 21, 2025, and National Security Advisor since May 1, 2025. He dually holds the two most important jobs in U.S. foreign policy. This means he is responsible, as initiator, administrator or implementer, of Trump Administration policies to:

• Institutionally demote human rights within the State Department;

• Eliminate human rights and democracy promotion within U.S. foreign policy;

• Eliminate funding for the UN human rights office;

• Cut funding for programs to promote human rights in China; and

• Try to eliminate the independent broadcasting of Radio Free Asia and Voice of America in Mandarin, Cantonese, Uyghur and Tibetan into China.

Most of these actions have Marco Rubio’s signature on them. He owns them.

When Rubio gives a big foreign policy speech, like in Munich, without using the words “human rights” once, those are his words. He owns them.

This is Marco Rubio.

3. Rubio’s presidential ambitions

Marco Rubio has wanted to be president for a long time. Pundits list him and Vice President as the two top Republican contenders for 2028.

To prevail, Rubio will have to out-MAGA Vance. Each will portray themselves as the avatar if not emanation of Our President Donald J. Trump. To attract Republican voters, Rubio will mimic Trump: hostile to democracy in a party that has made election-denial core to its ideology. Rubio will have to be silent on human rights, in line with the Republican Party’s removal of the words “human rights” from its public policy agenda, which I document here.

For better or worse, über-MAGA influencer Laura Loomer will have a big voice in the GOP primary. She likes what she sees in today’s Marco Rubio:

That same day, Loomer posted a video of her stalking Congresswoman Sarah McBride, taunting her with vile anti-trans bigotry: “‘Sarah’ doesn’t even know that having a dick means he’s not a woman… so what does he know about foreign affairs?? Maybe tell us what your actual gender is before you lecture @SecRubio.”

Anyone who earns the endorsement of Laura Loomer is not pro-human rights.

Loomer describes herself as a “proud Islamophobe.” She has a long record of anti-Muslim hate. My question to Muslim Uyghurs who hope Marco Rubio will once again champion their cause: do you think Marco Rubio calculates he has better odds of being president by aligning with anti-Muslim bigot Laura Loomer, or with you?

Marco Rubio is an opportunist. That’s not just my view. His own biographer, Manuel Roig-Franzia, concludes in a New York Times essay that Rubio is a “shape-shifter:” “For now, at least, he’s sending a clear message to the MAGA world that he is one of them — and would be a fitting heir.”

In Congressional hearings this past week, Rubio “praised Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping last month for producing real ‘deliverables,’” even though not one of those deliverables was human rights.

This is Marco Rubio.

**************

My theory of the case since January 2025 has been that pressure from pro-Rubio and GOP-friendly communities presented one of the few opportunities to mitigate some of the Administration’s damage – Chinese dissidents, Uyghurs, Tibetans, international religious freedom (especially Christian) advocates, anti-human trafficking advocates, etc. If these groups have pushed back, it has been done in private. If they did push back in private, it has not worked.

I sympathize with their dilemma. Not criticizing preserves the possibility of being rescued. Criticizing likely forecloses it. They exist in a state of fear and anxiety, very much like those who live under Chinese Communist Party rule. The fact that the advocates who speak for those who cannot speak up in China are now the ones who are afraid to speak up in America tells a lot about governance under the Ruling Party of Trump and Rubio, doesn’t it?

This is a dilemma for those in the crosshairs. I am not one; it’s not my place to tell them what to do. But my personal and professional advice is that Marco Rubio is not going to save you.

Again, this is the tyranny of false hope. False hope breeds inaction. Inaction means silence. Silence is complicity. Complicity means the Trump/Rubio anti-human rights policy carries the day.

The sooner that people realize that Marco Rubio is not going to save you, the sooner we can begin the hard work to identify the strategies and the genuine champions that can restore human rights, including in China, as a priority in U.S. foreign policy.

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There’s a line buried deep in Van Hollen’s essay that resonated and needs amplification:

“Nor will [Democratic primary voters] support a candidate who plans to re-enlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity.”

The senator is referring to those in the Biden Administration who gave the ethno-nationalist government of Benjamin Netanyahu a green light to do whatever it wanted with U.S.-supplied weapons after October 7. The result has been war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. These are the officials who chose to exempt Israel from accountability under international human rights and humanitarian law, which the United States has generally (but sadly not uniformly) applied to everyone else.

Some may see this as a dig at Kamala Harris. But she was not a “decision maker” here. I see Van Hollen talking about Tony Blinken, then-Secretary of State, and Jake Sullivan, then-National Security Advisor.

The principle of accountability is fundamental to human rights. As former UN High Commissioner Human Rights Navi Pillay put it, “At the core of any effort to establish accountability are three indispensable and interlinked rights: the right to truth, the right to justice, and the right to an effective remedy and reparation.”

In short, people should face consequences for their actions. Rule of law demands individuals be held accountable under the law. The opposite of accountability is impunity.

Impunity is the prevalent paradigm in today’s American politics under Republican Party control of all three branches of the federal government. Impunity is their intended agenda. There are too many examples. Here are three:

• President Trump pardoning some 1,600 people convicted of crimes related to the insurrection and January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, and then corruptly directing the Justice Department to create a $1.776 billion slush fund using tax payer money to pay them off/reward them.

• The Supreme Court’s decision to give absolute immunity to any president for acts deemed official, with the practical effect of granting impunity to Donald Trump for past and future crimes.

• Trump’s Department of Justice opening up a criminal investigation against E. Jean Carroll, who won a civil suit against Donald Trump for sexual assault and defamation in which the judge said Trump did rape her as the term is understood “in common modern parlance” – an unambiguous case of a powerful politician using the power of the state to give himself impunity, which “makes Watergate look like an unpaid parking ticket.”

The scale and scope of redress needed to respond to this impunity is incalculable. America needs robust transitional justice, defined by the UN as a “full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past conflict, repression, violations and abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation.”

The state of Minnesota has taken a positive step, creating the Minnesota Truth Council to provide a “record of survivor and witness experiences and produce a report with recommendations for legislative and policy reform” in response to what international human rights experts would call repression by state security forces – but what we know as the ICE surge. The United States will need a post-MAGA national Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The challenge is made steeper by the fact that Trump and his Republican allies are perversely co-opting the language of accountability to impose their Impunity Agenda. Most vile is Trump calling his $1.776 billion payoff to pardoned criminals a “Truth and Justice Commission.” Not to mention the fact that the MAGA hacks and DOGE bros have been systematically dismantling institutions of accountability in the U.S. government.

The effort will require a broad national coalition, as all genuine reconciliation processes do. Today it is hard to envision how to put it together. Such a coalition must go beyond partisan politics of course. But by practical necessity it will include elements of the only major political party that is currently defending the Constitution, democratic institutions, rule of law and anti-corruption in the United States – the Democrats.

To lead by example is essential. That’s the whole point of this Unexemptional blog – that that United States can help create a more just world, but only if it genuinely respects human rights at home and through its foreign policy. “Leading by example” is a pillar of the UN’s framework for accountability in human rights.

As part of the Accountability Agenda, the Democratic Party must lead by example.

Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan were President Biden’s prime implementers of his policy response to Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, and to the Government of Israel’s actions thereto. The policy was Biden’s and he bears prime responsibility for the consequences of his decisions. But Biden will never hold public office again.

Blinken and Sullivan might, however. They’re young enough that they could still play roles in a future Democratic administration (Sullivan is not even 50 yet). Matt Duss in the Nation and Julia Ioffe in Puck detail how the “Biden bros” are making the rounds at establishment liberal think tanks, “positioning to return to power.” Ioffe quotes one insider, “The idea that the same foreign policy leadership that brought us the Afghanistan withdrawal and the cover-up of Biden’s decline should be in charge of staffing the next Democratic administration is tone deaf at best.”

There are people who believe Biden, Blinken and others should be subject to investigation by the International Criminal Court for “their accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.” I’ll leave that debate for the future.

For now, Democrats can send a clear message that they are serious about accountability: disinvite Blinken, Sullivan and the other architects of the U.S. role in the Gaza catastrophe. Say: thank you for your service (or not) but we don’t need your expertise any more. We’ve got a new generation – people who believe that all humans are equal in their demands for rights and dignity, and are willing to put that into policy.

It’s sad. I was at the State Department when Blinken was Deputy. He was known as a human rights guy, especially compared to his predecessor, Wendy Sherman, and his boss, John Kerry. When those of us on the human rights side of the building wanted human rights points inserted into a memo, his staff was helpful. I do not know how he feels about his role in Gaza policy. I do know that he will have to face protests at every public appearance for the rest of his life. He made decisions and will have to live with the consequences. That’s called accountability.

Blinken may be a nice guy. But from a victim-centered viewpoint (which is what genuine human rights work inherently is) impunity is blind to personality. There is no niceness exemption from accountability.

As a first step, let’s lead by example.

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Rather, this is a common-sense look at how we find ourselves in this moment on Iran:

The United States had a smart, imperfect but tough, agreement to deal with a problem of a difficult nation. But a bunch of idiots motivated by politics and stupidity ripped it up and are now arguing about whether to negotiate to get the U.S. back to where it was 11 years ago.

This is a story of the triumph of idiocy over competence, of the victory of crass politics over realistic pragmatism, of the primacy of getting-to-no over getting-to-yes.

This story informs us beyond the Iran issue. It is an indictment of current U.S. foreign policymaking across the board. We are in a bad place.

Beam back to 2015. The Obama Administration negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to limit the Iranian nuclear program by blocking the two paths to accumulate weapons-grade fissile material for a nuclear weapon: enriching uranium and separating plutonium. It was accompanied by rigorous measures to ensure compliance, including inspections, snap-back sanctions, and heavyweight political buy-in by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany and the EU. In return, Iran would receive selected relief from sanctions.

JCPOA was obdurately opposed by the governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, hardliners in Iran, AIPAC, and the Republican Party. The common bonds between these groups are a lot closer than they would admit.

This Coalition of the Unwilling immediately set about defeating JCPOA, cementing the GOP-Netanyahu alliance that has since blossomed into state-sanctioned hierarchical ethno-nationalism in both countries, and ethnic cleansing and genocide in one, welcomed by the other.

President Trump (1.0) withdrew from JCPOA in 2018. President Biden tried to resuscitate it. But by then Iranian hard-liners had the upper hand, emboldened by the claim that the U.S. could not be trusted, a claim that Trump has proven demonstrably true.

Beam forward to 2026. President Trump (2.0) launches a military attack on Iran, rationalized in part to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon (I’m being generous here; finding a sensible and logical reason from Trump for going to war is like expecting a sensible and logical reason from your toddler for why he’s crying and writhing on the carpet – a not inexact analogy).

Now, President Trump is posting about an imminent “deal” with Iran, which according to press reports, would address, in order: a cease-fire, a re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and then “a 60-day process for tackling other issues, chief among them Iran’s nuclear program.” The deal could include the unfreezing of Iranian assets, a thing Republicans said Obama was a traitor for proposing.

So in sum, Donald Trump promising a conception of a framework of a plan for the third step of a process which would get us to … where we were a decade ago before Donald Trump killed it.

This is THE ART OF STUPIDITY.

Take a step back and try to look at this from a removed, objective perspective. Like as an international relations professor 30 years from now. Or as a normie non-chud today.

It’s just idiotic. The U.S. government is now working to get back to a place it was 11 years ago, from a worse position, and facing a much higher hurdle -- trying to reopen a Strait that was open before the President initiated a war designed in part to prevent a nuclear program that that same President un-prevented eight years ago.

I feel dumb writing this. Because it’s all dumb.

Now you have voices in the Republican Party and the Israeli government criticizing the President’s imminent “deal” because Trump’s plan might possibly lead to the same outcome that they and Trump said was bad: a halt to Iran’s nuclear program.

These are politicians who NEED an Iranian nuclear program to sustain their politics. Let’s be honest about the fuckery going on here.

Now Trump is demanding that Arab nations sign a peace deal with Israel under his own personal authority. “Is he trying to sabotage [his own] whole Iran process?” WTF??

These are not people who have serious and sober concern for U.S. national security. These are not people who value expertise.

When I talk about idiots and incompetents, I’m not just talking about people in way over their heads (looking at you, Marco Rubio). I’m also thinking of smart, informed foreign policy practitioners who let themselves be complicit in stupid and incompetent policies (looking at you, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, re: Gaza).

The phrase that comes to mind is The Death of Expertise, the title of the book by Tom Nichols, a devotee of serious and sober foreign policymaking. Yesterday he wrote in the Atlantic about the incompetence and incoherence of Trump’s Iran policy and the emergent, reflexive chud opposition. He’s right, of course. U.S. national security is currently amateur hour.

Every time I sit to try to get a grown-up’s understanding of where things are with Iran, I quickly give up. Trump contradicts himself. Out-of-the-loop Rubio offers some platitude. Hegseth flexes about pronouns. The White House posts dank memes. I cognitively resign myself that this is the realm of the dimwits and not to expect competence or seriousness from people with a demonstrated record of lacking either.

But this is incredibly scary, because this is serious and grave stuff. We need and deserve genuine experts and serious policy people steering the ship of state. We will not get it as long Trump and the chuds are in charge. Let us hope/pray that nothing truly disastrous happens until we can get an actual adult in the room.

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Pursuant to President Trump’s early “anti-DEI” Executive Orders, the federal government has been removing words from government websites, publications and announcements – words like “gender,” “identity,” “diversity” and “woman” that his Administration considers contrary to the Ruling Party’s ideology. This is their ‘war on woke.’ Free speech groups have called this censorship.

As I document below, the words “human rights” are also being stripped from government statements and reports and from Congressional legislation. The process is not as formalized as the anti-DEI word removal, but it’s happening. The ‘war on woke’ is targeting human rights. Here’s the evidence:

1. GOP politics is turning away from human rights. The 2016 Republican party platform mentions human rights 10 times. The 2024 GOP platform not at all.

2. GOP policy is shunning human rights. Last November, the Trump Administration released its National Security Strategy. It does not include the words “human rights.” Compare that to Biden’s, with 10, Trump 1.0 with one (not zero!), and G.W. Bush with nine. references. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s big speech in Munich does not mention “human rights” once.

3. GOP governance is sidelining human rights. Rubio’s State Department is institutionally demoting human rights, severely reducing the bureaus dealing with human rights, refugees and human trafficking, eliminating the office dealing with atrocities and war crimes, drastically cutting assistance programs for human rights advocacy, and trying to kill independent broadcasting into closed societies (like Radio Free Asia) and the National Endowment for Democracy.

Here are some illustrative examples:

• Departing from tradition, Secretary Rubio declined to make a statement for the release of the 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights (for comparison here is Secretary Blinken’s statement for the previous year). Moreover, Rubio dramatically scaled back the content of the report, omitting key sections, and giving a free pass to governments led by Trump’s buddies.

• Rubio’s statement on the 36^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre references “human rights” once. In 2024, Secretary Blinken cited “human rights” six times.

• The State Department’s 2026 report on conditions in Hong Kong has, under Rubio, zero mentions of human rights. By contrast, the 2024 report says human rights 11 times.

• Rubio’s Department’s statement on the Panchen Lama (a Tibetan religious figure disappeared by the Chinese government) is silent on human rights. The 2024 statement says it twice.

• Rubio doesn’t mention “human rights” in his most recent statement about Cuba (although the summary incorrectly claims he did). Secretary Blinken spoke of human rights when meeting with Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan human rights defenders.

This deletion is happening in Congress too. While Congress has traditionally been the branch to elevate human rights in foreign policy-making, the current majority – the same Ruling Party as President Trump – is complicit in this excise of “human rights” from public policy.

(The following evidence may appear to be selective. I admit I don’t have time to do an exhaustive analysis. I’m sure someone can find a GOP-led bill that has the term “human rights” in it to try to discredit my argument. What I can say is that I have been a professional human rights policy watcher and doer for decades, and my observations are not uninformed.)

• In the 119^th Congress (the current one), there has been one policy bill passed in the House of Representatives with the word “human rights” in it. Compare that to 18 in the 118^th Congress. Only two have passed the Senate in the 119^th, compared to 11 in the previous Congress.[1]

• Before the President went to China, the House and Senate passed resolutions calling for the release of Jimmy Lai and other political prisoners. Neither text mentioned “human rights” in relation to these cases, much less citing international human rights law as a basis for the violation of their rights. A bipartisan, bicameral letter on Jimmy Lai excludes “human rights” too.[2]

• Chairman of the House Select Committee on China John Moolannar (R-MI) wrote to the President and Secretary Rubio about human rights cases in China and Hong Kong but does not cite human rights to make his argument.

• Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Brian Mast (R-FL) does not mention “human rights” in a report on persecution of Christians in Nigeria, a statement on post-Assad Syria, and a statement on Venezuela.

• Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee James Risch (R-ID) does not mention “human rights” in statements on Bolivia, Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Iran, and international religious freedom.

This is bad.

This is bad for anyone who wants the U.S. to lead with a morals-based foreign policy.

This is bad for anyone who wants the U.S. government to help improve human rights conditions in other countries, or to work to free their family members detained by a human rights-abusing government.

This is bad for Americans. As I wrote a few months ago, I believe the conservative project to undermine international law is to give greater space for the U.S. government to violate the human rights of Americans -- to give themselves impunity. There are rumors that Administration officials, pursuant to Executive Order 14199, are reviewing whether to withdraw the United States from the international human rights treaties it has ratified (despite it being illegal without Senate consent).

Exempting the U.S. from international human rights law would deny Americans the ability to appeal to international institutions and governments in defense of their rights when they are abused by their own government. Delegitimizing human rights language further serves this agenda.

We haven’t been given a reason why Republicans are deleting “human rights” from their statements and policy work (has anyone asked them?). But I strongly suspect that it is a component of this larger Impunity Plan. If the U.S. government removes human rights from its discourse with and about other nations, it makes it easier for the U.S. government to deflect or ignore human rights criticism by other countries of the abuses the U.S. commits.

There must be a reason why Republicans are going silent on “human rights.” Whatever it is, it’s not good news if your relative is in a Chinese jail, if your community of faith is being persecuted in Pakistan or India, or if your neighbors are being shot in the streets of Minneapolis.

This trend is not going to reverse itself if people who genuinely care about human rights zip their lips for fear of offending their Republican friends. Rather, it will require people to be vocal and forceful in defense of human rights, including directly with their Republican friends. The sooner that starts the better.

The campaign to ban “woke” words is censorship, a restriction of the right to freedom of expression, a human rights abuse. It would be ironic as well as destructive if the term “human rights” disappears as a consequence of a human rights violation.

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[1] I exempt appropriations bills because their mentions of “human rights” refer to established programs or bureaus and don’t well reflect policy trends.

[2] It is true that Democrats cosponsored or signed these initiatives. But they were written by Republicans and Democrats were asked to sign on. It is unclear whether Democrats asked to include human rights language or, if so, Republicans declined their requests.

My focus is on human rights. For that, not only did Trump come back from Beijing empty handed, he made it worse. By a lot.

Trump has set a precedent that human rights are now excluded from engagement between leaders of the U.S. and China. As I wrote before the summit, previous presidents “all understood the fundamental values argument behind human rights appeals” with Chinese leaders. The Guardian’s senior China correspondent provides details on how G.W. Bush and Obama worked human rights into their China diplomacy.

All that came in context of the post-Tiananmen assumption – dare I say consensus – that human rights was an integral part of U.S. relations with China. This was understood by career and appointed diplomats from both parties.

But the impetus for human always came from Congress – from the MFN debates to the Dalai Lama gold medal to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

Presidents and their staffs were incentivized to keep human rights on the agenda, if not of their own volition, then because they knew they would get shit from Congress if they didn’t.

That’s today’s compounded problem. Not only do we have a President who doesn’t care about human rights and omits it from his China agenda. We have a Congress unwilling to hold him accountable when he omits.

OK, I know you’re gonna say I’m wrong. You can point to the number of letters and statements that Republican Members of Congress, bipartisan or otherwise, issued before the summit, calling on the President to urge Xi Jinping to release Jimmy Lai, Pastor Jin and others. This is true.

But look closer. Their statements and letters omit human rights language. There are no references to China’s obligations under international human rights law. Appeals to release these individuals – genuine worthy cases – are not made in the frame of human rights.

Ah, you may also say that Trump did raise human rights in Beijing. But that’s not accurate. Neither side’s read-out mentioned human rights. Yes, Trump did tell Fox News he had discussed Lai and the case of several detained pastors with Xi.

I do not begrudge the families and friends of Lai and Jin to do whatever possible, using whatever language, to free their loved ones detained by Chinese authorities. Both are 100% legitimate human rights cases. Both should be free.

But, from all evidence, those cases were not presented in a human rights framework citing China’s obligations under international law – presumably because human rights are a turn-off to President Trump. This is why I say that Trump raising these cases in Beijing does not equate to him raising human rights in Beijing. Because they weren’t framed that way.

Transactionalism can free a prisoner or two. But transactionalism is antithetical to human rights. Reliance on it corrodes the foundation on which a prisoner’s cause is based.

And Trump knows he will pay no price for this. This Congress will not hold the President accountable for failing to push human rights with the Chinese leader. I did a review of the social media accounts and websites of the dozen or so Republican Members of Congress who are most vocal on China human rights. Silence. Nothing. No criticism of Trump. Not even a mild lament.[1]

And this gets to a deeper problem. (I’m not talking about the current fundamental threat to American democracy of the sycophantic members of the Legislative Branch of the Ruling Party completely ignoring their Constitutional responsibilities in order give near-total control to the Party Leader – which is a problem!) I’m talking about the threat to the entire human rights enterprise.

As I discussed in my previous piece, hostility toward the international human rights system, including to the core concept of universality, is now baked into the Republican party. It would be bad enough if they don’t push Trump on human rights because of their timid obsequiousness. The real danger is in the fact that they agree with him. They are choosing not to include human rights language, concepts and principles in their work on China (or anything else) because they don’t like human rights language, concepts and principles.

I do still genuinely hope that Lai and Jin, and others, are released from detention after some face-saving time delay. We would join their families in relief if not celebration. But the underlying pathology will remain – the fact that the President and his Party are excising human rights from foreign policy, including on China. And that will only make it more difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to claim any moral credibility to call for others to be released, or to have their fundamental human rights respected by the government of China or any other country.

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[1] Democrats on the House and Senate foreign policy committees did.

This person’s jaw dropped to the floor. “How can you say that? Trump (first term) was so good on China!” I responded with an a list of reasons, which I subsequently wrote up in SIX reasons why a second Trump term would be terrible for human rights in China.

I was proven right.

And with sad irony, my RFA acquaintance, who reported on human rights abuses in the Uyghur region, lost his job because of Trump’s cuts.

I won’t take up space to list all the ways the second Trump Administration has been bad on human rights in China; you can read my documentation of it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. In short, they have cut programs to promote human rights and counter PRC influence, ended democracy and human rights promotion as a priority in foreign policy, and diminished America’s moral credibility by copying CCP-style authoritarian governance in the United States.

President Trump is worst president on China human rights ever. I say that as someone who has followed (or been involved in) this stuff since the early post-Tiananmen debates over Most Favored Nation status during the Bush 41 Administration. No president, in my opinion, has been very good on the issue. I say this as someone who was disappointed in Obama, even when I worked within his Administration on China policy.

President Trump is headed to a summit with his counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing on May 14-15. It is routine that whenever a president or senior official goes for a high-level meeting with Chinese leaders, there is a stream of letters, statements and requests from Members of Congress, activists and advocates asking that the U.S. side raise human rights issues. That is happening with Trump now too.

And it should. The reasons for human rights advocacy haven’t changed.

What has changed is that the audience is radically different. Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden all understood the fundamental values argument behind human rights appeals. The question was whether and how human rights was prioritized.

Not so with Donald Trump. He doesn’t give a shit about human rights. In fact, he relishes violating human rights. Look at the joy he gets in beating up protestors in American cities, killing people on boats, and cracking down on journalists and NGOs.

And yet advocates delude themselves that Trump is something he is not. They appeal to his better angels when he has none. Take this piece by the Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea: “Trump’s China Trip Offers a Golden Chance to Inspire Freedom.” It’s full of appeals to “liberty,” “freedom,” and “democracy” invoking gauzy Reagan imagery.

But Trump doesn’t care about any of that. Actually, Trump’s pro-tariff, pro-Putin, pro-government-investing-in-private-enterprise agenda has done more to bury Reagan’s legacy than any liberal Democrat.

Since January 2025, advocates have been tip-toeing around trying to find language that will find some appeal to the “America First” White House – framing issues as beneficial to Americans citizens or businesses, inserting “prosperity” or other magic MAGA words into appeals. And in turn, they remove language that does not appeal, like “democracy” and “rule of law.”

Let me be clear: I hope the advocacy works. Even if Trump succeeds in freeing one prisoner of conscience from a Chinese prison, even bringing home one unjustly detained American, that would be a positive.

But it would come at a cost. The effect of removing human rights language from human rights advocacy means … well … that it is not advocacy about human rights anymore. The consequence is the elimination of human rights concepts and principles from the discourse about China (or any other place). After four years of Trump, I fear lasting and irrevocable damage to the cause of human rights.

I can’t think of any leader that would welcome the elimination of human rights language from conversations about his country more than Xi Jinping. Donald Trump has already given many gifts to the CCP. I worry that everyone who cleanses their advocacy of human rights terms in a vain appeal to Trump is also complicit in his gifts to the CCP.

I sympathize with and do not begrudge advocates who do what they need to do to try to free an imprisoned relative or relieve others’ suffering. But I also want them to think deeply about the long-term consequences of the concessions that Trump and his Party are demanding of them.

If you’re waiting for Trump to have a change of heart, I’m sad for you, because this almost 80-year old won’t. If you’re waiting for Marco Rubio to revert, that’s not happening either. He’s full MAGA now.

Which brings me to my core point. Today’s bleak moment for China human rights advocacy isn’t a passing moment. It’s a symptom of a larger disease.

The disease is that the Republican Party, under Trump but also drawing on long-standing ideologies, is now formally and firmly hostile to the international human rights system. There is plenty of evidence for this – the Trump Administration pulling out of international bodies including from the UN Human Rights Council (and possible from international human rights treaties), penalizing international justice mechanisms, the absence of “human rights” from Administration policy documents and statements, much less with the words “internationally-recognized” or “universal” appended to it.

This hostility is now baked into the operating system of the Party that’s running the U.S. government. This isn’t a pathology that can be reversed by getting a committee chairman to sign a letter or a Secretary of State to make a statement. The president freeing a political prisoner would be great, but that does not cure the underlying disease.

And it won’t be solved by hoping Democrats can use positions of power, if they are ever allowed to regain them, to push back. They should, but they lack the ability to reach into the space where the disease has taken hold – within the Republican Party. But there are people who are in the China human rights movement who remain in that space. We must hope they are willing to use their connections to start the push-back. Because the moral foundation on which the China human rights cause is based may disappear if Republicans succeed in dismantling the underlying institutional foundation of international human rights.

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P.S. Also, let’s hope that Trump does not sell out Taiwan while in Beijing.

“During all 7 Commission hearings, witness after witness testified that the so-called ‘separation of church and state’ was used to take their God-given religious liberty rights away,” continued Patrick, as quoted on an official Department of Justice website.

Patrick’s statement is unequivocally false, as anyone with even just a middle school education can understand by a plain reading of the First Amendment (not to mention its extension by the and the Fourteenth Amendment, and Article VI, Clause 3). Or anyone with the slightest understanding of the principles and intentions of the Founding Fathers.

Unfortunately, this is not new. Ever since early-1960s Supreme Court decisions cited the First Amendment to keep the Bible from being taught in schools, conservatives have been attempting to de-separate church and state by reinterpreting constitutional law or trying to amend the Constitution.

And this is not isolated. It’s part of conservative designs to reinterpret the Constitution for ideological control: the President’s attempt to redefine the 14^th Amendment to negate birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court’s dispensing of the Voting Rights Act, Congress’ disavowal of its Article 1 responsibilities, and much more

This is how conservatives are normalizing the previously taboo and the transgressive – along with racism, antisemitism, white supremacy, patriarchal misogyny. Case in point: in 2019, the House Republican Conference stripped then-Rep. Steve King (R-IA) of his committee assignments for remarks that his own GOP colleagues considered racist and pro-white supremacist. But just last month, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) openly called Somalis low-IQ and a drain on society. Not only does he remain a Member of the House Republican Conference in good standing, he is merely affirming the Party position as enunciated by the Republican President.

Consistent with this toxic self-confidence to say the previously quiet part out loud are Paxton’s remarks about tearing down the wall between church and state.

Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission is chartered with “recommending steps to secure domestic religious liberty and identifying opportunities to further the cause of religious liberty around the world.” Sounds OK, right? Dig deeper.

The Commission’s membership is all Christian except for one Orthodox Jewish Rabbi. No Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, or non-religious members. It includes Paula White, head of the White House Faith Office who compared Trump to Jesus, considers the White House a Holy Ground and leads public Christian prayers on federal property

Its recommendations read like the wish list of a conservative Christian lobbyist. It seeks an “originalist” interpretation of the First Amendment which, as any SCOTUS-watcher will instinctively know, is code for overturning settled law. Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State observed, “Rather than advancing religious liberty, this commission is intent on imposing one ultra-conservative version of Christianity on all Americans.”

And there is the rampant use by Trump Administration officials of official government resources to promote explicitly pro-Christian messages, which I describe here.

They’re not just promising to tear down the wall between church and state. They’re actively doing it now. Using the power of the state. And with the active complicity of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which through several rulings “has gone out of its way to allow individuals and institutions to impose their religious beliefs and restrictions onto others.”

Abortion provides a crystal-clear case that the conservative meaning of “religious liberty” isn’t about free practice of individuals’ religious beliefs, but rather about one particular faith group’s “liberty” to force others in society to conform to its particular belief system.

The 2022 Dobbs decision, by which SCOTUS overturned the federally-protected constitutional right to privacy that made abortion legal, was primarily driven by Christian religious doctrine. Abortion opponents asserted that they had a collective right to live in a nation without abortion, rejecting the argument that legalized abortion was a matter of individual liberty.[1]

But people do claim that an abortion ban is a denial of their religious freedom. A Jewish woman in Kentucky recently won a case arguing that “that Kentucky’s laws violated her religious freedom because they use Christian doctrines and beliefs around the beginning of human life, imposing them over other religious beliefs.” A similar case was successful in Indiana, where the plaintiff cited the state’s religious freedom law to protect her access to abortion.

This Indiana case exposed the true aim of the Christian supremacists. They argued that the Jewish woman’s religious beliefs weren’t sincere, and that the religious freedom law could only be interpreted to protect their particular (Christian) meaning of religious liberty.

I’m not going to dive into Christian nationalism here. There’s plenty else out there. My purpose is to highlight how conservatives are deceptively using “religious liberty” to advance an agenda that actually threatens religious freedom.

This ruse is also a threat to the international religious freedom (IRF) movement, a community that I have worked with professionally for many years. I discuss the bipartisan nature of the policy and institutional architecture on IRF in this piece. All that is at risk now.

The moral credibility of IRF efforts depends on the ability to objectivity apply uniform standards to their analysis and advocacy. Defense of the rights of Christians in China and Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, for example, to freely practice their religion is based on a principle that there is a universal right to such practice.[2] It is not based on an argument that these faiths are superior or favored.

And yet that is exactly what the conservatives running the Administration and Congress are doing: promoting “religious liberty” with the express assertion that their version of Christianity is superior and favored. Presidential initiatives to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” empower these self-selected few to determine what is or is not bias against their version of Christianity, using power of the state to give their definition of what is un-biased official sanction – a back-door way of proclaiming an official religion.

Well, now, this is exactly what officials who regulate religious affairs in China and Pakistan do. How do we have any credibility to tell governments in Beijing and Islamabad what they are doing is wrong when our own government is doing the same thing?

“Religious freedom” loses its potency, if not meaning, if it is used not as a tool not to protect but rather a tool to impose.

The IRF community has resources to bring to bear on this problem -- lots of experienced people with a ton of policy knowledge. But there are barriers. For one, they can’t. By law and custom, IRF institutions are limited to monitoring and advocating on religious freedom in other countries, not in the U.S. Second, we must acknowledge that some of the organizations that are part of the IRF coalition are also among those supporting the conservatives’ state-enabled pro-Christian favoritism domestically. This is a self-defeating friction the community needs to confront if it wants to maintain its integrity, in my opinion.

We need to reclaim “religious liberty” to its genuine definition, as set by both the Founding Fathers and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. We need to call out the White House’s subterfuge in full voice. And we need the experts in religious freedom to help us do that.

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[1] Yes, I know that opponents will argue that they are defending the individual rights of the “unborn child.” But in my opinion, their argument fails because it depends on holding that one individual’s liberty necessitates the denial of another’s (the rights and autonomy of a woman). Thus, whether they admit or not, the anti-abortion crowd is asserting a collective right to override an individual right.

[2] Universal Declaration on Human Rights, Article 18

Within weeks of each other, the power elites of the U.S. and China, both of the ethnic majority, removed key legal frameworks that protected ethnic minorities from subjugation by the ethnic majority.[1]

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States negated the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act. The SCOTUS majority’s decision was based on a mindset that race shouldn’t matter, despite centuries of history documenting that race does indeed matter: as the basis for policies and laws intentionally designed to discriminate against people based on race.

In March 2026, China’s National People’s Congress passed the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress. The law would codify the Ruling Party’s plan to enable the assimilation of non-majority ethnic groups and narrow the space for distinct ethnic identities. The law “is consistent with a dramatic recent policy shift, to suppress the ethnic diversity formally recognised since 1949” and expands “the legal basis for restricting religious, cultural and political activities among minority groups.” In essence, the PRC government decided that ethnicity shouldn’t matter, despite decades if not centuries of history documenting that ethnicity does indeed matter as the basis for policies and laws intentionally designed to discriminate against people based on ethnicity.

The United States and China are similar: large and diverse populations, a multiplicity of ethnicities within its border, but with one ethnic group that dominates institutions of power.

Their histories and paths to the current moment are different, of course.

In 20^th century China, both the People’s Republic and the Republic before it has systems that recognized ethnic minorities (or nationalities – translating the term can be politically and culturally fraught) as distinct. This framework was paternalist and chauvinist, often imposed without meaningful input from the non-majority populations, but it was there. The PRC’s Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law (REAL) of 1984 provided (on paper) Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians and others designated non-majority groups he ability to manage their own affairs in education, language, etc.

In the U.S., the Voting Rights Act (VRA) passed in 1965 to ensure every citizen the ability to participate in democratic self-government – a century after slavery’s end had given way to legalized codes of discrimination and systematized efforts by the ruling class (almost exclusively white) to deny others (African-Americans) the right to vote and to democratic representation.

Now it’s 2026. The Ruling Parties of both countries have embraced policies of aggressive majoritarian assimilation. Each seeks a “forging of national identity” based not on an “E pluribus unum” notion of many composing a national whole, but rather of a nation defined (by elites) through a narrow set of ethnic, cultural and even religious parameters to which anyone outside those parameters must submit and assimilate into.

In the PRC, this is expressed through the “5,000 years of Chinese civilization” narrative that under Xi Jinping has been weaponized to impose the Ruling Party’s vision of what it means to be Chinese. In the U.S., this is the “Western Civilization” narrative that under Donald Trump has been weaponized to impose the Ruling Party’s vision of what it means to be American. Both are ethno-nationalism.

Both Ruling Parties’ assimilationist policies were grounded in an intellectual framework prepared in Party-aligned institutions. In China: Peking University’s Ma Rong critiqued pluralistic policies as failures and recommending assimilation as the way forward. In the U.S.: the Heritage Foundation critiqued civil rights policies as failures and recommending assimilation as the way forward.

In both counties, the previous legal frameworks were re-affirmed as recently as two decades ago: the REAL was updated in 2005 and the VRA was re-authorized in 2006, with a Senate vote of 98-0 and a Republican president signing it into law.[2]

In both countries, these mindsets were made into reality under the current personalist regimes: in China under Xi Jinping and in the U.S. under Donald Trump, whose appointments and license made possible the SCOTUS ruling.

Both Ruling Parties are rushing ahead to cement racial/ethnic hierarchy. The PRC is moving to erase ethnic minority languages. White-run Southern states are moving to redistrict out of existence Black-majority districts.

In both countries, the principle behind this shift is the same: race/ethnicity no longer matters. In China, it’s the idea that allowing minorities their own distinctiveness undermines national unity. In the U.S., it’s the idea that to consider race in public policy promotes division and undermines national unity.

This is why I assert that the CCP is a conservative party -- here I show all the traits in common between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and conservative parties in Russia, Hungary, the U.S. and elsewhere.

The mindset that race/ethnicity doesn’t matter is wrong of course. In the PRC, non-Han Chinese peoples like Tibetans, Uyghurs, Southern Mongolians still suffer discrimination and official persecution. In the U.S., people of non-European descent still suffer discrimination and official persecution (look at what ICE is doing).

Both situations are driven by nativism, ethno-nationalism, and a worldview that sees hierarchy as the natural order with the beholder’s race/ethnicity intuitively at the top.

China’s Ethnic Unity Law has been met with bipartisan criticism in Washington. A bipartisan group of senators said the “new ‘ethnic unity’ law only signals its escalating persecution of religious and ethnic minorities.”

But the reaction to the SCOTUS decision gutting the Voting Rights Act is anything but bipartisan. The four Democratic senators on that China statement all condemned the decision as a defeat for civil rights. Their position is consistent: the law in both countries should protect the minority from systematic discrimination by the majority.

The Republicans have not. Their position is that laws protect the minority from systematic discrimination by the majority are legitimate in China but not in the U.S.

The question that Americans should ask these Republican senators is this: Why do you believe that people in the PRC deserve legal protections against historical race-based discrimination but Americans do not?

The question that Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongolians should ask these Republican senators is this: Don’t Republican policies that preserve racial hierarchy by protecting systems of discrimination undermine the message that CCP policies preserving ethnic hierarchy by protecting systems of discrimination hurt Tibetans, Uyghurs and Mongolians?

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[1] Please grant me latitude in the use of “majority,” “minority,” “ethnic” and “race” in this piece. I am trying to point out behavioral parallels between socio-political systems that do not use the same terminology: “race” and “ethnicity” are not perfectly analogous but I use both to clarify the similarities within the systems. Of course, the histories of how groups assigned constructs of “race” and “ethnicity” came to their place – geographically and in relation to each other, in the PRC and the U.S. — are vastly different, rendering the terms “majority” and “minority” unavoidably fraught – again, used in this piece for sake of clarity.

[2] Republicans who say the REAL was phony because the CCP never genuinely believed in it should be asked if their vote to reauthorize VRA in 2006 was also phony because the GOP, as shown by SCOTUS decisions, never genuinely believed in it.

Question 1: President Trump’s admiration for Xi Jinping: If President Trump asks you to “tone it down” on human rights because he’s negotiating with Xi Jinping, as a former State Department official said Trump asked of your predecessor Mike Pompeo, will you do as he commands?

Rubio’s answer by performance: FAILURE. Secretary Rubio institutionally demoted human rights within the State Department by closing and demoting “functional” bureaus, such as the Office of Global Criminal Justice, and creating far right buzzword-coded offices (“Natural Rights,” “Remigration”) to serve an ideological agenda. Rubio politicized the once-respected annual human rights report by removing key content and giving a free pass to Trump-friendly governments. Rubio has been complicit in the neutering of the China hawks (including himself).

Q2: Territorial ambitions of China and the United States: As Secretary will you continue to oppose the PRC’s territorial ambitions? Do you think that President Trump’s territorial claims on Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada undermine the integrity of our case against China’s territorial claims? How would you make the case to allies that they should accept President’s territorial claims but not China’s territorial claims? What principle would you cite?

A: UPHOLD DOUBLE STANDARD. Yes, Rubio opposes China’s territorial ambitions. But he has supported Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland, defended his boss’ demand to make Canada the 51^st state, and said the U.S. would “take measures necessary to protect its rights” if Panama didn’t do what Trump wants. We don’t know if Rubio recognizes this double standard. But objectively we do know that the Trump Administration has failed to stem China’s territorial ambitions and its construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea.

Q3: Taiwan and Law of the Sea Treaty: As Secretary, will you support U.S. ratification of the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty (UNCLOS) in order to strengthen Taiwan’s case and the United States’ ability to deter aggression from the PRC, as many of your predecessors have done? As senator, you expressed opposition to UNCLOS ratification. As Secretary you will have a wider remit to protect Taiwan. Will you now support UNCLOS ratification?

A: NO. As Senator, Rubio opposed UNCLOS and as Secretary has done nothing to push ratification by the Senate. Undeterred by the stain of hypocrisy, Rubio invokes UNCLOS when defending freedom of navigation in the Taiwan Strait and while blatantly violating UNCLOS by supporting illegal boat strikes in international waters. This rules-apply-to-you-but-not-to-me double standard is self-defeatingly all too common in U.S. foreign policy and is practically the operating procedure of the Trump Administration.

Q4: Human rights abuses disguised as anti-terrorism: As a champion for Uyghurs, you know well the harm done when Chinese officials label all Uyghurs terrorists. So you are well placed to see the harm that Israeli officials are doing by labelling all Palestinians terrorists. As Secretary, will you ensure that U.S. policy makes a distinction between Hamas terrorists and the vast majority of Palestinian civilians who are not terrorists? In engagements with Israeli officials and citizens, will you bring your experience with the harm that the false blanket accusations that Uyghurs are terrorists to your discussions on their attitudes toward Palestinians?

A: FAILURE. Secretary Rubio has not been a champion for Uyghurs. Like the CCP, Rubio has repeatedly applies a blanket “terrorist” label to any individual or group he doesn’t like, including anyone who says that Palestinians are entitled to the same fundamental human rights as anybody else, and political opponents that criticize Trump far-right buddies. He is also fond of designating drug cartels as terrorist organizations despite questions about misapplication and drawing resources from genuine terrorist threats. Whether Rubio realizes he is giving succor to China’s harmful blanket terrorist label on Uyghurs is unknown.

Q5: Humanitarian safe harbor for victims of communism: Why didn’t you reintroduce these bills (to give Hong Kongers and Uyghurs fleeing repression by the Chinese Communist Party priority status (P-2) for refugee admission into the United States) in the last Congress? P-2 status can be granted under the authorities that the Secretary of State already possesses; it doesn’t need an act of Congress. As Secretary will you commit to helping Hong Kongers and Uyghurs fleeing CCP oppression by granting them P-2 refugee status so that they can find safe harbor in America? If not, why not?

A: FAILURE. Not only has Rubio has done nothing to help Uyghurs, Hong Kongers or anyone fleeing Chinese Communist oppression find safe harbor in the United States, he has made it harder by supporting Stephen Miller’s hardline and illegal crackdown on the asylum process. Instead, Rubio has facilitated the white nationalist agenda by using the refugee process to admit almost exclusively white South Africans. I have heard reports of Uyghurs stuck in ICE detention facilities, at risk of deportation in violation of U.S. and international law.

Q6: Uyghur deportations and double standards: If confirmed, would you engage with the government of Thailand to prevent the forcible return of these Uyghurs to China, where they would be at risk of persecution? Doesn’t President Trump’s plan for mass deportations, even if deportees face risk of persecution, undermine the moral authority of any argument you would make with the Thai government?

A: FAILURE. Sure, Rubio did call on Thailand not to do it, and imposed sanctions on Thai officials after they did. But after 10 years of these languishing in limbo in Thailand, the forcible return of these Uyghurs to China happened on Rubio’s watch. Thus it is a failure of his diplomacy. It’s also not coincidental, in my opinion, that it happened in the first weeks of the Trump Administration – I’m sure Thai officials calculated they wouldn’t face real retribution from a new American government that had eagerly made forced deportation its own policy.

By the way, that sanction announcement 13 months ago was the last time Rubio mentioned Uyghurs, as far as I can tell.

Q7: Universality of international human rights: Do you believe in the principle of the universality of human rights? Are the rights that the people of China – or any country – entitled to enjoy those provided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the UN human rights instruments adopted pursuant to it, or those that American policymakers say they should be? Do the human rights obligations of the Chinese government derive from treaties it has ratified or from treaties the U.S. has ratified? If the latter, please provide a legal rationale.

A: OPPOSED AND HOSTILE. No, he does not. In fact, Secretary Rubio has been actively undermining the notion of the universality of human rights and implementing a plan, as laid out in Project 2025, to redefine human rights through a far-right ideological lens that posits human rights not as universal but through hierarchies, with religion freedom and property rights as supreme and LGBTQ and reproductive rights as illegitimate. Examples include the new offices of “Natural Rights” and “Western Values” and his notorious Munich speech about “Western civilization.”

Q8: Ratification of international human rights treaties: As Chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, you called on the Chinese government to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Will you continue this as Secretary? Do you think the U.S. would have more moral authority on this issue if the U.S. ratified more human rights treaties? Do you find it embarrassing that the U.S., which portrays itself as a champion for human rights, has ratified fewer human rights treaties than the PRC?

A: FAILURE. Rubio has not called on China to ratify the ICCPR, and has done nothing to urge the Senate to ratify any of the human rights treaties the U.S. is not a party to. The PRC is party to twice as many human rights treaties (6) as the United States (3).

Q9: Changing names of occupied territory: Tibet and the West Bank: Do you agree with Tibetans that it is wrong for the occupying power (PRC) to change the name of their homeland over their objection? “West Bank” is the name used by the United States government, the United Nations, and Palestinians themselves for the land between Israel and Jordan. But like the PRC self-servingly calls Tibet “Xizang,” the Government of Israel self-servingly calls the West Bank “Judea and Samaria,” a term you have used. Don’t you think it is inconsistent, when people of a land reject the name change by an occupying power, to refuse it is one case and adopt it in another? Doesn’t your use of “Judea and Samaria” undermine the Tibetans’ case against “Xizang?”

A: UPHOLD DOUBLE STANDARD. Rubio uses “Gulf of America,” which his boss, without legal authority, seeks to call the Gulf of Mexico. He does not use “Judea and Samaria” although the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, nominally his subordinate, does, without any apparent correction by Rubio. There is no evidence Rubio has countered PRC efforts to relabel Tibet “Xizang.” In fact, Rubio closed the office that used to counter foreign disinformation, and there is no evidence that he has implemented the Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act, which requires him to counter PRC disinformation on Tibet, such as calling Tibet “Xinzang.”

Q:10 Democracy promotion under an anti-democratic president: As Secretary, which kind of democracy will you promote: the genuine one where leaders adhere to principles of democracy, including respecting the results of elections they lose, or Donald Trump’s version? We all agree it was wrong for Maduro to ignore legitimate election results and violate democratic principles to stay in power. As President Trump’s top diplomat, why should the people of Venezuela, or of any other country, take you seriously when you talk about democracy?

A: OPPOSED AND HOSTILE. Rubio has implemented Trump’s hostility toward democracy by canceling the Department’s pro-democracy programs and made it policy that the U.S. will no longer take stand against foreign governments and leaders who subvert democracy and rig elections. Rubio had previously taken the (widely-held) position that Maduro was illegitimate, but has supported Trump’s decision to recognize Maduro’s deputy Delcy Rodriguez as Venezuela’s leader, despite her lack of democratic legitimacy.

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