“Today’s Outrage” is a new feature. Since January 20, 2025 outrages at the federal level have been coming so thick and fast that trying to absorb them has been like trying to drink from a fire hydrant.
We thought we’d try to slow things down, and focus on one at a time. These articles are in-depth, meant to provide you with a solid understanding versus memes. BEST READ ON LAPTOP OR NOTEPAD.
We’re not worried about running out of material.
Many thanks to our authors!
From the Editor’s Desk
Why do powerful nations start wars — and what happens when one man alone decides who gets hurt? In this blistering, timely essay, the author traces the roots of war through history’s ugliest impulses: fear, anger, ego, and plunder. With a sharp eye on America’s constitutional design and a deeply critical look at President Trump’s latest military actions in Venezuela, the piece asks: have we become the kind of empire our founders warned us against? From Madison’s wisdom to modern oil grabs and rare earth lust, this is a must-read for anyone who cares about democracy, accountability, and the soul of a nation.
8. TODAY’S OUTRAGE: WHY DO PEOPLE START WARS?
Posted 1/3/26 on X by Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s most influential aides (Agence France-Presse, 2026)
“The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.” – James Madison (1798), in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
Most wars begin for a mix or perhaps a muddle of reasons, but the basic energies behind them, I believe, are the following.
1. Wars of Fear.
You might go to war because you worry about a neighbor, and want to get them before they get you. In 1967, Israel’s neighbors were gearing up to attack her, so she attacked them first. Rome’s experience with Hannibal in the Second Punic War led to Cato ending each of his speeches in the Roman Senate with “Carthage must be destroyed.” Often, when a nation appears to be getting too powerful, others will try to cut it down to size: that was the fundamental reason why Sparta fought Athens in the Peloponnesian War, and why Britain fought Germany in 1914. Wars to preserve a balance of power are, at bottom, Wars of Fear, although that fear is not necessarily irrational.
2. Wars of Anger.
You might lash out to avenge a perceived injustice, defeat, or humiliation, especially the latter: no one is more inclined to violence than a person who has just been humiliated. The Persian king Xerxes invaded Greece to avenge his father’s loss to the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon. Hitler wanted to avenge Germany’s defeat in 1919. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been fueled by the Arabs’ numerous humiliations in their wars with Israel. The United States lashed back at its attackers after Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Of course, some of these angers will seem to an onlooker more justified than others.
3. Wars of Plunder.
Ambitious Romans – Pompey, Crassus, Julius Caesar – would invade territories to acquire loot for both their country and themselves. Colonial wars are generally about plunder, as was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Since such a war is essentially nationalized robbery, those who start one will generally try, at least in modern times, to describe it as something else.
4. Wars of Ego.
Historically, the best way to acquire the sobriquet “the Great” – Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great, Pompey the Great, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne (Charles the Great), Frederick the Great – has been through military victory. Alexander had some practical reasons for attacking Persia – among other things, there was plenty to loot – but the only reason for many of his campaigns was a desire to find new worlds to conquer. In autocracies, Wars of Ego are extremely common. From Caesar to Louis XIV to, Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm to Adolf Hitler to Vladimir Putin, if you are a ‘man of power,’ the expansion of your nation’s power, and thus of your own, can easily become a driving passion.
As the Madison quote above indicates, the U.S. Constitution was partly designed to prevent America from being ruled by an Alexander or a Caesar. The Founders did not want American citizens to die for one man’s vainglory; they thought we should go to war only if it was the will of the people, and so they vested the war-making power in Congress. Since fighting a war through rule-by-committee was known to be inefficient, and since everyone knew George Washington would end up with the job, the President was designated Commander-in-Chief, but his brief was to execute the will of Congress. They were supposed to decide when and where we would fight. The President was only put in charge of the ‘how.’
The War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II– i.e. all of our major foreign conflicts up through 1945, with the exception of the Civil War, which the government was unwilling to label a “foreign conflict” – were accompanied by Declarations of War, as the Founders intended. But all that changed after World War II. Harry Truman never asked for a Declaration of War against North Korea, because he was afraid it would escalate, 1914-style, into war with Communist China and the Soviet Union. For legal cover he used a U.N. Security Council resolution and called what was happening “a police action.” One can sympathize with Truman’s desire to avoid World War III, but it did set an unfortunate precedent: Congress’s constitutional role was circumvented, and things stopped being called by their true names. Korea was our first big undeclared foreign war, but it was not our last.
Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq all received some form of Congressional authorization, but in spite of their scope – Afghanistan and Vietnam were the longest-running wars in U.S. history – none of them either began with or was accompanied by a Declaration of War. That this became our pattern after World War II is no coincidence. That was when we became a world empire, and a world empire is constantly using power – a little here, a little there – to sustain its far-flung structures. To exert influence beyond one’s borders means using the military and the quasi-military (e.g. the CIA) in non-transparent ways. Empire is exploitative, secretive, and ruthless, and its use of military force tends to share those qualities.
Besides America’s major wars, there have been dozens, probably hundreds, of smaller military actions which presidents have initiated on their own. Among the relatively recent ones, there was the invasion of Grenada, under Ronald Reagan; of Panama, under George H.W. Bush; the bombing of Serbia, under Bill Clinton; and of Libya, under Barack Obama. Some of these incursions may have been more virtuous than others, but all of them were decisions taken exclusively within the executive branch. The War Powers Act of 1973, a response to Vietnam, was meant to claw back the war-making prerogative to Congress, but that act allows presidents take unilateral military action for up to sixty days, and because it isn’t easy politically to cut off funding to troops in the field, “the War Powers Act has never been successfully employed to end any military mission” (Greenblatt, 2011).
In this context, what are we to make of President Trump’s military actions against Venezuela, including the kidnapping of its president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife? The first thing to notice is that these actions were entirely one man’s decision. If either the Congress or the American people had any desire to attack Venezuela, they’ve done an excellent job of concealing it. Congress, both of whose houses are controlled by the President’s own party, not only did not consent, but was not even consulted beforehand, although, according to the President, American oil companies were (Fortinsky, 2011). (The oil companies deny this.)
Venezuela did not attack us, and obviously poses no military threat to the United States. Are they some other kind of threat? The administration has accused the Maduros of being “narco-terrorists,” and by all accounts they are involved in the international cocaine trade, but Venezuela seems to be a transit country, not a producer, and most of its drugs go to Europe (Glatsky & Correal, 2026). Furthermore, Trump recently pardoned a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of shipping more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States (Biase, Scarff & Wratchford, 2024). Maduro seems to be corrupt,and noxious, but that hardly makes him unique among world leaders. All in all, it’s hard to see how this could be called a War of Fear.
Is it a War of Anger? Donald Trump is good at anger – he constantly feels slighted, and that no one gives him as much of anything as he deserves – but if Maduro has called him names, well, so has much of the rest of the world. In 2007, Venezuela nationalized its energy industry and kicked out some U.S. oil companies, but so have quite a few other countries – Mexico, Bolivia, Iran, Russia – and we haven’t kidnapped their presidents, at least not yet.
Perhaps this is what one might call a charitable war, prompted by compassion for the Venezuelan people, for whom the Maduro Era has not exactly been a golden age? Trump does not as a rule concern himself with the sufferings of foreigners, and when in 2016 the Department of Defense war-gamed what would happen if Maduro were forcibly removed from power, they concluded that Venezuela would most likely fall into chaos and civil war (Crowley, 2025). The Chinese have a saying that one day of anarchy is worse than a year of tyranny, and if Venezuela becomes a failed state, its populace will have gone out of the frying pan into the fire. For years, Trump has claimed to be a president who avoids wars, and who deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for ending them. So what’s going on here?
In the absence of other plausible motives, we must discuss Venezuela’s oil reserves, which are thought to be the largest in the world (Worldometer, n.d.). Trump talked extensively about them at his post-invasion press conference: he said American oil companies would “be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground” (Troianovski, 2026). He has talked before about grabbing back what Venezuela nationalized in 2007. “If you remember, they took all of our energy rights; they took all of our oil from not that long ago,” Mr. Trump said last month. “And we want it back.” (Troianovski, 2026) Trump has also talked in a similar way about oil reserves in the Middle East. “I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil,” he told The New York Times in 2016, when asked how his strategy to fight the Islamic State in the Middle East would differ from President Barack Obama’s approach. (Troianovski, 2026)
All of this makes our attack on Venezuela sound a lot like a War of Plunder. Traditionally the U.S. has opposed such wars, which, in addition to their moral dubiousness, are deeply destabilizing, and thus bad for international business. That, for instance, was why we pushed back against Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. Furthermore, history teaches that Wars of Plunder have a lot of ways to go wrong, because when you show a proclivity to steal other people’s stuff, they tend to band against you. Even if you think the powerful should grab what they want – a worldview that seems to have been endorsed a few days ago by Stephen Miller in an interview on CNN (“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power …These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time” (as quoted in Rogers, 2026)) – you might want to consider the possible pitfalls. If Venezuela does fall into chaos, it will become a tough place to “drill, baby, drill,” and if we insist on doing so, we will probably need to station American troops, or at least mercenaries, in a place where hostile locals will have many incentives to try to kill them. Occupying a country riven by domestic insurgencies – we learned how much fun that was in Iraq. And probably for that reason, as well as because of a current worldwide oil glut, American energy companies do not seem to be champing at the bit to go back into Venezuela (Domonoske, 2026).
Oil isn’t the only plunder which the President seems to covet. Greenland – the subject of Stephen Miller’s wife’s recent post, reproduced at the top of this piece – is rich in rare earth minerals (REM), which, because of environmental concerns, are difficult to mine in the U.S., and are crucial to many emerging technologies, including ones dear to the heart of Elon Musk, with whom Trump is evidently once again on good terms (Dwoskin, Allison & Siddiqui, 2025). Although the President claims we need Greenland “from the standpoint of national security” (Bennett, 2026), it already belongs to a NATO ally, and we are already the only foreign power with a military base there. A more plausible reason for his interest is that Greenland has (a) plentiful deposits of REM, and (b) not many people – and no American voters – to complain about the environmental damage involved in extracting them. A hunger for rare earth minerals is a theme for this administration. Trump has demanded them from Ukraine in return for our military aid (Reuters, 2025), and Canada’s deposits of REM, as well as a vast array of other natural resources, seem to be at the core of his musings about making her our 51st state (Zurcher, 2025).
If Venezuela seems like one War of Plunder, Katie Miller’s post appears to predict another. Of course Wars of Plunder and Wars of Ego frequently overlap. Wealth and conquest are both ways to feel Big, and if Donald Trump has shown one constant in his life, it is an all-consuming need to feel Big. Such a person is always looking – is addicted to looking – for ways to project and expand his own power, and sooner or later, domestic boundaries will start to seem too small to him.
Historically, the only way to avoid the world described by Stephen Miller – a world in which, to paraphrase Thuycidides, the strong take what they want, and the weak suffer what they must – is to inscribe democratically-legislated constraints into a rule of law. Since 1945, the United States has been the bulwark of a rules-based international order which, compared to most historical epochs, has done a pretty good job – not a perfect job, but a pretty good one – of preventing Wars of Plunder and Wars of Ego. Do we really want to reverse that? Do we really want to become a nation of bullies and thieves? Do we want to live in Stephen Miller’s world, or in James Madison’s? What do we want the United States of America to be about?
8. TODAY’S WIN: VIGIL FOR GOOD
We first heard the news about Renée Nicole Good on Facebook — that a young woman, whose final moments were captured on video, leaned out of her vehicle and said gently, “I’m not mad at you,” before gunshots rang out and an ICE agent called her a fucking bitch. That moment shattered something in all of us. We were shocked, enraged, heartbroken. And we were afraid — not just for what happened to Renée, but for what it says about how easily cruelty is excused when systems are unaccountable.
But this country responded — fast, fierce, and in numbers too big to ignore. Over the course of just a few days, more than 1,000 protests erupted across all 50 states, with tens of thousands of people pouring into streets, parks, and public squares. The largest demonstrations in Minneapolis alone drew over 20,000 people, and cities like Boston, Chicago, and Oakland filled with chants of ICE out for Good. This wasn’t chaos — it was clarity. A chorus of Americans from every background saying: “This is not who we are. We refuse to be silent.”
Here in Columbia, we showed up. We stood shoulder to shoulder at the Keyhole. We lit candles in grief and in resolve at an evening vigil. And we gathered again Saturday morning at Stadium and Broadway — not just to mourn, but to declare: our community will not let this violence go unanswered. From students to seniors, from longtime organizers to first-time protesters, Boone County made it clear: Renée’s name will not disappear. And neither will our outrage. We are building something — together.
That’s the win. Not just that we showed up — but that we are still here. That this moment is turning into a movement. That the fear and heartbreak didn’t push people away — it pulled them closer. People are activated. Awake. But now we need more than presence — we need persistence. We need to turn mourning into momentum. Silence is complicity, and complicity is how authoritarianism grows. The urgency isn’t “someday.” It’s now. If we wait until ICE comes to our community, it’s already too late. We prepare now. We resist now. We build power now.
Everyone who loves this country MUST stand up NOW. Renée’s last words were peace. Her death cannot be met with silence. The win is that everyone CAN DO SOMETHING!