November 2025
Articles from Mercy:
Critical Considerations
NSPM-7: Countering or perpetrating political violence?
Karen Donahue, RSM
On September 25, 2025, President Donald Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) titled Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. In justifying the need for such a measure, the president states that politically motivated violence is increasing dramatically in the U.S., but he only cites acts of violence perpetrated by so-called leftist groups and completely ignores violence from the right. For example, he never mentions the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 or the murders of two Minnesota state legislators and their spouses in June 2025.
The president believes that a vast left-wing conspiracy is behind these acts, although there is little evidence to support such a claim. NSPM-7 calls on federal agencies to prioritize investigation of a number of identities and ideologies that it sees as anti-fascist. These include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
As the Brennan Center notes, “this breathtakingly broad list easily encompasses everyone from labor organizers, socialists, many libertarians, those who criticize Christianity, pro-immigration groups, anti-ICE protesters, and racial justice and transgender activists, to anyone who holds views that the administration considers to be ‘anti-American.’ Under NSPM-7, the antifascist label can be attached to any of these types of people and groups and many more besides, giving the government maximum flexibility to pick and choose its targets.”
However, in their analysis of NSPM-7, the ACLU says that “the president cannot rewrite the Constitution by memo or otherwise. No matter what the president says or tries to do through NSPM-7, the First Amendment constrains what federal agencies can do when it comes to punishing groups and people for exercising their rights to free speech, peaceful protest, and supporting causes by making donations. It also safeguards against viewpoint-based government discrimination, coercion, and retaliation.”
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Marianne Comfort; Institute Justice Team
Mercy Associate Alexis Stephens of Guyana, as part of her participation in Mercy International Association’s Mercy Emerging Leaders Fellowship (MELF), completed a research project on the oil and gas industry in her home country of Guyana. You may watch a 36-minute presentation of her work here.
Alexis realized that many people in Guyana didn’t understand the threats from an industry that was promising jobs and economic growth. While the country reportedly has the world’s fast-growing economy, she notes that this boom hasn’t resulted in prosperity for the people of Guyana. The government is using a lot of the money to build roads and bridges, for instance, which is disrupting local communities and displacing residents.
Alexis created a guide to advocacy on oil and gas in Guyana for her MELF final project. The Institute Justice Team has adapted her toolkit to be useful in other countries and addressing all forms of extractive industries. You may find that here (en Español).
This toolkit is designed to equip individuals and organizations with the knowledge and tools necessary to advocate for a just transition away from fossil fuels, particularly within the oil and gas industry, mining, deforestation and other forms of large-scale extraction of resources. It aims to empower advocates to address the social, economic, and environmental inequalities associated with extraction, transportation, and consumption while promoting sustainable and equitable alternatives. The toolkit provides many resources to assist individuals in planning an advocacy campaign around the harms of extractive industries. These resources include suggestions for communication and education, coalition building, direct action, research and analysis, and legal action.
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Argentina and the advance of colonialism
Ana Siufi, RSM; Institute Justice Team
We live in a time of growing confusion, denials of truth, manipulations, violence, and neocolonialism in the Western world, and Argentina is a good example of this. In two years of [President] Milei’s misgovernment, while repeating in the mainstream media and social networks that they seek freedom, to defend the republic and become a great power, in reality we see repression, dictatorial decisions, the elimination of fundamental rights, the imposition of negative values such as hatred, rejection and violence, the exponential growth of unemployment, inequality, foreign debt, the narco-state and a shameful submission to foreign powers.
Never before has a government – not even the military dictatorship – shown such obedience to Anglo-Zionism by submitting to the orders of the U.S. Treasury, the International Monetary Fund, significant investment funds, J.P. Morgan (which has several former employees as officials in the Ministry of Economy), and the State of Israel.
All those mentioned above give orders to our government intending to impose poor living conditions on the majority, to plunder our gold reserves that have already gone to Great Britain, to facilitate extractivism of our abundant natural resources such as aquifers, oil, gas, lithium, gold, silver, copper, uranium, rare earths… and to authorize the installation of military bases in our territory, which is of significant geostrategic importance.
Meanwhile, the already weak democracy and the rule of law are being erased, as the separation of powers, the health, education and social security systems, science and technology, sources of employment and social assistance to the most vulnerable are systematically destroyed. We wake up every day with bad news of this tsunami that empties and erases essential state institutions and our sovereignty. Behind the propaganda and deceptions in social media with the slogan “FREEDOM ADVANCES” is the truth: “DESTRUCTIVE COLONIALISM ADVANCES”.
These days, Trump has threatened that there would be a tremendous economic disaster in the country if Milei did not win the legislative elections. The result was that he won, although with 16% fewer votes than two years ago (down from 56% to 40%), and with low voter turnout.
It is worth asking ourselves: Did people vote out of fear of pressure from Trump and other envoys, out of hatred of Peronism and polarization, out of an every person for themself sentiment, out of belief in the government’s promises, out of political ignorance, out of resignation, or out of support for the violent…? It is difficult to analyze, but we know that the triumph will deepen this colonialist policy – which is devastating for the middle and lower social sectors – while officials and the powerful elite will continue to enrich themselves and cynically practice their corruption, which the official narrative seeks to cover up with absurd explanations. At the same time, the opposition, disunited and weak, does not move forward with the impeachment trial that is so just and necessary.
This situation challenges us as a community of Mercy to unite church groups and organizations that denounce injustices and deceit, accompany legitimate protests, educate about trampled rights by helping to sustain critical thinking, draw strength from spirituality, and honor the national history of struggle for democracy and resistance to foreign oppression.
In these dark times, may the Spirit of Light and Love encourage us to be reborn from the ruins through solidarity, hopeful union, acceptance of those who are different, and care for all life. Amen.
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Ryan W Roberts, OLF; Institute Justice Team
No matter where you’re situated on the political spectrum, you doubtlessly have loud voices telling you to watch out for unreliable information or “fake news”. Some of those voices are from your past: parents, priests, and schoolteachers. Other voices are current: journalists, politicians, entertainers, and neighbors. We’re all formed by the encounters and experiences we’ve had, and our worldview shapes how we receive new information. An important task of any mindful person is to sift what we hear to discern what’s actually true.
One of the best tools we have in countering misinformation is a healthy dose of skepticism. Don’t take things at face value. Seek confirmation elsewhere, especially when it too closely matches your hopes or when it seems too good to be true. Lots of people benefit from our unexamined belief. Even sources we trust need verification; every source has a bias, even if you agree with it. Look for confirmation from multiple, unrelated sources.
Another important skill is finding the origin of information. The best accounts are primary sources, people reporting on themselves or events they personally witnessed. Those that have objective measurements—like scientists—or get independent evaluation—like peer-reviewed studies—come with a lot of built-in corroboration. On the other hand, lawyers and law enforcement will tell you that eye-witness accounts can be unreliable, requiring several stories to approach the objective truth of an event. Video or audio recordings are generally treated as objective if their contents are unaltered, while humans and the stories they tell or write are subject to numerous external factors and stimuli. The trustworthiness of a primary source is often related to its expertise, motivations, perceptiveness, and accurate recording skill.
Secondary sources are intermediaries that relate the content of a primary source and might summarize, provide context, elaborate, or analyze the primary source in some way. News reports are a prominent form of secondary source. The trustworthiness of a secondary source is often established by examining the primary sources used and developing a pattern of reliable reporting on other primary sources. The Justice Team has made some recommendations at the bottom of this article.
While evaluating sources for reliability is good practice in choosing where to go for news and other information, sometimes you encounter information from a source you don’t know. How can you evaluate whether a particular “fact” is indeed factual? This is where fact checking becomes important. Seeking corroboration from your trusted sources works in a lot of cases, but sometimes what you received is a bit more niche. Many times, its rarity is a clue to question its veracity. On the other hand, there are lots of truths that simply aren’t significant enough to get broad coverage in other sources. The Justice Team suggests a few fact-checking sites below.
Don’t become an unwitting pawn in someone else’s scheme for profit, influence, or propaganda. Never share a “gotcha” meme on social media without verifying its information. Don’t relate something you heard or read without a caveat or some deeper investigation. In a culture rife with misinformation like ours is today, you can be a finger in the dike that stops the overwhelming flood of lies playing right into the hands of power- and money-hungry systems that extract from our lives and the Earth for their own selfish benefit.
Justice Team recommended information sources:
Fact-checking sites to try:
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