Author: Will Bunch

It’s a good bet that a suburban Cincinnati man named Cody Morelock probably never heard of “Ned Ludd,” the mythical English weaver of the early 1800s who became the avatar of a movement to save society from the destructive force of a new technology.

But Morelock was absolutely channeling the spirit of history’s Luddites, who smashed up the newfangled machines of the nascent Industrial Revolution, when he was allegedly captured on video toppling a Flock automatic license plate reader near his home and obliterating the high-tech device and the solar panel powering it.

Morelock was arrested after the June incident, and then prosecutors in Clermont County, Ohio took what looked like an open-and-shut case — with surveillance tapes, credit card receipts, and other hard evidence connecting the 35-year-old man to the alleged crime — before a grand jury of his peers.

But Morelock’s peers apparently didn’t see a crime in the wanton destruction of a Flock camera spying on their community. The grand jury refused to indict him — another victory for the 21st-century Luddites who’ve turned U.S. politics upside down with their rage against the machines.

Public anger over the dystopia of omnipresent cameras tracking their every movement has caused more than 50 municipalities from coast to coast to cancel or reject contracts between local law enforcement and Georgia-based Flock Safety, the leading firm.

But that’s just the tip of a political iceberg: What’s becoming a mass movement against Big Tech’s intrusiveness in our everyday lives has also seen activists in scores of communities beat back proposed data centers that power artificial intelligence, or AI. Suddenly, politicians in both parties are tripping over each other to oppose the advanced technology they were backing just months earlier.

This weekend, I watched an online ad from a former Democratic state representative in Massachusetts running for the Bay State’s open congressional seat. The ad channels voter anger over Flock cameras, citing two local cases of police using them to stalk unsuspecting citizens. She slams an opponent for raising money from Big Tech sources.

With a wicked Boston accent, Jamie Belsito says, “Flock cameras feed our movements into a massive searchable network that we know can be tapped into by ICE, and now — in our own backyards — we see how that power can be abused.”

The uprising against Flock and government mass surveillance is merging with the already explosive movement against new data centers, which now sees a whopping 75% of Americans opposed to building one in their hometown — a kind of unity that in today’s bitterly divided nation you wouldn’t even see for cuddly puppies or ice cream sundaes.

Here in Pennsylvania, which has become an epicenter of proposed data centers, a recent analysis by Spotlight PA found at least 20 state legislative races in November in which these facilities have become a pivotal issue.

A governor’s race that started with both candidates seen as data center advocates now has the GOP’s Stacy Garrity calling for a moratorium as Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro — who in 2025 posed in front of earth movers to hail AI complexes as the Keystone State’s bright economic future — issued stringent new regulations while calling data centers “secretive … predators” and “bullies.”

Did I mention that Shapiro is seriously considering running for president in 2028? Did I need to?

Even right-wing and zealously pro-business red-state Republican governors like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have turned sharply against data centers this year.

It seems like the only U.S. politician with anything nice to say about these energy-sucking, polluting behemoths is Donald Trump, who told reporters last week, “If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in, an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous and the money paid, the taxes paid, are just enormous.”

You don’t need Kalshi to bet that dozens of Democrats will feature Trump’s toxic words in their fall campaign ads.

In the 21st century, the most exciting moments are the ones the TV pundits — who have more in common with their political drinking buddies or the cartoon villains of Silicon Valley than heartland voters — never saw coming. That list includes the progressive upheavals of 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, arguably a reaction not just to the Great Recession but Barack Obama’s tepid response, or 2017’s #MeToo movement after a man with multiple sexual misconduct allegations was elected president.

But then Trump’s two terms, including his popular vote plurality in 2024, were also arguably the result of public fury at elites, even if a big chunk of that anger was against the ones calling out racism or sexism or homophobia. It’s worth noting, of course, that the progressive revolts, especially 2020’s Black Lives Matter marches, sparked intense backlash, yet Trump’s MAGA movement now seems in full meltdown.

In one sense, the ability of billionaires and their endless money and their reactionary political allies to put down 21st-century unrest feels like a callback to the Luddites, whose revolution against the new machines changing the landscape of northern England in the early 19th century was also crushed, often violently, by the powers that be.

But Fred Hampton famously said, “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution,” and the radical spirit of the Luddites continued to fuel pro-worker and pro-human rights movements for two centuries. On the whole, the Industrial Revolution won, but in 2026, revulsion over the way Silicon Valley — and especially AI — is changing our daily lives so quickly feels as if things could turn out differently.

This moment was captured in a recent cartoon that roughly depicted George Jetson — whose world of flying cars was the future my generation of boomers was promised in the 1960s — doing the drudge work of vacuuming while Rosie the robot paints at an easel. Robots were supposed to free us to create beautiful music or write the great American novel in our leisure time, not do those things, as well.

To live in America in 2026 is to experience the constant anxiety of being watched by the government or big corporations — whether that’s on our phone or on the streets — and wondering when people stopped reading books, or whether that song was by a real person, or whether that video you just watched of the president (or from the president) is even real.

This weekend came news of an actual event in China called the World Humanoid Robot Games in which one of the robots shattered Usain Bolt’s world record for the 100-meter dash. Who wants this? … other than a handful of billionaires who are also rapidly building their own remote high-tech cities to save themselves from the looming torches and pitchforks.

They are going to need them. It was one thing when the Luddites trashed automated textile looms, when the meaning of work was up for grabs. That same threat is also posed by AI, which is starting to drag down the job market, but when robots take over track and field or pop music, people see that our fundamental humanity is under attack. That realization seems to have really kicked in this summer, and the future of our revolution is both exhilarating and somewhat scary.

Acts of vandalism — like the Ohio attack on the Flock camera — or worse are becoming somewhat more commonplace. Acts of violence — like the gunshots fired into the home of an Indianapolis city council member who supported data centers — are reprehensible and not helpful to the larger cause. In the present moment, there is rising hope that AI can be reined in the right way: at the ballot box.

When it comes to this issue, the ground beneath our feet may continue to keep shifting between now and Election Day. An article in Sunday’s New York Times described how the politics of data centers has scrambled a midterm election that was supposed to hinge on high gas prices and the growing threats to democracy. The piece noted that in Wisconsin and Florida — as well as Pennsylvania — the gubernatorial candidates from both major parties are now attacking the high-tech facilities.

Yet, it’s hard to jibe the politicians’ embrace of populism with news that the AI industry and its related political action committees will spend as much as $200 million on the November elections. What will happen in 2027 and beyond if, and likely when, the American body politic doesn’t have the strength to slow down these sprinting robots? Will Morelock’s alleged destruction of one Flock camera seem like child’s play?

The story of America in the 21st century has been a tale of widespread consensus that a grossly unequal and unfair nation is on the wrong track, yet bitter disagreement over whom to blame. Until now. The fight that no one saw coming — pitting everyday folks against billionaires and their robots, who can already outrun us — is about much more than an election for U.S. Congress. Today’s Luddites may be our best hope.

One of the worst things about Donald Trump’s America in the 2020s — I know, I know, it’s hard to pick — is the return of all the horrible stuff you foolishly thought our flawed nation was done with after the reckonings of the 1970s.

The American quagmire in Iran makes Vietnam look practically wise in comparison. Then it came out last week that the government was spying in Minnesota on what should be constitutionally protected protest activity by labor unions or environmental groups, in a callback to the notorious illegal FBI op known as COINTELPRO.

Oh, and the CIA is murdering* people in Latin America again.

The asterisk is for “allegedly,” based on a report last week in the Washington Post that confirmed growing suspicions about mysterious drone attacks last winter by “gringos” that struck at least three fishing boats that had sailed deep into Pacific Ocean waters from an impoverished coastal village in Ecuador.

One of the fishing vessels remains missing, its eight crew members presumed dead. The survivors of the other attacks remain traumatized from their injuries and their subsequent interrogation by men who wore no military uniforms — but had U.S. flag patches and spoke with American accents.

In March, the crew of the Negra Francisca Duarte II was returning to its Ecuadorian port in Manta with a fresh catch of seafood and, its sailors insist, no illegal drugs when it noticed a blue ship was trailing it on the horizon. Moments later, drones flew over the fishing craft and began dropping explosives.

“The boys were there, hurt and scared. Some got a fire extinguisher to try to put out the fire, but there were too many flames,” the captain of the Negra Francisca, Hernán Flores, told the New York Times, which published the first U.S. media account of the mysterious attack. Flores said injured sailors jumped into the ocean or scrambled onto lifeboats, and all were at first relieved when the blue boat arrived to rescue them.

Instead, according to the Times and other accounts, their ordeal was only beginning. The survivors were bound, hooded, and interrogated by the strange English speakers, who offered no medical treatment for their wounds. The boat headed north and transferred the crew members into custody in El Salvador, where officials soon released them — not charged with any crime, after the attack that nearly killed them.

The initial Times article did not confirm whom the men were working for, but it noted extensive data showing how each of the three attacked fishing boats had been tracked by a maritime patrol plane that was registered to a UPS mailbox in Richmond, Va., and flew from Tennessee to a military airstrip in El Salvador in November.

After the Times wrote about the three mystery boat attacks, the Post followed up with a report that the attacks were a special covert operation conducted by the CIA. These secret strikes have amplified a series of publicly acknowledged boat attacks in both the Pacific and the Caribbean by the U.S. military that have now killed more than 220 people since Trump returned to the White House 19 months ago.

Last week’s news reports built upon research and more than 100 interviews by the group Human Rights Watch, which is troubled by the lack of both legality and morality in a partnership forged between the United States and Ecuador. This includes not only the three boat attacks but a land assault against a farm near the border with Colombia, which also found no drugs, but in which farmers said they were tortured by the Ecuadorian military.

“The two countries’ security relationship is deepening at a moment when both governments have engaged in serious human rights violations fueled by their insistence on framing their confrontations with organized crime groups as a kind of war,” the rights group wrote.

It’s no secret that drug cartels have enlisted some fishing boats — sometimes through desperation to boost their meager income, but often through extortion — to aid their smuggling operations out of South and Central America.

But these alleged CIA drone strikes raise stark questions about the Trump regime’s strategy that is literally shoot first, ask questions later. Why are some sailors executed at sea when there’s not even evidence to charge the survivors with a crime? Even if some of these boats are tied to narcotics trafficking, what’s the legal and moral justification for a death sentence for low-level drug offenses?

There’s also this: What are these extrajudicial killings even accomplishing, beyond cementing the image around the world that Trump is running a violent criminal enterprise? The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has assessed that — some 230 or so lost human lives later — these U.S. boat attacks have had zero impact on reducing the flow of cocaine into the United States. That’s in part because most drugs that come into the United States by sea pass through larger commercial ports, not small fishing villages.

Instead, the biggest impact from the military drone strikes has been the series of so-called snuff videos that either Trump or Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has posted to social media platforms showing boats in gentle tropical waters getting blown to smithereens, in shock and awe tribute to their regime’s power to kill with impunity. But the secret, allegedly CIA attacks are not even that.

What is even the point of this cruelty?

I’m writing this column to honor the on-the-ground courage of Human Rights Watch and amplify the excellent journalism of Times and Post reporters — and because I’m furious that this story has drawn so little attention, and even less outrage.

Deep into the second year of Trump’s strongman second presidency, the news media is overwhelmed by the Caligula-like craziness of his regime and its fights over matters as small as a ballroom and as big as the Strait of Hormuz, not to mention the frequent weather disasters made worse by the climate crisis the president believes is a hoax. Some maimed or missing fishermen in a tiny village on the bottom side of the planet aren’t making the cut.

Which is probably exactly what the regime is going for. Trump and his MAGA minions would like nothing more than to numb you, me, and the rest of us to their growing archipelago of death, a bloodstained map that stretches from the icy streets of Minneapolis to a dingy detention site in Newark, N.J., and from a bomb-blasted island off Iran to the sickbeds in an African refugee camp. They want us to feel numb as their authoritarian death cult expands, and we cannot allow that to happen.

The truth is that the United States will remain a global pariah — a pitiful, helpless giant — as long as there is no accountability for these war crimes, including, or perhaps especially, the terror perpetrated by mystery men with American flag patches on the high seas. That means public hearings, trials, prison sentences, and the kind of truth and reconciliation this nation has not seen before.

Certainly the fishermen of Manta, Ecuador, will never forget the horrors that rained down upon them from a clear Pacific sky.

Simon Villacreses, a 52-year-old crew member of the Negra Francisca Duarte II, told Reuters that he suffered a head injury in the assault, and remains traumatized months later. “They started pointing guns at us. They took us aboard, put hoods over our heads and tied ​our hands behind our backs,” he said of the “gringos.”

The rattled Villacreses has not been back to sea since, telling the reporter, “Maybe I’ve given up fishing for good.” His livelihood has been destroyed by the criminal enterprise run out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Our outrage is not enough. We need to be relentless in the pursuit of justice.

There is one war Donald Trump is actually winning — unfortunately.

Clearly it’s not the ongoing fiasco in the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump and his MAGA culture warriors keep gaining new territory here at home in their all-out assault on knowledge, with America’s college campuses as the prime battleground.

The Trump regime is fighting to destroy liberal arts education in America, and this summer it opened a new front in the campaign to make going to college all about the narrow pathway to a job in a robot-driven economy — and little more.

A little-publicized new rule published last month by Trump’s Department of Education aims to end student loans to young people who major in fields that lead to jobs with below-average incomes. The rule won’t take effect until next year, and there remain real questions about how it might work and which programs would be most affected. But some experts are worried that training for essential jobs like social work or teaching will be harmed.

“I’m happy for an MBA to pay back every penny they borrowed,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and a former college president and education policymaker in the Barack Obama administration, told me last week. “But social workers and teachers shouldn’t be submitted to the same logic.” In other words, some jobs are more valuable to a healthy society than the dollar value we assign them.

Still, education experts who are critical of the Trump regime over many other policies say there could also be some good to come out of student loan reform, since the rule is likely to most heavily impact for-profit institutions, especially those that have abused the system to saddle young people with high debt and poor job prospects.

But Roosevelt Montás, who leads the Chang Chavkin Center for Liberal Education and Civic Life at Bard College, said the positive benefits of going after for-profit college scandals need to be weighed against the broader harm to the idea that a liberal education will give students more than a return-on-investment balance sheet.

Montás called the student loan rule “an example of how the Trump administration has found areas that, in fact, deserve criticism and require reform in higher education, and he has used these as a tool to destroy and weaken the system.”

This month, most of the nearly 20 million university students in the United States are drifting back to campus to begin a new academic year — with broad agreement across the political spectrum that American higher education is in crisis.

Undergraduate enrollment actually peaked in 2010, when that era’s economic crisis was at its nadir, and has declined gradually in most years since. Public trust in higher education — as with other large institutions — has plummeted even more steeply. You could write a book about how college access, the insane cost of tuition, and resentment between educational haves and have-nots drive our deep, bitter political divide.

The Trump regime is not letting this crisis go to waste. Ignoring the real roots of the problem — the steady privatization of getting a college degree since the 1970s — the MAGA government has been following the Project 2025 blueprint for waging an ideological war on campuses it sees as breeding grounds for future liberals.

The student loan rule is just the latest onslaught. In recent weeks, a White House policy paper mapped out a massive shift of as much as $200 billion away from grants for basic science on university campuses and toward work on artificial intelligence, or AI, with private companies competing for those dollars.

Meanwhile, a surprising number of universities — rather than fighting the Trump agenda — are saying they’ll sign onto a so-called reform agenda that merges some broadly popular measures, such as reducing tuition, with right-wing wish-list items like more conservative faculty, ending efforts to boost enrollment numbers for students of color, and cracking down on protests. This builds on the regime’s push to end campus diversity programs.

This overlap of societal and governmental crises has fallen hardest on small liberal arts colleges — some, like the experimental, born-of-the-1960s Hampshire College, have announced plans to close altogether — as have some degree programs in the humanities at larger schools, which have seen layoffs or even elimination.

“I think we’re at a real moment of crisis,” Montás said, noting that programs in the humanities and some social sciences were already weakened by downward enrollment trends and by ideological controversies even before the Trump regime targeted them. “These have energized questions about the value and cost of education. This combination of factors is proving deadly.”

But while the headlines tend to focus on campus closings or the latest faculty layoffs, the bigger story is the government’s push to radically reform the role that higher education plays in a healthy democracy.

In what we now clearly see as a golden age of U.S. college from the late 1940s into the ‘70s — when tuition was generally low, and enrollment was skyrocketing — advocates saw more diplomas as a way both to populate a new “knowledge economy” and also mold better citizens who’d be less likely to start World War III. Majors like English literature, philosophy, and sociology soared — as did the inclination to question authority in the fraught era of civil rights and the Vietnam War.

That last part, arguably, is what triggered a 60-years-and-counting conservative backlash that is currently maxing out under Trump. His regime doesn’t want to wreck college altogether — white dude-bros still need their keg parties, after all — as long as the ultimate outcome is creating worker drones, not critical thinkers.

The seeds exist for a backlash that might swing the pendulum back to where it was around 1965, but no one has really planted them. Instead of fighting the destruction of liberal education as a true opposition party, far too many Democrats have instead complied — insisting they support colleges, but only because they create jobs.

“Every student should have access to an education that aligns with industry demands and evolves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s global workforce” is a quote that sounds like it was ripped from Project 2025, but it was posted in 2022 by Joe Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona. Democratic governors like Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro spend more time touting trade school than talking about expanding opportunities for four-year bachelor’s degrees.

I’d argue that these politicos are misreading the current zeitgeist. There’s growing alarm these days about students no longer reading books in school (or anywhere), about how smartphones are crimping kids’ ability to communicate and grow, and about how little young people learn about how our government works. These anxieties have only metastasized with the rapid growth of AI.

Increasingly, politicians who last year were raving about the economic development possibilities of AI data centers are furiously backpedaling in the face of a full-on public revolt. While a lot of the backlash is driven by issues such as noise pollution or higher electric bills, the public unrest also reflects a more cosmic concern: Do we really want robots not only taking our jobs and making our art but thinking for us, too?

It’s easy for a politician to be against something, like a data center. But who is going to fight for something, like the humanities? The headline of this column about Democrats making a demand for more English lit majors into a political rallying cry was somewhat facetious — but should it be? Real leadership would mean fighting to give more young people more opportunities to flourish as creators and thinkers, without being terrified the other side will call you an “elitist.”

Mitchell said he’d like to see an expansion of federal loan forgiveness programs for graduates who go into public service careers like social work or teaching — perhaps on the state level — as part of a much broader return of the vanishing idea that higher education can be a public good.

Both Montás and Mitchell also advocated for college programs that would better integrate both career skills training and wider education in the liberal arts and civics. Mitchell touted, for example, a new program at the University of Texas which — working with the online learning company Coursera, where he is a board member — allows students to earn career-readiness certificates on their transcript even as they also pursue a major in the humanities.

Montás said his new center at Bard is part of a burgeoning national movement to grow general education programs within universities that promote classroom discussion through a heavy emphasis on what some call “the great books” of modern civilization. Advocates seek a core curriculum that would promote critical thinking and discourse beyond career-focused majors such as business or engineering. It would be, Montás said, “a return to approaches and conceptions of liberal education that are traditional — an emphasis on great books, an emphasis on character, an emphasis on civic education.”

The 2026 campaigns for Congress are well underway, and while you’ll hear a lot about vital issues like expanding access to healthcare or lowering gas prices, hardly anyone is running on bringing books back into the classroom or saving the humanities major. That feels like a big mistake. When there is a war against the very notion of higher education, somebody needs to be fighting back.

Ooh, that smell

Can’t you smell that smell?

Ooh, that smell

The smell of death surrounds you

— Lynyrd Skynyrd, “That Smell”

The United States government might wash its hands of any responsibility for the more than 700,000 human beings who’ve been deported since Donald Trump returned to the White House some 18 months ago, but it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to determine who’s to blame for the blood stains that have been left behind.

Last month, police outside the city of Retalhuleu in southwestern Guatemala found Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, 43, and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, dead in a sugar cane field. They’d been bound, gagged, and then executed by gunshots, with their 14-month-old daughter crying next to her mother’s lifeless body.

When Trump took office in January 2025, the couple was living in a suburb of St. Louis — working essential jobs and raising their three daughters while seeking to become legal residents of a country that had offered refuge from rampant crime and poverty back home in Guatemala.

The dream turned into a nightmare with one traffic stop in April 2025, as Pérez Paz was driving to work. Although a subsequent NPR investigation found just one permanent mark on his record — a paid $200 fine for driving without a license — Pérez Paz was swiftly deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). González de la Cruz had an active asylum application, but after struggling to support her kids while working two jobs, she decided to return home voluntarily.

The couple was murdered only weeks after they reunited in Guatemala.

“If immigration hadn’t picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn’t be going through this sorrow,” the dead man’s brother, Ronaldo Pérez Paz, told People magazine. “Unfortunately, immigration — the [U.S.] government — doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

No, it doesn’t. Nor did anyone with that government see the humanity of Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian asylum-seeker with a history of mental health struggles. She ended up in immigration custody after an arrest and was dumped by ICE agents at a Pittsburgh bus stop wearing summer clothes during a brutal February cold snap. She was found dead three days later, and a medical examiner has ruled that Michel’s death was a homicide.

“I believe that we need to observe all our brothers and sisters as neighbors,” Jaime Martinez of the Pittsburgh immigrant rights group Frontline Dignity told the Guardian, invoking the golden rule that was shattered by Trump’s cruelty-is-the-point regime.

The smell of death permeates the so-called brain trust of American militarism that decided back in February — for reasons still unfathomable — to bomb Iran back into the Stone Ages, in an on-again, off-again campaign in which it seems the collateral damage is the point.

Last week, according to a deep analysis by the New York Times, U.S. forces dropped a massive, 2,000-pound bomb in the middle of a dense residential neighborhood on Iran’s Qeshm Island along the contested Strait of Hormuz, pulverizing a family’s home.

The 3:40 a.m. blast killed Zahra Jafari, her husband, Qeysar Jafari, a taxi driver, and their son Sina, according to Iranian news agencies, who said two other children were rescued alive from the rubble.

Less than halfway through Trump’s second presidency, his strongman rule is increasingly becoming a death cult. The stench of immoral indifference to the humanity of anyone not part of the MAGA movement is spreading as fast as the COVID-19 virus that helped bring an end to Trump’s disastrous first presidency.

I realize I’ve probably overused my lifetime quota for invoking one of the greatest four minutes of filmmaking I’ve ever seen, but yet again I am reminded of Martin Scorsese’s brilliant montage in Goodfellas as dead bodies pile up in parked Cadillacs or on freezer-truck meat hooks in the wake of a huge armored-car heist. It’s a testament to the greed, brutality, and senseless violence of the mob life.

Today, I can’t help but hear the mournful piano coda from “Layla” as I watch the corpses of Trump’s recklessly lethal rule wash up on Caribbean beaches near the driftwood of their obliterated fishing boats, or inside the bombed sanctuary of an Iranian girls’ school, or from medical neglect inside ICE’s growing gulag archipelago.

The nattering nabobs who scoff at the notion that the United States — whose president on Saturday posted an AI photo of him kissing Jesus on a golden cross wrapped in the American flag — has sunk into fascism because there are no Auschwitz-style death camps just don’t get it.

Whether it’s ICE agents firing bullets into an immigrant’s car, or deportation flights that dump their passengers back into the gang violence they thought they’d escaped, or ending the programs that saved millions of kids in Africa from malaria, the Trump body count is already into the thousands, and it grows every day of his warped presidency.

The statistics matter, but you can’t put a number on the rank immorality of an utter disregard for whether people who don’t look like you live or die. Whatever the Trump death toll turns out to be, this stain on the American soul is never coming out.

There are rings of death in Donald Trump’s America. There are the direct attacks that jolt the conscience — the notorious fatal shootings by immigration agents of immigrants such as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero and protesters such as Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the pointless wars that bombed the Iranian school in Minab or an apartment building in Venezuela, and the boat attacks on vaguely alleged smugglers off South America that have killed more than 200.

But there’s also an outer band of gross neglect or indifference to human life that has led to scores of additional deaths, including the more than 50 people — some who’d complained of medical conditions that were ignored — who’ve died in ICE custody since Trump returned to office, or the unknown number who’d faced murder or poor medical care after deportation to the trouble-laden nations they’d tried to escape.

Then there’s the biggest — and most abstract — ring of all. It’s difficult to agree on an exact count, let alone bring accountability, for what researchers say is a wave of death — 600,000 people, mostly children, according to one Boston University study — that has resulted from the decimation of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). And what will become of the domestic surge of preventable diseases such as measles under a government whose top health official is a notorious critic of vaccines? At what point does bad policy become depraved indifference?

Death is contagious. In Ecuador, prosecutor Alexandra Bravo was investigating the U.S. drone strikes that destroyed three of her homeland’s fishing boats when a gunman on a motorcycle assassinated her and her sister. There’s no evidence that the United States has any direct responsibility for her death, but there’s every reason to believe she’d still be alive if this Trumpian death cult had not destabilized the planet.

The MAGA movement thrives on a brand of white supremacy that pumps up its adherents by dehumanizing everyone around them. And when people are stripped of their humanity, the Ten Commandments seem to no longer apply to their tormentors. It’s hard to reach Trump’s promised goal of one million deportations every year unless the deportees are just a number — not a mom, or a dad, or a cherished neighbor.

A bad president can be replaced every four years. A killing spree screams out for immediate action. We need to take whatever steps are possible right now to stop this rogue government before tomorrow’s headline about the next Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz or Daphy Michel.

The stench of death has already become unbearable.