2026-01-30 02:14:05
While the country was still reeling on Wednesday from the killing of two Americans by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the Trump administration undertook one of its most blatantly authoritarian actions yet, deploying the FBI to seize ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a heavily blue area in metro Atlanta that has been an epicenter of the president’s conspiracy theories about the election he lost. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump vowed in Davos last week. Fulton County appears to be the newest victim of Trump’s long-running retribution campaign.
The raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago. The capture of ballots in a large urban county in a key swing state is exactly what Trump contemplated when he tried to overturn the 2020 election—federalizing the National Guard to seize voting machines, something he now says he regrets not doing—and sets a chilling precedent for how his administration might interfere in the midterms should Republicans lose the House, Senate, or key state races.
“If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote.”
“The administration is using Fulton County as a blueprint to see what they can get away with elsewhere,” said Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director of All Voting is Local, a pro-democracy group. “If they’re allowed to take ballots here, then what would stop them from seizing ballots or voting machines in any future election in a county or state where their preferred candidates lose?”
In the past week, the different tactics the administration could use to interfere in the midterms have come into sharp focus. The Fulton County raid came just days after Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota hand over its full, unredacted voter roll to the Department of Justice as a way to “bring an end to the chaos in Minnesota,” which Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon denounced as “an apparent ransom to pay for our state’s peace and security.”
On the multiple fronts, the administration is weaponizing the power of law enforcement, from the FBI to ICE to the DOJ, to target blue states and counties and coerce them into taking actions that benefit the administration and punish those who don’t comply.
“To make release of the voter rolls a condition for ICE withdrawing from the state in Minnesota demonstrates this is really about power and control,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me on Thursday. “The federal government is trying to impose its will on the states. It signals what they’ve already indicated, which is they want more control over the 2026 election.”
Bellows has experienced the administration’s strong-arm tactics firsthand. Maine was one of the first states the DOJ sued to demand access to its full, unredacted voter roll, which Bellows has strenuously refused to turn over. More recently, ICE launched a large-scale operation in the state last week, which led to more than 200 arrests. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who faces a tough re-election this year, claimed on Thursday that ICE had “ceased its enhanced operations” in the state.
“A cynical view of why they’ve exited Maine is concerns that the backlash might topple Susan Collins and cost them a majority in the US Senate,” Bellows responded.
She described the ICE raids in the state as “violent and chaotic” and said she worried that ICE operations targeting blue states could depress voter turnout in November. “If people are afraid to leave their homes to go to work or school or get groceries, they’re definitely going to be afraid to leave their homes to vote,” Bellows said.
She noted that Maine has a special election for the state House of Representatives underway right now in Lewiston, which has a sizeable Somali community that has been targeted by ICE, and has been urging people that are afraid to go to the polls to cast absentee ballots instead.
Bellows sees a connection between the DOJ’s demands for state voter rolls, ICE operations in Minnesota and Maine, and the seizure of ballots in Fulton County.
“They seem intent on trying to influence the outcome of 2026,” she says, “because they fear accountability by the voters.”
2026-01-29 22:00:00
As the Trump administration continues to violently occupy Minnesota, the role of the defense tech firm Palantir—which continues to sell its data mining, automation, and surveillance technology to ICE—is coming under increasing scrutiny. A new tool, launched Thursday, follows the money making it happen.
Palantir Payroll, the product of an effort by the campaign Purge Palantir, compiles data from FEC filings to account for the two-way cash flow: from the government to Palantir via contracts, and from company executives to elected officials.
The campaign’s Jacinta González, head of programs at the progressive communications shop MediaJustice, says the tool helps bring to light Palantir’s business model to “operate in the shadows” through lobbying and political donations.
Palantir makes roughly half of its revenue through government sales, including a $30 million deal last April to build an “Immigration OS” to facilitate ICE’s “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,” according to the Washington Post.
According to internal communications reviewed by WIRED, Palantir then began a six-month pilot supporting ICE in three major areas: “Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting,” “Self-Deportation Tracking,” and “Immigration Lifecycle Operations focused on logistics planning and execution.” The program was renewed in September for an additional six-month period.
Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that Palantir is working on a tool for ICE that “populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address.” The tool reportedly obtains many target addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services—the White House granted ICE access to data on Medicaid enrollees last summer.
González has been organizing against immigrant detentions and deportations since the George W. Bush administration, under which ICE was founded; she says she’s seen over time how ICE adopted surveillance technology and data, and that Palantir Payroll “gives us the clarity to be able to demand something different.”
There are other valuable kinds of collective action around ICE’s suppliers, González says—she has seen students kicking out technology corporations holding recruiting events on campus and organizing at investor briefings within the financial sector—but even fundamental information about those firms’ funding and relationships with ICE can fly under the radar.
In fact, as a Monday report in Wired notes, Palantir’s own employees—some of whom are openly disturbed by the firm’s ICE collaboration—rely on outside news reports for information on their employer’s practices. CTO Akash Jain reportedly responded to one query about Palantir’s work with ICE by saying that the company does “not take the position of policing the use of our platform for every workflow.”
That attitude defines the company’s leadership. As Sophie Hurwitz wrote in Mother Jones last February, CEO Alex Karp said on an investor call following stock price surges that the company “is here to disrupt…and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” Since Palantir’s founding in 2003—the same year as ICE—by Karp and right-wing megadonor Peter Thiel, its tech has also reportedly been used to help make “kill lists” for the Israel Defense Forces.
González says that successive governments, Democrats included, have let the Palantir-DHS relationship grow entrenched: Since 2013, Palantir has provided ICE with the systems it currently uses to look through people’s information through a network of federally and privately-owned databases.
Elected officials, meanwhile, continue to take Palantir’s money. The top six Palantir-funded politicians—via the company’s corporate PAC or individual contributors employed there—are Donald Trump, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.)
The campaign includes a pledge for elected officials to commit to refusing Palantir-linked donations in the lead-up to the midterm elections.
“The only way that we’re able to win against a company that has as much power and influence as Palantir, is if as many people get involved as possible,” she said.
2026-01-29 20:30:00
In the weeks since an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Good, an unarmed US citizen and mother of three young children, federal officers have met protesters in Minneapolis with a tunnel vision of violence. These men have smashed car windows. Tear-gassed kids. Hauled off screaming women on their way to the doctor. Went door to door, carrying guns, asking neighbors about where to find “the Asian” families.
Last weekend, predictably, federal agents again shot and killed someone.
The Trump administration may be starting to show small signs of regret after its lies about Alex Pretti’s killing proved too much for Americans. But make no mistake: The wind-down is about quelling a PR crisis amid tanking poll numbers—not regret for their terrorist-like behavior. President Trump and his inner circle still insist that rounding people up and crushing dissidents brings peace to American cities besieged by the assault of having an immigrant community. In fact, some, like Steve Bannon, are calling for further escalation. “If you blink in Minneapolis, you’ll never make it to Detroit, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, to New York,” Bannon said on his podcast, the aptly titled War Room, on Monday. “[Trump must] put the insurgency down immediately.”
Agents dress for the war they want. They march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.
The pretext of this war, of course, has always been a bogus premise. Yet federal agents treat it with the dogma of settled fact. But I keep wondering: How does the average CBP or ICE agent convince themselves of this? Even now, I can’t help shake the absurdity of anyone—Trump, Greg Bovino, whomever—hoping to convince a thinking person, even themselves, to believe that places like Minneapolis have ever required an armed occupation. It’s against this genuine perplexity that I keep coming back to how these officers look and what mirrors might reflect back to them when they dress up for war.
“Anybody who’s had a fun evening on Halloween can understand what happens when somebody fully dresses up in paramilitary gear with flash bang grenades hanging off of them,” Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University, said. “They’re going to walk out in public and say to themselves, ‘I am different from all these people.’ They become the enforcer. And when they look out and see the other, they see an enemy. The [paramilitary gear] gets them to react differently and think differently than they normally would.”
The role of military-style uniforms in helping the Trump administration create a theater of war where none exists cannot be overstated. It marks a stark evolution from the early days of Trump’s mass deportation plans, when plainclothed agents looked a lot like your best friend’s worst boyfriend—the guy who moved to rural Pennsylvania and discovered the basement levels of gun culture. Now, agents march into town in the costume of a foreign invasion.
Consider the camouflage now ubiquitous across the cities ICE occupies. At first, the pattern’s technical science might seem like a natural extension of the Trump administration’s increasingly illegal efforts to shield the identities of the men carrying out its vision of cruelty. But the theory breaks down when you look at the urban landscapes where ICE hunts down immigrants. Simply put, wearing camo in places like Lake Street or Hyde Park defies its central aim. If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection, ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility. They want to show they are soldiers. And they want to do so to make it seem reasonable, if only to themselves, to act like an invading army.
When I reached out to the Department of Homeland Security about the use of military gear among ICE agents, spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin responded with her own question: “Why do ICE agents wear tactical gear when they are facing rampant assaults and vehicular attacks? Is that the question you’re asking?” No, not really. But the snark with which McLaughlin replied was enough to grasp that questioning why DHS employs camo when lush woodlands do not exist in the cities they invade was irrelevant. They are dressing for the war they want.
These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood type patches, despite little evidence that they would ever be needed.
What other way was there to interpret the coat of the former envoy of terror, Greg Bovino? The commentariat spent much time deliberating its lineage, whether or not Bovino’s hulking olive garb was in fact true Nazi-wear. (It turns out it was not.) But in roaming around Minneapolis in the fashions of Hugo Boss circa 1933, Bovino, who reportedly travels with his own film crew, succeeded in pushing the optics of war where it does not exist.
“What you’re seeing is the functionality of gear for legitimate, militarized purposes versus a type of postmodern, performative imagery,” Kraska said. “It makes them feel a particular way, to tap into those warrior fantasies and masculine drive of, ‘I’m a real man. I’m a real badass.'”
The same holds for the men under Bovino. These are federal agents who wear hats intended for jungle warfare—again, in Minneapolis, where no such jungle exists—as well as blood type patches, despite little evidence that it would ever be needed. After all, they are in Minneapolis, an American city with American hospitals, where doctors provide blood transfusions without the help of uniform instructions, the way a soldier on a remote battlefield might actually need. Furthermore, ICE’s own data strongly undercuts the notion that the job of an ICE officer is even uniquely dangerous work. In the absence of peril, federal agents turn to costume to legitimize their presence.
Above in their hotel rooms, federal agents return to their dead mall aesthetics to once again demonstrate “the paradox of this fascist movement.”
“This administration sees all of that as a benefit,” journalist Radley Balko, who writes the criminal justice newsletter The Watch, wrote over email. “They want to terrorize immigrant communities. They want to be seen as an occupying force. They’ve been clear about this. They want to make immigrant communities so fearful that they’ll self-deport, and they’ll tell others to stop coming here. Making immigration officers as scary and intimidating as possible is part of the strategy.”
The result has been a mix of violence and lethality at the hands of federal officials. But as Adam Serwer writes in the Atlantic, MAGA’s imagination of Trump’s men as warrior-like figures belies the fear behind their body armor. It also seeks to conceal the ham-fisted follies that have been paired with their false pretexts of war: jacked-up men in military gear falling on their asses; inebriated ICE agents threatening immigration checks on sheriffs who catch them drunk driving; ICE officers, some resembling the “overweight” men Pete Hegseth complains about, failing to arrest a delivery worker as he shouts, “I’m not a US citizen!” Above in their hotel rooms, federal agents return to their dead mall aesthetics to once again demonstrate what Kraska describes as “the paradox of this fascist movement.”
“Yes, it’s being run by incompetent buffoons,” Kraska told me. “This all seems like silly, immature, B-league stuff. But at the same time, it’s just as dangerous as any movement we’ve seen.”
You can see the same “badass” theatrics play out in DHS’s social accounts, where videos of immigrant arrests “flood the airwaves” and are celebrated to thumping music. Some are viewed by millions; others are shared by the president of the United States. So an uncomfortable question emerges: Does ICE roam the streets hoping to be featured in such videos? It certainly seems that way. A report from the Washington Post showed the DHS social media team eagerly hoping to go viral from arrests.
If camo’s built-in purpose is to avoid detection. ICE’s embrace of it is the opposite: They want maximum visibility.
The same theatrical throughline exists all the way up to Kristi Noem, who, despite a resume completely devoid of any law enforcement background, landed a job as Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary. What Noem did have, as I wrote in March, was the seemingly altered face for the job. It’s all about content.
It strikes as ironic, then, that cameras have emerged as one of the most powerful means to resist ICE’s violent tactics. Wielded by protesters, these devices have been critical in dismantling the Trump administration’s lies about the people they fatally shoot. If it is a war—an invasion!—then the administration said it could do whatever it wanted. It could separate families; it could hunt down immigrants. Well, maybe the opposite is true. Maybe dressing up like soldiers and beating up everyday people, when filmed, looks bad. For an administration so obsessed with content, they forgot that, at some point, backlash tends to follow those who go viral.
2026-01-29 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
A recent, non-binding opinion from the Government Accountability Office may pave the way for Congress to begin rescinding management plans for national monuments across the country, environmentalists and experts say, potentially leading to protected areas being further opened up for resource extraction. And Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah is yet again at the center of the renewed threats to the nation’s monuments.
Designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and spanning 1.9 million acres of public land, it protects scores of wildlife, archeological resources, and sacred sites for local tribes. Despite vast public support for the monument, Utah Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration for years worked to dismantle and downsize it, with the first Trump administration cutting 900,000 acres from the monument before the Biden administration restored it to its original size.
The monument’s resource management plan, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) opinion finds, must undergo congressional review. Local tribes and environmental groups expect Utah’s congressional delegation to introduce a “resolution of disapproval” in the House of Representatives to overturn the monument’s management plan using the Congressional Review Act—a 1996 law that Congress enacted to overturn certain federal agency actions through a special review process. Then Congress would have 60 days to vote on the matter. If the management plan is rescinded, the CRA requires any new plan to be substantially different from the current one that prioritizes conservation.
“In a place like Grand Staircase, confusion can breed on-the-ground impacts.”
“Utah politicians are at it again, doing whatever they can to erode protections for our public lands,” said Tom Delehanty, senior attorney at Earthjustice, in a statement. “The monument management plan was created by local officials, Tribes, and communities working together to provide certainty in how this national treasure is managed and protected. Now Utah’s elected officials want to flush that effort down the toilet—a situation that benefits no one.”
Downsizing or rescinding national monuments has been a major goal of the Trump administration. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum issued secretarial orders calling for the review of national monuments to determine which should be downsized or eliminated to make way for more resource extraction.
The Department of Justice, at the White House’s request, issued an opinion that the president has the power to review and eliminate national monuments. The Trump administration eliminated the two most recently created national monuments in California, but then walked back that decision.
The administration’s threats to the nation’s national monuments have been met with protests across the country. Polling has shown that presidential use of the Antiquities Act to create national monuments is widely popular, and polling in Utah shows that three-fourths of registered voters support Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Last year, the GAO issued similar opinions regarding resource management plans issued by BLM field offices, which Congress then struck down. But those previous decisions were all for general, multi-use public lands, not national monuments.
Many of the monuments targeted are significant to local tribes.
Steve Bloch, legal director at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said the newest GAO opinion is a major escalation of efforts to upend land management plans, and targets national monuments specifically rather than public lands in general. This month, Congress has extended the use of the CRA to include overturning protections from mining for Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, an unprecedented move to rescind an executive mineral withdrawal to allow a mine to be permitted in the area.
Resource management plans are the blueprint for how the Bureau of Land Management, which manages Grand Staircase, and other land agencies oversee protected lands, he said, guiding everything from how to protect endangered species to where new bathrooms can be built. Unlike other overturned management plans under the CRA, the overarching priority for monuments is protecting resources, he said.
For Grand Staircase, those include preserved fossils, cultural sites and unique biology and geology, Bloch said. Overturning the plan will only lead to confusion. “We know in a place like Grand Staircase, confusion can breed on-the-ground impacts,” he said.
Last June, Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy, a Republican representing the district encompassing Grand Staircase-Escalante and a vocal opponent of the Antiquities Act that allows presidents to designate national monuments, wrote a letter to the GAO requesting its opinion on whether the recently approved management plan for the monument was a formal “rule”—a legally binding decision issued by federal agencies. Management plans issued by the Bureau of Land Management or other land agencies have historically not been viewed as such and have consequently not been subject to the CRA.
But the GAO’s opinion found that a resource management plan is a formal rule because it has a “future effect” on how the land within the monument is managed and has “substantial effect on non-agency parties,” such as limiting cattle grazing, mining, logging and the use of off-highway vehicles in sensitive areas.
Many of the monuments targeted are significant to local tribes, which has been a top consideration in their management. Last year, the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians, the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Zuni Tribe formed the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Inter-Tribal Coalition to advocate for the protection of the monument and help shape how it is managed. The coalition has strongly denounced the GAO’s opinion and has urged members of Congress not to overturn the current resource management plan.
Without a strong plan, the coalition said, the tribes’ ancestral lands and cultural sites will be at risk of looting and degradation.
“Whether it is through the careful stewardship of sacred sites, educating others about our respective cultures, or the deliberations that guide the balance between access and protection, our active participation in these processes reflects our sovereignty and our commitment to a shared future,” said Cassidy K. Morgan, programs and projects specialist with the Navajo Nation Heritage and Historic Preservation Department who is a member of the coalition, in a statement.
“Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument reflects a truth we hold sacred: the land is inseparable from who we are. No matter the complexity of today’s debates, our guiding principle is clear: these places must be protected and honored as part of our shared heritage and as part of the life-giving system of Mother Earth.”
2026-01-29 20:30:00
“Alex Pretti was one of us,” an NIH worker who asked not to be named told me over the phone.
That’s a phrase I’ve been hearing a lot since Saturday, when the 37 year-old Veterans Affairs nurse was assaulted and then fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis.
The circumstances of the killing—called an execution by many observers—has rattled government workers. They’re distraught for the same reason many Americans are. There were numerous witnesses, for one. Donald Trump and his minions Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem thoughtlessly disparaged the victim. Ample video evidence directly contradicted the government’s narrative. And it was the second killing in a month by federal agents in Minneapolis, adding to DHS’s recent death toll—including many more who have died in ICE custody.
But to many federal workers, Pretti also was a colleague. The civil service was generally fragmented prior to Trump’s reelection. But his administration’s ruthless assault on the rights and livelihoods of career government employees has strengthened ties among workers from completely unrelated agencies, who have banded together to organize protests and share resources.
“There’s been so much fear being a federal employee about saying anything, but now the fear is going away.”
“I didn’t know Alex personally, but it does feel like a lot of federal workers right now are standing in solidarity with one another, and have been over the last year,” says Anna Culbertson, a former NIH employee who was terminated in the DOGE onslaught.
It’s not hard for civil servants to imagine what Pretti might have been going through over the past year. “The large majority of us have been suffering a great deal under this administration,” notes Justin Chen, an EPA employee and union president.
The already chronically understaffed VA lost more than 30,000 workers in 2025, about 10 percent of them nurses like Pretti. Those still there “walk around the hallways and it’s doom and gloom,” says Doug Massey, who works at the VA central office and serves as president of his union. He’s seen an uptick this past year in hostile work environment complaints—the animosity fueled by VA Secretary Doug Collins, who has so far said nothing to his staff about Pretti’s death, conciliatory or otherwise.
“That could have been me,” Massey told me, noting how Pretti was killed after he tried to help a woman the amped-up agents had shoved to the ground. “I like to think I’d be someone who stepped in.”
Of course, the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents who shot Pretti were also federal workers. “In theory, these two people should be driven by the same oath, which is to the Constitution,” says Jenna Norton, an NIH employee who was put on administrative leave after criticizing Trump—both then and now she was speaking in her personal capacity.
Under Trump, a chasm has widened between the majority of federal workers and ICE/CBP personnel. While most agencies are scraping by on diminished budgets, Congress promised ICE $75 billion without restriction, and its leaders appear willing to hire just about anyone with very little scrutiny. Immigration enforcement officers spent 2025 in a parallel universe, one with minimal training and $50,000 sign-on bonuses, while other agencies hemorrhaged veteran employees in the name of “government efficiency.”
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest federal workers’ union, has been one of the most vocal entities in combatting the firing of civil servants. But when one of its own was shot to death, the union’s initial statement was rather muted. AFGE leadership acknowledged that Pretti’s unnamed killer might be in the union as well. (It now appears that two CBP agents shot Pretti.) This revelation has led to calls, including from VA workers, for AFGE to ditch CBP on the grounds that the union cannot advocate for its members while representing people who are harming them. “That’s an internal conversation we need to have,” says Chen, whose union chapter, along with Massey’s, is part of AFGE. “Right now, we’re mourning.”
Individual AFGE chapters have made strong statements about Pretti’s death, calling for a response from Collins, and for ICE to leave Minnesota. “There’s been so much fear being a federal employee about saying anything, but now the fear is going away,” Massey says. “It’s being replaced by anger.”
Other federal workers are taking aim at ICE’s funding. A bill headed to a Senate vote on Friday lumps together funding for Health and Human Services (HHS)—which includes the NIH, the CDC, and the FDA—with yet more money for ICE and CBP. Norton and Culbertson were among the current and former HHS employees urging Congress to reject the bill.
“Obviously no one wants the government to shut down, but it’s deciding which is the lesser evil,” says the NIH worker who requested anonymity. “As health care providers, it’s our duty to make sacrifices.”
HHS employees have joined the nation’s largest nurses’ union in calling ICE a public health crisis. “If the administration were so concerned about making America healthy again,” the NIH employee says, “they’d be with us.”
2026-01-29 20:28:00
This article is adapted from Until the Last Gun Is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul (published January 2026 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, all rights reserved).
Dwight “Skip” Johnson, 19, returned home from his shift at a General Motors plant in Detroit one humid June evening in 1966 to find a letter awaiting him. He was to report to the Greyhound bus terminal on East Congress Street the following month for induction into the US military. “Willful failure to report at the place and hour of the day named in this Order subjects the violator to fine and imprisonment,” the letter warned.
More than 8 million Americans served in the armed forces during the Vietnam era, with about 3 million deployed in Southeast Asia, including more than 300,000 Black Americans. For a time, Skip would be among the most well-known. As a tank driver in the 69th Armor Regiment, he earned the Medal of Honor for fighting his way out of an ambush. He was celebrated by politicians and became an Army recruiter, until his life started to unravel. He slept fitfully, beset by nightmares and bleeding ulcers. Out of work, bills started to pill up. “Vietnam Hero Collapses Under Glory Strain,” read the headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after an attempted robbery in Detroit ended Skip’s life in April 1971. Psychiatrists Robert Jay Lifton and Chaim Shatan, who pioneered the study of post-traumatic stress disorder, identified Skip as the first high-profile example of the war’s psychological toll. He came to symbolize the complicated legacy of a generation.
I have been thinking back on Skip’s story—which I recount in my new book about Black soldiers who served in Vietnam—as the Trump White House and its so-called Department of War move to disparage the historical and contemporary military service of Black Americans.
Shortly after taking office, in February 2025, President Donald Trump abruptly fired General Charles “CQ” Brown, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as part of a purge of military leaders who advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. In March, Arlington National Cemetery scrubbed from its website educational materials about the history of Black service members, including the Tuskegee Airmen and even General Colin Powell, the first Black Joint Chiefs chairman. In July, the Army updated its grooming standards to phase out waivers that allowed soldiers diagnosed with Pseudofolliculitis barbae, or ingrown hairs, to grow beards. “Of course, this is racially motivated, there is no tactical reason,” a senior noncommissioned officer told the news site Military.com. The article cited an estimate from the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology that up to 60 percent of Black men have the condition.
With these and other petty moves executed by Pete Hegseth, Trump’s loyalist secretary of “war,” the White House and Pentagon appear strangely determined to undermine, and even erase the evidence of, Black patriotism—not to mention the military’s hard-won reputation as an institution that embraces the talents and capabilities of all Americans.
Such efforts, at a time when the military is struggling to attract eligible recruits, amount to a colossal own goal. In the 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, Black Americans have volunteered and reenlisted at higher rates than the general population. That’s not a talent pool you want to alienate. Per the most recent data available, Black Americans make up almost 14 percent of the civilian population, but 17 percent of active-duty service members across all branches. In the Army, nearly a quarter of all active-duty enlisted personnel are Black—and Black women make up 36 percent of all enlisted women.
Against this backdrop, it is important to recognize individual stories of Black valor and sacrifice, such as Skip Johnson’s. The volunteers who step up today—of all racial and ethnic backgrounds—have much in common with Skip: young, working-class men and women from Rust Belt cities and rural towns, for whom military service offers greater promise than the alternatives.
Back in the summer of 1966, Skip was an 18-year-old who had just graduated from Northwestern High School in Detroit. Like other men his age, he was required to register for the Selective Service. More than 230,000 men ages 18 to 26 had been drafted for military service in 1965, more than double the prior year. Skip knew several guys from his neighborhood who were required to report for duty. He had been anticipating the draft for months, unsure how he would feel when the notice finally arrived. Now, staring at the letter that would change the trajectory of his life, he thought of his mother and younger brother. After his stepfather, a Jamaican immigrant farmworker, was deported a decade earlier, he’d taken on adult responsibilities. His family relied on him, and he liked being relied on. If he were sent to Vietnam, who would take care of them?
He was also scared. Reports of US casualties were everywhere—on the evening news, in magazines, splashed across front pages. What worried him most was how many of the fallen looked like him. The disproportionate number of Black servicemen killed in the early stages of the Vietnam War brought a particular dread.
Early in 1966, the Pentagon released data showing that Black troops made up just under 15 percent of the Army in Vietnam but accounted for more than 18 percent of US military deaths there between 1961 and 1965. At the time, Black people were roughly 11 percent of the population. “Negroes Dying Faster than Whites in Vietnam,” read a headline in the New York Amsterdam News, a leading Black newspaper. “It is not likely to give comfort to Negroes battling to gain equality on the home front,” its editors declared, “to learn that they are being given more than an equal opportunity to die for their country on the battlefield of Vietnam.”
This disparity gave critics of the war new ammunition. They noted that less than 2 percent of local draft board members were Black, and 23 states had no Black board members at all. In Louisiana, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan had led the state’s all-white draft board for a decade, until NAACP protests forced his removal. In Georgia, the chairman of the Atlanta draft board publicly referred to Julian Bond, the civil rights activist and George state representative, as “that nigger,” lamenting, “We sure let him slip through our fingers.”
These draft boards wielded enormous power, including the ability to determine who qualified for draft deferments—with student deferments often based on scores from the Selective Service College Qualification Test. “The draft deferment test brings the circle of racial discrimination full cycle,” argued Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Democratic congressman who represented Harlem. Powell charged that standardized testing favored white, middle-class students. “First, we provide inferior education for Black students. Next, we give them a series of tests which many will flunk because of an inferior education. Then we pack these academic failures off to war.”
Among the Black men already serving, too, there was a growing unease that they were essentially cannon fodder. “I think we’re being killed off,” a Marine private stationed in Dong Ha told the Washington Evening Star in May 1968. “I think we’re being used.”
At the same time, some Black leaders offered more optimistic interpretations of the outsize role Black troops were playing in the war. “I feel good about it,” Lt. Colonel George Shoffer, one of the Army’s highest-ranking Black officers, told the New York Times in March 1968. “Not that I like the bloodshed, but the performance of the Negro in Vietnam tends to offset the fact that the Negro wasn’t considered worthy of being a front-line soldier in other wars.” Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, echoed that sentiment after visiting Vietnam at President Lyndon Johnson’s request. A World War II veteran, Young argued in his newspaper column that “race is irrelevant” in Vietnam and that in “the muck and mire of a war-torn land, colored soldiers fight and die courageously as representatives of all America.”
The numbers seemed to support this notion of Black courage—but also a lack of opportunity back home. In 1966, two-thirds of Black Army soldiers reenlisted when their contracts expired, compared with 20 percent of white soldiers. And in a Harris poll that year, two-thirds of Black respondents believed Black Americans had better chances to advance in the military than in civilian life.
On June 30, 1966, days before Skip was scheduled to report for duty, three soldiers from Fort Hood, Texas, made national headlines by refusing to deploy to Vietnam. The “Fort Hood Three”—Private First Class James Johnson, a Black man from Harlem; Private Dennis Mora, a Puerto Rican from Spanish Harlem; and Private David Samas, the son of Lithuanian and Italian immigrants from California—stood before a bank of reporters and television cameras to read a joint statement.
“We represent in our backgrounds a cross section of the Army and of America,” they began. “We speak as American soldiers. We have been in the Army long enough to know that we are not the only GIs who feel as we do. Large numbers of men in the service either do not understand this war or are against it.”
They condemned the conflict as “unjust, immoral, and illegal” and urged other soldiers to follow their lead. “Contrary to what the Pentagon believes,” they declared, “cannon fodder can talk.”
Their public defiance—which was the first time enlisted men openly refused orders to Vietnam—shocked the military and inspired antiwar activists. Folk singer Pete Seeger wrote a protest song, “Ballad of the Fort Hood Three,” in their honor. They were court-martialed, dishonorably discharged, and sentenced to three years of hard labor.
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara felt like he knew Skip Johnson—even though he had never heard of him. To McNamara, “Skip Johnson” was of a type: one of thousands of young men from poor and working-class backgrounds for whom military service could serve as a lifeline. At a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in New York in August 1966, McNamara announced Project 100,000, a sweeping initiative to induct 100,000 men into the military each year—most of whom had previously failed the Armed Forces Qualification Test.
McNamara cast the project as a fusion of military necessity and social uplift that he framed as an extension of President Johnson’s war on poverty. He declared that tens of thousands of men, “most of them with ‘poverty-encrusted’ backgrounds, would be ‘salvaged’ for military duty.” The program, he claimed, would “rehabilitate the nation’s subterranean poor” and “cure them of the idleness, ignorance, and apathy” that defined their lives.
“The poor of America…can be given an opportunity to serve in their country’s defense,” McNamara said, “and they can be given an opportunity to return to civilian life with skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay.”
The logic behind Project 100,000 drew heavily on the thinking of political scientist, scholar, and White House adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In 1963, Moynihan wrote “One Third of a Nation: A Report on Young Men Found Unqualified for Military Service,” which argued that mass disqualification from the draft reflected a deeper national crisis. Two years later, his controversial report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” advanced the theory that entrenched family behavior patterns and family instability—not structural inequality—had created a “culture of poverty” in Black communities.
Moynihan saw the military—“a world run by strong men and unquestioned authority”—as the antidote. “The biggest opportunity to do something about Negro youth has been right under our noses all the time,” he argued in an internal White House memo. “Very possibly our best hope is seriously to use the armed forces as a socializing experience for the poor, until somehow their environment begins turning out equal citizens.”
Moynihan believed expanding military service could directly reduce racial disparities in employment. “If 100,000 nonwhite men were added to the Armed Forces and resulted in a decrease of 100,000 in the unemployed, that unemployment rate would drop from 11.5 percent to 6.4 percent,” he calculated. At a time when Coretta Scott King—who is rarely celebrated as the leading antiwar activist she was—along with husband Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists charged that the war was draining resources from domestic programs, Moynihan and McNamara urged the president to view the military as an anti-poverty tool.
Over five years, from 1966 to 1971, McNamara’s initiative brought more than 300,000 men into the military who otherwise would have been deemed unfit for service. Nearly 40 percent of these “New Standards Men” were Black. “The plain fact is that our Project 100,000 is succeeding beyond even our most hopeful expectations,” McNamara told the National Association of Education Broadcasters in November 1967.
For the Johnson White House, the program was appealing because it expanded the draft pool without politically risky steps like activating reservists or drafting large numbers of college students—measures that could have ignited even more antiwar protests and congressional pushback. Instead, military recruiters scoured the country for more Skip Johnsons: poor and working-class men of all races.
Project 100,000 deepened the inequalities of a draft system that already favored families with money, education, and connections. In Queens, New York, for example, a wealthy real estate developer’s eldest son who would one day be president secured five Vietnam draft deferments—four because he was in college and the last based on a diagnosis of bone spurs, which the doctor’s daughters later claimed had been fabricated as a “favor” to the father. In Detroit’s wealthy suburbs, parents set up businesses in Canada and put their kids in charge to qualify them for deferments. Just across the Detroit River lay safety, but for Skip, fleeing to Canada was unthinkable.
“We’re setting up a kind of class warfare,” Lt. Colonel Jim Williams later told journalist James Fallows. “I wonder about the morality of a nation that lets the disadvantaged do the fighting.” Even Army General William Westmoreland came to describe the draft policy as “discriminatory and undemocratic,” resulting, he wrote in Military Review in 1979, “in the war being fought mainly by the poor man’s son.”
Some young soldiers rationalized the danger of combat in monetary terms. Roger Harris, who went from Roxbury—the heart of Boston’s Black community—to the Marines, remembered thinking: “If I die, at least my mother would get $10,000 life insurance benefit and be able to buy a house. She’d be rich.”
Across the country, casualty data reflected stories of opportunity—or its lack. In Illinois, men from working-class neighborhoods where the median family income was less than $5,000 were four times more likely to be killed in Vietnam than those from areas where family incomes exceeded $15,000. (The median family income in 1967 was $8,000.) In Beallsville, Ohio—a rural town of just 450 residents—15 young men went to Vietnam. Several did not return. “They got our boys because this is a poor town and the boys can’t afford to go to college,” Mayor Ben Gramlich told the New York Times in 1969, after the town’s sixth military funeral.
Thomas Edison High School in North Philadelphia—a working-class neighborhood not unlike Skip’s own—lost more than 50 young men over the course of the war, the highest-known death toll of any high school in the country. At Northwestern High, each month seemed to bring news of another former classmate wounded or killed: Wayne V. Glenn, hit by shrapnel in March 1966; Charles H. Shelton, died from gunshot wounds in June 1966; George H. Dorsey Jr., killed in Thi Ninh in February 1967.
Project 100,000 accelerated the losses. “When McNamara says he is going to draft 30 percent of the Black people out of the ghettos,” Stokely Carmichael told an audience at Morgan State University, “baby, that is nothing but urban removal.”
Skip was one of 382,000 men drafted in 1966—more than in any other year of the Vietnam War. As the Pentagon increasingly turned to poor and working-class teenagers to fill its ranks, the average draftee looked more like a Black kid from the Detroit projects than not.
Skip wasn’t yet 20 when he left Fort Knox for Vietnam. He had not asked to become a symbol—but in many ways, he was. He stood for a generation whose lives would be forever shaped by a war they did not choose.
On January 15, 1968, Skip’s 353rd day in Vietnam, his tank platoon was escorting a convoy of supply trucks from Kontum to Dak To when rockets fired by North Vietnamese troops slammed into the lead tanks. Amid the ambush, he struggled to rescue crewmates and defend himself, armed only with a pistol. “Specialist Johnson’s conspicuous gallantry at the risk of his life is in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflects great credit on himself and the United States Army,” Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor said when Skip was awarded the Medal of Honor in a White House ceremony on November 19, 1968.
In Until the Last Gun Is Silent, I set out to tell Skip’s story. Friends, classmates, teachers, and his former pastor described an inquisitive and kind young man with a rich singing voice. I spoke with a dozen veterans from his unit, the 69th Armor, who remembered his laugh, his selflessness, and the tight bonds that formed in his four-man tank crews. His widow, Katrina May, a spirited septuagenarian, told me how, as teenagers, Skip flirted with her for months before she finally agreed to go out with him. During his deployment, they wrote letters back and forth, making each other laugh and falling in love through the mail—an epistolary romance, like a Jane Austen novel set in Detroit. Katrina stood by Skip when he returned home, through moments of celebration and spirals of despair. She spoke of a young man who had his whole life ahead of him—until he didn’t.
Like so many Vietnam veterans, Skip struggled with unemployment and the psychological wounds of war. On April 29, 1971, he was shot and killed in an attempted robbery at a Detroit convenience store. Across the country, people who had never met Skip found meaning in his story. After a Memorial Day parade in Middletown, Connecticut, Korean War veteran Raymond Dzialo encouraged the crowd to care for the “war living” who struggled upon returning from Vietnam. “There are thousands of war veterans who are equally as hopeless as Dwight Johnson,” he said. Veterans found job training and drug treatment lacking, he argued: “We are thankless for the duty they have performed.”
Dzialo, who had read about Skip’s death in a newspaper days earlier, said the lack of support he encountered after the war was a stain on America’s pride. “We must honor the war living with jobs, with respect, with care, with thanks, and above all, with love.”
Psychiatrists Robert Jay Lifton, Chaim Shatan, and their colleagues were also keenly interested in Skip’s story. The year before, they had begun leading group therapy sessions in New York City, organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Listening to the men describe their emotions in these “rap groups,” the psychiatrists identified feelings of alienation, guilt, rage, and depression as common among many veterans. They hoped to identify enough shared characteristics to establish a medical diagnosis and improve the treatments available for returning soldiers.
“The dying of Congressional Medal of Honor winner Dwight Johnson on the floor of a grocery store has the impact of a modern tragedy,” they wrote in a June 1971 letter to the New York Times, in response to the paper’s report on Skip’s death. They sought to assign a new clinical language to a phenomenon as old as war itself—the Ancient Greeks called it “divine madness;” it was “soldier’s heart” in the Civil War, “shell shock” in World War I, and “combat fatigue” in World War II and Korea. Introducing the phrase “post-Vietnam syndrome,” the psychiatrists said Skip’s struggles echoed what they were hearing in their weekly sessions with veterans.
Lifton and Shatan discussed post-Vietnam syndrome widely over the next several years, lobbying for its recognition by the psychiatric community. They spoke at professional conferences, veteran advocacy meetings, and with journalists, and shared their findings in academic articles and books. They regularly cited Skip as “the first public acknowledgment of the existence of a Post-Vietnam Syndrome” and questioned government figures suggesting that “psychiatric casualties” among Vietnam veterans were lower than those from World War II or Korea.
Skip’s story helped to personalize the struggles of veterans more broadly. In 1980, thanks to Shatan and Lifton’s advocacy, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders officially recognized post-Vietnam syndrome as post-traumatic stress disorder. Shatan later estimated that the 12-year absence of a suitable clinical diagnostic category for veterans’ experiences—the American Psychiatric Association had removed “gross stress reactions” from the DSM-II in 1968—“saved the government hundreds of millions of dollars” in medical claims.
Today at Fort Knox, where Skip went through basic training and learned how to drive, maintain, load, and fire an M48A3 Patton tank, there remains a housing area for servicemen and their families named in his honor.
Although he shared a surname with a Vietnam-era president, only time will tell whether the Johnson Neighborhood will be renamed for being “DEI woke shit,” a phrase Hegseth used during a November 2024 podcast interview, not long before he was nominated as defense secretary.
After a year of wide-ranging efforts by Hegseth and others to denigrate Black military service, Skip’s life—in its triumph and its tragedy—serves as a powerful reminder that stories of true patriotism and sacrifice must never be erased, regardless of who embodies them.
This article was adapted from Until the Last Gun Is Silent, copyright © 2026, published by Viking. It’s the untold story of the Black patriots—from soldiers in combat to peace protesters—who ended the Vietnam War and defended the soul of American democracy, from a preeminent civil rights historian and the award-winning author of Half American.
