He was there about a proposed data center—a 550-acre Google project in this small town of 1,600 people. “I had 50 people I talked to,” Gustafson told me. “Nobody wanted that data center in their community. And at least a half a dozen people came up to me to say, ‘Hey, I voted for Trump. What the heck’s he doing, supporting these things?’”

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Gustafson says he’s had similar conversations all across the state. If there’s one thing he sees uniting Hoosiers of all stripes—from rural areas like Morgan County to suburbs like Franklin Township to the historically African American neighborhood of Martindale Brightwood in Indianapolis—it’s fury over these water-guzzling, air-polluting behemoths and the tech oligarchs imposing them.

These dynamics are playing out across the United States. Over the last year, intensifying waves of local opposition to Big Tech’s data center buildout have surged into a nationwide tsunami of resistance. Elites on both coasts, from leaders of the AI industry in Silicon Valley to leaders of the political establishment in Washington, DC, have struggled to make sense of the backlash. First they tried to write it off as business-as-usual NIMBYism: just a few local bans passed here and there, maybe some unknown city councilors losing reelection after signing data center deals—not such a big deal. Then Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began calling for a national moratorium. Pretty soon Utah’s Senate President got tossed out of office for supporting hyperscale proposals. And the movement continues to grow.

Today, three-quarters of Americans oppose local data center development, a swing of more than 30 points in just a year. Over 500 counties and municipalities have passed data center bans or moratoria, while dozens of proposed projects have been killed outright. And the issue has come to define some of the highest-profile political races in the country. In the battle for U.S. Senate in Ohio, populist Democrat Sherrod Brown has made Republican Senator Jon Husted’s support of data centers the centerpiece of his campaign, prompting warnings from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that “data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”

Other Republicans are taking notice. Texas Governor Greg Abbot once touted the state as the “epicenter of AI development”; last week he said data centers had “dug their own grave.” In Michigan, days after The Lever revealed that GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers held millions in AI-related investments, he announced his support for a one-year moratorium on their construction in the state.

Big Tech billionaires may finally be beginning to realize that this backlash poses real complications for them. But they still don’t understand the nature of the threat they’ve called down upon themselves. Because the movement against data centers represents more than just a series of local fights against a new kind of infrastructure project. It may, in fact, constitute the best opportunity we’ve had in generations to truly shake up American politics—by redirecting the partisan anger that oligarchic forces have long used to divide regular Americans and channeling that energy instead against the billionaires that are actually the cause of so many of our shared problems.

The political science term for this strategy, coined by Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, is “transformative repolarization.” McCoy and Somer argue that authoritarians and oligarchs often stoke what they call “pernicious polarization”—extreme toxic polarization that uses “us versus them” rhetoric, often on social and culture war issues, to divide the public in ways that harm democracy. In the face of such intense suspicion and distrust, depolarizing a society—trying to get people to stop viewing their fellow citizens as an existential danger—may not work on its own, in the absence of a unifying struggle to address underlying grievances. Instead, McCoy and Somer argue that opponents of authoritarianism need to redraw the lines of contestation that define their politics—to shift the “us versus them” struggle from, for example, a left-to-right polarization, to a different axis of conflict that can bring a large majority of the public together against real structural threats.

When you speak to organizers and community leaders on the front lines of local data center campaigns, it immediately becomes clear that they are seeing new configurations of people coming together in precisely this way. “On many issues, people come in with a baked-in partisan lens that influences their thinking,” said Ben Inskeep, program director at CAC. “On data centers, we don’t have those firm camps formed. And so we’re seeing broad concern from Republicans, Democrats, and everyone else on the political spectrum. We’re seeing folks saying, hey, I might be a MAGA Republican and you might be a liberal yahoo from the big city, but if you’re coming to our community to help us fight this data center, you’re my best friend.”

William Lawrence has been seeing the same thing in Michigan. The Sunrise Movement co-founder and congressional candidate made opposition to data centers a major focus of his successful campaign for the Democratic nomination to represent the Lansing area. He’s now hammering his Republican opponent on the issue—to great apparent effect, according to a recent poll finding Lawrence leading in the district, which is currently held by a Republican. “At a time when people are so polarized and isolated from each other, something that brings people together is rare,” he said. “We can all get together to watch the Spartans play at Spartan Stadium, but to get together in a context where you’re also talking about politics? That is a gift, and is not at all to be taken for granted.”

An organizer I spoke with who’s been opposing data center construction in Texas (who asked to remain anonymous) noted a similar dynamic playing out in his state. “I’ve never seen anything that mobilizes this many rural Texans before,” he told me. “Folks are starting to get politicized through this work. They’re realizing when they reach out to their state reps, their state senators, that these people are not batting for them. They’re batting for the tech oligarchs. And so people are realizing that the left-to-right divide isn’t as important as the divide between the working class and the big corporate interests.”

The electoral implications of this process should be obvious. But for anyone too thick to draw their own conclusions, voters themselves are starting to get quite explicit. When MS Now asked a woman in 80-percent-Republican Hood County, Texas, “You’re willing to forgo every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that’s what it takes to kill data centers?” her response was immediate: “Yep. My entire community’s going to break rank.”

What remains to be seen is whether Democrats will seize this massive opportunity—or let Republicans regain the initiative.

A Manifestation of Greed

“I’ve been waiting a long time for people to wake up to how they’re being ripped off,” Gustafson told me. So why are data centers the issue that’s finally waking people up?

For one, they’re essentially unique in the breadth of their odiousness—so everyone has a reason to be offended by them. Hyperscale data centers are massive industrial warehouses that can cover literally dozens of acres, generate debilitating noise pollution, and severely impact local water tables. They use obscene amounts of energy, straining local infrastructure and in many cases causing utility rates to spike. This also has devastating climate and environmental impacts, as AI developers are overwhelmingly meeting their energy needs with dirty fossil fuel generators that spew outrageous amounts of planet-warming emissions and severely impact local air quality.

Then there are the process concerns: use of eminent domain, the provision of taxpayer subsidies, and Big Tech’s near-ubiquitous practice of pushing local officials to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that shroud deals in suspicious opacity.

And all of this is for what? Though the development of data centers creates temporary construction work, once developed, the facilities do not provide communities with significant long-term jobs. The only thing these sites produce (other than many shades of pollution) is added compute for a technology that we’ve all been told will soon put billions of people out of work. In the meantime, as we wait to see whether that dystopian future materializes or it was all an economy-wrecking bubble, AI is largely being experienced as the thing making the internet more annoying, our jobs more stressful, surveillance more terrifying, and Big Tech billionaires—already widely despised—more powerful than ever. It’s not hard to understand why this doesn’t constitute a very compelling case for data centers.

What it does provide is a perfect canvas on which to illustrate the broader problems with our political and economic system—how a few individuals have all the money and power to control the decisions that impact our lives. “Data centers are the physical manifestation of the greed and the hubris and the power of the AI oligarchs,” Gustafson said. “That gets people thinking about why we are allowing these tech billionaires to just run roughshod over our state.”

What emerges from this process is a budding sense of solidarity that can extend far beyond the localized concerns that might have brought someone into a particular fight. Gustafson described how organizers from Evansville, a city in southwest Indiana, began supporting groups across the border in Kentucky when fights started ratcheting up there. Elsewhere, a farmer who became the leader of a data center fight in Henry County, Indiana, attended a meeting about a proposed project in a neighboring town. “Next thing you know, she’s helping that community, showing up for them, because it’s so much easier getting through this when you have somebody who’s been there and understands,” he said.

As Inskeep put it: “When one campaign ends, people are saying, ‘Hey, we fought ours, now that it’s done, we’re going to go to the next county and help them.’” And that starts a snowball effect. “People are seeing that they’re stronger together. It’s a beautiful thing.”

A Singular Opportunity

Clearly, these fights have created an opening for the left. But the politics around data centers are still very much up for grabs. Democrats should have a strong inherent edge, given that—on this issue, like so many others—President Donald Trump has forcefully aligned himself with his buddies in the billionaire class. Trump’s aggressive plans to accelerate Big Tech’s data center buildout include opening up federal lands for hyperscaler construction, axing public participation processes in permitting, and even waiving Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act requirements on the radically absurd grounds that data center approvals need to be expedited for national security reasons.

But other conservative forces have been ahead of the curve. Steve Bannon has long been working to put MAGA’s populist wing out front in opposing both data centers and AI more broadly. The Texas organizer I spoke with told me he sees a significant number of people coming into data center fights casting blame not on Big Tech oligarchs, but on China or the United Arab Emirates, in ways that can feel decidedly xenophobic or Islamophobic. “This is an opportunity, but it’s a short-lived opportunity and we need to seize it,” said Inskeep. “Because this can also be used against us. If we are not effective at doing the political education and helping folks through that process, I do think you could have a far-right, nationalist, anti-immigrant person use this issue to come to power and then implement horrifying policies.”

Needless to say, for Democrats to seize this opportunity, they first must actually take a unified stance against data centers. And unfortunately, many Democratic leaders remain just as in-bed with Big Tech billionaires as their GOP counterparts. Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills vetoed the data center moratorium passed by her state legislature. Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer was accused of dismissing her constituents’ concerns about the many data center projects she has supported. Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposes a data center moratorium and appointed the aggressively corporatist Josh Gottheimer and Big Tech-backed Zoe Lofgren to help develop House Democrats’ AI platform.

And there are some races where Democrats are squarely on the losing side of the issue. In Wisconsin, the Democratic nominee for governor, David Crowley, is already being blasted in ads by his Republican opponent for having said he wants Wisconsin to “become an AI and a data hub not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe.” Crowley won his gubernatorial primary after the entire Democratic establishment united to oppose the left-leaning candidate in the race, Francesca Hong, on the grounds that old “woke” posts—most famously a call to “cancel Thanksgiving”—made her unelectable. But Crowley’s troubles demonstrate why Democrats need to update their assumptions regarding what kinds of past statements make for real electoral liabilities. After all, nobody is actually going to cancel Thanksgiving. But making Wisconsin into a hub of hated data centers? That feels like a very real possibility to a lot of Wisconsin’s swing voters.

When I asked Lawrence what he’d want to say to party leadership on this point, his response was simple. “I would say, listen to the people. Nobody wants companies from Silicon Valley coming in, bullying us, making decisions that are going to impact the next century of our communities. Just listen to the people. You’ll be popular.”

So will Democrats take the chance they’ve been given? For the first time in generations, the billionaire class has overreached in a way that Americans of all stripes and ideologies are finding equally repulsive. They’ve created a perfect opening to repolarize the public—not just against Trump, but against the oligarchic and authoritarian systems that produced him in the first place.

The opportunity before us is singular. What a monstrous mistake it would be not to seize it.

This piece was published by The Guardian. They rock, check ‘em out!

P.S. A big thanks to Sharon Knettell and Abbott Stranahan for becoming this Substack’s most recent paid subscribers. I’m truly grateful for your support!

The big question, now, is whether the Democratic establishment that opposed these candidates so vehemently in the primary will rally around the nominees their voters elected—particularly El-Sayed, whose race is a must-win for Democrats if they are going to take back the Senate.

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Fortunately, a number of major party leaders have already announced their endorsement of El-Sayed. Representative Haley Stevens released a classy concession statement saying she is “proud to offer” her support in the general election against Mike Rogers. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens in the primary, also endorsed El-Sayed, saying, “We’re all united by our shared goal of getting things done for the people in Michigan.” Kamala Harris sent out a fundraising e-mail for him. And the machinery of the party is kicking into gear—the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC has already put out a genuinely moving ad for El-Sayed, set to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”

This shows how far the center of gravity in the party has shifted—and quickly. After all, it was only last year when a number of centrist leaders, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani after Democratic voters in New York City decisively chose him as their mayoral nominee. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand even went on to falsely claim that Mamdani supported “global jihad,” a message echoed by Democratic Representatives Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen. Today, of course, Mamdani is one of the most popular Democrats in the country.

And yet, despite all this progress, it’s clear that we still have a long way to go until the left flank of the Democratic Party is broadly accepted as a legitimate, equal partner—and potentially a future senior partner—in the Democratic coalition, as evidenced by the significant array of party leaders who have not been so forthcoming in their support for the newly minted Michigan Senate nominee.

When asked, prior to Tuesday, if she would back the Muslim-American El-Sayed if he won the primary, Michigan Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten said, “I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue.” Since then, she’s refused to respond to a request about whether she would be endorsing him.

Michael LaRosa, who served as press secretary for first lady Jill Biden and special assistant to President Joe Biden, went further. “If [El-Sayed] wins, I will do everything I can to make sure he loses,” he posted before the primary, a position he’s doubled down on since. Other right-leaning Democratic influencers have shared similar sentiments.

Then there’s Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress—ostensibly the leading establishment think tank of the Democratic Party—who spent the last month relentlessly attacking El-Sayed on social media. So far, she has not changed her tune, offering no public statements of support for the Democratic nominee—just a bunch of posts implying that he lacks backing from the working class. Meanwhile the corporatist think tank Third Way responded to El-Sayed’s win not with a call to unify against the MAGA right but with the announcement of a $15 million campaign to “discredit” democratic socialism, despite concerns, as The New York Times put it, of “potentially undercutting Democratic nominees in swing-state races and undermining the party’s chances of retaking Congress.”

This refusal—whether real or threatened—to, in centrist parlance, “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” is particularly ironic given that it’s the very crime many of these same establishment figures spent months accusing El-Sayed of committing. The difference is that, in contrast to today’s centrist threats, El-Sayed never betrayed the Democratic Party. The attacks from the right focused on El-Sayed’s support of the Uncommitted movement, an attempt to push Biden on his disastrous Gaza policy during the 2024 primaries—and only during the primaries. As Waleed Shahid, an Uncommitted organizer, explained, “We weren’t trying to blow up the coalition. We were trying to keep it alive.” Indeed, El-Sayed endorsed Kamala Harris the morning after she launched her 2024 campaign.

It seems, then, that we will soon see what counts as a greater betrayal among certain members of the Democratic establishment: using your primary vote to try to persuade a presumptive Democratic nominee to change course on an issue that was (empirically) an electoral catastrophe, or actively undermining the general election campaign of your party’s confirmed nominee in a must-win battleground seat.

Just the fact that this is a question demonstrates the hypocrisy behind some centrists’ past evocation of “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” a line that’s long been used to discipline progressives. What made those admonitions so galling was that progressive Democrats have been overwhelmingly voting blue no matter who, election after election. A higher percentage of Bernie’s voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 than Clinton’s supporters in the 2008 presidential primary backed Barack Obama’s general election campaign. The same is true of the 2020 election, when progressives aggressively rallied behind Biden, and the 2024 election, when they did the same for Harris (as I can attest to firsthand, as one of the organizers of the “Progressives for Harris” effort).

The truth is, it’s very easy to say “Vote Blue No Matter Who” when that means voting for your own worldview and interests. It’s a lot harder when it requires supporting someone who is on the opposite side of issues that are deeply important to you. Progressives spend their entire lives swallowing their feelings to do the latter and still get attacked by the establishment for disloyalty. But the moment this dynamic flips—as occurred in Michigan this week, thanks to an array of superior candidates running superior campaigns with a superior capacity to meet this moment—key members of the centrist establishment have shown that their loyalty is not to the Democratic Party but to their side’s control of the party.

Hopefully, this time around, these figures will choose to act with more grace. Hopefully, Democratic elected officials like Scholten will put aside their factional grievances and join the majority of their party’s voters and leaders in helping Democratic nominees defeat the Republicans rubber-stamping Trump’s authoritarian power grabs. Hopefully, centrists can start taking a page from the most committed base of the Democratic coalition—the progressives who have again and again shifted gears from disappointing primary losses to supporting the Democratic nominees in the general election, the ones they had, at one point, campaigned against. If nothing else, hopefully the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” Democrats can muster the basic wherewithal to actually vote blue no matter who.

This piece was published by The Nation. They rock, check ‘em out!

P.S. A big thanks to NinKat, for becoming this newsletter’s most recent paid subscriber. I’m grateful for your support!

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Far too many parents were forced to have some version of this conversation with their children this month, as smoke from record-breaking wildfires poured across the midwest and north-east. Some of them already had to tell their kids that their Fourth of July festivities were canceled because of the lethal heatwave that caused numerous mass casualty events earlier this month.

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According to scientists, these extreme weather events are not “natural” disasters. A team of researchers already published a study finding that the Fourth of July heat wave would have been “virtually impossible” but for the climate crisis. Other studies—using methods recently validated by the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s top scientific advisory body—found that the pollution from individual Big Oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP made some past climate-exacerbated heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely compared with preindustrial levels.

Big Oil’s role in these disasters was no accident. Decades ago, these companies were predicting that their fossil fuels would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate harms that would create “more violent weather” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes”. Even as they used this knowledge to protect their own infrastructure, they orchestrated fraudulent campaigns of climate denial and deception to lock us into the disasters we are currently experiencing.

It’s no wonder, then, that climate harms are increasingly being interpreted not just as tragedies but as crimes. “We need Nuremberg trials for Big Oil,” wrote one climate advocacy group in a recent post that received tens of thousands of likes—and the sentiment has been echoed by many others.

The desire for an extraordinary tribunal is understandable given the scale of the harm. The Nazis were responsible for approximately 40 million deaths; some analyses estimate that climate change will cause more than 1 billion preventable deaths this century.

But we actually don’t need any special new legal innovations like the Nuremberg trials to begin to prosecute these climate crimes. In jurisdictions across the country, there are already criminal laws on the books that describe and proscribe Big Oil’s conduct in knowingly driving and deceptively covering up the climate crisis—offenses such as reckless endangerment, causing or risking catastrophe, and involuntary manslaughter.

Most states have a reckless endangerment offense. These laws criminalize reckless conduct that creates a substantial risk of injuring another person. Recklessness means knowing something is dangerous—e.g., predicting your pollution would cause “more violent weather”—and engaging in that conduct anyway. That’s exactly what Big Oil did, and the resulting climate crisis is now creating a substantial risk of injuring people across the country.

Some jurisdictions also criminalize conduct that creates a risk of catastrophe, meaning “widespread injury or damage”. Pennsylvania and New Jersey both have these laws on the books, and were two of the states hit hardest by the Fourth of July heatwave, with dozens killed and thousands more hospitalized. Case law shows that these catastrophe laws in particular have been used to prosecute actors for exacerbating a danger by lying about it. In one such case, the operators of a pier in Philadelphia were warned by engineers that the structure was in danger of collapsing. Rather than addressing the problem, they covered it up. When the pier collapsed, the operators were charged with risking catastrophe, and the Pennsylvania supreme court agreed, writing: “After having been made specifically aware of the imminent danger that the pier posed to human life, [they] took affirmative measures to keep that knowledge to themselves and took affirmative steps that exposed others to the risk.” Swap out the word “pier” for “climate change” and that ruling applies perfectly to Big Oil.

Finally, there’s involuntary manslaughter—the crime of recklessly causing (or, in many states, substantially contributing to) the death of another person. Clearly, climate-caused deaths are accelerating—a recent analysis found that extreme heat from climate change may have caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe last month alone. Already, there are victims and survivors who are connecting the dots to Big Oil. Earlier this month, a Washington state court ruled that a lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry for the wrongful death of the plaintiff’s mother in a climate-induced heatwave will proceed toward discovery and trial. Prosecutors could follow suit and begin charging Big Oil companies in relation to the climate disasters that are, in some instances, taking the lives of more of their constituents than are being lost to traditional homicides.

Of course, the scale of Big Oil’s climate liability will only grow in the coming years—this is, after all, not just the hottest summer of our lives, but the coolest summer for the rest of our lives. Someday, we can hope that the corporate actors responsible for such breathtaking havoc will face a made-to-fit tribunal that can fully address the ways they have condemned my five-year-old and countless children like him to a dangerous future. But we don’t need to wait.

Climate victims deserve justice now, and the officials responsible for pursuing that justice have all the laws they need to begin prosecuting Big Oil today. So next time you hear a climate disaster described as a crime, remember that this isn’t just rhetoric. These really are crimes. It’s time we treated them that way.

This piece was published by The Guardian. They rock, check ‘em out!

P.S. A big thanks to Howard Newman, for becoming this newsletter’s most recent paid subscriber. I’m grateful for your support!

It’s not a great time for those of us—the majority of Americans, despite what the climate hushers claim—who understand that these climate disasters are a growing threat to everything we hold dear.

So it’s important to take note of the victories, when they come along. That’s why I wanted to share this essay I wrote for The New Republic about a major legal victory in the fight to hold Big Oil accountable for their climate crimes.

“The court should add this far-fetched claim to the growing list of meritless climate lawsuits the state and federal courts have already dismissed.” That’s how Chevron’s lawyer Theodore Boutrous responded last year when Misti Leon filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in Washington State against major oil and gas companies for the wrongful death of her mother, Julie Leon, who died during the record-breaking Pacific Northwest heat dome that killed over 1,400 people in 2021.

Last week, a Washington state court published its response to Big Oil’s effort to throw out Leon’s “far-fetched” claim. Boutrous was no doubt disappointed, for the court rejected the defendants’ motion to dismiss—meaning Misti Leon’s case to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for her mother’s climate-induced death will now be proceeding toward discovery and trial.

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This is a big deal. First, it’s striking how clearly the court ruled that Leon’s pathbreaking new theory of climate accountability is “not about regulating emissions,” as the defendants had argued. Leon’s lawsuit alleges that Big Oil companies should be liable for her mother’s death based on two state law causes of action: their failure to warn the public about the climate catastrophes they knew their fossil fuel products would cause, and their deceptive advertising—both climate denial and greenwashing—that have misled the public about these dangers for decades.

The defendants refused to accept those claims on their own terms. Big Oil’s primary arguments to dismiss Leon’s suit—the same arguments it is currently pushing at the Supreme Court against a more traditional climate case—are that her case is preempted by the Clean Air Act (and also, somehow, the Constitution) and that her claims would “usurp the power of the legislative and executive branches to set climate policy.”

The court’s response to these claims was unequivocal: Failure to warn and deceptive advertising are state law causes of action. They are adjudicated by courts all the time. And they have nothing to do with—and are therefore not preempted by—the Clean Air Act. “This case is about a single individual and an allegation that a single weather event contributed to her untimely passing,” the court wrote. “It is seeking damages for her death and nothing else”—pointedly, damages that are “not an attempt to regulate future emissions.” Such claims are not preempted because the Clean Air Act “does not address product liability or deceptive marketing.” And they are not non-justiciable political questions because they are “simple torts” that do not “implicate separation-of-powers concerns.” This ruling is a major boon to Leon’s new legal theory.

Naturally, surviving a motion to dismiss doesn’t mean a case will succeed—not by a long shot. But this ruling confirms that such a lawsuit is legally plausible. The court essentially asks if there would be a cognizable claim if it accepted the plaintiff’s factual allegations as true. If one has confidence in Leon’s allegations—regarding Big Oil’s climate deception, the role of this deception in furthering climate change, and the impact of climate change on heat waves like the Pacific Northwest heat dome—then there is every reason to believe that a judge’s gatekeeping regarding these legal questions is as big an obstacle to a suit like Leon’s as the willingness of a jury of regular people to respond to evidence of Big Oil’s deception by ruling in favor of a bereaved daughter like Misti Leon.

As such, this ruling could encourage other victims of climate disasters to file their own wrongful death suits against Big Oil—and it could give other plaintiffs’ attorneys confidence to take on these cases. That should make the fossil fuel industry very nervous. Julie Leon is far from the only victim of Big Oil’s climate misconduct. Dozens of people in New Jersey and Philadelphia were just killed in the Fourth of July heat wave, which climate scientists have already determined would have been “virtually impossible” but for climate change. Maricopa County, Arizona, experienced 430 heat-related deaths in 2025, and its death count this year is outpacing that figure “at a troubling rate.” Figures like these could be on track to explode in the near future. Already, some regions are experiencing orders of magnitude more carnage—a recent analysis found that extreme heat from climate change may have caused over 20,000 deaths in Europe last month alone.

The progression of Leon’s case could also help inspire a powerful and previously untapped category of legal actors to join the fight for climate accountability: prosecutors. Though criminal prosecution requires a higher burden of proof than civil litigation, the core legal argument being made by Misti Leon is similar to the one prosecutors would rely on to charge Big Oil companies with criminal offenses—like homicide, reckless endangerment, or risking catastrophe—in relation to the climate disasters that are, in some instances, killing more of their constituents than are being lost to traditional homicides.

It seems the fossil fuel industry is becoming concerned about this possibility. The latest draft legislation being put forward by the American Legislative Exchange Council to immunize oil and gas companies from liability for climate harms includes language creating a shield for all “criminal charges, indictments, or prosecutions based on or arising from” Big Oil’s climate-related misconduct.

Corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP are desperately looking for get-out-of-jail-free cards like these because they know that claims like those of Misti Leon are not, in fact, “far-fetched” or “meritless,” as Boutrous bluffed. They know that people like Julie Leon should not be losing their lives. People like Misti should not be losing their mothers. These are not natural tragedies. They’re the result of the conduct of a small number of companies that knew their fossil fuels would cause, in their own words, “globally catastrophic” climate harms that would create “more violent weather” and cause “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” Despite this knowledge, they spent years preventing the public from understanding the risks their products were creating, in order to protect their obscene profits.

These companies have blood on their hands. The volume of that blood is growing every year. Following this latest court decision, they are one step closer to being held accountable for their lethal conduct. And it’s all thanks to the courage of Misti Leon, a regular person going up against some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to win justice for her mother. For now, at least, she’s winning.

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Progressives like me argue that we shouldn’t throw immigrants under the bus. But we’re not arguing the issue doesn’t have salience—despite the fact that essentially nobody in America is being personally hurt by immigration. Indeed, in many of the places where immigration is most politically salient, almost nobody is interacting with immigrants at all—there aren’t a whole lot of undocumented people or border-related disputes happening in, say, rural central Pennsylvania. But immigration still matters to a lot of voters, in large part because there’s a whole political party and media ecosystem that rants about it constantly. It has been made salient, despite having little material impact on people.

The point is simple: Talking about an issue matters.

I mention this because I have written another piece, this one for Boston Review, arguing against “climate hushing”—the effort by a bunch of corporate- and billionaire-funded centrist think tanks to persuade Democrats to stop talking about climate change.

The piece attempts to methodically rebut each of the—often very weak or dishonest—arguments made by the climate hushers about why climate change isn’t a politically useful issue for Democrats (TL;DR: it totally is).

But in some ways that’s almost besides the point. As we sweat through another deadly heat wave that has already killed tens of thousands in recent weeks, and contemplate that terrifying aphorism—this is both the hottest summer of our lives, and the coldest summer of the rest of our lives—it’s worth insisting not only that there is electoral value in talking about climate, but also that there is a moral imperative to do so.

As I write in the piece:

Though critics of climate activism like to position themselves as tellers of “tough truths,” the toughest truth is that decarbonizing our economy can’t be done obliquely. Whether or not Democrats talk about climate, you can bet that Leonard Leo, the Koch network, conservative media outlets, and the fossil fuel industry will keep working to lock us ever deeper into relying on oil and gas. In 2024 Fox News ran more segments on climate change than CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and MSNBC combined; all that Democrats achieve by ceding the narrative on climate to the right is to guarantee that MAGA and Big Oil win the debate.

This fact is so obvious that even some proponents of climate hushing, like Searchlight Senior Fellow Jane Flegal, acknowledge it. In her words, “It is hard for me to imagine ‘solving’ climate change as a problem without somebody caring about climate change qua climate change.” Flegal squares the circle with climate hushing by arguing it’s a temporary measure—someday, maybe, things will look different, and we can talk about climate then. The problem is that physics doesn’t care about politics: the more time we take, the greater the likelihood of truly dystopian scenarios. Plus, it’s hard to imagine how a more favorable political context for climate talk could possibly arise without active efforts to build political will now. When white moderates complained in similar fashion about the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King criticized their “mythical concept of time” in Why We Can’t Wait (1964).

We can’t wait when it comes to climate change, either. In the end, this is about whether we are able to maintain organized civilization on this planet. To push the line—now dominant across the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party—that we shouldn’t discuss climate change is not only morally wrong; it carries water for the fossil fuel industry and the forces that got us here in the first place.

I hope you’ll read the rest of the piece, and—if you find it useful—share it around. I think this is a message that we really need to be hammering home, especially as this summer of climate disasters continues.

P.S. I want to thank Ruth Rivera, Lisa Beade, and Charlie for signing up to support my work with a paid subscription. It really means a ton, thanks a million!

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That’s not to say that Mamdani’s support was the only variable in the left’s wins on Tuesday. NY-DSA’s door-to-door organizing capacity is incredibly important. Voter backlash against incumbents’ AIPAC-fueled support for Israel was a major factor. And more broadly, the Democratic base’s rage at the failure of party elites to stop Trump has shifted the terrain on which all insurgent primary challenges are playing out.

But Mamdani was unquestionably a key driver in these races. That is particularly clear in Claire Valdez’s lopsided victory in NY-7 over Antonio Reynoso, a former insurgent himself with a record of genuine progressive accomplishments whose platform was virtually identical to Valdez’s. The most important distinguishing factor in that race was Mamdani’s endorsement. It seemed like every Valdez mailer had Mamdani’s smiling face on it. And it made all the difference.

The lesson here is that, at least within their particular jurisdiction, a chief executive becomes the leader of their party. And when you’re the chief executive and leader of your party, as Donald Trump put it, “Everyone wants to be [your] friend.” This bandwagon effect doesn’t always materialize—nobody is arguing that Chicago’s beleaguered Mayor Brandon Johnson is remaking that city’s politics in his image. But the attentional advantages of an effective chief executive mean that when such a leader has a clear vision for where their party needs to go and explicitly communicates that vision to party members, they can remake their party.

We saw this dynamic clearly in Trump’s consolidation of the GOP. Over just a few cycles, he shattered the Republican establishment and turned it into a vessel for the MAGA movement. We even saw Biden, despite his obvious frailties, engender a trace of this—it’s no accident that insurgent progressive primary wins largely trailed off during his term, because in general, the average party member wants to be with their leader.

And that’s exactly what we’re seeing today with Mamdani’s success in reshaping the Democratic establishment in New York City. Politico summed up this dynamic well in an article about how centrist Democrats “are freaking out” that progressives are “becoming more mainstream as they keep winning—reshaping the Democratic Party.” Or as Liam Kerr, head of the Manchin-glazing WelcomePAC, put it: “Centrist Democrats, normie Democrats, need to realize we’re the insurgents, and they’re the new establishment.”

That is, of course, DSA’s goal: to create a new, pro-working class, anti-oligarchy establishment to run the Democratic Party. And Mamdani’s new undisputed role as kingmaker shows that taking a big swing for the top executive spot can pay such outsized dividends toward that end that it’s worth the risk.

In hindsight, this all seems obvious. But it’s worth remembering that it was not so clear at the beginning of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. Many of NY-DSA’s members in office advocated against endorsing Mamdani, arguing that the potential downsides of his run were too great and the movement should continue focusing on building up its ranks of lower-level elected officials.

Many on the left today have a similar analysis when it comes to the 2028 presidential campaign. It’s time for us to exorcise those doubts. There’s simply nothing that matters more than a leftist winning the Democratic presidential nomination. It matters for our chances of defeating MAGA—because the Democratic Party’s best shot to beat Trump’s successor is with a candidate who embraces real economic populism. It matters for our substantive goals—because, as Trump has demonstrated, the US presidency has accumulated essentially imperial power to pursue an agenda through executive and administrative action. Perhaps most of all, it matters for the left’s project of remaking the Democratic Party into one that can actually tackle the obscene inequality, rampant corruption, escalating climate crisis, and other existential challenges of our era—because as Mamdani’s mayoralty has demonstrated in New York City, if a leftist can become the leader of the national Democratic Party, the median Democratic voter will follow.

That’s where Ocasio-Cortez comes in.

Of course, AOC is not the only progressive who could plausibly run for president. Congressman Ro Khanna has been boldly supporting populists across the country, calling out the sclerosis of Democrats’ congressional leadership, and leading the charge in prosecuting the case against the Epstein class. Senator Chris Van Hollen, who has been a courageous voice against Israeli apartheid, also recently expressed an interest in at least exploring a presidential campaign. And I, for one, would be all in for a third Bernie Sanders run.

But the chances of that materializing at Sanders’s age—he will be 86 in 2028—seem close to nil, which is likely why Sanders has been working so hard to build up the next generation of left leadership. And though nobody can ever quite fill his shoes, there is a clear inheritor of Sanders’s role as standard-bearer for the US left: AOC.

Much of the chatter about AOC’s political future has focused on whether she should run for president or challenge Chuck Schumer for Senate. But at this point, challenging Schumer is a waste of her talents. Schumer’s favorability among New Yorkers sits at just 38 percent, the Democratic base is furious at him for his capitulations to Trump, and the issue most central to his political identity—unquestioning loyalty to the Israeli government—has become toxic among Democratic primary voters. You don’t need an AOC to take him out—there are numerous other progressive leaders in the state who could do so.

By contrast, it’s hard to imagine anyone on the left being in a better position for a presidential run than AOC is right now. She’s one of the most effective communicators in the Democratic Party. She’s one of the strongest grassroots fundraisers in Congress. She’s one of the most popular politicians in the country. And she is uniquely positioned to build the kind of increasingly potent Democratic primary coalition—young people, Latinos, and working-class voters—that powered other major anti-establishment victories, from Mamdani to James Talarico in Texas. This goes beyond identity politics—it’s not just that AOC is young, Latina, and working class. It’s that she can genuinely and compellingly speak to the experiences, fears, and aspirations of these constituencies.

What she isn’t, at this point, is clearly set on pursuing a presidential campaign in 2028. When asked by David Axelrod if she was running, she answered, “My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare is forever… I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window and observing the conditions of this country. And saying what move or what decision can I make today that is going to get us closer to that future, stronger, faster, better than yesterday.”

This response was celebrated online as a piece of rhetoric, and rightly so—it’s a phenomenal answer. But as a statement of actual political strategy, it’s a little off. If you want single-payer healthcare, there’s nothing that could have a greater impact than electing a president who will actually fight to pass single-payer healthcare. And there’s nobody in a stronger position right now to be that president than AOC, if she chooses to run.

That’s not to say she is perfect. She’s a politician, and none of us will agree with all her choices. I personally found her recent explanation for supporting Hakeem Jeffries as the Democratic leader in the House frustrating. And she made mistakes in the 2024 campaign—others have called for her to apologize for whitewashing Kamala Harris’s Gaza stance during her speech at the DNC, and as someone who worked to oust Biden from the Democratic ticket, I was upset when she (and other progressives) threw him a lifeline after his debate fiasco. Needless to say, the left will have to hold her to account like any elected leader.

But given the upsides of an AOC presidency, those of us on the left should be urging her to run. If our ultimate aim is to reshape the Democratic Party into a force that can defeat the authoritarian right and transform this country for the better, the struggle for the White House isn’t a distraction. It’s perhaps the most important political fight of our lifetimes—and AOC can win it.

This piece was published by The Nation. They rock, check ‘em out!

P.S. I want to share a big thank-you to Lisa Barsumian, Kathy Rourke, and Rich Streitfeld for becoming paid subscribers. I truly appreciate the support!

P.P.S. It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned Fighting Fascism, the podcast I’m doing with The Nation. But if you’re looking for a new show to listen to, consider checking it out! I’m biased, but I think we’ve had a bunch of really genuinely interesting conversations—on AI oligarchs with Cory Doctorow (the “enshittification” guy), labor with Sara Nelson, corruption with David Sirota, and lots more.

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That’s because Raymond played a lead role in ExxonMobil’s—and the entire oil and gas industry’s—campaign of climate deception, which set us on course for the planetary crisis that is playing out today.

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This was a knowing conspiracy. Raymond and his colleagues running fossil fuel corporations understood decades ago that the unchecked burning of fossil fuels would, in the words of their own senior employees’ internal communications, be “globally catastrophic,” do “great irreversible harm to our planet,” have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival,” and cause such destabilization that “civilization could prove a fragile thing.”

Upon learning about the world-historic harm they were causing, Raymond and his ilk could have opted for a less lethal business model. They could have alerted the public and regulators. At the very least, they could have remained silent and let the rest of us solve the civilization-threatening crisis they were creating.

They did none of these things. Instead, they spread climate denial to block the development of clean energy alternatives—or, in the words of a 1988 Exxon strategy memo, they “emphasize[d] the uncertainty of scientific conclusions” to resist the “development of nonfossil fuel resources”—so they could continue wringing profit from destroying humanity’s only habitat for as long as possible. Indeed, they lied about climate science even as they relied on it themselves to adapt their pipelines and offshore oil platforms to the extreme weather disasters they were causing. Truth for them; lies for everyone else.

To the extent they admit the harms of fossil fuels, industry representatives sometimes argue the harms are justified by the benefits. But if they believed that—and if they believed consumers and the public would agree—then they wouldn’t have spent the last several decades lying about climate science and solutions. The time has long passed to commit to renewable energy sources, which can replace the vast majority of fossil fuel use and are cleaner and safer. They’re also more affordable—clean energy is now the cheapest form of electricity, a tipping point that would have arrived much sooner without Big Oil’s campaign of deception and suppression that Raymond helped spearhead.

On Raymond’s death, ExxonMobil stated that his “legacy will forever remain a pillar of this company.” That is undoubtedly true for his legacy of climate deception, which ExxonMobil and its co-conspirators have continued building on to this day. Of course, they have updated their talking points. In place of Raymond’s explicit climate denial, one recent strategy is to portray their companies and fossil fuel products as contributing to climate solutions when they know otherwise. For example, ExxonMobil spent $175 million marketing its development of algae biofuels as the answer to global warming, despite warnings from the corporation’s own scientists that such claims were “completely impossible to achieve.” The details have changed, but the basic move—weaponize disinformation to block a clean energy transition—remains the same. Raymond’s pillar of deception still stands.

When all is said and done, Raymond and his ilk may bear responsibility for more death and destruction than any of history’s worst villains. His co-conspirators are still aggressively working to worsen a climate crisis that may cause hundreds of millions, and possibly even billions, of avoidable deaths.

Unlike the countless victims of climate deception—the mother killed by extreme heat that would have been virtually impossible but for climate change; the family swept away by a climate-exacerbated hurricane; the farmers starving in a drought made 100 times more likely by climate change—Raymond had the privilege of dying of natural causes at the end of a long life. He never faced accountability.

But Raymond was far from the only actor responsible for unleashing climate chaos on our world. His successors are still at large, fueling the same planetary arson he fanned for decades. Raymond may be gone, but his work remains a crime in progress. It must be halted.

This piece was co-authored by my friend and colleague David Arkush, Director of Public Citizen’s Climate Program.

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These weather extremes are not natural. They are climate disasters. And as a report published last week by my organization, Public Citizen, outlines, they are exactly the kind of catastrophes that Big Oil companies predicted their fossil fuel products would cause—at the same time that they were orchestrating fraudulent campaigns of climate denial to block solutions that would have alleviated these harms.

To put it bluntly, Big Oil is ruining summer.

Naturally, the most obvious threat is the heat. The last three summers have been the three hottest ever recorded. Since 1985, 80 percent of U.S. cities have experienced an increase in the number of days with a heat index of 90 degrees or higher. This trend has already extended into 2026, with record-smashing heat this spring across the western half of the country, including an average national temperature in March that was an astounding 9.35 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the twentieth-century norm.

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This escalation in extreme heat isn’t a coincidence. A climate attribution study of the March 2026 heat wave found that it would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change. Nationally, scientists have found that the climate crisis lengthened the average heat wave season in the U.S. from 23 days to 70 days over the last 60 years. Another scientific study concluded that last summer, the average American experienced at least one additional week’s worth of risky heat days due to climate change, while 32 U.S. cities (home to over 21 million people) experienced 30 or more additional risky heat days.

Scientists are increasingly able to determine the degree to which the emissions of particular oil and gas companies have contributed to particular heat waves. For example, a study published last fall in the prestigious journal Nature analyzed a number of major heat waves, including the extreme heat that hit the American Southwest in July 2023. The researchers found emissions from each of the biggest fossil fuel companies—ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP—made that lethal heat wave at least 10,000 times more likely to occur. They concluded that these events would have been virtually impossible without those emissions.

And it’s not just that these companies contributed to the oppressive heat that is now defining summer for so many of us—it’s that they knew full well what they were doing. For decades, Big Oil companies internally forecast exactly how their fossil fuel products would drive increasing heat, and how we would experience these changes. In 1996, for example, Exxon scientist DJ Devlin gave a presentation to the Global Climate Coalition, a group of fossil fuel companies that colluded to spread climate denial, reviewing the science connecting climate change with “suffering and death due to thermal extremes.” He discussed how the “elderly, sick, and very young” would be particularly vulnerable. And he explained the idea of threshold temperatures, referring to the point at which temperatures cross a critical limit “beyond which mortality rises significantly.”

While the “thermal extremes” of recent summers have been bad, they occurred during a La Niña, the cooling phase of the Pacific Ocean’s heat cycle. But this summer is going to be different. Scientists expect that in the coming months the Pacific Ocean will begin its warming cycle, or El Niño. And this El Niño is predicted to be particularly catastrophic—again, largely due to climate change.

Some studies have found that global warming may be leading to stronger El Niño events. More importantly, climate change means that this El Niño will build on a higher temperature baseline, which will have the effect of supercharging its impacts. That constitutes a dangerous cycle. As Defense Department meteorologist Eric Webb put it: “Due to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases, the climate system cannot effectively exhaust the heat released in a major El Niño event before the next El Niño comes along and pushes the baseline upward again.”

And it’s not just heat that will be supercharged this summer. Climate change is also causing a severe intensification of droughts and wildfires across our country, turning summer in many areas into a season of water rationing, air quality alerts, or worse.

The U.S. already experienced its most intense spring drought ever this year, with the first three months of 2026 being the driest on record. Over 60 percent of the country is currently experiencing at least moderate drought. And in many regions, the situation is far more severe.

Ninety-nine percent of the Southeast is in drought, with over 60 percent in severe to exceptional drought. This has spurred record-breaking wildfires across the region—Georgia has already had eight times as many burned acres so far this year compared to the pace of the last five years. The Great Plains region is facing similar challenges. Nearly 90 percent of Nebraska is in drought, and the region has already experienced record-breaking spring wildfires that burned over a million acres of land across Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. And in the West, extended drought is reaching a tipping point, following the lowest snowpack levels in a century. Utah recently announced a state of emergency over its water crisis, with the entire state in severe drought and 22 of 29 counties experiencing extreme drought. Colorado, which also relies on snowpack, may soon follow.

These droughts, and their subsequent impacts on wildfires, are directly related to climate change. Climate scientist Kaitlyn Trudeau described the relationship this way: “Climate change is making the atmosphere thirstier. As it gets hotter, the amount of moisture that is pulled out of the landscape or sucked out of plants and soils also increases.” A 2023 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found that almost 40 percent of the area burned by wildfires in the western United States over the last several decades can be attributed to the emissions of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. Speaking of the connection between climate change and increasing dryness that is contributing to wildfire growth, the author of the study said, “I’ve never had such a strong correlation in my data before.”

Big Oil companies understood their role in enabling these climate effects decades ago. In 1981, Exxon scientist Henry Shaw wrote an internal memorandum to Exxon’s president of research and engineering explaining that it was “Exxon’s position” that a doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels would result in “major shifts in rainfall.” In 1982, the American Petroleum Institute commissioned a report warning that climate change would have “serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival since patterns of aridity and rainfall can change.” And in 1998, Shell confidentially predicted that if fossil fuels were not brought under control there would be “more droughts” that would “dramatically change” agricultural patterns and “disrupt eco-systems.” Shell even predicted that because of these changes, “conflicts would abound” and “civilization could prove a fragile thing.”

Then there are summer storms. Hurricane season began on June 1. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted a worse than average hurricane season in the Pacific this year (combined with a below-normal season in the Atlantic, where El Niño generally suppresses the number of storms), forecasting between three and six hurricanes, including one to three major storms.

Although hurricanes are not new phenomena, climate change is increasing their severity in several ways. Higher sea surface temperatures make hurricanes more likely to intensify—in fact, over the past 40 years, three times as many storms within a few hundred miles of coasts have intensified rapidly due to warming of the oceans. Storms are also staying stronger farther inland than they did in the past, with warmer sea surface temperatures leading to a “slower decay” of storms by increasing the amount of moisture they can carry. They are generating more rainfall, as well. For every degree of warming, the atmosphere can hold 7 percent more water vapor that could fall as rain. For example, a study funded by the Energy Department looking at Hurricane Ida concluded that climate change was directly responsible for up to half a million people’s exposure to the storm’s floodwaters.

Coastal storms are also becoming more dangerous due to rising seas, whose levels have increased eight to nine inches since 1880, and may rise multiple feet during this century. A study of Hurricane Sandy estimated that sea level rise increased the likelihood of flooding in that storm by 300 percent.

Big Oil companies were fully aware that climate change would make coastal storms like these more dangerous. In 1989, Shell Oil Company produced a confidential planning document that predicted, based on “conventional and probably conservative” assumptions, that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause “more violent weather,” including “more storms” and “more deluges.”

In fact, Big Oil companies demonstrated their understanding of and belief in these scientific conclusions by modifying their own infrastructure, often at significant expense, to prepare for the coming reality of worsening storms and rising sea levels. In the 1990s, engineers working for Shell, Exxon, and ConocoPhillips noted in design specifications for natural gas pipelines that there could be a “considerable increase of the frequency of storms as a result of climate change,” even specifying for one offshore natural gas platform that an “estimated rise in water level, due to global warming, of 0.5 meters may be assumed” for the project’s 25-year lifespan.

Even as these firms were taking action to protect their own assets from the climate harms they knew were coming, these same companies were engaging in massive disinformation campaigns to, as one fossil fuel coalition’s internal strategy document put it, “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).” In the words of former Senator Chuck Hagel, who championed anti-climate legislation when he was in Congress: “They lied.… It would have put the United States and the world on a whole different track, and today we would have been so much further ahead than we are. It’s cost this country, and it cost the world.”

One of these costs is the carefree summers of our past. Big Oil stole them from us. So over the next few months, if—or more likely when—you find yourself baking under the sun of a record-breaking heat wave that’s making it impossible to enjoy your favorite summer activities, or stuck inside because the air outdoors is dangerously smoky from wildfires near and far, keep in mind that this didn’t just happen. Our summers haven’t simply gotten worse. They have been made worse by specific companies that knew that what they were doing would ruin summer and went ahead and did it anyway. We shouldn’t let them get away with it.

This piece was published by The New Republic. They rock, check ‘em out!

P.S. Continuing with the tradition I started last of thanking a new paid subscriber each time I post, I want to give a shout-out to Robert Morton. Robert, thanks a million for your support, it means a great deal!

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After the 2025 elections, corporate-backed establishment groups like Third Way and WelcomePAC argued vehemently that Mamdani’s win offered few if any lessons for Democrats outside of New York City, and that the real attention should be on politicians like Spanberger. Just last week, Clinton strategist Paul Begala reiterated this message, saying in an interview with NPR that Mamdani had “the weakest performance of a successful Democrat in New York in a hundred years,” whereas “in a state where the Republicans were controlling every statewide office, Abigail Spanberger wins in a landslide.”

This oft-repeated talking point is easily debunked. Zohran Mamdani won the votes of more New Yorkers than any mayoral candidate in over 50 years. Though his 51 percent vote share wouldn’t be particularly impressive if he had just been running against a Republican, that wasn’t the lineup he faced. Mamdani ran against both a Republican and former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, scion of a famous Democratic dynasty, who was boosted by a tsunami of billionaire super PAC spending. The apples-to-apples comparison here would be if Spanberger had faced not just the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee but also a former Democratic governor like Ralph Northam or Terry McAuliffe.

As it is, in her one-on-one race, Spanberger earned close to 58 percent. That sounds impressive—even though she was facing an extremely weak Republican opponent—until you learn that this was the exact vote share that Democrats won in the Virginia House of Delegates. It turns out Spanberger didn’t receive 58 percent because she’s an electoral overperformer—she received 58 percent because she was running with a D next to her name in a state with a long record of swerving hard against the party in control of the governor’s mansion and White House, months after DOGE had laid off tens of thousands of Virginians.

Whatever their margins of victory, both Mamdani and Spanberger won their elections. So what have these Democratic executives actually done with their time in office?

Mamdani’s first six months have been a whirlwind of action to reinvigorate the institutions of city government and demonstrate to New Yorkers that Democratic governance can make a positive material impact in their lives. To list a few of these achievements, the Mamdani administration:

• Established free childcare for 2-year-olds.

• Targeted junk fees and subscription traps.

• Announced new rec centers, youth clinics, and early childhood education centers.

• Developed new bike and bus lanes across the city.

• Invested $50 million in park improvements.

• Created a new Office of Community Safety and the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, which has already won over $34 million on behalf of tenants and secured repairs at over 6,000 apartments across the city.

• Launched “rental ripoff hearings” to provide tenants an opportunity to register complaints with city officials.

• Filled 100,000 potholes.

• Established a program to quickly remove unnecessary sidewalk scaffolding.

• Secured a wealth tax on luxury second homes.

• Cut hundreds of millions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.

• Closed an inherited $12 billion budget deficit to deliver a balanced city budget.

Mamdani’s administration has communicated these achievements to the public in innovative and attention-grabbing ways, telling a story of government actually making things better. Here’s how Mamdani announced plans for his administration’s first city-owned grocery store:

“This store will serve as physical proof of our conviction that government can be a force for good—that government can drive change that improves people’s lives. And standing here this morning, I cannot help but think of the words of our fortieth president, Ronald Reagan. He famously said, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ It’s a good quote, but I disagree. I think nine more terrifying words are actually, ‘I worked all day and can’t feed my family.’ We are going to use the power of government to lower prices and make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table. When government understands its purpose as serving the very working people that it has left behind time and again, it can make a difference in the most pressing struggles facing our city today. It’s not just that government can help; it’s that government must help and our government will help.”

This message is about more than stoking one politician’s popularity. It is laying the groundwork for a new narrative of public-sector action—one that can supplant the right’s decades-long effort to persuade Americans that government is the problem. Convincing the public of this narrative is a necessary step toward establishing a durable governing majority for any left or center-left party.

The right, by contrast, thrives when the public believes that government can’t deliver for regular people. That’s why Spanberger’s recent conduct is so devastating. Not only has she been failing to enact an ambitious agenda, but she has been actively blocking efforts to pass major Democratic priorities in Virginia, vetoing a series of bills sent to her by her own party’s legislative majorities.

Spanberger vetoed legislation giving Virginia’s public workers the right to unionize. This betrayal inspired a wave of condemnation from organized labor, including the Virginia Public Sector Labor Coalition, which stated, “Governor Spanberger today betrayed half a million of Virginia’s public service workers by going back on her campaign promise to support collective bargaining rights for the people who keep our communities running every day. Instead of aligning herself with General Assembly Democrats who unanimously supported this bill, Spanberger vetoed the bill just as her predecessor Glenn Youngkin did, sending Virginia workers the crystal clear message that they are no better off than they were under a Republican governor.”

Spanberger vetoed legislation creating the right to class-action lawsuits, a legal mechanism for seeking redress against malicious corporate conduct that exists in every state but Virginia and Mississippi. Right-wing business groups celebrated her move, while consumer advocates were deeply stung. As the bill’s Senate sponsor said, “This legislation was about leveling the playing field between Virginia consumers and large corporations when widespread harm occurs but no single individual has the resources to fight back alone.”

Spanberger vetoed legislation to stop ICE from conducting warrantless arrests in state-run facilities, leaving immigrants in the state afraid to go to courts or hospitals or to take their children to school. In the words of the ACLU of Virginia’s policy director, “The governor’s position seems to be that if ICE wants to do whatever it wants to do in our courthouses, they can, and that the state’s not going to do anything about that. That sends a terribly dangerous message to the Trump administration when we know that they have acted rogue and lawlessly.”

Spanberger vetoed legislation creating a legal retail market for recreational marijuana in Virginia, an issue that has supermajority support in the state. “We’re left in a position of uncertainty,” said the bill’s Senate sponsor, “for my community, for small-business owners, and particularly for those individuals who thought that under a Democratic governor the question of cannabis would not be a matter of if, but instead a matter of when.”

Spanberger vetoed legislation that would have lowered prescription drug prices for patients by extending Medicare’s negotiated drug prices to people in private health plans and Medicaid. This pleased corporate lobbying groups like the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America, who lauded Spanberger for taking “the right step to protect Virginia patients from a flawed policy.” Meanwhile, patient and consumer advocates were crushed, with the director of the affordable health care organization Families USA saying, “Governor Spanberger’s veto is a blow to Virginia families who struggle every day to afford their medications.”

Spanberger also vetoed legislation to stop illegitimate purges of voter rolls, protect defendants with behavioral health issues, and shield universities from speech restrictions like those pushed by Trump. This end-of-session legislative massacre is a substantive disaster for Virginia’s workers, consumers, immigrants, patients, and other communities, who have lost not just an opportunity but perhaps their only opportunity to get their priorities enacted, given the reality that Democrats cannot count on maintaining a trifecta over state government for long.

But it’s also a political disaster for Democrats. In the short term, it risks suppressing enthusiasm among all the constituencies Spanberger betrayed. As Virginia Tech political analyst Dr. Cayce Myers put it, “You certainly could envision a situation where people say, ‘Well, you know, this was something that they promised, but they weren’t able to deliver.’ And they’re less enthusiastic, writ large, about going and voting.”

But the long-term effects of this pro-corporate governance could be even more dangerous. Spanberger has sent millions of Virginians the message that Republicans and Democrats are all the same.

For many liberals, it’s hard to grasp how anyone could believe there’s no difference between the parties. But if you’re a senior struggling to afford your prescriptions, or a public worker who’s sick and tired of crappy benefits, and you see Democratic Governor Spanberger issue the exact same veto of your top priority as Republican Governor Youngkin did, benefiting the exact same corporate special interests, it’s not actually that crazy to say, “None of these crooks are looking out for me; screw ’em all.”

This is political poison—not just for Democrats, but for democracy. After all, if all these politicians are crooks, and our democratic institutions can’t seem to effect any real change, why not throw in with a strongman who promises to blow the whole corrupt system sky-high?

Trump was defeated in 2020, only to return in an even more dangerous form four years later. So we already know that it is not enough to beat MAGA once at the ballot box. If Democrats do not pair their next electoral victory with a strong record of governance—one that reflects the Mamdani commitment to positively improving people’s lives, not the Spanberger model of selling out to corporations—we are going to be right back in the maws of fascism one election later. And this time, we might not be facing an authoritarian as incompetent and self-defeating as Trump has been.

This piece was published by The New Republic. They rock, check ‘em out!

P.S. I recently approved the option on my Substack page that allows people to sign up as paid subscribers if they want to. I just wanted to be clear that I will never, ever ask anyone to do so. (I have a full-time job and don’t depend on my writing for income—I just have a lot of thoughts that sometimes need to come out!) But I am very grateful that some lovely folks did sign up, and felt like they deserve thanks. So I’m going to start a practice of sharing my appreciation to a new subscriber whenever I post. Today I want to give a shout-out to Elizabeth Reardon. Elizabeth, thanks so much for your very kind support, it really means a lot!

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This climate hushing kicked into gear again recently, with a New York Times op-ed (one of many such pieces the Times has run in the last year) originally titled, “Forget Climate Change. Democrats Need to Talk About Other Issues,” which argued that the “way out” of Democrats’ current unpopularity is to “stop elevating” issues like climate. While that piece was going to press, centrist Democrats were convening in Canada to discuss, among other topics, the need for “less climate talk.” As Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., said during the conference, “The average American is going to struggle to care about climate change if they can’t figure out how to pay their rent.”

The assumptions here are that climate action is deeply unpopular among American voters, that Democrats consistently put climate at the center of their messaging, and that that messaging is a major reason for their losses in 2024. But none of these assumptions are true.

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A recent Gallup poll found that climate concern is near an all-time high. A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans believe climate change is a major threat to the United States, while only 19 percent believe it is not a threat. And a series of peer-reviewed studies from the 89% Project found that 74 percent of voters in the U.S. want their government to “do more” about climate change.

As these numbers make clear, there is actually super-majority support for clean energy and climate action in this country. And no climate hushers have provided any evidence to the contrary. The best they have been able to show is that climate does not make the top of the list of most motivating issues to voters. But that makes sense: Climate shows up in people’s lives not as an issue unto itself, but in the form of rising insurance costs, the health impacts from heatwaves, or a need for greater disaster preparedness.

Advocates have long known that the best way to talk about climate is in the context of people’s everyday concerns. If Democrats were talking about climate in isolation, vaguely gesturing at the need to limit global temperature rise, and doing this to the exclusion of other issues that voters feel to be more pressing, no doubt that would be a mistake.

But here’s the thing: Nobody—literally nobody—has been doing that. Democrats called their big Biden-era climate law the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Kamala Harris barely mentioned climate in her campaign. It’s not like she refused to talk about rising rents because she was obsessed with the Green New Deal, as Slotkin’s comment seems to imply. Indeed, it’s been well-reported that Harris was pushed to deemphasize her affordability agenda by corporate advisors and Wall Street donors, not climate activists. But corporate-backed Democratic politicians and think tanks see the climate movement as a much more convenient scapegoat.

In the 2024 election, climate simply wasn’t an issue at all. Biden’s age, the war in Gaza, inflation, and Harris’s inability to articulate a clear vision for her presidency were all much more determinative factors. In fact, most voters hadn’t even heard of the Inflation Reduction Act—and when they were told about it, they loved it. That suggests that more messaging on climate, not less, would have helped Harris and Democrats.

Indeed, climate change offers major political opportunities for the Democratic Party. Discussing climate action is a way for Democrats to simultaneously rally the base and win over moderates who overwhelmingly trust Democrats more on this issue than Republicans. It’s also a way to wedge the GOP: A majority of young Republicans care about climate, most MAGA voters support solar, and the Make America Healthy Again wing of MAGA is concerned about the health impacts of fossil fuels (which is worrying climate denialists).

Yes, Democrats need to be smart about connecting climate to affordability—something the IRA failed to do, with its long time horizons and indirect benefits that were removed from people’s daily experiences. But this isn’t rocket science. A majority of voters say they believe climate change will have a direct financial impact on their families, and a strong majority of Americans are struggling with rising electricity prices, a problem that voters primarily blame on corporate profits (38 percent), data centers (14 percent), and grid pressures from extreme weather (11 percent).

On the flip side, expanding clean energy is the fastest way to produce cheap electricity needed to lower utility rates—and Democrats hold a massive trust advantage over Republicans when it comes to clean power. By articulating how climate action can address these bread-and-butter concerns, in contrast with Republicans—for example: Democrats want to expand cheap, clean energy to secure lower utility rates, while Trump is spending billions of taxpayer dollars to cancel these projects; Democrats want to make polluters pay for increasingly costly climate disasters, while Republicans want us to pay for the damage Big Oil caused—Democrats can leverage their advantages on these issues to win voters’ trust on some of working people’s most significant affordability concerns.

These are not complicated ideas, as populist policy frameworks like the Climate and Community Institute’s recent “Stop Greed, Build Green” agenda make clear. And it’s worth noting the element of class condescension that is woven into the climate hushers’ apparent belief that working class voters are too stupid or poorly educated to care about these issues. In the recent Times op-ed, the author claims that only highly educated and affluent voters—the “Brahmin Left”—prioritize climate action. This is factually incorrect—polling has repeatedly shown that more Latino, Black, and lower-income people say climate change is important to their vote than rich white people do. The idea that the “little people” aren’t sophisticated enough to care about a global crisis that they are disproportionately on the front lines of should be closely interrogated.

Finally, in addition to all these messaging considerations, we should not forget the substantive urgency of addressing climate change. Again and again in recent years, what had previously been considered worst-case scenarios for the escalating speed and destructive effects of global warming have been proven, if anything, to be too conservative. Record-breaking wildfires, extreme heat, and drought are already causing severe misery across vast swathes of our country, and the monstrous El Niño currently building up in the Pacific could literally kill millions.

If we want safety and security for ourselves and our children, we need to take serious climate action. And we can’t actually do that obliquely. Yes, clean energy economics are so good at this point that we’re going to see a degree of decarbonization even without building an explicit pro-climate coalition. But this laissez-faire approach won’t be enough to break through fossil fueled rightwing opposition—at least not at a speed and scale necessary to have a good shot at avoiding the most horrific climate outcomes that we are currently on track to experience.

Whether or not Democrats talk about climate, the other side certainly will—Fox News and the Koch network and the fossil fuel industry, flush with war profiteering cash that can be funneled into lobbying campaigns to further rig the game against renewables, will keep spreading disinformation and polarizing against climate action. And in the absence of a potent social demand for that action, the political will for real decarbonization—in the face of obstacles, trade-offs, and entrenched opposition interests—risks collapsing.

There are lots of important questions and debates we can and should be having about how to rebuild an explicit popular climate discourse over time. But the argument that we shouldn’t be trying to do that at all contradicts the polling data and is an argument for accepting climate catastrophe. That is something all people of good conscience should resist.

This piece was co-authored by Jamie Henn, executive director of Fossil Free Media. A version of the essay appeared in Jacobin.

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When I first heard about this book, it almost seemed too good to be true. Saunders is my favorite living writer. Climate-denying Big Oil CEOs are my bread-and-butter (and I mean that literally—I direct a climate accountability program where I spend my days advocating for fossil fuel companies to pay for their climate crimes). What could possibly be better than putting these together?

Then I started getting jittery. The pre-publication characterizations of Vigil all described the novel as exploring “the thorny question of absolution.” If there’s one topic I don’t want to consider in connection with climate-denying Big Oil CEOs, it’s absolution.

So I asked Saunders if he’d be willing to do an interview with me for The New Republic. You can find that interview—which is much better edited than this post—right here. But I thought I’d share an extended version with you, as well, because it includes a reference by George to Big Oil CEOs getting their penises chopped off in hell, and I think we can all agree that is the kind of content we deserve right now.

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Vigil takes us inside the head of a climate-denying Big Oil executive at the end of his life. Did you have hopes for what effect the novel might have on readers?

When I started, there was an overlay of, “Well, I’m 67, what’s the most urgent thing happening in the universe? Climate change.” But I realized that while climate change is in this book, it’s not about climate change. It’s like how people will say Schindler’s List is about the Holocaust, but it actually isn’t—it’s set there, but it’s a book within that setting that does its own particular thing which is, for example, examining if it’s possible to work for good within an evil system. The goal, I guess, is really just to wake a reader up a little bit—to make a person more aware of the world around them, to maybe feel a little more fond of the world.

Now that I’m done with it, I can see that it’s an agitating book for a lot of people. Some people really loved it, some hated it. And that’s kind of a first for me. That’s sort of a nice accomplishment, at this late stage—to do something slightly new, even if it’s annoying.

There was so much I loved about this book. But I was really upset by the ending.

I think a lot of people either thought “Oh it’s the most beautiful ending” or “I hate it.” Tell me what got under your skin.

We live in a world that has been so corroded by elite impunity. We see again and again how the wealthy and powerful get away with murder. So to watch K.J. Boone, who experienced no worldly accountability for Big Oil’s climate denial, finally face the prospect of punishment in the afterlife, and then to see Jill swoop in and save him at the last minute—it’s kind of like my favorite writer looked into my brain and conjured up my literal worst nightmare.

But can I say . . . you’re missing a step. Because yes, in life, he couldn’t make any repentance, and he dies a dick. But then when he’s free of his body, suddenly he sees the horror that he’s done. So given that in the fictional world this transformation happens, now the question is, do you still want to kick that guy? I would argue I don’t want to kick him anymore.

I think there still needs to be punishment.

In the real world I agree with you—if you could rouse him up and put him on his feet and march him to jail, I’m all for that.

You could easily argue that she lets him off the hook. But I would console you by saying the real hook is in a book I’m not going to write, after K.J. Boone runs around the earth for 10,000 years. Then it may very well be that he goes to hell and burns there for a while.

Well that is a relief.

Oh yeah, they beat the fuck out of him. Lances through the head, they cut off his penis, it’s horrible what happens. [Laughs]

But I hear what you’re saying, I really do. It’s true that we don’t get the result we want for him. But it’s because of Jill, and her partially correct but also partly erroneous idea of how things should be.

Jill has this extreme perspective on moral responsibility—that we are all “inevitable occurrences,” and that therefore to pass judgment on someone for doing anything is absurd. Another character, the Frenchman, asks, “Do you really believe it? That bad and good are the same?” I’ve heard you say that both Jill and the Frenchman’s perspectives are true, despite being at odds.

I think that idea of an “inevitable occurrence” is probably demonstrably true by logic, if you look at eternity. But it’s very uncomfortable. And you can’t live like that. I think basically we all live with both those ideas alive in us all the time. So for example, when somebody offends you, part of your mind goes, “Well, that sucks, but you know, given who he is, I get it,” and you move slightly in the direction of mercy. And at the same time, when somebody rears back their fist to hit you, if you can get a quick left hook in, you do that. So I think the book is uncomfortable because it’s kind of making it a binary. And the reason it’s a binary is because . . . she’s dead.

Dying kind of fucks with your head a bit, huh?

Yeah, it does. At least the people in these Bardo realms, they are in extremity. But for me, Jill’s idea is correct, and the other idea is correct, and we’re always negotiating between the two. Because otherwise, why mercy? Why try to understand somebody? If everybody is infinitely malleable and can completely fix their shit, why don’t they? And therefore you don’t have to be merciful, you just call them on it.

You’ve talked about how empathy does not dull our action against bad actors, but in fact can sharpen it. I’m skeptical that this idea applies when it comes to a K.J. Boone-type figure, like the executives at ExxonMobil. Because these companies are not going to be persuaded to do the right thing—they need to be forced.

I agree. But I would say you are doing the Jill thing in your climate accountability work, because you’re looking at the problem, you’re looking at the villain, with curiosity, and you’re saying, “That approach doesn’t work, but this one might.” What I would argue for is “know thy enemy”—and nothing’s off the table at that point. All kinds of religious traditions are full of stories of enlightened beings who were super harsh in order to have a positive outcome. So it’s not about kid gloves, but about informing oneself and not impeding your understanding with some pre-existing agenda. For example, if you are an activist and you say, “This Big Oil CEO is Satan embodied and he’s in the back room eating human flesh,” well, you’ve imagined the enemy incorrectly, and I would imagine then your actions would be inefficient. Whereas if you have a complete understanding of who that person is, with empathy underneath it, you’re going to have a sharper idea of what must be done.

I guess my perspective is we already know what must be done. I think most of our problems are not technical in nature, they’re political—we know the solutions, it’s just a question of overcoming the interests opposed to them. From that perspective, there can be utility in caricature—and even, I’d argue, truth to it, because a lot of these guys do, by any reasonable approximation, look a lot like Satan eating human flesh.

I defer to you on that because you’re the one who’s active in this. For me, if you took that approach in fiction I think what would happen is somebody would get about five pages in and go, “Oh, Saunders, he’s pedantically putting his liberal beliefs into the story, I don’t want to read anymore.”

Now, in some of my stories I do take a caricature approach and nail the evil guys. And that’s really satisfying to do. That can be done depending on the point of view you’re telling the story with. If I’m narrating a guy from inside, I can’t exactly say, “I’m Satan incarnate.” Every book has a problem, and this book’s “problem”—its dominant feature—was point of view.

It’s funny, because as we were going back and forth over email I thought, “Oh, you were actually in my book!” There was a scene where somebody came to K.J. Boone’s house who had your deep understanding of the issues and your political viewpoint, and at one point Jill came into his mind and we got the whole story. That was very satisfying, because I could say to the reader, “Dear reader, here’s what I think. I’m on your side.” But the bottom dropped out of the book at that point. It felt like an authorial trick. Because it was.

You’ve said before that moralizing can make the bottom drop out of literature. But where’s the line? There are works of great literature, like, say, The Grapes of Wrath, that I would describe as moralizing, but they’re still incredible art. I would describe some of your work that way. I can’t help but read “Escape from Spiderhead” as moralizing against our carceral system, or “Pastoralia” as moralizing against capitalist exploitation. But they’re also perfect works of literature.

The best answer to your question would be to read In Dubious Battle, the book Steinbeck wrote before The Grapes of Wrath. That book is full of polemic, but it’s unearned polemic—convenient situations that prove the viewpoint of the writer. It’s not a bad book, but it’s so inflamed with Steinbeck’s political views that you don’t buy it. Steinbeck learned from that, and so in The Grapes of Wrath you imbibe the socialism from within because it’s completely sensible in that world he created.

It doesn’t mean that fiction can’t have a moral position and produce feeling, but it has to be done honestly. For me it has a little bit to do with not trying too hard, or not being too sure of what you’re trying to say.

So when you were writing “Pastoralia,” you didn’t have it in your head from the beginning that it was going to be about capitalist exploitation?

No, no, it literally was a dream I had that I was back at my old job, with my office-mate, and we were in caveman suits. That was it. But that theme is so much a part of who I am. Like, at rest, I’m a socialist—I’ve been deeply wounded by a lot of stuff I’ve seen in my life and if I don’t block that out it just manifests.

What should be the role of literature and art in sparking social change?

Well, my honest answer—that I don’t always live by—is that I don’t think an artist should think about that intention directly. Let the art do what it wants to do. But a beautiful work of art will, sometimes, spark change, just because the primary ingredient of a work of art is truth. Like Chekhov said, “If you show a man how he really is, he will change.” Likewise a culture. But the work has to be truthful.

Right now across the country there are organizers working to make polluters pay for climate costs, there are lawsuits targeting Big Oil for their deception, my day job is advocating for prosecution of these bad actors. Do you think Vigil has lessons for those of us pursuing climate accountability in the real world?

Honestly, I don’t think so. I think you don’t need a lesson from me on that. You know what you’re doing, and it’s righteous, and so I don’t think you need a lesson from me on that. I really don’t.

Jill’s role is to comfort people at the end. Thanks to the real-life K.J. Boones, humanity is in a similar place to Jill’s charges when it comes to climate—we are closing in on tipping points that already lock us into some truly world-shattering nightmares. I’m curious what you think the role of comfort is in that context?

That’s the question of the book. My answer, as a person and a citizen is, “Raise hell and don’t deny anything.” If the wolf’s outside the door and you go, “Oh it’s probably a poodle,” that’s not comfort. I think comfort and radical action are the same thing at this point. That’s the only source of comfort there could possibly be, and everything else is just placating.

I love that answer. For me, there is also this choice of: I can be depressed because we’re heading to hell, or I can try to hold onto the wonder that still exists, while we have it. And your work—as you said at the top, just trying to make people see things with a little more wonder—that is part of that comfort for me.

I hope so. I heard a Buddhist teacher one time saying that the most dangerous emotion is despair. In the place where we are now, if people like you and me fold up the tent…well, that’s how they get you. We have to keep our heads out of the sand and up in the clouds. But you can’t go too far in either direction.

George, thanks so much.

Keep me posted on what you’re doing because I’m so interested in it and moved by your passion. And let’s talk again about the next one—which I’ll make sure is not about climate.

The grassroots resistance to AI data centers that is springing up in communities across the country outlines the kind of multiracial working-class coalition many of us on the Left have always dreamed of—a diverse, nonpartisan, top-bottom movement against Big Tech billionaires that has the potential to reshape American politics in incredibly positive ways.

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The most immediate, short-term policy demand driving this local organizing is a moratorium on new data centers. There are different versions of this policy: Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced a national moratorium; statewide moratoria have been proposed in at least twelve states (and one passed in Maine, though the legislation was vetoed by Governor Janet Mills); and dozens of cities, towns, and counties have already enacted such laws.

This pushback has drawn its own pushback. In a recent Jacobin essay, Holly Buck argues that “a moratorium on AI data centers is a terrible idea” that “poses serious equity concerns.” Such a pause, she writes, “is not a substitute for actual AI governance.”

This argument—and Buck, of course, is far from the only person making it—seems to misunderstand the thrust of the data center moratorium effort, which is to stall the breakneck development of these projects so that we can enact “actual AI governance.” Buck complains that organizations supporting “data center blocking efforts should put their attention towards a broader set of solutions”—which is exactly what they have been doing. My organization, Public Citizen, developed a comprehensive suite of actionable steps to rein in Big Tech and make sure consumers, workers, and the climate are protected from the data center buildout. And we’re not alone; other organizations, like the NAACP, have also released guiding principles for equitable data center development.

The problem is not that we don’t have policy solutions to this crisis. The problem is that Big Tech’s private (and unpopular) investment in data centers is moving at an astounding pace, and we don’t have the time or leverage to establish the regulatory framework necessary to make this system work for the public. In the words of Alex Bores, a candidate for Congress who worked in Big Tech and whom tech billionaires have spent millions of dollars attacking because of his support for AI regulation, moratoria proposals

are setting the terms of the debate, which is: Why are we going forward with this until we’ve done the real work? … If I could wave a magic wand and pass any bill I want, it wouldn’t be the moratorium. It would be the regulations that the moratorium is calling for. But putting that as a negotiating tactic, I think, is meeting the moment.

The criticism that the push for a data center moratorium fails to resolve every issue of “actual AI governance” seems to rest on the idea that there is a magic wand we could wave to pass any bill we want. But there is no magic wand. And though moratorium opponents like Buck say that “the people should be driving this discussion, not companies like OpenAI,” they never offer alternative suggestions for how the people could overcome the Big Tech billionaires that are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into super PACs to block any attempts at real regulation. The passage of data center moratoria is—as far as I can tell, and as far as anyone else out there seems to be able to tell—essentially the only tool available to us that could exert meaningful leverage over these companies.

This leverage stems in part from the fact that Big Tech really wants to build their hyperscalers here in the United States. Buck asserts that these companies would respond to a moratorium by simply offshoring their data centers. But developing countries do not have the energy and grid infrastructure to support these projects, absent absolutely massive investments by Big Tech. What’s more, offshore hyperscalers would respond to queries significantly more slowly than domestic ones, further compounding costs, particularly for products that are highly interactive. Big Tech will go to great lengths to avoid these problems. (As an aside, Buck also warns from an equity perspective that we should be “wary of proposals that would send burdens elsewhere.” But this is tantamount to saying, “You must let the ruling class hurt you, because otherwise they might hurt someone less privileged than you.” It’s essentially an argument corporations could make against any jurisdiction in the U.S. passing any pro-social regulation at all—an extremely convenient paradigm for the forces of capital.)

Securing this leverage is clearly necessary to rein in Big Tech’s dangerous practices, which are as diverse as the constituencies mobilizing to oppose them. Many data center opponents are motivated by the impact of these projects on energy costs—electricity prices in some data center-dense areas have surged over 250 percent in recent years, and in 2024 customers of PJM paid $4.3 billion more in electricity costs to cover data centers’ new transmission infrastructure. Others rightly fear the environmental and climate harms of this buildout—data centers’ energy demand is actively extending the life of dirty coal plants and driving a massive expansion of new gas-fired power plants. Some harbor deeper concerns over the dangers this technology poses to our society, and the way that AI currently serves powerful capitalist interests.

From discrimination in facial recognition systems, to disastrous attempts to integrate AI chatbots into public schools, to RealPage’s algorithmic facilitation of rental price-fixing, to Amazon’s AI-supported surveillance of warehouse workers, to the use of AI to justify benefit cuts and Medicaid coverage denials to low-income people, to the increasingly prevalent algorithmic wage exploitation of gig workers, to the growth of dystopian state surveillance, to the fact that I can’t ever find a goddamned customer service phone number anymore because they’ve all been replaced by AI chatbots, the actual evidence is clear that AI is not liberating us as individuals but rather concentrating power in the hands of those who already have far too much control over our lives.

Some moratorium opponents have framed the diversity of these coalitions as a deficit. As Buck wrote, “Part of why the moratorium push is such a dead end is because the disparate right-left coalitions that have emerged around stopping data centers have different interests when it comes to other issues.” But building coalitions among constituencies with “different interests when it comes to other issues” is the entire work of politics, and always has been. Talk to any on-the-ground organizers, and they will tell you that it is actually the diversity of data center opponents that makes this issue so politically potent.

I asked a colleague of mine, Kamil Cook, who has been supporting data center campaigns in Texas, to share some reflections on this organizing. “There are certainly political contradictions that some working class groups are struggling through,” he told me.

But I’ve seen how these fights are forcing communities to reckon with how power functions in places like rural Texas. They’re helping people realize that their politicians do not serve them and the only way that they can protect their community is by standing together and figuring out their own solutions. I’ve worked with some incredibly conservative Texans and many of them have referenced Bernie’s policies on data centers and AI. Imagine if there was a real political current that was articulating their concerns?”

Ben Inskeep, another organizer who’s been supporting these fights in Indiana, put it this way: “People from all walks of life are waking up to the broken system we have where both parties are exploiting us. Not a ‘dead end.’ An incredible opportunity for class consciousness!

We should think of this fight as an opportunity. A genuinely nationwide coalition has organically formed in opposition to the greed and avarice of an industry that is endangering our democracy, undermining our labor, and enshittifying every aspect of our lives. That coalition has settled, for completely sound strategic reasons, on demands for national, state, and local moratoria on AI data centers. The Left should be uniformly on its side.

This piece appeared in Jacobin.

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Like many pundits have claimed in the aftermath of this stunning democratic victory, my Fighting Fascism co-hosts and I have always been experts on the politics of Hungary. (Just kidding. I’m often reminded in moments like this of an Onion article that came out shortly after September 11th, “Area Man Acts Like He’s Been Interested in Afghanistan All Along.”)

So we invited two actual experts who have spent a great deal of time studying Orban’s regime—senior Vox correspondent Zack Beauchamp and political scientist Dr. Jennifer McCoy—to join us on the podcast to talk through how Magyar beat Hungary’s longtime strongman and what lessons this victory might offer for our fight against fascism here in the United States. If you were excited about Hungary’s watershed election and want to understand the dynamics better, I definitely recommend checking out this episode—you can find it here on Apple Podcasts or here on Spotify.

There’s one takeaway in particular I want to stress from this political earthquake. But first, I should share a caveat: International comparisons are tricky. As Zack Beauchamp warned us of Hungary, “It’s a different country from the United States, with a fundamentally different political context and culture.”

Still, I’d argue that there is a lesson for Democrats from Magyar’s victory, and it’s this: We need to redraw the lines of conflict that define our politics. As Dr. McCoy put it during our conversation, “When we’re experiencing what we call ‘pernicious polarization’—extreme toxic polarization that’s harming democracy—then simply trying to depolarize may not work, because it’s very hard to bring together these two sides that have been so polarized. Instead, we need to shift the axis of conflict that the incumbent government has polarized around—whether that’s left-versus-right, or in the case of Hungary, EU-versus-Russia—to another definition of the conflict that can galvanize a large majority of people.”

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So what was the axis of conflict around which Magyar sought to repolarize the Hungarian people? As Dr. McCoy explained, “Magyar defined the conflict as the nation versus the clan, referring to Orban’s clan, by which he meant a corrupt oligarchy. And by the nation he meant the good of the people.”

It is indisputable that Magyar ran against the corruption of Orban’s billionaire buddies. He decried how “a few families own half the country.” He proposed a wealth tax on the ultra rich. He promised to end the culture of elite impunity that flourished under Orban. As Dr. McCoy summarized, “It used to be called the 99% versus the 1%. It’s the people of the country versus the billionaires, versus the corrupt oligarchy.”

Magyar’s approach here should sound very familiar to anyone who’s heard James Talarico say, “It’s not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom,” or Graham Platner growl, “The enemy is the oligarchy—it’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out,” or Zohran Mamdani announce, “We’re taxing the rich,” or Elizabeth Warren declare, “The wealthy have avoided accountability time and again,” or heard Bernie Sanders speak for more than two minutes at any point in his life.

This is an axis of conflict that can appeal to any society defined by extreme inequality, where the system feels rigged and the wealthy and well-connected get away with murder. And it’s an approach that Democrats absolutely must embrace if they want to build the kind of big-tent majorities necessary to do to Trumpism what Magyar just did to Orbanism.

Most rank-and-file Democrats seem to understand this. Indeed, the only real obstacle standing in the way of this populist turn is the corporatist wing of the party—the elected officials, consultants, think tanks, and pundits who continue fighting like hell to protect their Wall Street, Big Oil, AIPAC, crypto, and AI patrons. In my opinion, if there’s one lesson we should draw from the defeat of Orban, it’s that these corporate shills are threatening our ability to achieve a victory like the one we saw last week in Hungary. If we want to build the kind of repolarized supermajority that Magyar was able to bring together in opposition to Orban, we need to break the corporatists’ stranglehold on the Democratic Party—and once it’s broken, we must never look back.

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I’m pretty new to following Piker, who is joining Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed at campaign appearances this week. I think he first came onto my radar when he interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before one of their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies last year. I knew he was a popular Twitch streamer with a significant following among young men—essentially the exact “liberal Joe Rogan” figure that Democrats identified in the aftermath of the 2024 election as one of their greatest needs—as well as an unabashed anti-Zionist critic of Israel.

I also know that groups like Third Way have been the loudest voices urging Democrats to abandon “purity tests” like protecting immigrants and the transgender community. So when Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, and press adviser Lily Cohen wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Piker is a “Jew-hater,” against whom “the Democratic Party needs to draw a line in the sand,” I assumed that there must be something pretty serious behind their claims that Piker has helped spread “the surge of antisemitism.” And that worried me, as someone who has written about my own concerns regarding the growth of antisemitism in this country—so I spent some time watching footage of his streams. What I found left me disturbed—but not about Piker. Rather, I was floored by the bad faith of those attacking him.

Here’s the fact that Piker’s critics never mention: For years, he has consistently warned of the dangers of antisemitism and spoken up for Jewish people, in a world of online streaming where doing so can be unpopular. Yes, Piker strongly opposes the political ideology of Zionism—so if you’re someone who believes that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are necessarily the same, this discussion is not going to be persuasive to you. (Then again, that position also requires one to accept that Albert Einstein was an antisemite for declaring, “My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish State, with borders, an army and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our ranks.”)

But if you’re able to separate out these concepts, Piker’s own words speak for themselves. Here are just a few of the instances where this supposed “Jew-hater” has spent his time and social capital educating his audience.

On the seriousness of antisemitism:

• “Antisemitism is a canary in the coal mine of fascism. It’s one of the oldest bigotries that has caused those of the Jewish faith a tremendous amount of pain. From pogroms to the Holocaust, Jews have always been singled out by those in power as a scapegoat for the instability and economic volatility that people in power caused. A resilient, nascent antisemitism is a constant threat.”

• “The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting happened not that long ago! Antisemitism has been a problem in Western society in perpetuity. It has always been an issue. Originally it was used to justify pogroms against the Jews, expulsion and murder and forced conversions, whether you look to Spain or Portugal or Russia or any other place where Jews live. That’s why there’s a lot of intergenerational trauma within the shared history of Jews.”

• “Antisemitism is a real problem. Antisemitism is a real problem. Anyone who tells you that’s not the case is fucking silly.”

• “I will always, always call out antisemitism. It’s gross, it’s immoral, it is a hate crime.”

On antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism:

• “That shit is so damaging, dude. I think there’s nothing grosser than, well, being antisemitic, period. But also, there’s nothing grosser than both being antisemitic and then using the cause of Palestine to feed people more antisemitic commentary. This is your pet project, dude? Fuck you.”

• “No, Zionists don’t run the world. Shut the fuck up. No, it’s not appropriate to say Zionists run the world, either. That just sounds like you’re antisemitic but trying to hide it. No, capitalists run the world. Some of those capital owners are Zionists. But that does not mean that they’re Jewish.”

• “Antisemitism has exploded, from Kanye West’s latest song, all the way down to some of the most prominent conservative pundits openly agitating towards antisemitism, using cynically what is going on in Gaza to develop a heinous message that attributes all of those crimes to Jewish people.”

On antisemitic tropes:

• “The notion that Jews are monolithic in their understanding of the world and control the money supply and the media and use it to degenerate Western civilization, that kind of antisemitism is a clearcut indication that someone is most likely operating on fascist principles.”

• “Jews are not one singular hivemind. It’s a very common Jewish trope, like a joke, if there’s three Jews in a room, there’s four different opinions. The idea that Jewish people are of one singular mind on any issue whatsoever is fucking ridiculous.”

On the positive contributions of the Jewish people:

• “It’s so wild to look at the history of Judaism, as both an ethnicity and also as a religion. The history of the Jewish people is one of withstanding pogroms and resisting genocide. I know that all of these Jewish figures have almost always been at the forefront of resistance to genocidal acts. They’ve been at the front of any matter of injustice globally, whether it be the civil rights movement in America, whether it be apartheid in South Africa, you will always find Jewish people at the forefront.”

Stories from Piker’s followers also speak volumes. Take this memory from a longtime watcher, who wrote recently: “I’ll never forget in like 2022 when I was watching live and some scumbag paid for an antisemitic superchat and Hasan paused for 10 seconds and finally went ‘you know I can see you paid for that with a university email address right?’ and threatened to call the dean on him.”

It’s not just that these are not the words and actions of a “Jew-hater”—these are the words and actions of someone who seems committed to resisting the very real antisemitism that is growing in his (largely young and male) streaming world.

So what are Piker’s centrist critics even talking about? Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, condemned Piker amid the news of his upcoming appearance with El-Sayed, writing that Piker “routinely uses his platform to spread anti-Jewish tropes, amplify propaganda from designated terrorist groups, and promote toxic anti-Zionism.”

Greenblatt didn’t cite specifics, but Third Way’s Cowan and Cohen, in their Journal op-ed, identified four comments as evidence of Piker’s antisemitism: “He has referred to ultra-Orthodox Jews as ‘inbred,’ employed antisemitic dog whistles (‘bloodthirsty, violent pig-dog’) against an anti-Hamas viewer of his stream, compared liberal Zionists to ‘liberal Nazis,’ and said ‘Hamas is a thousand times better’ than the Israeli state.” Piker has also been attacked for having said, “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”

I dislike much of this quoted language, so I wanted to ask Piker about it. He agreed to discuss these comments with me, but first he shared some context about his work.

“Here’s the structural problem with what I do as a livestreamer,” he told me last Monday. “I’m talking for 10 hours a day on very volatile issues, oftentimes from a perspective that most Americans are not privy to, an anti-imperialist framework. These are issues that people closely identify with, so tensions are high. And then on top of that, I have a policy of letting whoever wants to speak in this 30,000-person, Madison Square Garden–size arena.” (That’s the size of his average livestream audience.)

“So people come in and piss me off,” Piker said. “They say shit when I’m delivering an impassioned speech or looking at some heinous war crimes. And there are moments where I just pop off and they’ll clip that. And then they’ll try to disseminate that to the end of the world and completely rob it of its context. If you were talking for 10 hours a day, you’re going to say stuff that could very easily be misconstrued.”

He has a good point. Piker has done almost 20,000 hours of entirely unscripted, off-the-cuff streaming (for context, there are 8,760 hours in a year). The fact that these comments are the best examples of “antisemitism” that Piker’s critics can point to says a lot about their claims. But let’s look at each statement in turn.

“It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”

“I think it’s very clear what I was saying,” Piker told me. “I was debating someone at the time about there being sexual violence that occurred on October 7th. And I said sexual violence does take place in situations like this, and there was definitely testimony of sexual violence that had taken place amongst the hostages. But that doesn’t change the dynamic of Israel committing a genocide against the Palestinians, and my opposing that genocide.” The original footage of this moment bears this out; the claim that Piker was condoning sexual violence—rather than saying it does not justify Israel’s actions—is simply bad faith.

“Hamas is a thousand times better” than the state of Israel.

Putting aside the hyperbole of “a thousand times,” Piker says he stands by the basic sentiment of this comment. “I think it’s unquestionable at this point that, yeah, Hamas didn’t do a genocide. Israel did. And I think that’s very hard to argue against, beyond saying, how crazy, how ridiculous, Hamas is a terrorist organization, you’re a terrorist.” Personally, I think there are limits to a quantitative comparison of Hamas and Israel, both of which have done horrendous things—but it’s not antisemitic of Piker to make the observation that Israel has killed more innocent people and caused more suffering and destruction than Hamas.

Comparing “liberal Zionists” to “liberal Nazis”

Here’s the full quote: “When people say, like, ‘Oh, well, I’m a liberal Zionist, I want there to be a Jewish ethno-state,’ I’m like, ‘OK, what do you mean?’ It’s like saying you’re like a liberal Nazi. Like, you want an Aryan majority ethno-state?” Piker was clearly making a point about the problematic nature of all ethno-nationalisms. “These are the exact same forces that I combat here in the United States of America as an American citizen,” he explained to me. “The growth of fascism that’s taking place in this country. In some ways I see Israel as, like, our future, as where we are headed here in the United States. And in many ways, we’re already there, right? So it’s not a special status for Zionism, is what I mean. It’s just like any other reactionary ideology that I actively combat.”

Much of the argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitic boils down to a sense that Jewish ethno-nationalism is treated differently than other ethno-nationalisms. But it’s clear that Piker has long demonstrated a universal opposition to ethno-nationalisms of any kind. You can argue that his comparison between Zionism and Nazism is insensitive, but it’s not antisemitic—particularly when you consider that prominent Zionists like Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse recently made a similar comparison, albeit framed (horrifyingly enough) as a positive.

“Bloodthirsty, violent pig-dog”

“I’ve never heard that be referred to Jewish people,” Piker told me, referring to “pig-dog.” “Someone showed me there has been one instance where a Nazi called Jewish people that, but I didn’t know that.” To be clear, I have never before heard anyone claim that “pig-dog” was an antisemitic dog whistle. The only other use of “pig-dog” I’ve been able to find was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which a taunting Frenchman tells King Arthur, “You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!” I suppose one could argue that “bloodthirsty” and “violent” are dog whistles referencing the antisemitic “blood libel” trope, but this comment occurred in the context of an exchange about bloody acts of violence—that certainly seems like a more reasonable explanation to me.

Referring to ultra-Orthodox Jews as “inbred”

I told Piker that I thought calling ultra-Orthodox Jews “inbred” was dehumanizing and indefensible. He essentially agreed with me, though he provided some important context. “As far as the utilization of the term ‘inbred,’ there’s a 10-minute compilation of me calling white nationalists, white supremacists, racists, neo-Nazis all inbred, because at the end of the day, I just use it as a substitute instead of other pejoratives.” (I checked, and it’s true that Piker does frequently use the term “inbred” as an insult for all sorts of groups.) Having said this, Piker also expressed regret about this comment, saying, “But yeah, I agree, that’s the one quote that’s like, someone could hear that and sincerely be like, ‘Oh, this guy’s actually antisemitic.’ It’s one that I will be more careful not to utilize in the future. Yeah, of course I regret that.”

So, to review: Over the course of nearly 20,000 hours of streaming, Piker’s attackers have found one offensive comment about ultra-Orthodox Jews—which he has used in different contexts about different groups—and several other comments that essentially boil down to strident anti-Zionism, all set in the context of years of speaking out about the dangers of antisemitism.

This is the person that figures like ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt—who, it’s worth remembering, defended Elon Musk after the Tesla CEO threw up a Sieg heil! to an arena full of Trump supporters—are telling us is a major threat to Jews today. This is the person that Third Way’s president admitted he dislikes more than Donald Trump and MAGA. It all seems to say a lot more about these groups than it does about Piker.

To end our conversation, I asked Piker whether he thinks it’s possible to arrest the growth of antisemitism that we are seeing right now. He was surprisingly optimistic.

“There’s a lot of people that have told me that I’ve played a formative role in them snapping out of the white supremacist pipeline, the right-wing rabbit holes,” he told me. “I’ve seen people go from being Groypers to slowly but surely recognizing that a lot of this stuff is distractions from class war. A lot of this stuff is distractions from the real economic pain that they’re feeling on a daily basis. And I’m able to, like, rip them away from that. I think for young men, they’re very malleable. They can change their minds. I don’t think the average American fascist is a card-carrying ideologically minded fascist. There’s an opportunity to just shake these guys and bring some sense back into their worldview.”

Between Piker and his critics, it seems pretty clear who’s in a better position to do that shaking.

A version of this piece appeared in The New Republic.

But I really thought you’d enjoy today’s conversation, in which Matt, Jonathan, and I spoke with our friend Morris Katz about his experience steering Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, how important effective storytelling is in the fight against fascism, and why Democrats need to start naming villains if we’re going to turn things around.

You can check out the episode here on Apple Podcasts or here on Spotify. And below I’m sharing a transcript from the conversation. Take a look—Morris has some smart things to say!

Aaron: We are excited to welcome to the Fighting Fascism Podcast our friend Morris Katz. How’s it going, Morris?

Morris: Great to be here, guys. I missed you.

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Aaron: Yeah, we missed you too! So what’s it felt like to go from being just a guy to a certified big deal magazine profile guy?

Morris: I think for better or for worse—and I think maybe you can relate to this Aaron—I feel like I was born with a certain level of what others could perceive as obnoxious arrogance. So I’ve just always behaved like someone who thinks they’re right. And now I say the same things I’ve said before in the same way, but now other people are like, “Wow, that’s really profound,” and I’m like, this is the exact way I’ve always been.

There’s also an element of feeling a little fraudulent. People are like, “How did you make Zohran Mamdani?” And Zohran Mamdani is Zohran Mamdani. At my best, I’m like, yeah, you should do this really good idea that you have.

So I feel lucky and fortunate, and hope that I can kind of capitalize on some of the clout or whatever, to pull things in the right direction.

Aaron: I was crashing at your place in October of ‘24.

Morris: Ye of little faith.

Aaron: Yeah. And I was like, “Hey, so what’s going on with the mayor’s race?” And you were like, “There’s this Zohran guy.” I was like, that sounds crazy? And you literally laid it out—we’re gonna turn out all these South Asians, and there’s all these people that nobody is paying attention to. And then it just fucking happened!

Jonathan: Walter Benjamin has this famous quote: “Behind every fascism, there’s a failed revolution.” Which I’ll interpret to mean fascism arises in the aftermath of the left failing to take advantage of a crisis moment. Our hypothesis is that genuine economic populism combined with skilled and savvy political execution is the anecdote to authoritarianism—it deflates authoritarian appeals, it takes the wind out of Trump’s sails. Do you agree with this hypothesis, and what does Zohran’s campaign have to say about this idea?

Morris: Yeah, I mean, I fully disagree. [Laughs] No, I absolutely agree.

And I think the main thing when you look at the Trump stuff that I think certain bad faith neoliberals intentionally miss is the idea of small government, and the kind of posture Democrats take around government size. We’ve had decades of Democrats who are apologetic about government. It’s like how can we never make it feel like we’re being active, or we’re trying to expand government. And then you look at what Trump’s doing. This obviously is a form of authoritarianism, fascism. But that is a man who is not afraid of big government and whose supporters are not being turned off by big government.

What people are actually asking for, given the realities of income inequality right now, and other social currents, people are desperate for intervention in their lives to make things feel better. They just want to see an aggressive act towards improvement. And Democrats are running away from that. That created a vacuum for Trump. And I think what you see with the Mayor is someone who’s deeply committed to not just delivering on an agenda, but of telling a story of how government can make people’s lives better. And that is both an expansion of a social safety net, but also a demand of excellence in the services government does provide. And whether it’s a small act like paving the bump over the Williamsburg Bridge, or a profound act like the step towards universal childcare. To me, it’s one in the same—you’re telling a story that government is here for you, government’s in your life, making things better.

Jonathan: I actually had some back and forth with some fellow socialists post election, where people were saying it’s socialist policy, this shows that socialist politics are popular. And I was like, yeah, but…

Matt: He’s got a lot of swag.

Jonathan: The socialists who are reading what you’re writing about, they don’t need to be persuaded that socialism wins. What they need is to learn how to do the style and the charisma and the savvy and the campaigning and the relating to a mass multiracial working class base. So I’m just curious about your thoughts about some of these non verbal, non quantifiable, “this guy’s in my corner, he cares about people like me” vibes.

Morris: First I’ll say that everyone takes what they want from the Zohran victory, right? You have centrists who are like social media matters and good web content matters and we should say the word affordability. And others are like, it has nothing to do with Zohran, it’s just the right moment for someone with the right ideology. And I think we needed both things to be true. If Zohran wasn’t a socialist, he would not have won. And if he wasn’t Zohran, I don’t think he would have won. Those things combined to make the successful campaign that it was.

Where the language and storytelling and tactics come into it is we spend a lot of time on the left in general talking about things explicitly through the expansion of social services. There’s not a ton about efficiency and effectiveness of government. And I think if we want people to believe in a larger government, we need people to believe in excellent government. And that’s mostly boring stuff. I think what the Mayor is really good at is finding ways to communicate about everyday government, ways to improve government, ways people feel government in their lives in a way that breaks through. It’s like in the campaign, his Halalflation video.

Voiceover from ad: New York is suffering from a crisis, and it’s called Halalflation. If I was the mayor, I’d be working with City Council from day one to make Halal eight bucks again. Tastes like 10 bucks, but it should be eight.

Morris: That is a permitting reform video. And instead, it’s like a fun viral video that feels New York, that’s authentic, that blows up. Paving the bump on the Williamsburg Bridge is another good example—now there’s all these people posting on social media about riding over the Zoh-ramp. That is an act of rebellion, in some ways, against the currents of authoritarianism and fascism. But what it requires is understanding that people in positions of power have an ability to decide what stories we’re telling.

If you contrast the way the Mayor approaches a lot of these things with Biden’s time in office, where they accomplished big things. And yet I don’t know if I could actually tell you a real, tangible thing right now. The one Biden thing I remember seeing is driving through Michigan at some point and seeing a road under construction. The sign read, this is paid for and funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. It’s so lame! Almost no Republicans voted for it, it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t feel like a story of government success in those instances. It’s like, what? Who? No one cares.

Matt: I was gonna ask you about your other favorite ads from Zohran’s campaign. Because I know the rebrand is now Morris Katz, strategist. But like, he’s an ad man.

Morris: Leave it to you to undo the work of my rebrand.

So one was the Mayor going out after Trump won, and talking to Trump voters.

Voiceover from ad: Did you get a chance to vote?

Yes.

And who did you vote for?

The million dollar question. Trump.

Trump.

Donald Trump.

Well, I actually early voted. I voted for Trump.

Morris: So many politicians just solely exist in response to dialogue, versus doing something to help shape dialogue. And I think in many ways, a lesson from the campaign is you’re not going to be winning if you’re constantly just in response to narrative, versus shaping it. This video started to change the dynamics of that race towards the affordability agenda in a way that expanded people’s minds about what was possible, and began to highlight the different coalitions that could be formed.

Then on the paid media side, there was an ad we ran in the primary that was filmed at one of our rallies. And it starts with, “There’s a myth about this city.”

Voiceover from ad: There is a myth about this city. It’s the lie that life has to be hard in New York. I believe we can guarantee cheaper groceries, we can raise the minimum wage, we can freeze the rent for more than two million tenants and build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes.

Morris: “It’s city government’s job to deliver that. We’re done settling for less.” And I think the reason I like that one is it rejects the narrative in which we lose. It’s easy for people to be like, “Oh, yeah, fuck, things are too expensive, but it’s not government’s job to change that.” We need to be doing more work as a party and as a wing of the party to reframe the grounds of debate such that we can win our arguments.

Aaron: That was the most amazing thing to me about the campaign—just creating the arena that you knew you could win in, around affordability. We’ve seen national Democrats see that, and start saying the word affordability a lot—like, voters care about affordability, so I’m gonna talk about affordability as if it’s like a Chat GPT response. So what do you see as the essential components of creating that narrative? Are there some real takeaways for other Democratic candidates who are serious about learning from that success, beyond just using the word?

Morris: I think you can run a very hopeful, forward-looking campaign, like the Mayor did, and also be clear about villains. To me, it’s incredibly hard to talk about an affordability crisis with an inability to talk about anyone responsible for the affordability crisis. It’s literally like telling someone, “You are being so fucked right now. But I’m not gonna tell you who’s doing the fucking.” It’s like, well, why? That’s weird. Private equity buying up homes, price gouging, just like the general resentment of corporations and the billionaire class—all this shit is not French, you hear this all on doors, this all is felt by people. And I think if you’re not articulating that, you’re undercutting your ability to say anything else on affordability.

Jonathan: And it makes people not trust you! Because they know someone’s to blame. And it shows that you’re not willing to stand up to powerful people, if you’re not willing to name culprits.

Aaron: The most revelatory moment for me in this cycle was the Graham Platner introductory video, and that line where he says, I’m not afraid to name an enemy.

Voiceover from ad: I did four infantry tours in the Marine Corps, in the army. I’m not afraid to name an enemy. And the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it, the politicians who sell us out. And yeah, that means politicians like Susan Collins.

Aaron: That, to me, just feels like the embodiment of what has been wrong with Democrats and what we need to fix. I’d be curious to hear the backstory of where that line came from. Was that a Graham original, was that your idea, how did that come about?

Morris: Graham is uniquely, relentlessly focused on the enemy component. I think he feels very strongly that none of this is happening by accident. And I think a lot of it’s interestingly informed by the process he experienced of going to war and spending all this time in this horrible conflict and feeling like it was the result of a corrupt political system. And that just very much attuned him to an ability to be like, here’s the fucked thing happening, here’s the person doing the fucking.

People are not buying the idea that Donald Trump is the end all be all enemy, and they’re not wrong. This gets to the quote you opened with. It is objectively true that the Democrats held the White House for 12 out of 16 years, had majorities in both chambers for multiple windows of that, and really did not do much to fundamentally transform people’s lives. And so if we just pretend that Donald Trump emerged out of nowhere and isn’t a symptom of a broader failing that both parties are responsible for, there’s no credibility there. It’s the result of a Democratic Party that was unwilling to take on the villains.

Aaron: One thing that I’ve heard some discourse around, is yeah, the messaging, the candidate, the strategy was great, but really the lesson here is structural. There was public financing of elections. There was this DSA organization that had been built up over many years. I’m sure the actual answer, as usual, is all of it’s essential, but just from a diagnostic perspective, where do we prioritize our time and energy?

Morris: I think in a lot of different ways Zohran doesn’t exist without New York City DSA. From his political education to his win for his assembly seat to the launch and execution of the campaign. And I think if every left group and chapter across the country operated the way New York City DSA operates, we would have a lot more power in a lot more places.

I also think, again, Zohran is a uniquely, uniquely, uniquely talented individual. But a lot of that only works because of his politics. If he had shitty politics, it would not be breaking through in the same way. It’s like his charisma opens the door, and then it’s the policies that keep them there. That’s even like Trump. He comes across as kind of chaotic, and he acts chaotically. But he’s elected as an avatar of a chaos agent, and he delivers on that. It’s the vibe, and it’s consistent. And I think, Graham, here’s a similar example of a uniquely gifted communicator, but also his policies. Like, he speaks far more villains than the Mayor does. It is a more central part of Graham’s message, and also it totally connects with how people interpret him.

Matt: He looks like he could be in an action movie.

Morris: I always say, I only work for candidates in coastal areas who I think could be in an action movie, and that’s why I’ve done Graham and Aaron.

Jonathan: There is still the proof of concept where economic populists have to win in some of these districts that are not safe blue, that are purple or lean red statewide races. I mean, I was hoping after 2016 there would be some establishment Dems who would see the writing on the wall of the failures of the neoliberal turn of the Democratic Party, and be like, these aren’t just leftists, this is actually how you win. Having more political operatives who aren’t aligned with us, being like, oh shit, if I want to win, I actually have to pick a fight with corporate power

Morris: So I think that much of the criticism at this point is clearly bad faith. How many case studies do you need? You look at Dan Osborne’s campaign in Nebraska last cycle with a 14-point overperformance, the biggest overperformance of any federal race in the country over Kamala Harris. If you look at the campaign, and what he ran on, that is a populist vision. It is incredibly different than Zohran’s populist vision, but it is still a populist vision. And then there’s Chris Deluzio, who we were told for a long time, Connor Lamb’s a star because he’s the only Democrat who could possibly win this seat, and it’s impossible to win this seat if you’re don’t take corporate PAC money, and if you’re not kind of a lame DC piece of shit or whatever. And then Chris Deluzio comes in and it’s not even a swing seat anymore. Or like, Pat Ryan, same exact thing. Sherrod Brown and John Tester were two of the other massive overperformances the last cycle. I think Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown are two of the top four or five best senators in the entire United States Senate. We don’t have to close our eyes and imagine what a big tent party looks like, because we have it here.

And so it drives me crazy when people pretend that the brand issue is coming from the left. I’m like, no, we have a big tent brand actually figured out. It is a tent that is big enough for John Tester and Summer Lee. That is a sustainable, coherent vision that is rooted in clear villains and clear prose. But instead, we just have all this bullshit corporate filler in the middle that’s seeking to misinterpret it. So I don’t think there’s any number of case studies that will prove the case, because they don’t want the case to be proven, because they are part of the same corporate establishment.

I do think this year is a uniquely good year to be able to beat these candidates, even with the entire Democratic establishment against us. You look at Graham Platner, you look at what’s happening to Haley Stevens [failing] in Michigan, you look at some of these exciting primaries across the country, and I think there’s just such an appetite that we can change enough of who has power, even in Washington, that it then kind of forces out the folks standing in the way.

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean the Democratic Party makes a lot more sense today if you realize that there’s a lot of politicians and operatives who would rather keep their jobs and status in a party that loses than lose their jobs and status in a party that wins.

Aaron: Morris, you now exist both as a thought leader in the populous left political world, but also as someone who is, I assume, frequently interacting with establishment consultant shills who got us into this mess. How is that world reacting to you? To get us back on track, can that consultant class be turned from the dark side, or do they need to be just rooted out completely?

Morris: Well, if I’m a thought leader, we’re so fucked.

Sometimes I’m surprised in a really good way. Then there are other instances where I think there’s such an ingrained brain rot. You’re just in the bubble in which there’s this moderate versus left fight, which is just so far from any voter. I think that’s the main thing that either needs to lift as a spell or people need to be replaced who are holding on to it, the way people throw around liberal or left or, you know, too crazy left.

I was talking to someone who actually might run for office. I won’t say where. He’s a steel worker. And he says, Yeah, I’m a moderate. And I was with some of my team. We’re doing a bio call, and I muted for a second. I said to my team, I’m going to ask him who his favorite politician is. And I guarantee you, he’s gonna say Bernie Sanders. So I say, who’s your favorite politician? He’s like, Bernie Sanders. What issue do you care most about? Medicare for All and getting billionaires to not be allowed to buy our elections.

The point is that he was identifying as a moderate. And it’s like, that is the average voter. The biggest problem, I think, is the consultant class talks about moderate and they’re picturing someone who’s like, what I really want to see is a public health option and universal background checks.

Aaron: Yeah, a moderate who’s like, we don’t want to suppress AI innovation with too much regulation.

It’s a question of, do we have a tent pole for our majoritarian tent that’s based on us versus them, there should not be five creepy pedophiles who own all of the wealth in this country, common sense that everyone agrees on, or should the tentpole be, like, AI and crypto are great and saving us? It’s just crazy, the bankruptcy of the side that still is running things.

Jonathan: There’s a really important insight in what you just said, Morris. It’s really important for us to distinguish between moderate as a position that is intuitively popular to low information voters—like moderate, yeah, I’m my own man, I’m between these two extremes, I think for myself, which is actually a thing that we encounter all the time at the doors. Versus moderate as this bludgeon used by political operatives and elites to mask an unpopular status quo with this false optics of popularity.

Aaron: Morris, as someone who thinks a lot about images and storytelling and narrative, that has also always been a big part of fascism and successful fascist takeovers. You think of Goebbels and Triumph of the Will—Nazis understood you need a whole apparatus for this. What are you seeing right now from Trump and MAGA on this front? They have had powerful storytelling in the past. It kind of feels to me like they’re falling apart in that regard, which is obviously a big opportunity. But how are you thinking about our opposition right now?

Morris: I think they’re certainly losing the plot a little bit. I’m not a conspiracy person, but I wonder how much the Epstein stuff has played a role in triggering a series of distractions.

But I think in general, the biggest thing that we have forfeited is the element of nostalgia. Their visual esthetics and language are incredibly nostalgic and sentimental. It feels like Americana, and we’ve just ceded that to them.

The Harris campaign is the best example of this. You’re trying to win the Rust Belt. And so in 2022 for Fetterman, the slogan of the campaign was no No One Left Behind. Because lots of towns across Pennsylvania feel like their best days were a generation ago or more. So Harris, you’re running a campaign for the rust belt, and your slogan is Forward. This is a place that is sad, that wants to go back.

I didn’t even think of this at the time, but the closing metaphor of who played at that big concert they did towards the end. It was like a Lady Gaga concert at Carrie Furnace, which is this abandoned old steel mill, for a rally about abortion rights. It’s such an incredibly emblematic-of-why-we-lose moment—you’re standing in a steel mill that used to employ tens of thousands of people, that has been gutted by trade deals ushered in by Democrats, talking about moving further forward with Lady Gaga and abortion rights. That’s incoherent.

Now Democrats are like, they want to take us back. And people are like, I want to go back. We need to be on the side of nostalgia, we need to make people scared of the future that fascism is presenting, and kind of flip this dynamic.

Aaron: You think of the best ad from 2016 and it was Bernie’s America, right? That was all in on that exact feeling.

Jonathan: And Trump’s closing ad did the same thing.

Aaron: Yeah, it was a Bernie ad with 15 seconds of racism. That was Trump’s whole campaign in 2016—Bernie with 15 seconds of racism.

Jonathan: Now, one thing that was really striking about Zohran’s campaign is, while he was a broken record on affordability, he didn’t just avoid other questions. He didn’t do what a lot of unstrategic establishment Dems are trying to do, which is actually throw vulnerable people under the bus and throw coalition partners in the Democratic Party under the bus.

We wrote in a strategy memo about this—that Zohran represented the difference between voting for the greater good versus voting for the lesser evil. That when people are voting for the lesser evil, there’s not going to be a lot of enthusiasm, and the shitty things that they disagree with might be demotivating to turn out or let alone volunteer. But when people are voting for the greater good, low information voters, even if they have prejudices, they’re like, Yeah, but this guy’s fighting for me. He’s in my corner and and then they respect them almost for going out on a limb on other issues that they might disagree with. I’m curious about your thoughts about how to handle this, because we know that Republicans are going to attack all of our candidates on cultural war issues, no matter what we do or say or do not say.

Morris: This is a Platner line, but a politics that sells anyone out is a politics that will eventually sell everyone out. And I think if you can frame things centrally around that, you give yourself a lot of room. I also think people misinterpret so much about what worked with Trump pulling the debate towards social issues. The reason the debate was able to get pulled towards social issues is because we did not have an economic agenda, not because Americans cared more about social issues than economics. Everyone talks about “She’s for they them.” No one talks about “He’s for you.” And that’s the more important part. If people knew who Kamala was for, then she wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to that attack.

And that’s not to say every Democrat needs to talk about these things the exact same way. I’m not naive to thinking that New York City should be the same as an Oklahoma Senate race or something. There should be room to use different language, different words, different policies. But that’s different than, say, Colin Allred, who cut an ad that was him sitting in his living room, looking kind of proper, being like “We got to stop these girls from infiltrating our boys sports, I’m a football player. I know that.” And the thing is, he looked fucking weak. People aren’t responding to Trump on this because of the policy. They’re responding because he looks strong.

My other biggest pet peeve is when Democrats call Trump a bully. I’m like, people want a fucking bully. You want a bully fighting for you. When you’re calling him a bully, you sound like you’re the one shoved in a locker, and who’s gonna believe that person is gonna fight for them? And so it’s such a misread, whereas, I think Fetterman in 2022 actually did a good job of this, which was to say what kind of a fucking man is Dr. Oz to be picking on some fucking kids? And Dr. Oz shut the fuck up about it, because that’s a winning debate for us.

I’m soft launching a new metaphor I haven’t used before. We’ll see how it goes.

Matt: Let’s go!

Morris: It feels like when you’re in a relationship that’s going through a rough patch, and you’re fighting about the dumbest thing, but you’re spending 45 minutes fighting about the dumbest thing because the relationship’s not working. It’s like, yeah, we’re fighting about the three transgender athletes in Maine because we are in a fucked economy. And unless you’re going to talk about that, you’re going to fight about these other dumb things. And we are imposing that on ourselves by making it a restriction that we won’t go there, and we’re gonna stay in the kind of unhappy, anxiety ridden relationship with voters, unless we go to a place of talking about the actual issue at hand.

Matt: I didn’t know if you were gonna land the plane there, but I feel like you landed it. I like it. I think that’s a good metaphor.

Morris: A Fighting Fascism exclusive.

Aaron: David Sirota had a formula for this a while ago. He had a three part equation.

1. If Democrats define themselves by shitty identity politics primarily, then they’re going to have trouble winning in conservative and swing areas, because nobody likes that, even if they are pretty good on economic stuff.

2. If they try to define themselves as Republicans, they’re also going to have trouble winning in those areas, because voters are going to choose the real thing.

3. But if they define themselves as the party of economic populism—that they’re fully committing to fighting against oligarchy, to standing up for regular people—then they can win in those swing districts and redder states without abandoning these social issues.

I think that’s right. And the problem is the entire Democratic Party apparatus—donors, think tanks. everything—for many, many years, has been built to push people into one or two and not into three. Which is why it’s exciting to see your work trying to push people into three, or help people in three.

Morris: It’s just the case that if we applied purity tests to taking corporate money, half the party would be gone. That is one of the most universally popular things out there, and good policy, yet that’s a line too far for us.

Sometimes we’ll be on a race and someone in a primary is like, you can’t come out for Medicare for All, because you know how they’ll use that against you in the general. And I’m waiting to see the general election ad attacking someone over Medicare for All. I just have never seen it. It’s crazy that we bought into this myth that literally has never existed.

I went back the other day and was watching the Obama 2012 ads, and that is one of the most populist presidential campaigns possible. It is literally “Mitt Romney is a fucking Wall Street crook, and we brought the hammer down on people like Mitt Romney.” That was effectively the campaign.

Aaron: That’s what’s so fucking insane, is they were like, “Oh, we’re the incumbent, the economy’s not great, we’re kind of in trouble, we need to do the thing that will help us win. Let’s do economic populism.” People do seem to understand that this is how you win.

Matt: All right, I feel like we should wrap up. But before we end, we do want to hear your 2028 predictions.

Morris: I think there’s a handful of people who are doing interesting things right now. Obviously AOC is a uniquely compelling figure to a lot of people, and has her finger on the pulse of the very politics we’re talking about in a uniquely strong way.

Aaron: I love AOC. I feel like there are people who see her as too coded in the social liberal camp, and maybe that’s just because she’s a Latina woman. I would be so excited about her candidacy. But I do feel like there is that discourse. What do you think about that?

Morris: Look, any concern about any of these 2028 people is totally valid and fair. That’s why we have primaries. And everyone should get punched in the face 200 times. And let’s see who’s left standing.

That being said, I don’t hear those same people share those concerns about more corporate candidates who have those same vulnerabilities. I’ve yet to hear a really good theory of the case for Pete Buttigieg.

Everyone’s gonna have different questions. What I will say about AOC is, a coalition that you’re seeing increasingly be a profoundly powerful electoral coalition is young people, Latino voters, and more white working class voters. That’s the Mamdani coalition, that was the Talarico coalition—and she seems uniquely equipped to win that.

And her numbers. I think there’s a little bit of polling derangement syndrome around Bernie and AOC, where it’s like, poll after poll, the most popular politicians in America, and then everyone’s like, they’re just unelectable. So I think, you don’t know until you know, but I’m skeptical of some of that criticism.

And then there’s Ro Khanna. Obviously a very steep uphill climb, but he’s doing all of the right things. He’s bet well on a few things. He bet well on the Epstein class stuff. He is endorsing across the country in an aggressive way. He’s got a lane on the AI stuff that’s interesting and unique

And then I think there are other interesting folks like John Ossoff, Gallego, there are other people who are a little less to the left, but check some of these boxes that we’re talking about.

I’ll tell you, I think it definitely shouldn’t be Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro. People treat Josh Shapiro like he’s an electoral juggernaut because he beat someone who dressed up as a Nazi all the time.

Matt: Yeah, he beat some, like, dumb Nazi Italian. Like, I could do that. That’s ridiculous.

Aaron: Matt, we cannot, cannot bring the Rhode Island Portuguese-Italian white ethnic conflict into this podcast. We just can’t.

Jonathan: Any parting wisdom for us, Morris?

Morris: There are a lot of these races across the country that don’t necessarily get the same levels of attention, but that are equally important. There are only so many Zohran Mamdanis and Graham Platners. And not only are there only so many of them, there’s an element of luck to all of this. There’s an element of luck to the algorithm that allows you to go viral and all that. And we need to be doing our collective jobs, of amplifying, of donating to, of investing, of spreading the gospel of the larger populist slate.

Jonathan: Thanks Morris, and thanks for your work.

Morris: Thank you. Great to be here. I’ll talk to you guys soon.

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I thought of a sketch from the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb. The bit opens on a bunker with two SS officers. One walks worriedly over to the other. “Hans, I’ve just noticed something,” the Nazi says nervously. “Have you looked at our caps recently?”

“Our caps?”

“The badges on our caps, have you looked at them?”

“What? No. I don’t…”

“They’ve got skulls on them,” the Nazi interrupts. “Have you noticed that our caps have actually got little pictures of skulls on them.” He pauses, looking anxious. Then he asks the question that’s become immortalized in meme form: “Hans… are we the baddies?”

Trump’s nihilistic war on Iran is not the first disaster that’s made me think the United States might be a baddie. My first time cursing our government was when George W. Bush officially killed the Kyoto climate treaty. As a freshman in high school, I marched against the war in Iraq. I’m used to thinking of the United States as a dangerous actor on the world stage.

And yet, that was never all we were. There were always redeeming qualities. These counterpoints are exactly what the Trump regime has spent the last year stripping away—ending lifesaving international aid programs, clawing back the IRA’s climate investments, blowing up any remaining commitments to democratic principles and international law.

And then came the war on Iran. There’s just no way to tell a story in which a character launches a surprise attack on an elementary school during a busy school day—tearing apart tiny bodies that were just hours earlier hugging parents and grandparents and siblings—and not have that character be the baddie.

So what does it mean, to realize your country is the baddie? What are the obligations of a citizen of such a nation? Obviously there’s a responsibility to do what we can to oppose the vile acts of our state—to vote against our current government, to protest its war, to work to hold our leaders accountable. But what about in between the moments when we can take useful action? My immediate question—standing there in the woods, caught between the nightmarish fact of those murdered children and the reality of my own kids getting farther and farther up the trail ahead—was how can one justify living a full and happy life in such a morally intolerable context?

In my algorithmic circles, there was a genre of social media post that would pop up every few months during the course of Israel’s war on Gaza. Someone would share a picture of Israelis enjoying themselves—maybe a clip of a busy Tel Aviv beach full of good-looking young people sunbathing or playing matkot. And then someone else would repost the image with some version of the caption, “This is The Zone of Interest,” a reference to the Oscar-winning 2024 film by Jonathan Glazer.

The Zone of Interest depicts Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the disquietingly banal domestic life he and his family enjoyed in their flower-filled estate located just outside the walls of the Nazi’s most infamous extermination camp. At various points in the movie, we see telltale signs of the horrors being committed next door—a plume of crematoria smoke visible through the bedroom window, a stream of ash flowing into the river in which Rudolf and his kids are paddling, a distant rat-tat-tat of gunfire on the other side of the garden wall that only the family’s dog seems to notice. But throughout the film, the focus of the camera remains squarely on the Höss family and the cheerful life they insist on living in the shadow of humanity’s most evil crime.

It’s a disturbing movie to watch, and intentionally so. As Glazer said in his Oscar acceptance speech, “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present—not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we do now.’”

Though Glazer was clear—and courageous in his moral clarity—about the applicability of his film to the genocide in Gaza, I always had a conflicted reaction when I’d see those “crowd of happy Israelis = Zone of Interest” posts. On the one hand, part of me would think, “Well, wait, some of these people probably oppose what’s happening in Gaza. Are they really not allowed to enjoy a day in the sun because their government is committing war crimes that they’re not in a position to stop?” But another part of me would recoil at this joyful embrace of life. “If my country were directly committing atrocities, I hope I’d at least have the good grace to be deeply depressed about it,” I’d think.

Well, here we are.

Of course, we shouldn’t make false equivalencies. What’s happening in Iran right now is not, or at least not yet, as damnable as what happened in Gaza. And none of these abominations even come close, in quantitative terms, to the catastrophe of the Holocaust. But the kaleidoscope of nightmares that our government is conjuring today—the children attempting suicide in federally run concentration camps, the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the shutdown of USAID, the unadulterated malevolence of White House propaganda videos that intersperse actual kill-shot footage from Iran with clips from Braveheart and Gladiator—is enough to make the United States of a kind with depravities of the past.

So the question remains: Are we obligated to at least have the good grace to be depressed? Is it acceptable to embrace happiness when surrounded by so much evil?

There’s a short story by Anton Chekhov that grapples with precisely these questions. The story, “Gooseberries,” has a very simple plot: Two men out hunting are forced by a rainstorm to seek shelter at a friend’s estate; they arrive just as the friend is bathing in his pond; all three have a swim; then, while they are lounging together after dinner, one of the visitors, Ivan, argues to his friends that the embrace of happiness in a world of suffering is wrong.

In this passage, Chekhov has Ivan deliver a profound statement:

We see those who go to the market to buy food, eat during the day, sleep during the night, who talk their nonsense, get married, grow old, complacently drag their dead to the cemetery; but we don’t see or hear those who suffer, and the horrors of life go on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition. And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.

What’s perhaps most interesting to me, reading this passage in the year 2026, is that we actually do have the option now—in a way Chekhov never could have imagined while writing those words in 1898—of enlisting our own personal man with a hammer, in the form of X or Instagram or TikTok. Depending on your algorithm, scrolling across these social media platforms can be a continual reminder that there are unhappy people; that our government is blowing up children and raining cancer down on civilians and reveling in that violence and destruction. Meanwhile I’m out here enjoying the fresh air on a hike, looking for a good spot for the family to picnic.

What might Chekhov have thought of such doomscrolling? Certainly one could read the above passage and confidently conclude that here is a Russian literary genius firmly on team “be depressed.” But in “Gooseberries,” it’s not actually clear what Chekhov’s position on Ivan’s man-with-a-hammer strategy really is. I mentioned that before we get to the big moralizing speech at the heart of his story, Chekhov’s three characters bathe in a pond—a scene that the author George Saunders named his lovely 2021 book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain after. And who do you think Chekhov has enjoying that swim the most?

Ivan went outside, plunged into the water with a splash, and swam in the rain, flinging his arms out wide. He stirred the water into waves which set the white lilies bobbing up and down; he swam to the very middle of the millpond and dived, and came up a minute later in another place, and swam on, and kept on diving, trying to touch the bottom. “By God!” he kept repeating delightedly, “By God!” He swam to the mill, talked to the peasants there, then returned and lay on his back in the middle of the pond, turning his face to the rain. The others were dressed and ready to go, but he still went on swimming and diving. “By God!” he kept exclaiming. “Lord, have mercy on me!”

Well now! Pond Ivan doesn’t sound like a guy who believes that embracing joy in a world of suffering is all bad. Chekhov seems to say through his character’s conflicted relationship with happiness that yes, there’s a connection between ignoring suffering and maintaining it, and likewise between the embrace of happiness and the avoidance of the unhappy—but at the same time, it’s a wonderful thing to jump in a pond and dive to the bottom and lie on your back while the rain falls, and why should we deny ourselves that experience?

So how do we reconcile these contradictory feelings? The easy answer is moderation—a Middle Way that steers clear of extremes on either end. But I’m not sure moderation is really what this moment calls for. We should feel sadness and anger at the actions of our government—and honestly there should be an extremity to those feelings. The horrors being committed in our name merit—demand, even—some extremes. At the same time, unrelenting misery will not motivate action—and action should be the ultimate goal here. The hero in The Zone of Interest isn’t a Nazi who, unlike the Hösses, has the good grace to be depressed. Rather, it’s a Polish girl—based on a real person, Alexandra Bistron-Kotodziejczyk, whom Glazer dedicated his Oscar to—that the film shows sneaking up to Auschwitz in the dead of night, hiding apples across a worksite for the starving prisoners to find the next day. In Glazer’s words:

That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere, and I found it in her. She is the force for good.

The objective for each of us is to be a force for good, to create some light in the darkness. Perhaps, as Glazer found, that requires finding some light for ourselves, to keep things from getting too dark. Maybe it even justifies an intense embrace of those lighter moments—a jump in the pond, as Chekhov envisioned.

Which brings me back once more to our hike. Standing paralyzed on the snow-dusted trail, scrolling, I didn’t look up from my phone, even as my 5-year-old turned around to shout, “Hurry up, Dad!” My country had just murdered dozens of children. Now was not the time for family fun.

A minute later he shouted again, even louder, “DAD! It’s picnic time.” And this time the words punched through the fog in my head. Indeed, my stomach grumbled, a reminder that as sad as I was, I was also hungry. I dropped my phone back into my pocket and hurried up the trail. Because my son was right, of course. It was picnic time.

This essay appeared in The Nation. They’re also the sponsor of our new Fighting Fascism Podcast, which you can check out here on Apple Podcasts and here on Spotify!

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I also want to wish a chag sameach to everyone celebrating Passover tonight. For anyone still putting together their haggadahs and looking for some good commentary to thread in, I’ll just flag one of my favorite lines in the Book of Exodus [23:9], in which God commands the Hebrews: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.”

If I had to choose a single line that’s at the core of my Judaism, it’s probably this one. The Jewish people have suffered many things—enslavement, injustice, unimaginable violence. It’s possible to extract different meanings from that suffering. But we’ve got clear guidance here that the key lesson we should be taking with us is that to oppress strangers—people who we think are not like us, though we will know their souls if we pause long enough to remember our Jewish history—is to continue our own oppression.

You can listen to the first episode here:

Fighting Fascism on Apple Podcasts

Fighting Fascism on Spotify

We’re in a moment that demands not just outrage, but strategy. So this is a show that will look hard at past and present fascist movements, the conditions that enabled them, and—crucially—the resistance movements that defeated them.

Each week, my friends Matt DaSilva, Jonathan Smucker, and I (with the help of our producer, Nik Damants) will sit down with historians, strategists, and activists. We’ll be looking both forward and backward: For example, next week we’re talking with Morris Katz, the lead strategist for Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, on why the Democratic Party keeps fumbling and how to make it stop; after that we’ll interview Eric Rauchway, a leading expert on FDR—America’s original antifascist—on what Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition can teach us about winning.

Today’s episode features Astra Taylor, author of End Times Fascism, and Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, who joined us for a big picture conversation about what it means to fight fascism in this historical moment. We talked about popular resistance to ICE, tensions between “radical” and “normie” mobilization, how much we all hate AI, and why it shouldn’t actually be that hard to build a majoritarian coalition around the idea that a few dozen creepy billionaires shouldn’t own literally everything on the planet. I really think you’ll enjoy the conversation, and hope you’ll check it out!

And, if I can be so bold as to ask a personal favor: I’d be grateful if you could take five seconds to give the show a rating on your podcast app (Apple or Spotify). Truly, it would mean a lot to me, as this has a big effect on whether people will find the podcast on their feed.

Thanks a million! Oh, and here are a few short clips from today’s episode if you want to get a taste of the discussion:

Astra on Big Tech

Mark on antifascism and art

Me on billionaires

Please consider subscribing, and you can also follow Fighting Fascism on Twitter, Bluesky, and Instagram. Thanks again!

It has been a long time since this claim made much sense to me. But in recent years it has become abundantly clear not only that this claim is false but that it is in fact the inverse of our current reality. Because here’s the truth: There is nothing making Jews in America less safe today than the actions of Israel’s far-right government—actions that too many of our mainstream Jewish institutions still refuse to disavow.

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Over the last few years, the Israeli government—through its hubris, brutality, and high-handed approach to American politics—has been doing everything in its power to turn the American public against it. Americans have watched the Israeli military commit an unending stream of barbaric war crimes in Gaza, paid for in large part by our tax dollars. We’ve observed Israeli-backed settlers commit lynchings and other apartheid-enforcing mob violence in the West Bank, including against American citizens. We’ve seen the Israeli prime minister wield an astonishing degree of influence over American politics and government policy. And most recently, we heard the Trump administration admit that it was pushed into launching its war against Iran because Israel wanted it to.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, the “imminent threat” to America that required such extraordinary military action was that “if Iran was attacked, and we believe that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us.” Translation: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to attack Iran, so President Trump had to jump on board—because apparently the alternatives, forcing the Israelis to back down or letting them act alone, were inconceivable.

This joint Israeli-American war is already deeply unpopular. It will become more unpopular still as the costs (currently over a billion dollars a day) and the losses (at least 13 Americans have been killed) and the horrors (Iranians digging mass graves for the more than 150 elementary school girls our government killed and toxic black clouds raining carcinogens on millions of civilians) continue to pile up. That’s bad news for Israel’s standing with the American public, among whom a serious backlash against Israel has already been building.

Now, in an ideal world, a backlash against Israel would be just that—nobody would conflate the Israeli government with the Jewish people as a whole. Americans who are rightly angry about what they’ve been seeing from Netanyahu’s regime should say, “Israel’s government killed tens of thousands of children in Gaza” or “Israel’s government dragged us into a nightmare conflict with Iran” or “Israel’s government murdered my family.” In an ideal world, nobody would say, “The Jews did these things.”

But we don’t live in that ideal world. And that’s in part because of the radically pro-Israel posture of the majority of mainstream Jewish institutions in our country.

These groups—of course the political organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, but also local community institutions (Jewish federations, professional groups, campus leaders, media outlets, and more)—have spent the last three years aggressively declaring that criticism of Israel equates to antisemitism, that anti-Zionist Jews are not real Jews, and that the American Jewish community will stand with Israel no matter what crimes the state commits. In short, they have been insisting that “Israel” and “Jews” should be conflated—or in the words of Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL president, “You cannot take the Zion out of Jewish identity, you cannot take the Zionism out of Judaism.”

Given that chorus from the very organizations and leaders who claim they represent the Jewish community, you don’t have to be a Nazi to start ascribing the Israeli regime’s horrifying conduct to all Jews. You just have to be a relatively low-information gentile who’s not familiar with the point of view of the growing majority of actual American Jews, who are increasingly critical of Israel but whose views are suppressed by our mainline institutions.

Of course—and I imagine some readers have already shouted this at their screens in frustration—antisemites will always find a justification to hate Jews. They did so before Israel existed, and they would continue to do so if there were no ethnonationalist Jewish state or if America’s Jewish establishment did break with Israel’s regime.

But this argument misunderstands the nature of the threat American Jews face today. Yes, there have always been, and likely will always be, virulent antisemites out there. But a world where this kind of resentment is relegated to a minor fringe is very different from one where these ideas have infiltrated a much broader population.

A decade ago, your average podcast-listening young man was not likely to think in terms of “the Jews are causing this or that harm.” But after years of watching a live-streamed genocide be committed by the Jewish state and rarely hearing any condemnation by mainstream American Jewish institutions, that is changing. And it’s easy to imagine the change accelerating as those same Jewish organizations celebrate a war that is despised by the American people.

This change matters greatly. It’s the difference between antisemitic provocateur Nick Fuentes being some freak few people have heard of, and Fuentes having such a large and influential following that people like Vice President JD Vance hesitate to exclude him from GOP spaces. Fuentes has grown his base dramatically since Oct. 7, largely because of his shrewd weaving together of young people’s legitimate outrage over the Israeli government’s conduct with his own classically vile “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”-style antisemitism. (A similar story could be told about other hugely powerful figures on the antisemitic right, like Tucker Carlson.)

To point out how antisemitism has been spreading is not to justify or legitimate its spread. On the contrary, it is to affirm that this is a real problem, and taking a problem seriously requires understanding it.

And so it must be said that the move Fuentes and his ilk are making—unequivocally equating Israel and the Jews—is functionally the same move that Jewish organizations make when they declare that criticism of Israeli policy is antisemitism, a charge the ADL recently leveled at California Governor Gavin Newsom for his relatively anodyne description of Israel as “sort of an apartheid state.” (To be clear, Israel is an apartheid state, definitionally—a Jewish baby born today in a West Bank community will have full rights in Israel, a vote in national elections, and access to civilian courts; a Palestinian baby born in that same community will have no democratic rights, tight restrictions on their movement, frequent harassment from settlers, and no access to justice beyond what Israel’s unaccountable military courts mete out. That’s apartheid.)

For years, these mainstream Jewish institutions have insisted they could have it both ways—declaring that being a Jew in good standing in our community requires undying support for the state of Israel while also maintaining that American Jews cannot be held responsible for Israel’s actions. But here’s the thing: You cannot claim that everyone who criticizes Israel for indiscriminately killing children is an antisemite—that is, someone who hates all Jews—without implying that indiscriminately killing children is somehow a project undertaken by all Jews rather than the project of a specific out-of-control far-right government and its supporters. And if you repeat that message often enough, well, some people are going to start believing it.

It is perfectly legitimate for a backlash against the Israeli regime to be building here in the United States. Americans are tired of seeing Israel manipulate our political system to ensure that our taxpayer dollars continue to subsidize Israeli aggression. And the fact that this observation seems to rhyme with a classic antisemitic trope of Jewish puppet masters controlling all world governments does not make it less true that Israel exerts enormous influence over US politics—though it does underline the degree to which Israeli policy fails to consider the safety and interests of American Jews. Given these empirical realities, Americans have to be ideologically committed to Israel to be satisfied with the current state of Israeli-American relations.

But if a significant proportion of the US population metabolizes their anger toward Israel into resentment against Jews as a whole—an outcome that the rhetoric of America First’s Nick Fuentes and the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt both seem to be inviting—that is a more dangerous state of affairs than Jews in this country have faced in generations, as we saw recently in Michigan, where a man attacked a synagogue after an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon killed four members of his family. Certainly, it’s a less safe world for my Jewish sons than the one I had the privilege of growing up in, in which yes, there were antisemites, but they had no real path to take their hate to scale. Today, such paths exist, and it’s possible we’re already quite far down them.

Of course, the security of American Jews should not be the primary focus of public discourse right now. Iranian schoolgirls have been mass-murdered, ancient cities are getting carpet-bombed, American service members are under attack, and millions of people across multiple Middle Eastern countries are facing the dislocations, uncertainties, and horrors of war. These imminent crises all matter more than my long-term concerns about the growth of antisemitism in our country.

Still, this point deserves attention. The logic of Zionism rests heavily on the claim that Jewish safety necessitates a Jewish state. It is largely this desire—to protect our people, whom history has proved need protection—that has led so many national and local Jewish institutions to continue backing the Israeli regime, through apartheid and genocide and more. But this approach is self-defeating. Tying the honor and reputation of our people to the rogue government of an ethnostate is not making us safer. On the contrary, it’s making American Jews more vulnerable to the kind of antisemitic mass politics that we haven’t had to worry about in this country for a long time. That’s what my Jewish sons have to look forward to. And it’s not going to change until our mainline Jewish institutions start owning up to the danger they’ve created for all of us and start demonstrating, through their words and deeds, that Israel does not, in fact, equal the Jews.

This essay appeared in The Boston Globe and will be in Sunday’s print edition.

One last thing. I know there are people—including people I love very, very dearly—who will strongly disagree with parts or all of this essay. All I can say is that this conversation is important to me in large part because Judaism is important to me, and I don’t think I personally would be living in accordance with my Jewish values (values I learned from some of you) if I didn’t speak up.

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The lonesomeness of Mabel’s fight for animals remains a central theme in Hoppers. We see it again immediately upon cutting to the present day, when Mabel stands alone in front of a demolition crew, trying to stop the bulldozing of a wooded glade—her childhood haven—that the town mayor, Jerry, wants to turn into a new expressway, “getting you where you need to go up to four minutes faster.” Mayor Jerry tells Mabel that she’s the only one who wants to save the glade, whereas everyone in town wants the highway. To prove him wrong, Mabel launches a petition drive, which leads to a montage of doors getting slammed in her face—once more, it seems like Mabel is the only one who cares.

After that, the story becomes increasingly zany, as Mabel discovers an experimental “hopper” technology that allows her to Avatar herself into a lifelike beaver robot and set off on a journey to recruit real beavers to return to the glade (since beavers can bring back the wetlands that might create a permitting obstacle to Mayor Jerry’s overpass plans—because yes, this Pixar movie has a distinctly anti-abundance bro sensibility).

But throughout these madcap adventures, the film reiterates that taking the plight of non-human animals seriously can be a lonely endeavor. In one moment of despair, Mabel turns to a beaver she has befriended, and cries, “Why doesn’t anyone else care?”

Watching this movie with my five-year-old son beside me was a peculiar emotional experience. He is a committed vegetarian, and sometimes—particularly when he sees people he loves, like his cousins or grandparents, eating meat—he’ll get sad or frustrated, unable to wrap his head around how people he knows to be good could appear so unconcerned about the suffering of other living creatures. But for the most part, he still lives in a world where feeling empathy and compassion for non-humans is the norm.

It’s almost a universal truth that kids love animals, and this fondness is generally encouraged. Until, at some point, it’s not; at some point, we become adults, and adults are supposed to put aside childish preoccupations with animals and center our worldview on people. Understanding humans as the only beings whose welfare truly matters is practically a marker of one’s maturity. And to resist this dominant perspective is to invite ridicule.

Anyone who’s spent time as a vegetarian or vegan knows a bit about that ridicule. The internet is full of articles with headlines like “Why do people hate vegans so much?” This animus isn’t just anecdotal—a peer-reviewed study from 2015 found that omnivores evaluated vegetarians and vegans more negatively than people with other dietary restrictions, with those motivated by animal rights or environmental concerns treated particularly poorly. And new versions of this scorn are regularly evolving, with perhaps the most recent iteration coming from the billionaire funders and millionaire pundits behind the abundance movement, who have endeavored to reframe environmentalists—not oligarchs or fascists, but rather people like Mabel fighting to protect their local glades from expressways—as the source of all society’s ills.

Of course, there have been valid reasons to criticize the environmental movement over the years, not least the white supremacy of a number of its early founders. And given that our world is overflowing with more human suffering than any one mind could ever hope to get a grip on, it’s a completely reasonable choice to limit one’s empathic focus to our species.

But that doesn’t explain why people so frequently treat the destruction of nature and the suffering of animals as undeserving of legitimate concern. If misery and loss are bad, then these are among the greatest catastrophes taking place today. Around 10 billion chickens, turkeys, cows, and pigs are slaughtered in the U.S. every year. Animals that research suggests are just as smart as the dogs and cats we adore, and just as capable of joy and affection and sadness and suffering, are subjected to the most cruel, barbaric, would-get-you-immediately-arrested-for-animal-abuse conditions that you can possibly imagine (though I suspect many of us are literally not capable of imagining the actual horrors of this factory farmed existence).

Meanwhile, we are rapidly turning the rest of our planet—to our current knowledge the most uniquely precious place in the entire universe—into a degraded wasteland. The statistics can feel somewhat numbing. Humanity has caused the loss of 85 percent of all wild mammals and half of all plants. Since 1970, North America’s wild bird population has fallen by three billion. In that same time, human activities have significantly altered 75 percent of the ice-free land surface on the planet, and destroyed over 85 percent of the world’s wetlands. When I watch Planet Earth or other nature documentaries with my son, he is shown a world teeming with wildlife. But in reality, the beautiful diversity of animals these shows depict are marginalized exceptions to what our planet has become. Humans and our miserable livestock now account for more than 96 percent of all mammal biomass on Earth. Every other mammal—every whale, big cat, moose, beaver, monkey, kangaroo, mouse, elephant, deer, fox, all of them—in combination adds up to just four percent.

Indeed, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. Every single day, species that have been evolving and adapting and surviving for millions or tens of millions or in some cases hundreds of millions of years are being brought to an abrupt and inescapably permanent end—life forms that will never again be seen in the universe, because of us. My son, who loves dinosaurs as much as he loves all other animals, will sometimes get sad thinking about the asteroid that caused the fifth mass extinction event 66 million years ago. This was the single most catastrophic moment in our planet’s history from a biological perspective—every non-avian dinosaur lineage wiped out, and countless other species too, so that for millions of years afterwards Earth was a barren world of small and monotonously similar creatures. I’m still never quite sure how to communicate to my son that we are creating, of our own free will, a comparable disaster today.

And yet, this almost incomprehensible tragedy is barely discussed—even by people like me. There’s no crisis in the world that causes me as much existential anguish as this one, and yet I barely ever speak about it, post about it, write about it. I write about climate change, but climate—while it’s a major cause of biodiversity loss—is a fundamentally human story; it’s our civilization that is at risk of collapsing due to climate change, which has driven nearly every civilizational collapse in human history. The breakdown of global ecological systems and the mass suffering of animals are less human-centered problems, which is why it almost feels embarrassing to take these desperately urgent crises seriously. In most contexts, doing so is a lonely affair.

So it’s pretty remarkable that Hoppers—a movie about a young woman who takes the natural world as seriously as it deserves to be taken, while grappling with the heartache and fury she feels towards everyone around her who couldn’t care less—has been for two weekends in a row the top film virtually everywhere on the planet, with a global box office take of $165 million so far. That’s a lot of people who have watched and enjoyed this story, and—perhaps, to some small degree—internalized some of its themes. In a moment when good news can feel hard to come by, that feels worth celebrating.

When we got home from our screening, my wife, who hadn’t joined us at the theater, asked our son what the movie was about. He said it was about “believing.” A bit of a head-scratcher, that answer—there’s not really any explicit discussion of believing in Hoppers; no scenes where Tinkerbell is brought back to life through the power of belief. And I couldn’t get the kid to expand on his initial response, which was open-ended enough to allow an essay-writer to layer all sorts of profound meanings on top. He’s five—five-year-olds say weird things all the time.

But I can’t help but give his response my own spin. After watching this movie, and seeing the world’s response to it, what I am choosing to believe is that there are a lot of us who care about the non-human world. If we all just had the courage to be as loud and proud about that belief as Mabel, maybe this fight wouldn’t have to be so lonely.

This essay appeared in The New Republic. Thanks so much for reading, it means the world to me!

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Given everything that has happened since Donald Trump returned to power last January, you could hardly be blamed if you were unaware that Garland—who Barack Obama unsuccessfully nominated to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and who served as Joe Biden’s attorney general—got a new job. It’s an old job, really: He returned to the corporate law firm Arnold & Porter, where he had previously been a partner, to work on focus areas including white collar defense.

White collar defense, which often involves helping the rich and powerful escape accountability, is also the best way to describe Garland’s tenure as attorney general, at least where it matters. While Garland’s DOJ immediately began to prosecute the lowest-level participants in Trump’s crimes against democracy—the foot soldiers of Jan. 6—Garland steadfastly refused to take on the architect of that insurrection, waiting almost three years to bring federal charges against Trump himself. Indeed, Garland only took action after Congress’s Jan. 6 committee essentially forced him to launch the prosecutorial effort he’d spent years resisting. By that time, it was—in the most predictable way imaginable—already too late. Trump was running for reelection, meaning he could cast his prosecution as political persecution. He would be reelected before the cases against him had any chance to be concluded. Where accountability mattered, Garland failed spectacularly.

This, and the resulting dystopian reality we are living through today, were not necessary or foregone conclusions. Another path was eminently possible, as a veritable pileup of international counterexamples demonstrates. Just this February, South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol was jailed for life for his imposition of martial law in December 2024. Last November, a Peruvian court handed down an 11-year sentence to former president Pedro Castillo for his attempt to dissolve Peru’s Congress in December 2022. And last September, Brazil’s highest court condemned former president Jair Bolsonaro to 27 years in prison for his efforts to overturn that country’s 2022 election results.

The Brazilian comparison is particularly instructive, because of the beat-for-beat similarities between Bolsonaro and Trump. Both are right-wing populists who falsely insisted they had won an election they had lost. Both used tactics of denial and conspiracy to inspire violent attacks against their respective capitols with the goal of blocking a democratic transition of power. But the paths of these authoritarian despots diverged sharply following their attempted coups. One is currently in prison. The other is back in control of the most powerful nation on Earth, waging an all-out assault on our Constitution that frankly makes the crimes of his first term look like child’s play.

Given this tragic sequence of events, it is not, I think, too soon for those of us opposed to Trump’s corrupt and cruel reign of terror—and in particular for our ostensible opposition party, whose leaders failed so utterly in their previous attempt to bring Trump to justice—to begin thinking seriously about what accountability for the crimes of this regime will look like if (and needless to say, it is a big if) Democrats are able to take back Congress and the presidency. Clearly, the Garland approach failed. What should replace it?

The only appropriate answer is the zealous pursuit of justice at every level of this criminal enterprise of an administration. The next Democratic administration should extend the Garland approach to January 6—a focus on the criminal foot soldiers of the Trump regime—to a host of other areas, most notably immigration enforcement, foreign policy, and corruption. But it shouldn’t stop there, as the response to January 6 did. It must go further.

Justice not only for the ICE and CBP thugs who murdered Americans in the streets, but also for the senior advisors and cabinet secretaries who sent those thugs on their campaigns of stochastic terrorism. Justice for the goons who will, it seems increasingly likely, seek to rig our upcoming elections, and the higher-level apparatchiks devising those antidemocratic schemes. Justice not just for the officials who executed double-tap strikes against civilians and bombed elementary schools and committed other startlingly barbaric war crimes, but more importantly, for the leaders who criminally launched such brazenly illegal military actions and wars. And, of course, justice for everyone inside and outside of this administration engaging in the most incomprehensibly flagrant looting of America’s public resources in our history.

Admittedly, all of this is a tall order. Pursuing accountability with such breadth and depth would require a serious commitment of resources, attention, and political capital. But it’s a necessary, not an optional, step towards rebuilding our democracy, which—even in this ideal future in which Democrats have overcome Trump’s efforts to dismantle free elections to win back temporary control of the government—will be overwhelmingly fragile for a long time to come. As the Allies understood when devising their denazification programs for Germany after World War II, America simply cannot afford to allow the bandits, propagandists, and sadists who’ve been running this administration to simply slide back into positions of power and privilege from which to plot their next fascist takeover. If Garland’s ignominious tenure as attorney general achieved nothing else of value, let it at least have taught us this lesson.

Of course, these prosecutions would be polarizing; in today’s political environment, there’s little that is not, though much of this administration’s conduct that merits prosecution enjoys supermajority levels of reprobation from the public. But a push for accountability, to succeed, will require a demonstration of popular support—in other words, a mandate. And that means it is incumbent on Democrats to make this fight for accountability a key part of their platform, starting now.

This will make many Democratic leaders squeamish. The party’s centrist establishment hates to take strong stances on just about anything. And there may be opposition from some on the left, as well. After all, doesn’t this “prosecute Trump” fixation risk dragging us back to a pre-2020 resistance liberalism that deprioritized material conditions and obscured the structural problems of oligarchy, of which Trump is really just a symptom?

Well, it could, if done poorly. But it could also buttress a much more powerful populist message, of the kind that Democrats desperately need to embrace if they are going to beat the diminished but still-potent right-wing populism of Trump and his MAGA heirs.

The word “populism” is thrown around a lot to describe very different political tendencies, in large part because populist anger can be channeled in polar opposite directions, towards fascism on the one hand or social democracy on the other. But at its core, populism is what you get when a critical mass of a society stops seeing the previous systems of political authority as legitimate. And there is nothing—literally nothing—that creates that perception of illegitimacy more than repeated demonstrations of elite impunity.

This dynamic is the foundation of our current political crisis. Indeed, elite impunity is what created Donald Trump, whose pledges to tear the system down triumphed twice against candidates who responded to his anti-system rhetoric by defending that system. In 2016 and 2024 Trump cast himself as an outsider who was being attacked precisely because he represented a threat to America’s political establishment and economic and cultural elite. For many, the alarm with which Trump was greeted only solidified this status. Finally, someone was promising to deliver some much-needed punishment to those who deserved it. In a world where regular people have watched again and again as rich assholes hollowed out their communities and denuded their lives and faced zero consequences for their crimes, Trump’s exhortation—“For those who’ve been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution”—starts to sound pretty good. At least someone’s talking about retribution.

Obviously, that was never the reality of Trumpism, and today Trump’s administration stands as the ultimate monument to elite impunity. There are countless examples of how his regime has become a platonic ideal of the corrupt swamp, from the pardon-for-cash operation it has been running for wealthy criminals of all stripes, to the DOJ’s announcement that it simply won’t be prosecuting corporate crimes anymore. But the clearest narrative connecting Trump and elite impunity—indeed, the most intuitively understandable indictment of how our institutions have failed to hold elites accountable for their depravity—is the one that’s for months been flowing out of the millions of documents that make up the Epstein files.

It’s worth noting here that our old friend Merrick Garland sat on the Epstein files for four years without raising a finger to seek justice for Epstein’s victims or raise awareness about his accomplices, enablers, and associates—the latter group of which includes Epstein’s longtime friend Donald Trump, who sent him a pornographic birthday card referencing a “wonderful secret” that would “never age,” and who has been accused of trafficking and sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl whom the FBI later found credible enough to interview four times.

Thanks to horrifying references like these, the Trump administration has become deeply entangled and, in the eyes of many voters, incriminated in the Epstein saga. And that means Democrats have an opportunity to develop a broader message of opposition to elite impunity—one that rightfully combines pledges to hold both Epstein’s associates and the Trump administration accountable for their wanton criminality. Because the truth is, these two groups are one and the same. As Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff aptly put it, “We were told that MAGA was for working-class Americans. But this is a government of, by, and for the ultra-rich. It’s the wealthiest cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class. They are the elites they pretend to hate.”

It’s a message Democrats can run—and govern—on. Remember the system you so despised, with its one set of rules for you and me and another for the wealthy and powerful? The system that let Jeffrey Epstein off with a slap on the wrist because he was rich and well-connected? The system that transferred teen sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushy minimum security prison where she reportedly is waited on hand and foot by prison officials and was given a puppy? Well, that’s the same system that’s been working to protect Epstein’s longtime friend Donald Trump and all his sycophantic deputies—like Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, a documented visitor to Epstein’s pedophile island—from being held accountable for their many crimes. And this time it’s the Democrats who are promising to burn that god-forsaken system of elite impunity down to the ground.

Of course, it would be madness at this point to trust the Democratic establishment—so long led by the likes of Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers, each of whom spent years consorting with Epstein—to embrace this message. Thankfully, 2028 offers Democrats an opportunity to wipe the slate clean of their decrepitly complicit establishment.

This is one of the Democrats’ greatest advantages right now. As Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expulsion from GOP politics has demonstrated, taking on Epstein means taking on Trump, and no politician can become the next Republican presidential nominee by running against Trump. But our next Democratic nominee absolutely can—and must—commit to waging a war on the Epstein class, prosecuting its horrors, and rooting out the larger culture of elite impunity that is destroying our country from within. That promise not only gives Democrats a powerful populist message to run on—it also sets them up to demonstrate a real popular mandate, post-election, to bring the perpetrators of this regime’s horrific crimes to justice.

This January, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva held a rally in front of a massive banner reading “Defense of Democracy.” He was there to veto legislation that Brazil’s opposition-controlled Congress had passed to lower Bolsonaro’s sentence from 27 to two years. After describing Bolsonaro’s attempted coup as a reminder that “democracy is not an unshakeable achievement,” Lula proclaimed, “In the name of the future, we do not have the right to forget the past.” Unlike Lula, America’s last Democratic administration failed to appreciate this essential truth. It is quite possible that this failure will prove lethal to our democracy. But if it’s not—if we are so fortunate as to have an opportunity to drive MAGA from power in 2026 and 2028—Democrats cannot be allowed to repeat their past mistakes. We must bring the architects of our current nightmare to justice—not in the name of the past, but in the name of the future.

This essay appeared in The New Republic, a great outlet you can also follow on Substack.

Oh, and one quick heads up! A couple very smart and entertaining friends and I are partnering with The Nation to release a new podcast at the end of the month—the Fighting Fascism Podcast—focused on the history of fascist takeovers, the conditions enabling them, the resistance movements that have defeated them, how we got to where we are today, and where we need to be going. We’ve got a few episodes already recorded that I’m actually really proud of. We don’t have an exact launch date, but I’ll be sure to let you know when we do!

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